Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century

Description

This volume uses a series of portraits of 'imperial lives' in order to rethink the history of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It tells the stories of men and women who dwelt for extended periods in one colonial space before moving on to dwell in others, developing 'imperial careers'. These men and women consist of four colonial governors, two governors' wives, two missionaries, a nurse/entrepreneur, a poet/civil servant and a mercenary. Leading scholars of colonialism guide the reader through the ways that these individuals made the British Empire, and the ways that the empire made them. Their life histories constituted meaningful connections across the empire that facilitated the continual reformulation of imperial discourses, practices and cultures. Together, their stories help us to re-imagine the geographies of the British Empire and to destabilize the categories of metropole and colony.

David Lambert is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (2005). Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. His previous books include South Africa Past, Present and Future (2000) and Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (2001).

'[Colonial Lives] brings together recent work on biography and subjectivity on the one hand and the literature on space and place that has done much to shape contemporary apprehensions of empire, and it does so with fresh insight and a lot of intellectual energy as well.' Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History '... this is a fine collection of scholarly essays that shed important light on the complex spatialities of the British Empire. As such it deserves a wide readership. One hopes it will inspire further scholarship to elucidate those new networks that were forged by colonised subjects and that similarly spanned imperial space and shaped subjectivities.' Journal of Historical Geography 'Colonial Lives amply demonstrates what biography at its best can do: provide a window into larger subjects and themes, readable and compelling human sized history.' Journal of Historical Biography 'This book offers more than simply a new spatial framework for understanding empire; it is a series of biographical sketches of life histories that explore the complexity and ambiguity of trans imperial identity through the tracing and mapping of careers across multiple sites of empire.' Journal of Southern African Studies