Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T14:00:39.220Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Assessing imperialism

from Part III - Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

J. R. McNeill
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Kenneth Pomeranz
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Get access

Summary

This chapter discusses several related questions about the history of imperialism since about 1750. Across the world in the middle of the eighteenth century there were dozens of political units that people at the time recognized as empires, colonies, and metropoles. The Ottoman Empire, often seen as a classic land empire, could just as easily be framed as an empire built on controlling seaways. Establishing an empire that worked over time meant establishing an unequal power relationship between at least two groups, traditionally described as the 'colonizer' and the 'colonized'. The web or network model accounts for multi-directional flows and influences within an empire, enabling a more complex understanding of imperial social formation. Hybridization, in terms of cultural, economic, and political practice as well as the actual mixing of DNA, has been shown to be common in all imperial contexts. The pervasive Eurocentrism embedded in the concepts of modernity and modern imperialism.
Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further reading

Armitage, David, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, eds. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context. London: Palgrave, 2010.Google Scholar
Ballantyne, Tony. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. London: Palgrave, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ballantyne, Tony, and Burton, Antoinette. Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870–1945. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Ballantyne, Tony, and Burton, Antoinette, eds. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ballantyne, Tony, Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire. Champaign, il: University of Illinois Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Banerjee, Sukanya. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Bang, Peter Fibiger, and Bayly, C. A., eds. Tributary Empires in Global History. London: Palgrave, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baranowski, Shelley. Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler. Cambridge University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.Google Scholar
Burbank, Jane, and Cooper, Frederick. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Cain, P. J., and Hopkins, A. G.. British Imperialism: 1688–2000, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Chandra, Shefali. The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Conklin, Alice. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930. Stanford University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Conklin, Alice, and Fletcher, Ian, eds. European Imperialism, 1830–1930. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, John. After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000. London: Penguin, 2007.Google Scholar
Darwin, John. The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970. Cambridge University Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duane, Anna Mae. Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim. Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 1963.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Moira, ed. The History of Mary Prince, rev. edn. Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Niall. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002.Google Scholar
Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.Google Scholar
Grant, Kevin, Levine, Philippa, and Trentmann, Frank, eds. Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire, and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950. London: Palgrave, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Catherine, ed. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Chicago University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Hall, Catherine, Cultures of Empire: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Hobson, J. A. Imperialism. Cambridge University Press, 1902.Google Scholar
Hopkins, A. G., ed. Globalization in World History. New York: Random House, 2002.Google Scholar
Howe, Stephen, ed. The New Imperial Histories Reader. London: Routledge, 2009.Google Scholar
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins. London: Penguin, 2001.Google Scholar
Joseph, Gilbert Michael, Catherine Legrand, and Salvatore, Ricardo D., eds. Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US–Latin American Relations. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapell, Matthew W., and Elliott, Andrew B. R., eds. Playing With the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.Google Scholar
Karl, Rebecca. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Khalid, Adeeb. “Backwardness and the quest for civilization: early Soviet Central Asia in comparative perspective.” Slavic Review 65:2 (Summer 2006), 231251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khoury, Dina Rizk, and K. Kennedy, Dane. “Comparing empires: the Ottoman domains and the British Raj in the long nineteenth century.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27:2 (2007), 233244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. New York: International Publishers, 1939.Google Scholar
Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morillo, Stephen. Frameworks of World History: Networks, Hierarchies, Culture. Combined Volume. Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Nanni, Giordano. The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire. Manchester University Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Omissi, David, and Thompson, Andrew, eds. The Impact of the South African War. London: Palgrave, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paxton, Nancy. Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947. New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Robinson, Ronald, and Gallagher, John, with Denny, Alice. Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism. London: Macmillan, 1961.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Vintage, 1978.Google Scholar
Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Sherman, Joseph. “Serving the natives: whiteness as the price of hospitality in South African Yiddish literature.” Journal of Southern African Studies 26:3 (2000), 505521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherwood, Marika. After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade Since 1807. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinha, Mrinalini. Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri C.The Rani of Sirmur: an essay in reading the archives.” History and Theory 24:3 (1985), 247272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoler, Ann L. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Tagliocozzo, Eric, and Chang, Wen-Chin, eds. Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Topik, Steven, Marichal, Carlos, and Frank, Zephyr, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turoma, Sanna, and Waldstein, Maxim, eds. Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union. New York: Ashgate, 2013.Google Scholar
Walvin, James. Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire. New York: Wiley, 2001.Google Scholar
Warren, James H.Contesting colonial masculinity/constituting imperial authority: Ceylon in mid-nineteenth-century British public debate.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 6:2 (December 2004), 3962.Google Scholar
Wesseling, H. L. The European Colonial Empires, 1815–1919. London: Pearson, 2004.Google Scholar
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.Google Scholar
Wilson, Kathleen. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Cambridge University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Winks, Robin, ed. Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 5: Historiography. Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×