Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
Jan 2021 · Cambridge University Press
Ebook
417
Pages
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About this ebook
Ruling the World tells the story of how the largest and most diverse empire in history was governed, everywhere and all at once. Focusing on some of the most tumultuous years of Queen Victoria's reign, Alan Lester, Kate Boehme and Peter Mitchell adopt an entirely new perspective to explain how the men in charge of the British Empire sought to manage simultaneous events across the globe. Using case studies including Canada, South Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, India and Afghanistan, they reveal how the empire represented a complex series of trade-offs between Parliament's, colonial governors', colonists' and colonised peoples' agendas. They also highlight the compromises that these men made as they adapted their ideals of freedom, civilization and liberalism to the realities of an empire imposed through violence and governed in the interests of Britons.
About the author
Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex and Professor of History at La Trobe University. He is the author of Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (2001) and the co-author of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (2014).
Kate Boehme is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leicester. She has published on South Asian History in a number of journals, including the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.
Peter Mitchell is a writer and historian from Newcastle. He is the author of Imperial Nostalgia (forthcoming).
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