At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World

by Catherine Hall (Editor), Sonjya O. Rose (Editor)

This pioneering 2006 volume addresses the question of how Britain's empire was lived through everyday practices - in church and chapel, by readers at home, as embodied in sexualities or forms of citizenship, as narrated in histories - from the eighteenth century to the present. Leading historians explore the imperial experience and legacy for those located, physically or imaginatively, 'at home, ' from the impact of empire on constructions of womanhood, masculinity and class to its influence in shaping literature, sexuality, visual culture, consumption and history-writing. They assess how people thought imperially, not in the sense of political affiliations for or against empire, but simply assuming it was there, part of the given world that had made them who they were. They also show how empire became a contentious focus of attention at certain moments and in particular ways. This will be essential reading for scholars and students of modern Britain and its empire

Genres: History, 19th Century, Nonfiction, Sociology

350 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2002

About the author

Catherine Hall is a professor of history at University College, London. She is the editor of Cultures of Empire: A Reader and coauthor of Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780 - 1850 and Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867.

"My research focuses on re-thinking the relation between Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am particularly interested in the ways in which empire impacted upon metropolitan life, how the empire was lived 'at home', and how English identities, both masculine and feminine, were constituted in relation to the multiple 'others' of the empire. ivilising Subjects looks at the process of mutual constitution, both of colonizer and colonized, in England and Jamaica in the period between the 1830s and the 1860s. My recent book, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012), focuses on the significance of the Macaulays, father and son, in defining the parameters of nation and empire in the early nineteenth century."

Reviews

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains a collection of generally well-written chapters various aspects of the home-world of the British Empire. In some respects, the book fills a gap in the history of empire.