Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain

by Catherine Hall

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England was a phenomenal Victorian best-seller defining a nation’s sense of self, its triumphant rise to a powerfully homogenous nation built on a global empire and its claim to be the modern nation, marking the route to civilization for all others. In this book Catherine Hall explores the emotional, intellectual, and political roots of Zachary Macaulay, the leading abolitionist, and his son Thomas’s visions of race, nation, and empire. The contrasting moments of evangelical humanitarianism and liberal imperialism are read through the writings and careers of the two men.

Genres: History

420 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2012

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."