History : Colonial Studies

Details how France's most profitable plantation colony became Haiti, Latin America's first independent nation, through an uprising by slaves. This work explains the origins of this free colored class, exposes the ways its members supported and challenged slavery, and examines how they shaped a new 'American' identity. more...

Price: $75.00

This book analyses the roots and emergence of the new Islamic movements and the main thinkers that inspired them. The author considers issues like the effects of colonialism on Islam, Islam and violence and secularism and the Islamic reaction. more...

Price: $28.95

Kipling, Elgar, Mafeking Night . . . all these conjure up an image of a British society besotted with imperial pride in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact the true picture was more complex than this and people reacted to their empire in different ways. Many were hardly aware of it at all. This lively book is the first study of the impact of the empire on British society and culture that looks beneath the surface to find out what people really thought, with some. surprising results. - ;The British empire was a huge enterprise. To foreigners it more or less defined Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its repercussions in the wider world are still with us today. It also had a great impact on Britain herself: for example, on her economy, security, population, and eating habits. One might expect this to have been reflected in her society and culture. Indeed, this has now become the conventional wisdom: that Britain was steeped in imperialism. domestically, which affected (or infected) almost everything Britons thought, felt, and did. This is the first book to examine this assumption critically against the broader background of contemporary British society. Bernard Porter, a leading imperial historian, argues that the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad. Many Britons could hardly have been aware of it for most of the nineteenth century and only a small number was in any way committed to it. Between these extremes opinions differed widely over what was even meant by the empire. This depended largely. on class, and even when people were aware of the empire, it had no appreciable impact on their thinking about anything else. Indeed, the influence far more often went the other way, with perceptions of the empire being affected (or distorted) by more powerful domestic discourses. Although Britain was. an imperial nation in this period, she was never a genuine imperial society. As well as showing how this was poss more...

Price: $40.00

A comprehensive study in English linking filmmaking in the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) with that in francophone West Africa and examining the factors (including Islam and the involvement of African and French governments) which have shaped post-independence production. more...

Price: $107.46

In After Empire Michael Gorra explores how three novelists of empire—Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie—have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity left in the wake of British imperialism. Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on race, Gorra begins with Scott's portrait, in The Raj Quartet, of the character Hari Kumar—a seeming oxymoron, an "English boy with a dark brown skin," whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. He then turns to the opposed figures of Naipaul and Rushdie, the two great novelists of the Indian diaspora. Whereas Naipaul's long and controversial career maps the "deep disorder" spread by both imperialism and its passing, Rushdie demonstrates that certain consequences of that disorder, such as migrancy and mimicry, have themselves become creative forces. After Empire provides engaging and enlightening readings of postcolonial fiction, showing how imperialism helped shape British national identity—and how, after the end of empire, that identity must now be reconfigured. more...

Price: $20.00