Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in

Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This volume comprehensively examines the ways metropolitan Britons spoke and wrote about the British Empire during the short eighteenth century, from about 1730 to 1790. The work argues that following several decades of largely uncritical celebration of the empire as a vibrant commercial entity that had made Britain prosperous and powerful, a growing familiarity with the character of overseas territories and their inhabitants during and after the Seven Years' War produced a substantial critique of empire. Evolving out of a widespread revulsion against the behaviors exhibited by many groups of Britons overseas and building on a language of "otherness" that metropolitans had used since the beginning of overseas expansion to describe its participants, the societies, and polities that Britons abroad had constructed in their new habitats, this critique used the languages of humanity and justice as standards by which to evaluate and condemn the behaviors, in turn, of East India Company servants, American slaveholders, Atlantic slave traders, Irish pensioners, absentees, oppressors of Catholics, and British political and military leaders during the American War of Independence. Although this critique represented a massive contemporary condemnation of British colonialism and manifested an impulse among metropolitans to distance themselves from imperial excesses, the benefits of empire were far too substantial to permit any turning away from it, and the moment of sensibility waned.

Country	USA
Author	Jack P. Greene
Binding	Paperback
Brand	Greene, Jack P.
EAN	9781107682986
Feature	Used Book in Good Condition
IsAdultProduct
ISBN	1107682983
Label	Cambridge University Press
Manufacturer	Cambridge University Press
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	404
PublicationDate	2013-03-29
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
ReleaseDate	2013-05-24
Studio	Cambridge University Press

Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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