Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900

Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900 PDF Author: Adrian S. Wisnicki
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429558295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature examines the impact of non-western cultural, political, and social forces and agencies on the production of British expeditionary literature; it is a project of recovery. The book argues that such non-western impact was considerable, that it shaped the discursive and material dimensions of expeditionary literature, and that the impact extends to diverse materials from the expeditionary archive at a scale and depth that critics have previously not acknowledged. The focus of the study falls on Victorian expeditionary literature related to Africa, a continent of accelerating British imperial interest in the nineteenth century, but the study’s findings have the potential to inform scholarship on European expeditionary, imperial, and colonial literature from a wide variety of periods and locations. The book’s analysis is illustrative, not comprehensive. Each chapter targets intercultural encounters and expeditionary literature associated with a specific time period and African region or location. The book suggests that future scholarship – especially in areas such as expeditionary history, geography, cartography, travel writing studies, and book history – needs to adopt much more of a localized, non-western focus if it is to offer a full account of the production of expeditionary discourse and literature.

Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900

Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900 PDF Author: Adrian S. Wisnicki
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429558295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature examines the impact of non-western cultural, political, and social forces and agencies on the production of British expeditionary literature; it is a project of recovery. The book argues that such non-western impact was considerable, that it shaped the discursive and material dimensions of expeditionary literature, and that the impact extends to diverse materials from the expeditionary archive at a scale and depth that critics have previously not acknowledged. The focus of the study falls on Victorian expeditionary literature related to Africa, a continent of accelerating British imperial interest in the nineteenth century, but the study’s findings have the potential to inform scholarship on European expeditionary, imperial, and colonial literature from a wide variety of periods and locations. The book’s analysis is illustrative, not comprehensive. Each chapter targets intercultural encounters and expeditionary literature associated with a specific time period and African region or location. The book suggests that future scholarship – especially in areas such as expeditionary history, geography, cartography, travel writing studies, and book history – needs to adopt much more of a localized, non-western focus if it is to offer a full account of the production of expeditionary discourse and literature.

Climate in Motion

Climate in Motion PDF Author: Deborah R. Coen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022655502X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary. Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe. She argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a patchwork of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Led by Julius Hann in Vienna, Habsburg scientists were the first to investigate precisely how local winds and storms might be related to the general circulation of the earth’s atmosphere as a whole. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Coen grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization. Climate in Motion presents the history of modern climate science as a history of “scaling”—that is, the embodied work of moving between different frameworks for measuring the world. In this way, it offers a critical historical perspective on the concepts of scale that structure thinking about the climate crisis today and the range of possibilities for responding to it.

Imperial Bodies in London

Imperial Bodies in London PDF Author: Kristin D. Hussey
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988445
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Since the eighteenth century, European administrators and officers, military men, soldiers, missionaries, doctors, wives, and servants moved back and forth between Britain and its growing imperial territories. The introduction of steam-powered vessels, and deep-docks to accommodate them at London ports, significantly reduced travel time for colonists and imperial servants traveling home to see their families, enjoy a period of study leave, or recuperate from the tropical climate. With their minds enervated by the sun, livers disrupted by the heat, and blood teeming with parasites, these patients brought the empire home and, in doing so, transformed medicine in Britain. With Imperial Bodies in London, Kristin D. Hussey offers a postcolonial history of medicine in London. Following mobile tropical bodies, her book challenges the idea of a uniquely domestic medical practice, arguing instead that British medicine was imperial medicine in the late Victorian era. Using the analytic tools of geography, she interrogates sites of encounter across the imperial metropolis to explore how medical research and practice were transformed and remade at the crossroads of empire.

Environment and Ecology in the Long Nineteenth-Century

Environment and Ecology in the Long Nineteenth-Century PDF Author: Mark Frost
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040134297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 771

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Book Description
This volume includes sources relating to a range of social and cultural contexts, including the proliferation of natural history crazes (ferns, aquaria, orchids, etc); debates about the social and environmental impacts of changing land use in town and country; debates about demographics, population, and resources inspired by Thomas Malthus; attempts to preserve landscapes (e.g., The Commons Preservation Society), debates about hunger, poverty, and disease in the countryside, particularly during the ‘Hungry Forties’, and relating to the Captain Swing and Chartist disturbances; the rise of land Utopianism and rural Utopian community projects; the rise of new forms of rural leisure; aesthetic engagements with rural enviroments and new world travel; and debates about pollution (especially water pollution). The volume will also turn to a range of literary sources from the period prior to 1858 to illustrate the ways in which changing attitudes to environments emerged in fiction. These include extracts from Dickens’s early works, the hunting novels of R. S. Surtees, the social novels of Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Tonna, Charles Kingsley and Margaret Oliphant, John Ruskin’s environmental fairytale, ‘The King of the Golden River’, chartist fiction, Victorian children’s fiction, and adventure novels.

Mungo Park's Ghost

Mungo Park's Ghost PDF Author: Dane Kennedy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009393030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The British sent two large expeditions to Africa in 1816, one to follow the Niger River to its outlet, the other to trace the Congo River to its source. The forgotten story of their disastrous failures is a revealing case study of the hubris that spurred the exploration of Africa.

Writing the South African San

Writing the South African San PDF Author: Lara Atkin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030862267
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book offers an innovative new framework for reading British and settler representations of Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. Taking the representation of the Southern African San as its case study, it uses methodologies drawn from critical anthropology, imperial history and literary studies to show the role that literary representations of Indigenous peoples played in popularising the hierarchical view of racial difference. The study identifies an ‘ethnographic poetics’ in which the claims of scientific discourse blend with a consciously literary preference for metaphor and analogy. This created a set of mobile figures that could be disseminated to different reading publics in both Britain and the colonies through a variety of literary genres and textual media. It advances research on race and imperial history by focusing on the importance of literature - from newspapers and periodicals to popular novels - in shaping discourses of national and racial belonging in Britain and the Cape Colony.

The Smell of Slavery

The Smell of Slavery PDF Author: Andrew Kettler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108846599
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
In the Atlantic World, different groups were aromatically classified in opposition to other ethnic, gendered, and class assemblies due to an economic necessity that needed certain bodies to be defined as excremental, which culminated in the creation of a progressive tautology that linked Africa and waste through a conceptual hendiadys born of capitalist licentiousness. The African subject was defined as a scented object, appropriated as filthy to create levels of ownership through discourse that marked African peoples as unable to access spaces of Western modernity. Embodied cultural knowledge was potent enough to alter the biological function of the five senses to create a European olfactory consciousness made to sense the African other as foul. Fascinating, informative, and deeply researched, The Smell of Slavery exposes that concerns with pungency within the Western self were emitted outward upon the freshly dug outhouse of the mass slave grave called the Atlantic World.

River of the Gods

River of the Gods PDF Author: Candice Millard
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525435646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The harrowing story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time and its complicated legacy—from the New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST • GOODREADS "A lean, fast-paced account of the almost absurdly dangerous quest by [Richard Burton and John Speke] to solve the geographic riddle of their era." —The New York Times Book Review For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe – and extend their colonial empires. Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton’s opposite in temperament and beliefs. From the start the two men clashed. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke’s great envy. The day before they were to publicly debate,Speke shot himself. Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan’s army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without Bombay and men like him, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived. In River of the Gods Candice Millard has written another peerless story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.

Mobility and Corporeality in Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Literature

Mobility and Corporeality in Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Literature PDF Author: Jaine Chemmachery
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793625689
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Mobility and Corporeality in 19th and 21st Century Anglophone Literature: Bodies in Motion aims at exploring the intersection of literary, mobility and body studies in Anglophone literature from the 19th century to the 21st century. Corporeal mobility includes a variety of mobile bodies that have long been othered and marginalised due to issues pertaining to gender, disability, race, and class. Yet there is a relative lack of academic work on it, despite the fact that Anglophone literature has increasingly portrayed the circulation of characters, objects, and information since the 19th century, echoing the many types of mobility that have occurred through processes of colonisation, decolonisation and globalisation. This book, therefore, discusses the ways in which literatures produced in the English-speaking world challenge normative depictions of bodies on the move and reconceptualise them by making corporeality an essential feature of movement across the world.

Rethinking Geographical Explorations in Extreme Environments

Rethinking Geographical Explorations in Extreme Environments PDF Author: Marco Armiero
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000624145
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Focusing on extreme environments, from Umberto Nobile’s expedition to the Arctic to the commercialization of Mt Everest, this volume examines global environmental margins, how they are conceived and how perceptions have changed. Mountaintops and Arctic environments are the settings of social encounters, political strategies, individual enterprises, geopolitical tensions, decolonial practises, and scientific experiments. Concentrating on mountaineering and Arctic exploration between 1880 – 1960, contributors to this volume show how environmental marginalisation has been discursively implemented and materially generated by foreign and local actors. It examines to what extent the status and identity of extreme environments has changed during modern times, moving them from periphery to the centre and discarding their marginality. The first section looks at ways in which societies have framed remoteness, through the lens of commercialization, colonialism, knowledge production and sport, while the second examines the reverse transfer, focusing on how extreme nature has influenced societies, through international network creation, political consensus and identity building. This collection enriches the historical understanding of exploration by adopting a critical approach and offering multidimensional and multi-gaze reconstructions. This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in environmental history, geography, colonial studies and the environmental humanities.