Imperial Knowledge


Book Description

While Western literature has long reflected the techniques of power that privileged the colonial masters and their point of view, Russian fictional and nonfictional texts have escaped such scrutiny because Russia is not generally considered a colonial power. In arguing that Russia's long history of territorial expansion is a form of colonization, this book uses postcolonial theory to examine Russian literature and the power structures reflected in it. Among the authors discussed are Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn.




Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power


Book Description

Looking at the way cultural competencies and sensibilities entered into the construction of race in the colonial context, this text proposes that 'cultural racism' in fact predates its postmodern discovery.




The Imperial Security State


Book Description

The Imperial Security State explores an important but under-explored dimension of British imperialism - its information system and the close links between military knowledge and the maintenance of empire. James Hevia's innovative study focuses on route books and military reports produced by the British Indian Army military intelligence between 1880 and 1940. He shows that together these formed a renewable and authoritative archive that was used to train intelligence officers, to inform civilian policy makers and to provide vital information to commanders as they approached the battlefield. The strategic, geographical, political and ethnographical knowledge that was gathered not only framed imperial strategies towards colonized areas to the east but also produced the very object of intervention: Asia itself. Finally, the book addresses the long-term impact of the security regime, revealing how elements of British colonial knowledge have continued to influence contemporary tactics of counterinsurgency in twenty-first-century Iraq and Afghanistan.




Imagining Afghanistan


Book Description

An innovative exploration of how colonial interventions in Afghanistan have been made possible through representations of the country as 'backward'.




The Imperial Archive


Book Description

Argues that by meeting the vast administrative challenge of the British Empire - thorough maps and surveys, censuses and statistics - Victorian administrators developed a new symbiosis of knowledge and power. The book draws on works by Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and Bram Stoker.







Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic


Book Description

Drawing on texts written by and about European and Euro-American captives in a variety of languages and genres, Lisa Voigt explores the role of captivity in the production of knowledge, identity, and authority in the early modern imperial world. The pr




Taming the Imperial Imagination


Book Description

A new perspective on empire, international relations and foreign policy through attention to British colonial knowledge on Afghanistan from 1808 to 1878.




An Empire of Others


Book Description

Ethnographers helped to perceive, to understand and also to shape imperial as well as Soviet Russia?s cultural diversity. This volume focuses on the contexts in which ethnographic knowledge was created. Usually, ethnographic findings were superseded by imperial discourse: Defining regions, connecting them with ethnic origins and conceiving national entities necessarily implied the mapping of political and historical hierarchies. But beyond these spatial conceptualizations the essays particularly address the specific conditions in which ethnographic knowledge appeared and changed. On the one hand, they turn to the several fields into which ethnographic knowledge poured and materialized, i.e., history, historiography, anthropology or ideology. On the other, they equally consider the impact of the specific formats, i.e., pictures, maps, atlases, lectures, songs, museums, and exhibitions, on academic as well as non-academic manifestations.




Mobilities of Knowledge


Book Description

This collection of essays examines how spatial mobilities of people and practices, technologies and objects, knowledge and ideas have shaped the production, circulation, and transfer of knowledge in different historical and geographical contexts. Targeting an interdisciplinary audience, Mobilities of Knowledge combines detailed empirical analyses with innovative conceptual approaches. The first part scrutinizes knowledge circulation, transfer, and adaption, focussing on the interpersonal communication process, early techniques of papermaking, a geographical text, indigenous knowledge in exploration, the genealogy of spatial analysis, and different disciplinary knowledges about the formation of cities, states, and agriculture. The second part analyses the interplay of mediators, networks, and learning by studying academic careers, travels, and collaborations within the British Empire, public internationalism in Geneva, the global transfer of corporate knowledge through expatriation, graduate mobility from the global south to the global north, and the international mobility of degree programs in higher education.This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.




Recent Books