Edges of Empire is a timely reassessment of the history and legacy of Orientalist art and visual culture through its focus on the intersection between modernization, modernism and Orientalism. Covers indigenous art and agency, contemporary practices of collection and display, and a survey of key Orientalist tropes Contains original essays on new perspectives for scholars and students of art history, architecture, museum studies and cultural and postcolonial studies Highlights contested identities and new definitions of self through topics such as 19th century monuments to Empire, cultural cross-dressing, performance and display at the international exhibitions, and contemporary museological practice.

A 2020 BookAuthority selection for best new American Civil War books Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.

In Edge of Empires, Carroll situates Hong Kong squarely within the framework of both Chinese and British colonial history, while exploring larger questions about the meaning and implications of colonialism in modern history.

During the 17th century, the Western border region of North America which existed just beyond the British imperial reach became an area of opportunity, intrigue and conflict for the diverse peoples - Europeans and Indians alike - who lived there. This book examines the complex society there.

In this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff uncovers the extraordinary stories of collectors who lived on the frontiers of the British Empire in India and Egypt, tracing their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Jasanoff delves beneath the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance to look at the British Empire through the eyes of the people caught up in it. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire enters a world where people lived, loved, mingled, and identified with one another in ways richer and more complex than previous accounts have led us to believe were possible. And as this book demonstrates, traces of that world remain tangible—and topical—today. An innovative, persuasive, and provocative work of history.

This volume explores the history of eugenics in four Dominions of the British Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. These self-governing colonies reshaped ideas absorbed from the metropole in accord with local conditions and ideals. Compared to Britain (and the US, Germany, and Scandinavia), their orientation was generally less hereditarian and more populist and agrarian. It also reflected the view that these young and enterprising societies could potentially show Britain the way — if they were protected from internal and external threat. This volume contributes to the increasingly comparative and international literature on the history of eugenics and to several ongoing historiographic debates, especially around issues of race. As white-settler societies, questions related to racial mixing and purity were inescapable, and a notable contribution of this volume is its attention to Indigenous populations, both as targets and on occasion agents of eugenic ideology.

Meng Yue examines the emergence of the international city of Shanghai, looking at the work of the commerical press, street theatre and literary arts and he shows that what can appear to be minor cultural changes often signal larger political and economic developments.

Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, Georgia is a country of rainforests and swamps, snow and glaciers, and semi-arid plains. It has ski resorts and mineral springs, monuments and an oil pipeline. It also has one of the longest and most turbulent histories in the Christian or Near Eastern world, but no comprehensive, up-to-date account has been written about this little-known country—until now. Remedying this omission, Donald Rayfield accesses a mass of new material from recently opened archives to tell Georgia’s absorbing story. Beginning with the first intimations of the existence of Georgians in ancient Anatolia and ending with the volatile presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, Rayfield deals with the country’s internal politics and swings between disintegration and unity, and divulges Georgia’s complex struggles with the empires that have tried to control, fragment, or even destroy it. He describes the country’s conflicts with Xenophon’s Greeks, Arabs, invading Turks, the Crusades, Genghis Khan, the Persian Empire, the Russian Empire, and Soviet totalitarianism. A wide-ranging examination of this small but colorful country, its dramatic state-building, and its tragic political mistakes, Edge of Empires draws our eyes to this often overlooked nation.

In the first decades of the 1800s, after almost three centuries of Iberian rule, former Spanish territories fragmented into more than a dozen new polities. Edge of Empire analyzes the emergence of Montevideo as a hot spot of Atlantic trade and regional center of power, often opposing Buenos Aires. By focusing on commercial and social networks in the Rio de la Plata region, the book examines how Montevideo merchant elites used transimperial connections to expand their influence and how their trade offered crucial support to Montevideo’s autonomist projects. These transimperial networks offered different political, social, and economic options to local societies and shaped the politics that emerged in the region, including the formation of Uruguay. Connecting South America to the broader Atlantic World, this book provides an excellent case study for examining the significance of cross-border interactions in shaping independence processes and political identities.

On the Edge of Empires explores the mixed culture of North Mesopotamia in the Roman period. This volatile region at the eastern edge of the Roman world became during the imperial period the theater of confrontation for multiple political entities: Rome, Parthia, Sasanian Persia. Roman presence is only recognizable through military installations – forts, barracks, military camps – yet these fascinating lands tell a story of frontier people and soldiers, of trade despite war, and daily life between the Empires. This volume combines archaeological and historical, literary and environmental evidence in order to explore this important borderland between east and west. On the Edge of Empires is a valuable addition to researchers engaged in the historical and archaeological reconstruction of the frontier areas of the Roman Empire, and a fascinating study for students and scholars of the Romans and their neighbours, borderlands in antiquity, and the history and archaeology of empires.