This collection follows the extraordinary careers of nine colonial subjects who won seats in high-level parliamentary institutions of the imperial powers that ruled over them. Revealing an unexplored dimension of the complex political organisation of modern empires, the essays show how early imperial constitutions allowed for the emergence of these unexpected members of parliament, asks how their presence was possible, and unveils the reactions across metropolitan circles, local communities and the voters who brought them to office. Unearthing the entanglements between political life in metropolitan and non-European societies, it illuminates the ambiguous zones, the margins for negotiation, and the emerging forms of leadership in colonial societies. From a Hispanicised Inca nobleman, to recently emancipated slaves and African colonial subjects, in linking these individuals and their political careers together, Unexpected Voices in Imperial Parliaments argues that the political organisation of modern empires incorporated the voices of the colonised and the non-European, in an ambiguous relationship that led to a widening of political participation and action throughout the imperial world. In doing so, this book offers a comprehensive but nuanced reassessment of the making and unmaking of modern empires.

The Colonial World: A History of European Empires, 1780s to the Present provides the most authoritative, in-depth overview on European imperialism available. It synthesizes recent developments in the study of European empires and provides new perspectives on European colonialism and the challenges to it. With a post-1800 focus and extensive background coverage tracing the subject to the early 1700s, the book charts the rise and eclipse of European empires. Robert Aldrich and Andreas Stucki integrate innovative approaches and findings from the 'new imperial history' and look at both the colonial era and the legacies it left behind for countries around the world after they gained independence. Dividing the text into three complementary sections, Aldrich and Stucki offer an original approach to the subject that allows you to explore: - Different eras of colonisation and decolonisation from early modern European colonialism to the present day - Overarching themes in colonial history, like 'land and sea', 'the body' and 'representations of colonialism' - A global range of snapshot colonial case studies, such as Peru (1780), India (1876), The South Pacific (1903), the Dutch East Indies (1938) and the Portuguese empire in Africa (1971) This is the essential text for anyone seeking to understand the nature and complexities of modern European imperialism and its aftermath.

Despite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. This book sheds new light on servants and their masters in the British Empire, and in doing so offers new discourses on the colonial home, imperial society identities and colonial culture. Using a wide range of source material, from private papers to newspaper articles, official papers and court records, Dussart explores the strategic nature of the relationship, the connection between imperialism, domesticity and a master/servant paradigm that was deployed in different ways by varied actors often neglected in the historical record. Positioned outside the family but inside the private place of the home, 'the domestic servant' was often the foil against which 19th-century contemporaries worked out class, race and gender identities across metropole and colony, creating those places in the process. The role of domestic servants in empire thus lay not only in the labour they undertook, but also in the way the servant-master relationship constituted ground that helped other power relations to be imagined and contested. Dussart explores the domestic service relationship in 19th-century Britain and India, considering how ideas about servants and their masters and/or mistresses spanned imperial space, and shaped peoples and places within it.

Investigating the history of vagrants in colonial Australia and New Zealand, this book provides insights into the histories and identities of marginalised peoples in the British Pacific Empire. Showing how their experiences were produced, shaped and transformed through laws and institutions, it reveals how the most vulnerable people in colonial society were regulated, marginalised and criminalised in the imperial world. Studying the language of vagrancy prosecution, narratives of mobility and welfare, vagrant families, gender and mobility and the political, social and cultural interpretations of vagrancy, this book sets out a conceptual framework of mobility as a field of inquiry for legal and historical studies. Defining 'mobility' as population movement and the occupation of new social and physical space, it offers an entry point to the related histories of penal colonies and new 'settler' societies. It provides insights into shared histories of vagrancy across New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and New Zealand, and explores how different jurisdictions regulated mobility within the temporal and geographical space of the British Pacific Empire.

Across Colonial Lines takes a multi-perspective approach to the study of empire and commodities, and encourages readers to look at commodity histories in alternative spatial and temporal contexts. It offers a comparative understanding of commodities in the Venetian, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British Empires. Highlighting the interwoven character of multiple commodity networks, this book situates commodities like gold, coffee, tea and indigo, to name a few, within pre-existing networks of labour, consumption and knowledge production. It explores the nexus between the local and the global, and highlights the role played by individual producers, petty traders, sailors and even consumers in creating regional circulations within a global political economy. In this volume, commodity networks are not just sites of production and trade, but also of political control, social organisation and consumption choices. They provide the impetus for globalisation from as early as the thirteenth century. Each chapter takes an individual commodity to illustrate the history of commodity transmission within imperial contexts. From early modern Venetian commerce to the trade networks of the Eurasian world; from the trading ambitions of British sailors to Portuguese global imperial ambitions; from the cross-imperial knowledge networks of indigo to the assertion of indigenous agency in Angola; and from the commodification of labour to the experience of tourism in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean World, Across Colonial Lines uses commodity networks as a lens to study empire building across varied yet connected geographies and chronologies.

Drawing on unpublished archival material, this volume compares Moravian economic practice in three different mission-settings, to demonstrate how Moravian practices evolved during the 18th century as part of a globalizing world and economy. Delivering in-depth analysis of the far-reaching and deep seated effects of missionary activity on indigenous communities and social relations, it explores how different economic contexts had an impact on the missionaries' relations with Indigenous and slave-populations in empire. Petterson provides an insight how the missionaries worked, lived among various non-European peoples, and how they organised themselves and their surroundings at a time of changing identities and socio economic change. Analysing how missionary practice developed over this period, it also demonstrates how the Moravian leadership's priorities and how this affected attitudes to non-European peoples on the ground. Standing outside of national and imperial boundaries, and ambivalent about the political notion of imperialism as well as colonisation itself, Moravian missionaries nonetheless functioned in parallel with colonial structures, and were part of a broadly culturally colonial mission. So, even on the outskirts of imperial organisation, they were often a crucial part of colonial practice and took part in normalising capitalist relations in many-but not all-settings, as this book demonstrates.

This book explores the emergence of 'Australasia' as a way of thinking about the culture and geography of this region. Although it is frequently understood to apply only to Australia and New Zealand, the concept has a longer and more complicated history. 'Australasia' emerged in the mid-18th century in both French and British writing as European empires extended their reach into Asia and the Pacific, and initially held strong links to the Asian continent. The book shows that interpretations and understandings of 'Australasia' shifted away from Asia in light of British imperial interests in the 19th century, and the concept was adapted by varying political agendas and cultural visions in order to reach into the Pacific or towards Antarctica. The Making and Remaking of Australasia offers a number of rich case studies which highlight how the idea itself was adapted and moulded by people and texts both in the southern hemisphere and the imperial metropole where a range of competing actors articulated divergent visions of this part of the British Empire. An important contribution to the cultural history of the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Studies, this collection shows how 'Australasia' has had multiple, often contrasting, meanings.