This book discusses the role of the visual arts in the assertion of European colonial power, examining the representation of Indian scenery and architecture by British artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Dramatic statements about the promise and peril of artificial intelligence for humanity abound, as an industry of experts claims that AI is poised to reshape nearly every sphere of life. Who profits from the idea that the age of AI has arrived? Why do ideas of AI’s transformative potential keep reappearing in social and political discourse, and how are they linked to broader political agendas? Yarden Katz reveals the ideology embedded in the concept of artificial intelligence, contending that it both serves and mimics the logic of white supremacy. He demonstrates that understandings of AI, as a field and a technology, have shifted dramatically over time based on the needs of its funders and the professional class that formed around it. From its origins in the Cold War military-industrial complex through its present-day Silicon Valley proselytizers and eager policy analysts, AI has never been simply a technical project enabled by larger data and better computing. Drawing on intimate familiarity with the field and its practices, Katz instead asks us to see how AI reinforces models of knowledge that assume white male superiority and an imperialist worldview. Only by seeing the connection between artificial intelligence and whiteness can we prioritize alternatives to the conception of AI as an all-encompassing technological force. Bringing together theories of whiteness and race in the humanities and social sciences with a deep understanding of the history and practice of science and computing, Artificial Whiteness is an incisive, urgent critique of the uses of AI as a political tool to uphold social hierarchies.

Exhibiting the empire considers how a whole range of cultural products – from paintings, prints, photographs, panoramas and ‘popular’ texts to ephemera, newspapers and the press, theatre and music, exhibitions, institutions and architecture – were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. It represents a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the relationship between culture and empire. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, individual chapters bring fresh perspectives to the interpretation of media, material culture and display, and their interaction with history. Taken together, this collection suggests that the history of empire needs to be, in part at least, a history of display and of reception. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British history, the history of empire, art history and the history of museums and collecting.

The book examines the interactions between Britain and India during the Raj in relation to issues of empire and visual culture. It explores the impact of the Anglo-Indian colonial encounter on the arts and aesthetic traditions of both cultures. Presenting a unique overview that ranges from painting, print-making and photography to architecture, exhibitions and Indian crafts, the book considers the art of urban elites and princely states alongside popular arts. The book highlights the key role of art in forging British colonial ideology. It offers accessible discussions of issues such as Orientalism and (post)colonialism and presents current approaches to questions of British art and empire. It is structured around visual examples which include early nineteenth-century British views of India, Indian negotiations of Western aesthetics represented by Company painting, Kalighat art, and the rise of Indian national art. It covers the display of Indian crafts both in India and at international exhibitions in Britain, as well as the place of India in the British Arts and Crafts movement. The role of the market and items of fashion such as the Kashmir shawl are also discussed, along with the role of photography in representing the colony and questions around national and imperial architecture. The book is aimed at students but will also be relevant to members of the general public with an interest in questions of art, visual culture and empire in relation to Britain and British India.

Honorable Mention, 2019 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, given by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology Honorable Mention, 2019 Sharon Stephens Prize, given by the American Ethnological Society Examines the role that race played in the inception of the airline industry Empire in the Air is at once a history of aviation, and an examination of how air travel changed lives along the transatlantic corridor of the African diaspora. Focusing on Britain and its Caribbean colonies, Chandra Bhimull reveals how the black West Indies shaped the development of British Airways. Bhimull offers a unique analysis of early airline travel, illuminating the links among empire, aviation and diaspora, and in doing so provides insights into how racially oppressed people experienced air travel. The emergence of artificial flight revolutionized the movement of people and power, and Bhimull makes the connection between airplanes and the other vessels that have helped make and maintain the African diaspora: the slave ships of the Middle Passage, the tracks of the Underground Railroad, and Marcus Garvey’s black-owned ocean liner. As a new technology, airline travel retained the racialist ideas and practices that were embedded in British imperialism, and these ideas shaped every aspect of how commercial aviation developed, from how airline routes were set, to who could travel easily and who could not. The author concludes with a look at airline travel today, suggesting that racism is still enmeshed in the banalities of contemporary flight.

The contrast between the temperate and the tropical is one of the most enduring themes in the history of the Western geographical imagination. Caught between the demands of experience and representation, documentation and fantasy, travelers in the tropics have often treated tropical nature as a foil to the temperate, to all that is civilized, modest, and enlightened. Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire explores images of the tropical world—maps, paintings, botanical drawings, photographs, diagrams, and texts—produced by European and American travelers over the past three centuries. Bringing together a group of distinguished contributors from disciplines across the arts and humanities, this volume contains eleven beautifully illustrated essays—arranged in three sections devoted to voyages, mappings, and sites—that consider the ways that tropical places were encountered, experienced, and represented in visual form. Covering a wide range of tropical sites in the Pacific, South Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, the book will appeal to a broad readership: scholars of postcolonial studies, art history, literature, imperial history, history of science, geography, and anthropology.

The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor's original study ties the colonizers' attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire's rightful place in the global sphere. Bentancor points to the underlying principles of Scholasticism, particularly in the work off Thomas Aquinas, as the basis of the instrumentalist conception of matter and enslavement, despite the inherent contradictions to moral principles. Bentancor grounds this metaphysical framework in a close reading of sixteenth-century debates on Spanish sovereignty in the Americas and treatises on natural history and mining by theologians, humanists, missionaries, mine owners, jurists, and colonial officials. To Bentancor, their presuppositions were a major turning point for colonial expansion and paved the way to global mercantilism.