Description
This is a detailed study of the various ways in which London and India were imaginatively constructed by British observers during the nineteenth century. This process took place within a unified field of knowledge that brought together travel and evangelical accounts to exert a formative influence on the creation of London and India for the domestic reading public. Their distinct narratives, rhetoric and chronologies forged homologies between representations of the metropolitan poor and colonial subjects - those constituencies that were seen as the most threatening to imperial progress. Thus the poor and particular sections of the Indian population were inscribed within discourses of western civilization as regressive and inferior peoples. Over time these discourses increasingly promoted notions of overt and rigid racial hierarchies, of which a legacy still remains.
Drawing upon cultural and intellectual history this comparative study seeks to rethink the location of the poor and India within the nineteenth-century imagination.
About the Author
John Marriott is Reader in History at the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London, and Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre
Book Information
ISBN 9780719080470
Author John Marriott
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Manchester University Press
Publisher Manchester University Press
Weight(grams) 363g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm * 14mm
