Antoinette Burton is Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, she is the author of numerous works on the British empire, women and feminism, and world history, including At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain and Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism.

It is rare to encounter a book that directly and effectively challenges the central paradigms of its field, and rarer still for one to do so successfully. In this book, Antoinette Burton ... takes up this task with her characteristic verve ... The implications of this argument are profound. Not only should the narrative history of the British Empire be reinterpreted as one of constant instability and challenge, but the fundamental precepts of so much imperial historiography must also be re-examined ... Burton has brought trouble, and those who caused it, to the centre of imperial history, and presented a powerful argument against any who would view the sunrise and sunset of Britain's empire without careful consideration of the long, fraught and turbulent day that lay between them.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Troubled Ground of Empire Chapter 1: Subject to Setback: Pax Britannica and the Question of Military Victory Chapter 2: Subject to Interruption: Economic Protest and the Limits of Imperial Order Chapter 3: Subject to Insurgency: Enemies of Empire and the Challenge to Governability Epilogue: Toward a Minority History of British Imperialism Notes Select Bibliography Index

Antoinette Burton is Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, she is the author of numerous works on the British empire, women and feminism, and world history, including At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain and Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism.

It is rare to encounter a book that directly and effectively challenges the central paradigms of its field, and rarer still for one to do so successfully. In this book, Antoinette Burton ... takes up this task with her characteristic verve ... The implications of this argument are profound. Not only should the narrative history of the British Empire be reinterpreted as one of constant instability and challenge, but the fundamental precepts of so much imperial historiography must also be re-examined ... Burton has brought trouble, and those who caused it, to the centre of imperial history, and presented a powerful argument against any who would view the sunrise and sunset of Britain's empire without careful consideration of the long, fraught and turbulent day that lay between them.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Troubled Ground of Empire Chapter 1: Subject to Setback: Pax Britannica and the Question of Military Victory Chapter 2: Subject to Interruption: Economic Protest and the Limits of Imperial Order Chapter 3: Subject to Insurgency: Enemies of Empire and the Challenge to Governability Epilogue: Toward a Minority History of British Imperialism Notes Select Bibliography Index

Antoinette Burton is Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, she is the author of numerous works on the British empire, women and feminism, and world history, including At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain and Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism.

It is rare to encounter a book that directly and effectively challenges the central paradigms of its field, and rarer still for one to do so successfully. In this book, Antoinette Burton ... takes up this task with her characteristic verve ... The implications of this argument are profound. Not only should the narrative history of the British Empire be reinterpreted as one of constant instability and challenge, but the fundamental precepts of so much imperial historiography must also be re-examined ... Burton has brought trouble, and those who caused it, to the centre of imperial history, and presented a powerful argument against any who would view the sunrise and sunset of Britain's empire without careful consideration of the long, fraught and turbulent day that lay between them.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Troubled Ground of Empire Chapter 1: Subject to Setback: Pax Britannica and the Question of Military Victory Chapter 2: Subject to Interruption: Economic Protest and the Limits of Imperial Order Chapter 3: Subject to Insurgency: Enemies of Empire and the Challenge to Governability Epilogue: Toward a Minority History of British Imperialism Notes Select Bibliography Index