Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has written and edited many books, most recently, The First Anglo-Afghan Wars: A Reader, A Primer for Teaching World History: Ten Design Principles, and Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism, all published by Duke University Press.Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and Visiting Distinguished Global Professor at New York University. Her prize-winning books include Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, 'We Spend Our Years as a Tale That is Told': Oral Historical Storytelling in a South African Chiefdom, and The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress.

"Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons will prove invaluable to scholars working on imperial print cultures, attempting to think globally in Victorian or American studies, or otherwise seeking to unfield British Empire studies." - Kellie D. Holzer (History: Reviews of New Books) "Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire . . . sketches an important new nexus for the analysis of print cultures and empires, tracing the ways in which print was embedded in imperial contexts and could inflect those contexts." - Robert J. Mayhew (Journal of Historical Geography) "Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire works well because the books reviewed in it are diverse in origin, subject, and intention, and because the essays are all of a very high quality; the essays work together to inform and stimulate their readers’ further thinking about the cultural workings of colonization and decolonization. It is a book well worth reading as a whole. Together, it becomes much more than the sum of its many parts." - Lisa Chilton (Canadian Journal of History)

• Acknowledgments ix Introduction. The Spine of Empire? Books and the Making of an Imperial Commons / Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr 1 1. Remaking the Empire from Newgate: Wakefield's A Letter from Sydney / Tony Ballantyne 29 2. Jane Eyre at Home and Abroad / Charlotte MacDonald 50 3. Macaulay's History of England: A Book That Shaped Nation and Empire / Catherine Hall 71 4. "The Day Will Come": Charles H. Pearson's National Life and Character: A Forecast / Marilyn Lake 90 5. Victims of "British Justice"? A Century of Wrong as Anti-imperial Tract, Core Narrative of the Afrikaner "Nation," and Victim-Based Solidarity-Building Discourse / Andre Du Toit 112 6. The Text in the World, the World through the Text: Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys / Elleke Boehmer 131 7. Hind Swaraj: Translating Sovereignty / Tridip Suhrud 153 8. Totaram Sanadhya's Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh: A History of Empire and Nation in a Minor Key / Mrinalini Sinha 168 9. C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins and the Making of the Modern Atlantic World / Aaron Kamugisha 190 10. Ethnography and Cultural Innovation in Mau Mau Detention Camps: Gakaara wa Wanjau's Mihiriga ya Agikuyu / Derek R. Peterson 216 Bibliography 239 Contributors 261 Index 265