Decentring Empire

This volume charts a new direction in the study of British imperialism, its impact on India and other colonial territories, and its influence in propelling the forces of globalisation. Moving beyond the standard model of a bilateral circuit between imperial centre and colonial periphery, it highlights instead the web of transcolonial and transnational networks that spread across and beyond the empire, operating both on its behalf and against its interests. It suggests that these networks worked in effect to decentre empire, shaping the multidimensional contours of the global modernity we contend with today. Decentring Empire brings together thirteen original essays by some of the leading scholars of British imperialism, their contributions offered in honour of Thomas R. Metcalf, the distinguished historian of colonial India. The essays range widely in scope, moving in time from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, in space from India to Ireland and Australia and elsewhere across the imperial map, and in topic from economic, political, and social to medical, legal, and cultural concerns. Taken together, they demonstrate the analytical richness of current scholarship on British colonialism in India and elsewhere and give fresh insights into its role in the making of the modern world. This is history at the cutting edge, an important contribution to the ongoing debate about empire and its consequences.