Biocultural Empire
New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds
Samantha Frost editor Professor Antoinette Burton editor Renisa Mawani editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:12th Dec '24
£85.00
This title is due to be published on 12th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This collection questions the supremacy of the human species in British imperial history and explores the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds to reimagine empire as the effect of biological, chemical and cultural processes.
Human species supremacy is one of the most persistent fictions at work in the field of modern British imperial history today. This open access collection challenges that assumption, and investigates what histories of empire look like if reimagined as the effect of biocultural, chemical and cultural processes, rather than the result of effects by humans that have been visited upon cultural landscapes, fauna and biomes. In understanding the boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds as porous and open to mutual transformation, and foregrounding interspecies interactions, Biocultural Empire seeks to understand the conditions of imperial power, experience and knowledge as a remix of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Bringing empire’s ‘biocultural histories’ to the fore, it asks imperial historians to reckon with an interpretative framework which refuses the sovereignty and boundedness of the imperial subject by seeing it as inseparable from its social and ecological formations. Through this biocultural framework this collection highlights how relentlessly the human species bias of western liberal thought persists at the heart of imperial projects and their histories, and offers a new anti-colonial method that represents a significant intervention in the field of British imperial history. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Illinois, USA and University of British Columbia, Canada.
This provocative collection takes imperial history where it has seldom been before, re-imagining empire as a consequence of biocultural processes. Compelling essays illustrate this approach whether through keratin, chromosomes, whales, plants, water, mud and more. An essential guide for doing radical imperial history in the age of the Anthropocene. * Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor Emeritus, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa *
The essays in this diverse and imaginatively assembled collection reconceptualize the history of the British empire by firmly contextualizing it within the organic and inorganic environments that always influenced the direction and impact of imperial activities and often constrained them. * Harriet Ritvo, Professor of History Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA *
Biocultural Empire is an important collection that finally brings together two of the most significant intellectual trends of the last years: the move beyond the biology/society binary, embodied by Frost’s work, and anti-colonial empire histories. It is this kind of collective and multidisciplinary work that we need to document the scale and depth of harm done by unjust structures and racialized violence in the Anthropocene, from cells to empires, in human and more-than-human worlds. * Maurizio Meloni, Associate Professor of Sociology, Deakin University, Australia *
ISBN: 9781350451056
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages