Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire
Douban
Mark Bradley 编
Overview
While the study of Classics in postcolonial worlds has received a great deal of recent attention, this is the first comprehensive study of the relationship between classical ideas and British colonialism. In this collection of essays, classical scholars and modern historians demonstrate that ideas about the Greek and Roman world since the eighteenth century developed hand-in-hand with the rise and fall of the British Empire. Beginning with the history of the British Museum and its engagement both with classical antiquity and with the opportunities provided by the British Empire, the contributors address the role of classical scholarship in understanding British colonization, the development of theories about race in Europe and beyond, the exploitation of individual classical texts as imperial discourses, ideas about imperial decline, and efforts to wrest ownership of the classical past from the dominating control of the British.
contents
Introduction : approaches to classics and imperialism / Mark Bradley --
Imperial encounters : discourses on empire and the uses of ancient history during the eighteenth century / Kostas Vlassopoulos --
Imperial ideology and the uses of Rome in discourses on Britain's Indian empire / Rama Sundari Mantena --
'The mirror-shield of knowledge' : classicizing the West Indies / Margaret Williamson --
'The ablest race' : the ancient Greeks in Victorian racial theory / Debbie Challis --
Tacitus' Agricola and the conquest of Britain : representations of empire in Victorian and Edwardian England / Mark Bradley --
Imperialist fragmentation and the discovery of Bacchylides / David Fearn --
Edward Gibbon and Francis Haverfield : the traditions of imperial decline / Adam Rogers and Richard Hingley --
Classics, race, and Edwardian anxieties about empire / Emma Reisz --
Visions of modernity in revisions of the past : Altaf Hussain Hali and the 'legacy of the Greeks' / Abhishek Kaicker --
Translatio imperii : America as the new Rome, c. 1900 / Margaret Malamud --
Envoi / Phiroze Vasunia.