Background Reading
This is a far from exhaustive list, but should help to get you started when working on group projects and essays, or seeking further context for seminars.
On nineteenth-century technology
- Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.
- Headrick, Daniel R. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
- Headrick, Daniel R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
- Marsden, Ben and Crosbie Smith. Engineering Empires: Technology, Science, and Culture, 1760-1911. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
On the nineteenth-century British Empire
- Burton, Antoinette. The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Darwin, John. The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- Levine, Philippa. The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset. London: Routledge, 2013.
Regional overviews
South Asia and the Indian Ocean
- Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. New York: Taylor & Francis, 1998.
- Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
- Metcalf, Barbara D. and Thomas R. Metcalf. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- Pearson, Michael. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge, 2007.
The Caribbean
- Higman, B. W. A Concise History of the Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Knight, Franklin W. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Australia and the Pacific
- Bashford, Alison and Stuart Macintyre, eds. The Cambridge History of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Igler, David. The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Matsuda, Matt K. Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples and Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
- Thomas, Nicholas. Islanders: The Pacific in an Age of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Africa
- Illiffe, John. Africans: The History of a Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Reid, Richard J. A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.