Networks and Counter Networks
In place of an older focus on the bilateral relationships between metropole and colony, historians have begun to conceive of the British Empire as a transnational network or assemblage of networks. In this seminar, we will assess the strengths and weaknesses of this approach and reflect on the place of technology within it. We will discuss how a focus on connections might affect our view of the past and consider what kind of evidence historians might look for when asking questions about connections, circulation, and exchange between places.
PowerPoint Presentation
Seminar Questions
- Why is ‘network’ a useful metaphor for thinking about nineteenth-century empire?
- How did nineteenth-century imperial networks operate?
- How important was technology to the maintenance of imperial networks?
- What kind of scholarship does a ‘networked’ conception of empire encourage us to pursue?
- What blind spots might arise because of a ‘networked’ conception of empire?
- What do you think Fred Cooper means when he describes the world as filled with ‘lumps’?
Essential Reading
- Lester, Alan. ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’. History Compass 4, no. 1 (2006): 124-141.
- Cooper, Frederick. ‘Globalization’. In Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 91-112. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005. [eBook available through library]
- Banivanua Mar, Tracey, and Nadia Rhook. ‘Counter Networks of Empires: Reading Unexpected People in Unexpected Places’. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 19, no. 2 (2018).
Further Reading
- Ballantyne, Tony and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
- Ballantyne, Tony, and Antoinette Burton, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire. Urbana, ILL: University of Illinois Press,
- Ballantyne, Tony. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2002.
- Banivanua Mar, Tracey. ‘Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past’. Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 3 (2015): 340-44.
- Carey, Jane, and Jane Lydon, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange. New York: Routledge, 2014.
- Grant, Kevin, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann, eds., Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880-1950. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
- Laidlaw, Zoe. Colonial Connections 1815-1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
- Lester, Alan. Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain. London: Routledge, 2001.
- Magee, Gary B., and Andrew S. Thompson. Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Standfield, Rachel, ed., Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes. Acton: Australian National University Press, 2018.
