Empire of Neglect - The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism

Informationen zum Autor Christopher Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Klappentext Following the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations! nineteenth-century liberal economic thinkers insisted that a globally hegemonic Britain would profit only by abandoning the formal empire. British West Indians across the divides of race and class understood that! far from signaling an invitation to nationalist independence! this liberal economic discourse inaugurated a policy of imperial "neglect"-a way of ignoring the ties that obligated Britain to sustain the worlds of the empire's distant fellow subjects. In Empire of Neglect Christopher Taylor examines this neglect's cultural and literary ramifications! tracing how nineteenth-century British West Indians reoriented their affective! cultural! and political worlds toward the Americas as a response to the liberalization of the British Empire. Analyzing a wide array of sources! from plantation correspondence! political economy treatises! and novels to newspapers! socialist programs! and memoirs! Taylor shows how the Americas came to serve as a real and figurative site at which abandoned West Indians sought to imagine and invent postliberal forms of political subjecthood. Zusammenfassung Christopher Taylor shows why nineteenth-century British West Indian letters were remarkably un-British by exploring how West Indians reoriented their affective! cultural! and political worlds toward the Americas in response to the liberalization of the British Empire and the resulting imperial neglect. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments  ix Introduction  1 Part One: Managing Neglect 1. The Political Economy of Neglect  33 2. "Them Worthless Ones": Emancipatory Liberalism in Jamaica  72 Interregnum: Between Worlds 3. Imperial Abandonment and Hemispheric Alternatives  107 Part Two: Building New Worlds 4. Uncle Bolívar's Children  147 5. "A Purely 'Mercial Transaction"  187 Coda. Americas That Were and Americas to Come  229 Notes  239 Bibliography  275 Index  301  ...

Product details

• Authors: Christopher Taylor
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.12.2017
• EAN: 9780822371151
• ISBN: 978-0-8223-7115-1
• No. of pages: 320
• Series: Radical Americas; Radical Americas
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Romance linguistics / literary studies