'Revealing for the first time the full scope of the globe-circling ambition of the English-speaking colonial theater, Kathleen Wilson also re-writes the history of the British Empire in the eighteenth century. Her stunning thesis is that theatrical and related kinds of public enactments did not merely reflect the expanding imperium but rather created it by enabling the performance of Englishness by people of all nations. Sustaining its bold claims by making both new archival discoveries and original arguments, Strolling Players of Empire raises the stakes for what research in the field will be for decades to come.' Joseph Roach, author of Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance
Prologue: Strollers without Borders; Introduction: Britain's Theatrical Empire; Part I. Playing: 1. Peripheralizing the Spheres: Theatrical Assemblages of the Imperial Provinces; 2. Rowe's Fair Penitent as Global History: Colonial Family Strategies and the Imperatives of Nation; 3. The Lure of the Other: Jews, Nabobs and Enslaved Africans in a Transcolonial Imaginary; Part II. Theatres of Empire: 4. Performances of Freedom: Jamaican Maroons in Imperial Transit; 5. Blackface Empire: or, the Slavery Meridian; 6. Zanga's Colony: Revenge in Sydney; Part III. East India Company Peripheries and the History of Modernity; 7. Performing The Wonder in Sumatra: Theatrical Ethnography in a New World History; 8. In Conclusion: Napoleonic Gothic, or St. Helena as Center of the British World.