Towards the end of the nineteenth century the British Empire was confronted by two great Chinese questions. The first of these questions (often known as the 'Far Eastern question') related specifically to the maintenance of British interests on the China Coast and the broader implications for British foreign policy in East Asia.
While safeguarding British interests in the Far East presented British policymakers with a range of significant challenges, as they wrestled with this first Chinese question, another question kept knocking at the door. Since the eighteenth century, when plans for...

Can a book change the world? If books were integral to the creation of the imperial global order, what role have they played in resisting that order throughout the twentieth century? To what extent have theories and movements of anti-imperial and anticolonial resistance across the planet been shaped by books as they are read across the world?

Fighting Words responds to these questions by examining how the book as a cultural form has fuelled resistance to empire in the long twentieth century. Through fifteen case studies that bring together literary, historical and book...