Winner of the Morris D. Forkasch prize for the best book in British history 2002


Civilising Subjects argues that the empire was at the heart of nineteenth-century Englishness. English men and women in the mid-nineteenth century imagined themselves at the centre of a great empire: their mental and emotional maps encompassed 'Aborigines' in Australia, 'negroes' in Jamaica, 'coolies' in the Indies. This sense of the other provided boundaries and markers of difference: ways of knowing who was 'civilised' and who was 'savage'.


This fascinating book tells...