During a major overhaul of British imperial policy following the Napoleonic Wars, an escaped convict reinvented himself as an improbable activist, renowned for his exposes of government misconduct and corruption in the Cape Colony and New South Wales. Charting scandals unleashed by the man known variously as Alexander Loe Kaye and William Edwards, Imperial Underworld offers a radical new account of the legal, constitutional and administrative transformations that unfolded during the British colonial order of the 1820s. In a narrative rife with daring jail breaks, infamous agents provocateurs,...

This book charts the previously untold story of decolonisation in the oceanic world of the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, presenting it both as an indigenous and an international phenomenon. Tracey Banivanua Mar reveals how the inherent limits of decolonisation were laid bare by the historical peculiarities of colonialism in the region and demonstrates the way imperial powers conceived of decolonisation as a new form of imperialism. She shows how Indigenous peoples responded to these limits by developing rich intellectual, political and cultural networks transcending colonial and...

A major study of the cultural origins of the Tudor plantations in Ireland and of early English imperialism in general.

An in-depth, comparative study of transatlantic abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This book reveals the ways in which those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century empire sought to make colonization compatible with humanitarianism.

This is a transnational history of the activist and intellectual network that connected the Black freedom struggle in the United States to liberation movements across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. John Munro charts the emergence of an anticolonial front within the postwar Black liberation movement comprising organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council on African Affairs and the American Society for African Culture and leading figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Alphaeus Hunton, George Padmore, Richard Wright,...

A study of the importance of debates about obeah, and state suppression of it, for Caribbean struggles about freedom and citizenship.

The Haitian Revolution may have galvanized subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and 'Frenchness' for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle of women and men of color for rights under the French colonial regime. Through political activism ranging from armed struggle to literary expression, these colonial subjects challenged and exploited promises in French Republican rhetoric that should have contradicted the continued use of slavery in the Americas and the introduction of exploitative labor...

Durba Ghosh uncovers the critical place of revolutionary terrorism in the colonial and postcolonial history of modern India.

A new perspective on the nineteenth-century imperial world through one family's history across North America, the Caribbean and United Kingdom.