Yale University Press
The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1756-1815
Key Metrics
- Ashley L Cohen
- Yale University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780300239973
- 6.5 X 9.3 X 1.3 inches
- 1.25 pounds
- History > Europe - Great Britain - Georgian Era (1714-1837)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
In this lively book, Ashley Cohen weaves a complex portrait of the imaginative geography of British imperialism. Contrary to most current scholarship, eighteenth-century Britons saw the empire not as separate Atlantic and Indian spheres but as an interconnected whole: the Indies. Crisscrossing the hemispheres, Cohen traces global histories of race, slavery, and class, from Boston to Bengal. She also reveals the empire to be pervasively present at home, in metropolitan scenes of fashionable sociability. Close-reading a mixed archive of plays, poems, travel narratives, parliamentary speeches, political pamphlets, visual satires, paintings, memoirs, manuscript letters, and diaries, Cohen reveals how the pairing of the two Indies in discourse helped produce colonial policies that linked them in practice. Combining the methods of literary studies and new imperial history, Cohen demonstrates how the imaginative geography of the Indies shaped the culture of British imperialism, which in turn changed the shape of the world.
Author Bio
I'm assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California.
I work at the intersection of eighteenth-century, postcolonial, and South Asia studies. My first monograph, The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture, 1756-1815 is forthcoming from Yale University Press (Fall 2020). My critical edition of Lady Nugent’s East India Journal was published by Oxford University Press (2014).
My articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Comparative Literature, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Sporting Cultures, 1650-1850 (UToronto Press, 2018), and Britain’s Black Past (Liverpool UP, 2020).
In 2018 I was awarded the inaugural Srinivas Aravamudan Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for my article, "The Global Indies: Historicizing Oceanic Metageographies."
I am currently at work on a number of new projects. First, a monograph entitled "Enlightenments Against Empire: Buddhism, Philosophical Materialism, and Anticolonialism in India, 1656-1956." Second, with collaborators, a translation of Yashpal's Hindi novel, Manushya Ke Roop (1949).
I offer courses on postcolonial theory, British Literature, and South Asian literature.
Source: University of Southern California
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