Synopsis
Across Colonial Lines takes a multi-perspective approach to the study of empire and commodities, and encourages readers to look at commodity histories in alternative spatial and temporal contexts. It offers a comparative understanding of commodities in the Venetian, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British Empires. Highlighting the interwoven character of multiple commodity networks, this book situates commodities like gold, coffee, tea and indigo, to name a few, within pre-existing networks of labour, consumption and knowledge production. It explores the nexus between the local and the global, and highlights the role played by individual producers, petty traders, sailors and even consumers in creating regional circulations within a global political economy. In this volume, commodity networks are not just sites of production and trade, but also of political control, social organisation and consumption choices. They provide the impetus for globalisation from as early as the thirteenth century. Each chapter takes an individual commodity to illustrate the history of commodity transmission within imperial contexts. From early modern Venetian commerce to the trade networks of the Eurasian world; from the trading ambitions of British sailors to Portuguese global imperial ambitions; from the cross-imperial knowledge networks of indigo to the assertion of indigenous agency in Angola; and from the commodification of labour to the experience of tourism in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean World, Across Colonial Lines uses commodity networks as a lens to study empire building across varied yet connected geographies and chronologies.
About the Authors
Devyani Gupta is Associate Professor at Jindal Global University, India, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University of Leeds, UK. She has held fellowships awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and Volkswagen Stiftung, and has taught at the Universities of Delhi, India, California, USA, and Leeds, UK.
Victoria K Haskins is Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Director of the Purai Global Indigenous History Centre, she works on histories of gender and colonialism, domestic service, and women's cross-cultural relationships. She is the author of One Bright Spot (2005), Matrons and Maids: Regulating Indian Domestic Service in Tucson, 1914-1934 (2012), Living with the Locals: Early Europeans' Experience of Indigenous Life (with John Maynard, 2016), and Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (with Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie and Frances Steel, 2019).
Purba Hossain is Economic History Society Tawney Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research London, UK, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. She received her PhD from Leeds University, UK, and is a recipient of the Royal Historical Society Marshall Fellowship.
Emily Manktelow is Senior Lecturer of Imperial and Global History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She is the author of Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier and co-editor of Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder i the British Colonial World (2015).
Fae Dussart is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of Sussex, UK. She is author, with Alan Lester, of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance Protecting Aborigines in the Nineteenth Century British Empire (2014), and of In the Service of empire: domestic service and mastery in metropole and colony (Bloomsbury 2022). Her work explores the meaning and constitution of British, imperial and colonial identity, and the intersection of these with the formation of spaces and places.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
