Connected Empires, Connected Worlds

Connected Empires, Connected Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Darwin contains diverse essays on the expansion, experience, and decline of empires. The volume is offered in honour of John Darwin’s contribution to the study of empire and its endings. Written by his former students and colleagues, the book’s chapters discuss topics from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

While each author has contributed according to their expertise, they also reflect on how John’s ideas and approaches continue to stimulate new work in disparate fields. Touching on the experience of empire in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia, the authors have engaged with concepts from across Darwin’s writings, including his earlier work on decolonisation, ‘decline’, and ‘the dynamics of territorial expansion’. As such, the work in this volume operates across a number of different scales of analysis: from case studies of transnational communities, state formation and military intervention, to imperial politics, inter-imperial comparison, and global historical frameworks.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

Robert S.G. Fletcher is Professor of History and Kinder Professor of British History at the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA. He previously worked at Warwick and Exeter, and as the Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global History at Oxford. His publications include British Imperialism and the ‘Tribal Question’ (2015), and The Ghost of Namamugi (2019).

Benjamin Mountford is Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University, Australia. He is the author of Britain, China & Colonial Australia (2016) and co-editor of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World (2017) and A Global History of Gold Rushes (2018).

Simon J. Potter is Professor of Modern History, University of Bristol, UK, and the author of Broadcasting Empire: the BBC and the British World, 1922-1970 (2012), British Imperial History (2015), and Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939 (2021).