Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain

A Reader

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by Antoinette Burton

St Martin's Press

Due/Published September 2001, pages, paper

ISBN 0312293356

Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader is the first source book to track the role the British Empire played in domestic politics, social attitudes, and intellectual and cultural life. Unlike most other books on this subject, the reader also highlights women's contributions to both domestic and imperial questions, and takes account of colonial men's and women's activities as well. The reader introduces the intersections of "home" and "empire" so that the effects of imperialism on Victorian politics and society can be fully appreciated.

Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain is divided into nine sections: Emancipation, Representation and Empire, Cultures of Service, Anti-Slavery and Reform, Imperial Britons at Mid-Century, Imagining an Imperial Polity, Women, Politics and Empire, Varieties of National and Imperial Patriotism, Empires' Civilizing Missions, Work, Race and Politics: Centers and Peripheries, and The Boer War and the New Century. The more than 90 documents that make up the sections range from W.A. Archibald's "The Sugar Question" (1847) to "Chinese Emigration" from the London Times (1866), to John Stuart Mill's "The Negro Question" (1850).

Author Biography: Antoinette Burton is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois. She is the author of Burdens of History (1994) and At the Heart of the Empire (1998).