Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867

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University of Chicago Press, 2002 - 556 pages
How did the English get to be English? In Civilising Subjects, Catherine Hall argues that the idea of empire was at the heart of mid-nineteenth-century British self-imagining, with peoples such as the "Aborigines" in Australia and the "negroes" in Jamaica serving as markers of difference separating "civilised" English from "savage" others.

Hall uses the stories of two groups of Englishmen and -women to explore British self-constructions both in the colonies and at home. In Jamaica, a group of Baptist missionaries hoped to make African-Jamaicans into people like themselves, only to be disappointed when the project proved neither simple nor congenial to the black men and women for whom they hoped to fashion new selves. And in Birmingham, abolitionist enthusiasm dominated the city in the 1830s, but by the 1860s, a harsher racial vocabulary reflected a new perception of the nonwhite subjects of empire as different kinds of men from the "manly citizens" of Birmingham.

This absorbing study of the "racing" of Englishness will be invaluable for imperial and cultural historians.

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Contents

V
25
VI
29
VII
59
The Preemancipation World in the Metropolitan Mind
69
VIII
71
The Baptist Missionary Society and the missionary project
86
IX
88
X
109
Mapping the Midland Metropolis
267
XXI
269
XXII
292
XXIII
303
XXIV
311
XXV
327
XXVI
340
XXVII
349

The constitution of the new black subject
115
XI
117
XII
142
XIII
152
XIV
176
XVII
201
XVIII
211
XIX
231
XX
245
XXVIII
372
XXIX
382
XXX
408
XXXI
426
XXXII
436
XXXIII
444
XXXIV
509
XXXV
538
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Page 14 - The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: "This land was created by us"; he is the unceasing cause: "If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages.

About the author (2002)

Catherine Hall is a professor of history at University College, London. She is the editor of Cultures of Empire: A Reader and coauthor of Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 and Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867.

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