Ebook: Empire calling : administering colonial Australasia and India

The essays gathered together in this book explore the roles of the men and women who served the British Empire in Australasia and India, and those who were subject to their administration. As these essays demonstrate, administrative arrangements involve complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often through radically unequal and racially based power relations. Colonial administration involves diverse domains of practice -- the Civil Service, schools and universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems -- and many forms of activities, including managing and organising; financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering and supplying; writing and implementing policies. In the two parts of this book, the authors -- from India, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain -- examine the ways colonial administrations accumulated and managed information and knowledge about the places and peoples under their jurisdiction. The administration of colonial spaces was neither a simple nor a unilinear project, and the essays in this book will contribute to key debates about imperial history. This book will appeal to readers from a variety of disciplines interested in the cultural history of the British Empire, including those working in the areas of literary, historical, postcolonial, and gender studies.  Read more...