The chapter situates children’s poetry within the print culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how such poetry provides insights into the shift from a reliance on British practices and literary models to a sense of literary distinctiveness and independence. It discusses how early alphabet books developed literacy as well as inculcated social and political values. It also considers how some children’s verse disseminated the trope of the lost child in the bush, while other verse familiarised children with the Australian environment. It discusses the emergence of fairy and fantasy worlds based on distinctly Australian settings following World War I, and a growing depiction of Australian progress. The chapter discusses the pedagogic role of school readers and their role in mediating continuing connections to Britain and a specifically Australian identity. The chapter also discusses the significance of columns for children in periodicals, and how their encouragement of children to write which led to the rise of a number of child poets.

This chapter draws on conceptualizations of the romance form by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson to provincialize them and delineate the imperial romance and its formal and functional specificities. It argues that the imperial romance is a colonial scripture, that is, a ritualized site for the articulation and performance of colonial ideology. It reads Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (1872), set in India, and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), set in Africa, to illustrate how these texts rearticulate categories of “good” and “evil.” It also underlines how these texts articulate and resolve colonial anxieties, especially around racial miscegenation. In underlining the imperial romance as a key site for the symbolic resolution of real contradictions of colonial life, the essay illuminates its ritual (and utopian) function that reaffirms and perpetuates colonial ideology.

As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the British Empire was threatened by nationalist insurrection in the colonies and by US–Soviet competition for global supremacy. Over the next three decades, the loss of over fifty overseas possessions problematized the country’s dominant narrative of national identity, much of it centered on the wealth and power accumulated by empire. The complex cultural responses to decolonization were typified in literature. On the one hand, diasporic authors from the Global South developed a powerful strand of anti-imperial commentary, illustrated by the work of Sam Selvon, Beryl Gilroy, Andrew Salkey, Attia Hosain, and Grace Nichols. On the other hand, several generations of (largely) white, middle-class English writers stuck to the imperial attitudes of the past, condemning indigenous revolt in the colonies (Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, Olivia Manning, P. H. Newby) and objecting to immigration into the metropolis (John Braine, Anthony Burgess, Margot Bennett). While postimperial fiction existed, most famously in novels by George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Colin MacInnes, postcolonial commentary would have a much greater impact on literary treatments of empire and identity in the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

Chapter 1 examines the fragility and unenviability of Black independence. It shows how Black Marxists and anticolonial figures navigated and negotiated Soviet and communist linkages from the 1940s to the 1960s against attempts by white Western imperial and colonial powers to weaponize the term “communism” to suffocate anticolonial movements and suspend Black independence. Once independent, the chapter shows that the Ghanaian government’s wariness of hastily establishing relations with the Soviet government arose not only from Western pressure but from genuine fears of swapping one set of white colonizers for another. The chapter then questions the totalizing analytical purchase of using the Cold War paradigm to understand the relationship between Black African nations and white empires – whether capitalist or communist – during the 20th century. It posits that a framework highly attentive to race and racism in international relations and diplomatic history must also be employed to understand the diplomatic actions of African states during this period. By so doing, Chapter 1 follows other pioneering works to argue that Ghanaians and the early African states had agency and dictated the paces and contours of their relationship with the USSR and other white imperial states.

This chapter explores how capitalism has shaped US global power, and how US foreign policy has shaped the trajectory of US capitalism. The approach departs from more well-examined questions, such as quantifying how much capitalist motivations dictated foreign policy decisions, or interrogating whether US actions were determined by geopolitical calculations of realpolitik, versus ideological commitments to democracy, versus ambitions of expanding market share. Rather, beginning with an observation of the inextricability of the development of capitalism and the US as a nation, this chapter examines in what ways economic motivations, structures, and beliefs have appeared in US diplomacy; how centering capitalism shifts the definitions we have of terms like “US foreign relations” and “US global power”; and how this framework troubles concepts we might otherwise have left unexamined. This approach poses new methodological challenges: determining what scale(s) are most useful for studying capitalism; the problem of accessing private corporate archives; how to consider the role of the state in a study that places capitalism at its core; expanding the roster of actors in the history of US foreign relations; and considering how a focus on business and labor changes our understanding of the connections between US power abroad and at home.

The introduction begins by tracing the historical ascent of comparativism, studying how comparison became a privileged tool of knowledge production in conjunction with imperialism. It examines the minute rhetorical operations and common tropes involved in Iran/Türkiye comparisons through an analysis of modern international scholarship on the Shahnameh, a classic verse epic associated with Iranian national identity.

Many eighteenth-century theorists of common law attributed its legitimacy in part to its connection to a particular location and history. However, as Britain incorporated Scotland and expanded its imperial reach abroad, British governors often attempted to carry common-law practices to new locations. In his fiction and nonfiction, Sir Walter Scott advocates maintaining Scotland’s common-law system but worries that the very cultural and legal distinctiveness he demands for Scotland prevents Scots from receiving justice under British law. Portraying the consequences of the Norman conquest in Ivanhoe (1819) and internal and external colonialism in Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott demonstrates the difficulties of reconciling the role of custom in common law’s legitimacy with a centralizing imperial state. In both works, the victors’ biases toward their own law mean that history and historical fiction no longer suture past and present, and that law imposes tragedy as well as order.

This chapter introduces the main themes of the volume, Anticolonialism and Social Thought. It provides a brief overview of the history of anticolonialism and argues that anticolonialism in history generates social thought and social theory.

During the 1970s–1980s, “self-reliance” (al-i‘timad al-thati/al-i‘timad ‘ala al-nafis) or “auto-centric” was a central Arab (and indeed Third World) theory of development. Thinkers and institutions broke with models of import-substitution and export-oriented industrialization that dominated developmental planning in republics and right-wing regimes, stemming from notions of development based on integration with the capitalist world system. They created a model implicitly or explicitly based on the Chinese experience of agrarian reform, self-reliance, and sovereign industrialization as the necessary steps to rupture with colonial underdevelopment. These economists, sociologists, and agronomists developed anticolonial and anti-imperialist theories of development based on self-reliance vis-à-vis macroeconomic architecture, technology, agriculture, and industrialization. This essay offers a preliminary genealogy of those ideas, tracing the emergence of these theories across space and time, through the work of major Arab thinkers such as Samir Amin, Mohamed Dowidar, Azzam Mahjoub, and Ismail-Sabri Abdallah.

Classical reception scholarship on Michael Field has primarily focused on the duo’s engagement with ancient Greek poetry, yet the author’s oeuvre contains eight closet dramas and innumerable poems focused on Ancient Rome. This chapter takes a closer look at Michael Field’s Roman Trilogy, comprised of The Race of Leaves (1898), The World at Auction (1901), and Julia Domna (1903), the dramas in which Michael Field grapple most closely with the entanglement between imperial and literary decadence. Through the depiction of queer artists using collaborative art as a form of resistance, the Decadent Trilogy sheds light on Michael Field’s understanding of the resemblance between ancient and modern imperial decadence.

This chapter examines a group of anticolonial and anti-imperialist intellectuals of different political persuasions thinking on Palestinian anticolonial national liberation at key moments in Palestinian history. It argues that central to these thinkers in their analysis of Palestine is a collapse in distinction between 1948- and 1967-occupied Palestine in Zionist settler-colonial ambitions in Palestine; the umbilical relationship between Zionism and US–Euro imperialism; as well as the centrality of Arab ruling classes to Zionist hegemony in Palestine.

This chapter argues that Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper saw Michael Field as a poet of Empire and proposes that scholarship on Michael Field has overlooked the conservative, reactionary social and racial politics of their oeuvre. The chapter surveys Michael Field’s often complex and contradictory responses to race, empire, and imperialism, as seen in their dedicatory verses to various national heroes and their play Brutus Ultor (addressed ‘To The People of England’). The chapter then examines their jingoistic attitude towards the Boer War at the turn of the century, and their orientalised depictions of ‘East’ in plays such as Queen Mariamne (1908), that are revealing of their treatment of racial and ethnic differences.

States are unable to cope with economic turbulence and social disintegration. They face an escalating crisis of legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. Transnational state apparatuses are unable to bridge the gap between a nation-state-based system of political authority and a globalizing economy. The contradiction is deepening between the legitimacy function and the accumulation function of the national state. There is a growing complexity and tension in the relationship between national states and transnational capital as well as between distinct fractions of capital. The mechanisms of consensual domination, or hegemony, are breaking down. The ruling classes are ramping up the global police state and turning to militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression. International tensions and geopolitical conflict are escalating. The evolution of the U.S.-China relationship is indicative of all of these trends and tendencies. The concept of imperialism needs to be updated to twenty-first century realities, with a focus on the relationship between the U.S. and Western states and their intervention, on the one hand, and transnational class exploitation on the other.

James’s modernism is based directly on the psychology he founded, and specifically on his recognition that the self is malleable (or “plastic”), aggregate, distributed, and capable of mental reform. Yet James’s outspoken critique of US imperialism and the lynching of African Americans reflected his understanding of the dangerous potential of conversion – namely, that revolutions in belief carry a measure of uncertainty and risk, not just to individual believers but to the very fabric of democratic thought. Jamesean conversion therefore dramatizes the processes by which consent is staged from within and from without. The self enacts the drama in the form of an internal dialogue in which one imagines one’s “self” inhabiting a particular temporo-spatial location, as if fulfilling the role of a protagonist in a work of fiction. Against that background, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware dramatize the processes through which individuals become plastically transformed under the manipulations of powerful “pattern-setters” of public opinion. By fracturing and fragmenting imperial forms of selfhood, these psychological Bildungsromane inaugurate a reform modernism that registers dissent from the imperial sway of groups, demonstrating the strenuous effort required by individuals to transform oppressive systems from within.