Crime and Empire
The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime
- Publisher's listprice GBP 132.50
-
59 823 Ft (56 975 Ft + 5% VAT)
The price is estimated because at the time of ordering we do not know what conversion rates will apply to HUF / product currency when the book arrives. In case HUF is weaker, the price increases slightly, in case HUF is stronger, the price goes lower slightly.
- Discount 10% (cc. 5 982 Ft off)
- Discounted price 53 841 Ft (51 278 Ft + 5% VAT)
Subcribe now and take benefit of a favourable price.
Subscribe
59 823 Ft
Availability
printed on demand
Why don't you give exact delivery time?
Delivery time is estimated on our previous experiences. We give estimations only, because we order from outside Hungary, and the delivery time mainly depends on how quickly the publisher supplies the book. Faster or slower deliveries both happen, but we do our best to supply as quickly as possible.
Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 9 October 2003
- ISBN 9780199261055
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages218 pages
- Size 223x145x18 mm
- Weight 420 g
- Language English 0
Categories
Short description:
In Crime and Empire, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee examines a wide range of nineteenth-century British fictions about crime in India - from writers such as Wilkie Collins, Walter Scott, and Conan Doyle to historical, parliamentary, and medical narratives. The discussion centres on the complex and productive relationship between crime and England's status as the world's leading imperial power.
MoreLong description:
The language of crime and punishment is everywhere, especially in the context of building new global orders where old imperial relationships between the west and the rest of the world are being redefined and redesigned. This book is about one of the formative moments of this rhetorical strategy of representing empires. By looking at a variety of British narratives about India being produced from the later half of the eighteenth century onwards, it suggests that the discourse of crime was one of the major representative tools which the British employed to understand, imagine, and rule the vast country. However, to understand the full implication of this strategy for British understanding of both the colonised 'others' and a particular image of 'self', we must study the formation of this discourse not only in the context of the colony, but of its peculiar importance within 'domestic' Britain itself. Nineteenth-Century British society placed a huge amount of importance on issues of crime, punishment, order, and policing. These issues became fundamental to British claims of being a civilised nation. Naturally, they became an important part of British colonial/imperial strategy. But, since in Britain these issues were sites of contest and not consent, of debate and opposition and not unquestioned hegemonic power, they were inherently risky tools to use in building an ideology of empire. As the various readings of the narratives employing 'fictions' of crime offered here shows, an opposition or critique of empire was formed through these fictions even as they were used to build a consensus for empire-building. The slippages and ambiguities associated with imperial narratives then, are not products of some inherent semiotic disorder. Rather, they grew out of a particular history within which the rhetoric employed by these narratives took shape. This book is an attempt to recover the traces of that history within the various imperial fictions of crime.
As Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee argues in his insightful, well-researched Crime and Empire, the British campaigns against both sati and Thuggee were part of a more general reformist approach to India that at once mirrored the rise of the "new police" in Britain and had the effect of criminalizing Indian culture as a whole. And if secular, utilitarian reformism worked to criminalize India, that was just as true of evangelicalism, as Jeffrey Cox points out: "For evangelicals ... something was very wrong with India, and the source of the evil was crystal clear: it was religion. Hinduism was obscene and cruel and bloody and lascivious, and so forth, and because of Hinduism, Indians were liars, thieves, widow-burners, murderers of infants, and so forth"(24)...
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Crime, Paradox, Fiction, Theory
The 'Criminal' Colony Before New Police
Demanding Reform: From Fielding to Peel
Resisting the New Police
New Policing, India, and Thuggee
Representing the Mutiny
Shifting Images of the Criminal
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
