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Human species supremacy is one of the most persistent fictions at work in the field of modern British imperial history today. This open access collection challenges that assumption, and investigates what histories of empire look like if reimagined as the effect of biocultural, chemical and cultural processes, rather than the result of effects by humans that have been visited upon cultural landscapes, fauna and biomes. In understanding the boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds as porous and open to mutual transformation, and foregrounding interspecies interactions, Biocultural Empire seeks to understand the conditions of imperial power, experience and knowledge as a remix of 'nature' and 'culture'. Bringing empire's 'biocultural histories' to the fore, it asks imperial historians to reckon with an interpretative framework which refuses the sovereignty and boundedness of the imperial subject by seeing it as inseparable from its social and ecological formations. Through this biocultural framework this collection highlights how relentlessly the human species bias of western liberal thought persists at the heart of imperial projects and their histories, and offers a new anti-colonial method that represents a significant intervention in the field of British imperial history. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Illinois, USA and University of British Columbia, Canada.
List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Biocultural Empires as an Anti-colonial Method, Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois, USA) Renisa Mawani (University of British Columbia, Canada), Samantha Frost (University of Illinois, USA) 1. Very Like a Whale: Animal Metaphors and the Biocultural Imagination, Jamie Jones (University of Illinois, USA) 2. Biocultural Histories of the Black Anthropocene: Energy, Consumption, and Non-Human Worlds in The History of Barbados and The History of Mary Prince, Anna Feuerstein, (University of Hawaii, USA) 3. A Victorian Parliament of Animals; or, the Biocultural as Imperial Political Form, Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois, USA) 4. Ganja and the Godhead: Plant Matter and the Sacral Binds of the Excise Principle in British India, Utathya Chattopadhyaya (UC-Santa Barbara, USA) 5. The Royal Sacred Hairy Family of Burmah: Human Difference and Biocultural Empire in the Nineteenth Century, Jonathan Saha, (Durham University, UK) 6. History in the Water(s): Water and Empire in North America's Wet Centre", Adele Perry, (University of Manitoba, Canada) 7. Strangers, Difference and the Darkness of Empire: The HMB Endeavour in New Zealand, Tony Ballantyne (University of Otago, New Zealand) 8. Papering over Muddy Histories: Imperial Logics of Space in the Anthropocene, Debjani Bhattacharya (University of Zurich, Switzerland) Bibliography Index
edited by Antoinette Burton, Renisa Mawani and Samantha Frost.