Empires and Imperialists: Systems of Violence, Classification and Identity

FROM THE EDITOR: The following the third of four requests for bibliographic feedback from graduate students in Northeastern University’s World History program focused on various aspects of imperial/colonial histories. The original posting came with all four bibliographies together, with an additional request for sources that might connect all four lists together. I have separated them out into four distinct postings with the hopes that this will increase both focus and discussion. 

Empires and Imperialists: Systems of Violence, Classification and Identity,Bridget Keown

My focus is on the imperial powers, specifically Britain and Germany, and the act of imperialism and colonization.  Broadly, I plan to study the myriad ways in which native populations were perceived, imagined, and classified, and how these perceptions of the other shaped European self-identity, particularly in the latter-half of the 19th century (up to and including the First World War).  More specifically, I am interested in the study of insanity, hysteria, neurasthenia, and concepts of madness in native populations and would especially welcome suggestions dealing with these topics.  Though this reading list does not necessarily have a geographic basis, my work thus far has focused on Irish identities within the British Empire, and I hope to continue this research as part of this study, working the Irish experience into a broader narrative of imperialism, violence and identity.

1.     Totality and Infinity, Emmanual Levinas

2.     On the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

3.     Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said

4.     Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates & New Perspectives, ed. Sven Oliver Muller & Cornelius Torp

5.     Clincial Psychiatry in Imperial Germany: A History of Psychiatric Practice, Eric J. Englestrom

6.     Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany, Andrew D. Evans

7.     Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904-1908 and its Aftermath, Jurgen Zimmerer & Joachim Zeller

8.     Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Isabel V. Hull

9.     German Women for Empire, 1884-1945, Lora Wildenthal

10.  The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa, George Steinmetz

11.  German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, eds. Volker Langbehn & Mohammad Salama

12.  The Killer Trail, Bertrand Taithe

13.  King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild

14.  Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo, Jules Marchal

15.  Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds. Frederick Cooper & Ann Laura Stoler

16.  Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective, eds. Graham MacPhee & Prem Poddar

17.  Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain, Alan Lester

18.  Martial Races, Heather Streets-Salter

19.  Double Crossings: Madness, Sexuality and Imperialism: Anne McClintock

20.  Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Ann Stoler

21.  Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, Luise White

22.  Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, Simon Gikandi

23.  The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity, eds. Carl Bridge & Kent Fedorowich

24.  Cultures of Empire: A Reader, Ed. Catherine Hall

25.  After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, Ed. Antoinette Burton

26.  Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, Catherine Hall

27.  Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock

28.  Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, David Arnold

29.  Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Annie E. Coombes

30.  Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory, Michael Silvestri

31.  The Devil & Mr. Casement, Jordan Goodman

32.  The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, Gautam Chakravarty

33.  Ireland and empire : colonial legacies in Irish history and culture, Stephen Howe

34.  Empire of analogies : Kipling, India and Ireland, Kaori Nagai