Commodities and Culture in the Colonial World

Commodity culture and colonialism are intimately related and mutually constitutive. The desire for commodities drove colonial expansion, at the same time that colonial expansion fuelled technological invention, created new markets for goods, displaced populations, and transformed local and indigenous cultures in dramatic and often violent ways. Contemporary interest in the object and its affective regimes has intensified following the recent ‘material turn’ in literary and cultural studies.

This book analyses the transformation of local cultures in the context of global interaction in the period 1851-1914. It also demonstrates methodologies and theoretical approaches that this field of study has generated, and puts these into practise in the case studies presented. Chapters by experts in the field are based on a variety of theoretical, empirical and disciplinary approaches, while addressing a broad range of commodities, texts, and regions.

An integrated, coherent and urgent response to a number of key debates in postcolonial studies, Victorian studies, world literature and imperial history, this book will be of interest to researchers with an interest in migration, commodity culture, colonial history, transnational networks of print and ideas, world literature, imperial history, postcolonial theory, globalisation and empire writing.

Supriya Chaudhuri is Professor and Co-ordinator, Centre of Advanced Study, Department of English, Jadavpur University, India. Her specializations include Renaissance studies, nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian cultural history, and translation.

Josephine McDonagh is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at King’s College London, UK.

Brian H. Murray is Postdoctoral Research Fellow on The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture project based in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is Global Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at New York University. Her publications include Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (1993), The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India (2003), and the co-edited volume Crisis of Secularism in India (2007).