Biocultural Empire - (Empire's Other Histories) by Antoinette Burton & Renisa Mawani & Samantha Frost (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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 byhumans 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 Empireseeks 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.

Review Quotes

Biocultural Empire is an important collection that finally brings together two of the most significant intellectual trends of the last years: the move beyond the biology/society binary, embodied by Frost's work, and anti-colonial empire histories. It is this kind of collective and multidisciplinary work that we need to document the scale and depth of harm done by unjust structures and racialized violence in the Anthropocene, from cells to empires, in human and more-than-human worlds.
Maurizio Meloni, Associate Professor of Sociology, Deakin University, Australia

The essays in this diverse and imaginatively assembled collection reconceptualize the history of the British empire by firmly contextualizing it within the organic and inorganic environments that always influenced the direction and impact of imperial activities and often constrained them.
Harriet Ritvo, Professor of History Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

This provocative collection takes imperial history where it has seldom been before, re-imagining empire as a consequence of biocultural processes. Compelling essays illustrate this approach whether through keratin, chromosomes, whales, plants, water, mud and more. An essential guide for doing radical imperial history in the age of the Anthropocene.
Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor Emeritus, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

About the Author

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Swanlund Endowed Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. A feminist historian of the British Empire whose work has focused on women, gender, race and intersectional approaches, she is the author of six monographs and many edited collections including (with Renisa Mawani) Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (2020).

Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories and Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, located on the unceded territories of the Musqueam peoples. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (2009) and Across Oceans of Law (2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020). With Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (2020).

Samantha Frost is Professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science, the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Contemporary Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. She is the author of Biocultural Creatures: Toward A New Theory of the Human (2016), which elucidates the conceptual significance of the plasticity of the biological body.