Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa

How did South Africans become black? How did the idea of blackness influence conceptions of disadvantaged groups in England such as women and the poor, and vice versa? Bringing the Empire Home tracks colonial images of blackness from South Africa to England and back again to answer questions such as these. Before the mid-1800s, black Africans were considered savage to the extent that their plight mirrored England's internal Others--women, the poor, and the Irish. By the 1900s, England's min...