Biocultural Empire

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.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: 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 Hawai'i-Manoa, 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)BibliographyIndex

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.