Making Empire

Richard Price is Professor and Chair at the Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park. His previous publications include Labour in British Society 1780–1980 (1986) and British Society 1680–1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (1999).

• Preface: intentions and purposes; 1. Encounters in empire; 2. The making of missionary culture; 3. Observation, engagement and optimism; 4. Cultural encounters: the destabilization of missionary culture; 5. Missionaries encounter the Chiefs; 6. The closing of the missionary mind; 7. Creating colonial knowledge; 8. Meetings, ceremonies and display; 9. Empire as democracy; 10. Empire and liberalism; 11. The destruction of the Xhosa Chiefs; 12. The trials of the Chiefs; 13. Postscript: endings and beginnings.

'In this exceptionally rich and sensitive study, Richard Price examines the clash between the British and the Xhosa in nineteenth-century South Africa - a laboratory, he suggests, for the imperial conquest of Africa. He traces the sad retreat by British missionaries and officials from a liberal humanitarianism to a harsh racism and the shrewd resistance by Xhosa chiefs to the encroachments of empire. This book offers as insightful an analysis of the colonial encounter and as moving an assessment of its costs as any I have read in some time.' Dane Kennedy, George Washington University