Strolling Players of Empire

Kathleen Wilson is Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University. Her prizewinning scholarship focuses on questions of identity, empire and culture in the long eighteenth century. Previous books include The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (1995), The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (2003) and A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (2004). A former Guggenheim and NEH Fellow and past president of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Wilson lives with her human and nonhuman relations in Manhattan and Long Island.

• Prologue: Strollers without Borders; Introduction: Britain's Theatrical Empire; Part I. Playing: 1. Peripheralizing the Spheres: Theatrical Assemblages of the Imperial Provinces; 2. Rowe's Fair Penitent as Global History: Colonial Family Strategies and the Imperatives of Nation; 3. The Lure of the Other: Jews, Nabobs and Enslaved Africans in a Transcolonial Imaginary; Part II. Theatres of Empire: 4. Performances of Freedom: Jamaican Maroons in Imperial Transit; 5. Blackface Empire: or, the Slavery Meridian; 6. Zanga's Colony: Revenge in Sydney; Part III. East India Company Peripheries and the History of Modernity; 7. Performing The Wonder in Sumatra: Theatrical Ethnography in a New World History; 8. In Conclusion: Napoleonic Gothic, or St. Helena as Center of the British World.

'The vibrancy of Britain's domestic theaters during the long eighteenth century has long been established. But in this rich, sophisticated, and adventurously researched book, Kathleen Wilson excavates theater's importance for Britain's overseas empire. Ranging from St. Helena to Jamaica, and Sydney to Calcutta, she shows how a wide range of actors and impresarios used and invested in plays to communicate, to set out arguments, and to offer cultural and racial assertions. Strolling Players of Empire is an arresting and significant work.' Linda Colley, author of The Gun, The Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World