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'Fantastic … the most important book on Black British history’ - Akala

Black People in the British Empire is a challenge to the official version of British history. It tells the story of Britain's exploitation and oppression of its subject peoples in its colonies, and in particular the people of Africa, Asia and Australasia

Peter Fryer reveals how the ideology of racism was used as justification for acquiring and expanding the Empire; how the British Industrial Revolution developed out of profits from the slave trade; and how the colonies were deliberately de-industrialised to create a market for British manufacturers.

In describing the frequency and the scale of revolts by subject peoples against slavery and foreign domination - and the brutality used in crushing them - Peter Fryer exposes the true history of colonialism, and restores to Black people their central role in Britain's past.

In this groundbreaking book, Jessica Martell investigates the relationship between industrial food and the emergence of literary modernisms in Britain and Ireland. By the early twentieth century, the industrialization of the British Empire’s food system had rendered many traditional farming operations, and attendant agrarian ways of life, obsolete. Weaving insights from modernist studies, food studies, and ecocriticism, Farm to Form contends that industrial food made nature “modernist,” a term used as literary scholars understand it—stylistically disorienting, unfamiliar, and artificial but also exhilarating, excessive, and above all, new. Martell draws in part upon archives in the United Kingdom but also presents imperial foodways as an extended rehearsal for the current era of industrial food supremacy. She analyzes how pastoral mode, anachronism, fragmentation, and polyvocal narration reflect the power of the literary arts to reckon with—and to resist—the new “modernist ecologies” of the twentieth century.

Deeply informed by Martell’s extensive knowledge of modern British, Irish, American, and World Literatures, this progressive work positions modernism as central to the study of narratives of resistance against social and environmental degradation. Analyzed works include those of Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, George Russell, and James Joyce.

In light of climate change, fossil fuel supremacy, nutritional dearth, and other pressing food issues, modernist texts bring to life an era of crisis and anxiety similar to our own. In doing so, Martell summons the past as a way to employ the modernist term of “defamiliarizing” the present so that entrenched perceptions can be challenged. Our current food regime is both new and constantly evolving with the first industrial food trades. Studying earlier cultural responses to them invites us to return to persistent problems with new insights and renewed passion.
 

The first full-length study of militarism and militaristic associational culture in interwar Britain.

While militaristic and patriotic organizations formed an important part of political culture in Edwardian Britain, 1918 often marks a terminus for histories of organized militarism. Taking the end of the First World War as its starting point, this book argues that militarism was able to survive World War I, despite the competing rise of liberal internationalism, pacifism, and anti-war sentiment. Focusing on the ideas, aims, and activities of the Navy League and the Air League of the British Empire—two extra-parliamentary organizations established to promote naval and aerial supremacy—the book examines how the Leagues negotiated the trauma of the First World War and how they contributed to the societal and military preparation for a second global conflict as the clouds of war gathered in the late 1930s.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Organised Militarism in Interwar Britain explains how these Leagues mobilized broad public and political support and what the story of each organization tells us about the impact of war on British society and culture, civil-military relations, political and private activism, military theater and commemoration, youth, and the politics of disarmament, collective security, internationalism, and national defense. In doing so, it demonstrates that martial and militaristic sentiment remained an important part of mainstream British political culture, despite the ravages of war.