Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656-1833

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe.

Author: Kathleen Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12/01/2022
Pages: 496
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.67w x 1.02d
ISBN: 9781108479783

About the Author
Wilson, Kathleen: - 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.