Media and the British Empire

'The only true history of a country', wrote Thomas Macaulay, 'is to be found in its newspapers'. This book explores how the media shaped and defined the economic, social, political and cultural dynamics of the British Empire by viewing it from the perspective of the colonised as well as the colonisers.

"Media and the British Empire is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of essays, which describe and examine the role of the media in the empire during the 19th and 20th centuries. As some of the contributions dramatically illustrate, that role was extremely significant." - Bill Kirkman, The Round Table "Media and the British Empire is thoroughly interdisciplinary. It innovatively integrates media and imperial politics across the colonies, as well as within them, and synthesizes specific incidents with theoretical explorations of media permeability that permitted local and even individual voices to resist imperial power. These essays, conveying how Victorian press developments persisted well into the twentieth century, offer incisive, counter-intuitive insights into the ways national and class identities cohere and diffuse around the reporting of events. Despite collaborations with the politically powerful, media do not fully control news reception and can be undone by rumor or individual persistence. Without erasing realities of imperial repression, this excellent anthology reassesses empire as non-monolithic, dialogic, dialectical processes subject to highly nuanced metropolitan and colonial imperial media variables to expand our understanding of the complex textures of imperial media." - Julie F. Codell, Victorian Studies

ALAIN CANUEL ResearcherPHILIP CASS Acting Assistant Dean, College of Communication and Media Sciences, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAEDENIS CRYLE Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies, Central Queensland University, AustraliaROSS HARVEY Professor of Library and Information Management, Charles Sturt University, AustraliaDEANA HEATH Lecturer in South Asian and World History, Trinity College, Dublin, IrelandJOHN LAMBERT Associate Professor, Department of History, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South AfricaJOANNA LEWIS Lecturer in Imperial and African History, Department of International History, London School of Economics, UKSU LIN LEWIS ResearcherJOHN M. MACKENZIE Professor Emeritus of Imperial History, Lancaster University, UKPHILIP MURPHY Reader in Imperial and Commonwealth History, University of Reading, UKTIM PRATT ResearcherIAN ST. JOHN ResearcherMARK TULLY ResearcherSUSAN WILLIAMS Fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, UKPHILIP WOODS Lecturer in History, Thames Valley University, UK