Making Empire: Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa

by Richard Price

• ISBN13: 9780521889681
• ISBN10: 0521889685
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-10
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is the dramatic story of the colonial encounter and the construction of empire in Southern Africa in the nineteenth century. What did the British make of the Xhosa and how did they make sense of their politics and culture? How did the British establish and then explain their dominion, especially when it ran counter to the cultural values they believed themselves to represent? Richard Price answers these questions by looking at the ways in which individual missionaries, officials and politicians interacted with the Xhosa. He describes how those encounters changed and shaped the culture of imperial rule in Southern Africa. He charts how an imperial regime developed both in the minds of the colonizers and in the everyday practice of power and how the British imperial presence was entangled in and shaped by the encounter with the Xhosa from the very moment of their first meeting.

Table of Contents

Preface: intentions and purposes

Encounters in empire

The making of missionary culture

Observation, engagement and optimism

Cultural encounters: the destabilization of missionary culture

Missionaries encounter the Chiefs

The closing of the missionary mind

Creating colonial knowledge

Meetings, ceremonies and display

Empire as democracy

Empire and liberalism

The destruction of the Xhosa Chiefs

The trials of the Chiefs

Postscript: endings and beginnings

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