This is the first book to survey in comparative form the transmission of
imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. The chapters, focusing on France, Britain, the
Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, provide parallel studies of the
manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European
empires were given wider popular visibility.
The international group of contributors, who are all scholars working at
the cutting edge of these fields, place their work in the context of
governmental policies, the economic bases of imperial expansion, major
events such as wars of conquest, the emergence of myths of heroic action
in exotic contexts, religious and missionary impulses, as well as the
new media which facilitated such popular dissemination. Among these
media were the press, international exhibitions, popular literature,
educational institutions and methods, ceremonies, church sermons and
lectures, monuments, paintings and much else. Some attempt is made to
consider public responses, in terms of voting patterns, government
popularity or the lack of it, as well as in the spheres of economic and
social development bound up with industrialization, commerce,
employment, and emigration. Fascinating trans-national similarities, as
well as significant differences, emerge from this approach, nonetheless
revealing that
imperialism often constituted a dominant ideology in these countries.
This book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of European and
imperial history and cultural and media studies.
