Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760–1830

Review

“Onni Gust's Unhomely Empire is an exceptionally nuanced and delightfully troubling study of the ideas of belonging and estrangement at the heart of the British imperial experience threading through Scottish Highlands and India of the Company Raj. It brings together intimate questions of domicile, sexuality, and racial difference as key facets of imperial selfhood observed through overlapping lenses of history and biography in ways that have not been attempted before.” ―Sudipta Sen, Professor of History, University of California, Davis, USA

Product Description

Examining the discourse of 'home' and 'exile' in Enlightenment thought, this book explores its role in British imperial expansion during the 'long' 18th century. European imperial expansion radically increased population mobility through new trade routes, war, disease and labour, and by the 18th century millions of people were on the move. This book argues that this mass movement led to intellectual ideas and questions about what it meant to belong, and played a major role in the construction of racial difference in empire.

Unhomely Empire maps the consolidation of an elite discourse of 'home' and 'exile' through three inter-related case studies and debates; slavery and abolition in the Caribbean, Scottish highland emigration to North America, and raising white girls in colonial India. Playing out over poetry, political pamphlets, travel writing, philosophy, letters and diaries, these debates offer a unique insight into the movement of ideas across a British-imperial literary network. Using this rich cultural material, Gust argues that these intellectual ideas in the long 18th century played a key role in determining who could belong to nation, civilization and humanity.

About the Author

Onni Gust is Assistant Professor of History at University of Nottingham, UK. A cultural historian of the British Empire in the 'long' 18th century (c. 1730-1830), their work addresses questions of belonging and identity in the 18th-century British empire, with a particular interest in the development of ideas of race and gender. They have taught History and Gender Studies at University College London and the London School of Economics, both UK, as well as Amherst College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts in the US.