"Tells a compelling story of the various generations of Baptist missionaries in Jamaica and carefully plots
the changes in their attitudes towards their black parishioners, both slaves and freedmen, uncovering in the process
contradictions determined by the irreducible and everyday realities of imperial rule....Hall's excellent book is
likely to inspire more debate and more excavations among imperial historians and political activists."
--Edward Said, London Review of Books
Publisher Web Site, December, 2003
Summary
How did the English get to be English? In Civilising Subjects, Catherine Hall argues that the idea of empire
was at the heart of mid-nineteenth-century British self-imagining, with peoples such as the "Aborigines"
in Australia and the "negroes" in Jamaica serving as markers of difference separating "civilised"
English from "savage" others.
Hall uses the stories of two groups of Englishmen and -women to explore British self-constructions both in the
colonies and at home. In Jamaica, a group of Baptist missionaries hoped to make African-Jamaicans into people like
themselves, only to be disappointed when the project proved neither simple nor congenial to the black men and women
for whom they hoped to fashion new selves. And in Birmingham, abolitionist enthusiasm dominated the city in the
1830s, but by the 1860s, a harsher racial vocabulary reflected a new perception of the nonwhite subjects of empire
as different kinds of men from the "manly citizens" of Birmingham.
This absorbing study of the "racing" of Englishness will be invaluable for imperial and cultural historians.