Media and the British Empire

"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