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In 1804, Haiti declared its independence from France to become the world’s first ‘black’ nation state. Throughout the nineteenth century, Haiti maintained its independence, consolidating and expanding its national and, at times, imperial projects. In doing so, Haiti joined a host of other nation states and empires that were emerging and expanding across the Atlantic World. The largest and, in many ways, most powerful of these empires was that of Britain. Haiti in the British Imagination is the first book to focus on the diplomatic relations and cultural interactions between Haiti and Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. As well as a story of British imperial aggression and Haitian ‘resistance’, it is also one of a more complicated set of relations: of rivalry, cultural exchange and intellectual dialogue. At particular moments in the Victorian period, ideas about Haiti had wide-reaching relevancies for British anxieties over the quality of British imperial administration, over what should be the relations between ‘the British’ and people of African descent, and defining the limits of black sovereignty. Haitians were key in formulating, disseminating and correcting ideas about Haiti. Through acts of dialogue, Britons and Haitians impacted on the worldviews of one another, and with that changed the political and cultural landscapes of the Atlantic World.

Enriching the metropole-colony frame that has tended to dominate studies of European colonial empire, this book assumes a transnational approach to modern Italy and establishes how Italy’s national project and history of nationalism was intimately bound up with the fantasy—and then reality during the fascist period—of an empire in the Mediterranean. Although largely forgotten in both Italy and Greece, Italian imperial rule in the Dodecanese islands tells the story of the making of modern Europe at its margins. Unlike other studies of Italian colonialism, that emphasize Mussolini’s creation of a new ‘Roman’ empire, Italy’s Sea demonstrates that ambitions for colonization in the Mediterranean extend back to the Liberal unification of Italy. By retracing how ideas of the local, the regional and the global were united with the idea of the ‘national’ in Italy, the book offers of new perspective of postcolonial critique of both Italy and Europe, and sheds light on contemporary ideas of race, nation and belonging today.

Wyndham Lewis was both a serious proponent and forthright critic of modernism. His assault upon his contemporaries foreshadowed the twenty-first century scholarly interest in the networks, professions, and coteries – rather than the myths and heroics – of modernism. Lewis, after a long period of neglect, now sits increasingly at the heart of a revised field of modernist studies. This book explores Lewis’s cultural criticism as a valuable body of writing which posed questions that have yet to be answered about subsidy and the function of the artist, about professionalism and ethics, about who should pay for the arts, and what the artist’s obligations should be in return. It is the first book-length study of this body of critical writing, through which Lewis articulated the central and most lasting of his critical preoccupations: the question of how the work of the artist is to be valued, and the artist to be paid, in a professionalised society. This book makes an important contribution to the long overdue reassessment of a complex, contrarian figure, spanning the disciplines of literature and the visual arts, who asked pressing questions about the role and status of the artist, and ultimately about the value (economic, civic, political) of the work of art.