Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750-1850 [Hardcover]

''Empires of the Imagination' is a bold, provocative and ambitious book' --Ludmilla Jordanova, Professor of Modern History, King's College, London

'Empires of the Imagination is a bold, provocative and ambitious book.' --Ludmilla Jordanova, Professor of Modern History, King's College London

'an excellent book, brimming with insights and splendid illustrations...a sumptuous treat indeed' --Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph

"ambitious, authoritative survey of British visual culture in an age of imperial ascent" -- Maya Jasan

"beautifully produced, closely argued and deeply researched...an important, weighty book. It deserves close scrutiny and a warm reception." --Prof. Denis Judd, BBC History Magazine

"a hefty, exceptionally learned and exhaustively ... researched book ... Hoock's feel for the creative disorderliness of the time is a pleasure" --Simon Schama, Financial Times

"a learned, engrossing book. ... For anybody interested in British painting, military history or the culture of empire, this is a sumptuous treat indeed." --Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Telegraph

"ambitious, authoritative survey of British visual culture in an age of imperial ascent" --Maya Jasanoff, Guardian

'Empires Of The Imagination is a remarkable achievement, as sumptuous in argument as it is in presentation.'
--Brian Morton, Sunday Herald

"Hoock's analysis is of an astonishing breadth. It proves equally entertaining and encyclopaedic by virtue of good story-telling" --Deborah Rosario, Oxonian Review

This scholarly yet highly accessible book illuminates the manifold ways in which the culture of power and the power of culture were interwoven and shaped the character of British public life.

Between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, Britain evolved from a substantial international power yet relative artistic backwater into a global superpower and a leading cultural force in Europe. In this original and wide-ranging book, Hoock illuminates the manifold ways in which the culture of power and the power of culture were interwoven in this period of dramatic change. Britons invested artistic and imaginative effort to come to terms with the loss of the American colonies; to sustain the generation-long fight against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France; and to assert and legitimate their growing empire in India. Demonstrating how Britain fought international culture wars over prize antiquities from the Mediterranean and Near East, the book explores how Britons appropriated ancient cultures from the Mediterranean, the Near East, and India, and casts a fresh eye on iconic objects such as the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Marbles.

The book features four specially designed maps as well as 20 colour and 48 black and white illustrations.

Over the course of the century after 1750, Britain evolved from a substantial international power yet relative artistic backwater into a global superpower and a leading cultural force in Europe. Empires of the Imagination illuminates the manifold ways in which the culture of power and the power of culture were interwoven in this period of dramatic change. Britons invested artistic and imaginative effort to come to terms with the loss of the American colonies; to sustain the generation-long fight against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France; and to assert and legitimate their growing empire in India. Award-winning historian Holger Hoock explores the controversial careers of America's leading painters during her War of Independence and analyses the unique British military pantheon created at St Paul's Cathedral at the turn of the nineteenth century. Demonstrating how Britain fought international culture wars over prize antiquities from the Mediterranean and Near East, the book offers a fresh interpretation of the origins of the British Museum's collections. Detailed studies of Britons and their local assistants who first documented the ancient monuments of India and Java contribute to debates about Orientalism and the production of imperial knowledge. From Athens to Amaravati, British archaeological interventions prompted concerns about plunder and preservation. Drawing on a very broad range of textual sources and material culture, Empires of the Imagination combines impeccable scholarship with a lively narrative style. It powerfully revises our understanding of the cultural role of the Hanoverian and early Victorian British state. By putting British culture into an international context, it highlights both European similarities and its distinctly British features.

'Empires of the Imagination is an ambitious and original study of how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperial power was made manifest in a variety of cultural media, especially the visual arts. Covering three continents and a range of detailed case studies, it combines breadth and depth, explaining how the British state and the ruling political and artistic elites worked together to create a powerful conception of the British empire.' - John Brewer, California Institute of Technology, author of The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. 'Empires of the Imagination is a bold and provocative book that seeks to develop an integrated form of history, which does justice to the entangled relations between culture and politics. Clearly and elegantly written, and thoughtfully illustrated, this volume brings together collecting and memorialisation, travel and national identity, heroism and diplomacy, war and aesthetic drives in fruitful ways. It presents a wide perspective on an exceptionally significant era for the British world.' - Ludmilla Jordanova, King's College London, author of History in Practice.

Holger Hoock (b. 1972) is the Carroll J. Amundson Professor of British History at the University of Pittsburgh. His first book, The King's Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture (OUP, 2003), was runner-up for the 2004 Whitfield Prize in British History.