Biocultural Empire

Antoinette Burton, Victoria Haskins, Renisa Mawani, Emily J. Manktelow, Samantha Frost

Human species supremacy is one of the most persistent fictions at work in the field of modern British imperial history today. This open access collection challenges that assumption, and investigates what histories of empire look like if reimagined as the effect of biocultural, chemical and cultural processes, rather than the result of effects by humans that have been visited upon cultural landscapes, fauna and biomes. In understanding the boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds as porous and open to mutual transformation, and foregrounding interspecies interactions, Biocultural Empire seeks to understand the conditions of imperial power, experience and knowledge as a remix of 'nature' and 'culture'. Bringing empire's 'biocultural histories' to the fore, it asks imperial historians to reckon with an interpretative framework which refuses the sovereignty and boundedness of the...