@article{887981,
      recid = {887981},
      author = {Greene, Jack P.},
      title = {Evaluating empire and confronting colonialism in  eighteenth-century Britain [electronic resource] /},
      publisher = {Cambridge University Press,},
      address = {Cambridge ;},
      pages = {xx, 385 p.},
      year = {2013},
      abstract = {"This volume comprehensively examines the ways  metropolitan Britons spoke and wrote about the British  Empire during the short eighteenth century, from about 1730  to 1790. The work argues that following several decades of  largely uncritical celebration of the empire as a vibrant  commercial entity that had made Britain prosperous and  powerful, a growing familiarity with the character of  overseas territories and their inhabitants during and after  the Seven Years,Ŵ War produced a substantial critique of  empire. Evolving out of a widespread revulsion against the  behaviors exhibited by many groups of Britons overseas and  building on a language of "otherness" that metropolitans  had used since the beginning of overseas expansion to  describe its participants, the societies, and polities that  Britons abroad had constructed in their new habitats, this  critique used the languages of humanity and justice as  standards by which to evaluate and condemn the behaviors,  in turn, of East India Company servants, American  slaveholders, Atlantic slave traders, Irish pensioners,  absentees, oppressors of Catholics, and British political  and military leaders during the American War of  Independence. Although this critique represented a massive  contemporary condemnation of British colonialism and  manifested an impulse among metropolitans to distance  themselves from imperial excesses, the benefits of empire  were far too substantial to permit any turning away from  it, and the moment of sensibility waned"--},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/887981},
}