Introduction: around the world in eighty plays
Imperial theatrics: spectacle and empire in the nineteenth century
Pt. 1: Re-casting the castaway: the nineteenth-century theatrical robinsonade
The novel is not enough: text and performance in the cataract of the ganges
Adapting a nation to empire: the evolution of the Crusoe pantomime
Crusoe's clothes: performing authority in the admirable Crichton
Pt. 2: Theatrical nabobery: imperial wealth, masculinity, and metropolitan identities
The stage nabob's eighteenth-century origins
'The yellow beams of his oriental countenance': the nabob as racial and cultural hybrid
Australian gold rush plays and the Anglo-Indian nabob's antipodal antithesis
Pt. 3: Staging the mutiny: ethnicity, masculinity, and imperial crisis
India in the limelight: empire and the theatre of war
The empire needs men: mutiny plays and the mobilization of masculinity
Forging a greater Britain: the highland soldier and the renegotiation of ethnic alterities
Conclusion: the Imperial encounter from stage to screen.