Death and the Nabob

Imperialism and Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century India

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5115098
AutoresR M W Travers (Cornell University, autor correspondente), R Travers
Ano2007
Volume196
Fascículo1
Páginas83-124
Data de publicação2007-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoPast & Present (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
EditoraOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gtm016
OpenAlexW2093515148
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas13
Referências citadas9

Over the long eighteenth century, the British imperial state emerged as a precocious example of a ‘fiscal-military’ regime, mobilizing people and money on an unprecedented scale to fight its European and global wars.1 The growing power of the British state and empire relied on symbolic and rhetorical capital as well as coercive technologies, and the idea of Britishness itself became an important tool in mobilizing support for the state's militaristic goals.2 Even the dead were not immune to the ideological force field of militant nationalism. Indeed, official notions of Britishness in the eighteenth century were preoccupied as much with dead heroes as with living ones. The deaths of General Wolfe at Quebec or Nelson at Trafalgar were only the most famous among a macabre procession of great death scenes that came to symbolize the sacrificial heroism of the nation, and especially its officer classes. From the Seven Years War to the Napoleonic War, Westminster Abbey and St Paul's were transformed by a forest of elaborate tombs into schools for imperial warrior-statesmen and generals.

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