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Reading The Global: Troubling Perspectives On Britain's Empire In Asia
by Krishnan, Sanjay
About This Book
The global is an instituted perspective, adopted initially by the British in order to make sense of their polyglot territorial empire. It served to make heterogeneous spaces and non-white subjects "legible," and in effect produced the regions it sought merely to describe. The global was the dominant perspective from which the world was produced for representation and control. It also set the terms within which subjectivity and history came to be imagined by colonisers and modern anticolonial nationalists.
In this book, Sanjay Krishnan demonstrates how ideas of the global took root in 18th- and 19th-century descriptions of Southeast Asia. Krishnan turns to the works of Adam Smith, Thomas De Quincey, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, and Joseph Conrad, four authors who discuss the Malay Archipelago during the rise and consolidation of the British Empire.
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