SALES SHEET

Webs of Empire
Locating New Zealands Colonial Past

Tony Ballantyne
Breaking open colonisation to reveal tangled cultural and economic networks, Webs of Empire offers new paths into our colonial history. Linking Gore and Chicago, Mori and Asia, India and newspapers, whalers and writing; empire building becomes a spreading web of connected places, people, ideas and trade. These links question narrow, national stories, while broadening perspectives on the past and the legacies of colonialism that persist today. Underpinned by deep archival research, this groundbreaking collection shows why Tony Ballantyne is one of the most influential historians working in New Zealand today. Over the last decade Tony Ballantyne has driven forward a new vision of colonial history one in which the trans-imperial mobility of ideas, people and things comes into sharper relief; in which the history of any one place is re-conceived through its connections with elsewhere. This book shows how, in reshaping our understanding of New Zealands place in the world, he has also reconfigured Britains imperial history. Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex Tony Ballantyne is the most influential historian working in NZ today. Webs of Empire demonstrates his archival richness and mastery of his profession, provoking new interpretations of history and of historians. This is compelling and essential reading. Lydia Wevers, Professor and Director of the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington

RRP$49.99 240 x 170 mm 376 pages ISBN 9781927131435 Published November 2012

Key sales points:

Tony Ballantyne, the new head of department at Otago, is quickly becoming one of our leading historians, at the forefront of the next generation of NZ historians This is an inclusive history, it reaches out to people, societies and cultures in a way that encourages identification and engagement The web metaphor at the heart of the book has shaped the study and writing of history on an international scale there will be widespread interest in its release The focus on India and S.E. Asia is a strength and timely in terms of todays global cultural and economic dynamics

Author information
Dr Tony Ballantyne is Professor of History at the University of Otago and a leading New Zealand historian. His publications include many articles and edited collections, and the monographs Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World and Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire.

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Tony Ballantyne is one of the leading historians of the British Empire, and of the transnational and global turn. Here, gathered in a collection of vibrant essays, he turns his distinctive eye towards New Zealand in particular. Tackling the rich terrain of New Zealand historians, this collection of essays teases out the key contours of New Zealand history writing, while helping us see some new possibilities. No other historian seems quite to grasp the place of New Zealand in the empire and the world like Ballantyne, nor to explain with such clarity the interpretive costs that have come with our tradition and habits of history. Admired by so many historians for his prescient metaphor of the webs of empire, here in Webs of Empire Ballantyne strums the silken strands that bind New Zealand and New Zealanders to so many histories so many more than we know or acknowledge. Damon Salesa, Associate Professor of Pacific Studies at the Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Auckland

Contents
Introduction: Relocating Colonial Histories 1. Race and the Webs of Empire Connections 2. Writing Out Asia 3. Teaching Mori About Asia 4. India in New Zealand 5. Te Anus Story Empire 6. Sealers, Whalers and the Entanglements of Empire 7. Christianity, Colonisation and Cross-Cultural Communication 8. War, Knowledge and the Crisis of Empire Writing 9. Archives, Empires and Histories of Colonialism 10. Mr Peals Archive 11. Paper, Pen and Print 12. Writing and the Culture of Colonisation Place 13. Thinking Local 14. On Place, Space and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Conclusion: Writing the Colonial Past