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9780822371151

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In a world dominated by the competitive logic of free trade, what happens to those groups and places whose diminished profitability consigns them to feelings of abandonment and neglect? Christopher Taylor's Empire of Neglect gives that question a hefty dose of historical depth. ... His book will be of interest not only to specialists but also to anyone who is receptive to a set of sensitive reflections on the price that has been paid by any group or region that loses its centrality because the logic of market capitalism has passed it by. -- Theodore Koditschek * Victorian Studies * Empire of Neglect is exemplary for the ways it illustrates the worlds of critique and self-fashioning that are opened when we look elsewhere and otherwise. -- Adom Getachew * Small Axe * A brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed study. . . . Simply put, Empire of Neglect is a field-making book. Because it sets itself so resolutely against not only the methodological protocols, but even the typical discursive structures of work explicitly or tacitly aligned with economic liberalism, it is by no means an easy or accessible read. Rather, it insists upon the dissonance that comes with questioning the basic premises of existing Americanist and Victorianist understandings of the Atlantic and the Hemispheric discursive frames. But for that reason, this remarkable piece of scholarship rewards careful reading and rereading, and promises to gradually but inexorably shape all that comes after it. -- Martha Schoolman * Review 19 * In Empire of Neglect, Christopher Taylor presents a compelling argument that free trade undermined not only the commercial protections the colonists expected but also the social contracts they felt they were owed. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. -- W.T. Martin * Choice * Dexterously brings together a range of long-neglected texts and voices. . . . Empire of Neglect fruitfully adds to critical conversations about shifts in late coloniality in the long nineteenth century and will interest Americanists working in a variety of period subfields. -- Duncan Faherty * American Literary History *

In Empire of Neglect, Christopher Taylor presents a compelling argument that free trade undermined not only the commercial protections the colonists expected but also the social contracts they felt they were owed. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. -- W.T. Martin * Choice Connect * Dexterously brings together a range of long-neglected texts and voices. . . . Empire of Neglect fruitfully adds to critical conversations about shifts in late coloniality in the long nineteenth century and will interest Americanists working in a variety of period subfields. -- Duncan Faherty * American Literary History *

Empire of Neglect is a searching inquiry into one of the central paradoxes of British slave emancipation in the West Indies, namely, that the arrival of the seeming boon of liberal freedom was actively shaped by an imperial policy of racial disavowal and free market indifference. In its careful attention to the uneven terrain of the late colonial project, Christopher Taylor's book is also a study of how to properly rehistoricize liberalism's often contradictory governing powers. It is a fine achievement of scholarship and imagination. -- David Scott, Columbia University This startling work is the first study to examine the institutional effects of West Indian emancipation, which it does in systematic, insightful, and original ways. Christopher Taylor makes it impossible to think of nineteenth-century literature and culture by and about British West Indians as separate from its entanglement with the free trade policies predicated on West Indian neglect and abandonment. Empire of Neglect will be of enduring relevance and importance. -- Sean X. Goudie, author of * Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic *

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Christopher Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

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