Overview

Writing the Empire is a collective biography of the McIlwraiths, a family of politicians, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, scientists, and scholars. Known for their contributions to literature, politics, and anthropology, the McIlwraiths originated in Ayrshire, Scotland, and spread across the British Empire, specifically North America and Australia, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Focusing on imperial networking, Writing the Empire reflects on three generations of the McIlwraiths’ life writing, including correspondence, diaries, memoirs, and estate papers, along with published works by members of the family. By moving from generation to generation, but also from one stage of a person’s life to the next, the author investigates how various McIlwraiths, both men and women, articulated their identity as subjects of the British Empire over time. Eva-Marie Kröller identifies parallel and competing forms of communication that involved major public figures beyond the family’s immediate circle, and explores the challenges issued by Indigenous people to imperial ideologies. Drawing from private papers and public archives, Writing the Empire is an illuminating biography that will appeal to readers interested in the links between life writing and imperial history.

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9781487507572

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Reviews

"""Writing the Empire is a masterpiece of archival research and reconstruction that illuminates and challenges broad-brush narratives of British imperial and colonial history and demonstrates how biography can, in fact, be more than minutiae without meaning."" -- Ben Wilkie, La Trobe University * <em>Journal of Australian Studies</em> * ""Kroller is to be commended for her exploration of the gendered relationships between family members and other intimate connections are well-explored in this book. She took on a monumental task to synthesize an enormous amount of material and pull out cohesive themes for each section, and yet she still managed to include an intersectional lens to her analysis."" -- Victoria Seta Cosby * <em>Ontario History</em> * ""Writing the Empire is a significant piece of scholarship and historians interested in empire and colonialism will benefit from engaging with it."" -- Robert Hogg * <em>The British Columbia Review</em> * ""Eva-Marie Kroller has drawn upon recent scholarship of imperial connections and networking, as well as extensive archival work, to produce an idiosyncratic and highly original history of the extended McIlwraith family."" -- Barbara J. Messamore, University of the Fraser Valley * <em>Canadian Historical Review</em> * ""A splendid accomplishment in literary analysis, family history, and the study of the anatomy of Empire."" -- Andrew Holman, Bridgewater State University * <em>British Journal of Canadian Studies</em> * ""Writing the Empire is a fascinating … history of a family that left its traces [in] Empire politics as well as the international academic and publishing worlds."" * <em>Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen</em> * ""What distinguishes this work from some family histories is its clear-eyed attention to the good and the bad, including the impact of empire on women, Black people, Indigenous people, and other ‘imperial subjects.’"" -- Margery Fee * <em>Canadian Literature</em> *"

Writing the Empire represents on all accounts a magnum opus. There is nothing like it. Eva-Marie Kroeller has collected a wide range of archival and scholarly sources and turned them into a composite whole, an outstanding achievement. This book is a major piece of writing and offers a great diversity of insights for the scholarly community as well as for people who like to read about family genealogies in conjunction with imperial constellations. - Alfred Hornung, Director, Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University With extensive archival research and an engaging writing style, Writing the Empire tells a the fascinating story of a Scottish family that, at the height of British imperialism, emigrated to Canada and Australia and employed imperial networks to succeed in these colonial locations. This book will be of interest to historians of the British Empire, imperialism, colonialism, and colonial life writing. - Kristine Moruzi, Senior Lecturer of Writing and Literature, Deakin University

Author Information

Eva-Marie Kröller is a professor emerita in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia.

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