This chapter considers a key change in the military spectacle of the West India Regiments in the mid-to-late 1850s when the uniform for all ranks below commissioned officer was altered to one inspired by France’s Zouave forces. Representing a form of martial rebranding, this was a dramatic shift that ended the policy of using the same basic uniforms as other British Foot Regiments. Two interpretive frames for this ‘Zouavisation’ of the West India Regiments are offered. First, there was a desire to emulate and replicate the picturesque valour that the French Zouaves had displayed in the Crimean War, a sentiment strongly expressed by Queen Victoria herself. Second, there was an effort to assign uniforms that were more sensitive to the local conditions in which British military units operated. In the case of the West India Regiments, this policy served to inscribe racial differences between troops, as demonstrated by the fact that the officers of the regiments were not required to wear Zouave-style uniforms. This change reflected shifting ideas about people of African descent, as well as about tropicality, in this period.

Chapter 7 looks at the place of the final remaining West India Regiment within the mass militarised culture of late nineteenth-century Britain. The first book-length regimental histories date from this period. Written by men who had served in the 1873-74 Anglo-Asante War as junior officers, these histories offered more celebratory accounts of the West India Regiments and represented an effort to secure the status and historical legacy of the units. A particular focus of the chapter is the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 when representatives of the regiment were present in London. The coverage they received, as well as their depiction in popular cultural forms, serves to reveal their exclusion from a British Army that was rendered White and metropolitan at this apogee of a racially inflected imperial culture. As such, the partial equality that had been granted to their Black soldiers when they were created a century earlier was symbolically undone.

Row upon row of Victorian terraced houses in areas such as Romsey testify to the huge expansion of Cambridge in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The author shows how the growth of town and University was hastened by the enclosure of the medieval open fields, the arrival of the railway in 1845 and long overdue reforms to the University. The population of the University swelled as it finally opened its doors to scholars of different religions in 1856, and to women in 1869. The author looks at pioneer women at Newnham and Girton, the first Black students, and the first academic wives permitted in Cambridge. The role of University abolitionists and campaigners such as Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano are also explored. When the Duke of Devonshire founded the Cavendish Laboratory, there followed a tremendous period of scientific advance which included the discovery of the electron and neutron and splitting of the atom, led by J. J. Thomson, Rutherford and Chadwick. Significant individuals such as Darwin, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Virginia Woolf and poet Rupert Brooke are also included, as are the charms of Grantchester Meadows and the Orchard Tea Garden.

How did Churchill and Roosevelt communicate with Stalin?In this chapter, we examine the linguistic histories and abilities of a number of prominent figures, both historical and not so historical.

The aesthetics of the self as inextricably linked to an unruly affective economy are explored in Chapter 5 with respect to Mustafa Sa’eed, the protagonist of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. I also highlight the novel’s subtle intertextual arrangements and literary echoes which are part of a larger symphony of mirrorings that form a recurrent principle ramifying at different levels of the text. I track the various references to Othello, Heart of Darkness, A Thousand and One Nights, and texts of the Arab Nahda (renaissance) that are widely interspersed throughout the novel. Finally, I examine Mustafa Sa’eed’s motivation toward self-authorship and the ability to fashion his own identity autonomously and in complete control both of its contingent processes and of their final product. He does this through the deployment of exoticizing orientalist stereotypes, which are rendered completely redundant when he encounters his wife Jean Morris.

The sixth chapter focuses on Victorian anxieties about the empire’s powerful women, as reflected in Yusuf Khan Kambalposh’s Urdu travelogue, Tarikh-i-Yusufi. Published in 1847, it records the dreamlike vision of the Lucknow Muslim captain who arrived in England on August 1837 and three months later witnessed Queen Victoria’s stately procession for the Lord Mayor’s feast. In Yusuf’s eyes, this spectacle renders Britain a fairyland, an immersive virtual world indeterminately woven with the actual and the artificial. Its wonders emanate from visual recreations like Astley’s Amphitheater, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Diorama, the Colosseum, Vauxhall Gardens, Madam Tussauds Wax Museum, and the British Museum – what he calls “magic houses” that connect disparate geographies, creeds, and languages virtually. Through his repartee with female fairies in these tourist sites, he imagines an ephemeral empire of strangers. Refashioning his masculinity in this empire, he behaves like the autonomous subject of a new female monarch who is yet to become an icon of imperial self-confidence.

This chapter explores the links between opera’s sublime mode and political power through two case studies from London in 1848: a 4 May performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s La sonnambula at Her Majesty’s Theatre and a 20 July performance of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots at Covent Garden. In these instances, the sublime was routed mainly through the star singer-actresses Jenny Lind and Pauline Viardot-Garcia respectively, whose performances were judged immeasurably moving and powerful by several critics and fans. But in each case Queen Victoria, too, carried her aura of ‘natural power’ into the performative circuit: with Lind, through demonstrative gestures of royal protection; with Viardot, through the framing of Les Huguenots as a ‘command performance’. This chapter argues that at each performance the queen and diva, supported by their respective entourages, formed a circuit in which the ‘command’ of the opera diva and the queen’s innate sovereignty mutually constituted, or ‘surrogated’, one other.

Paisley, a Scottish village, here recapitulates the whole story of the Industrial Revolution - its borrowings from Indian textile production, its radical politics and the emerging splits between commerce and manufacturing and between capital and labor. In the nineteenth century, Paisley experienced the next phase as industrialization matured. Its skilled handloom weavers were part of the destruction of the Indian textile industry, as well as one episode of worker unrest that became political activism. How the radical handloom weavers of Paisley were replaced by steam power tells how the larger profession of handloom weaving swelled during industrialization and then disappeared into powered production. When the book ends in the 1840s, industrialization had developed new class structures, and both workers and industrialists used their social class - their relation to the means of production - as the basis for political activism. The concept of invention was itself invented as a buttress to industry’s ideals, which achieved specific political goals when Parliament repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. This accomplishment enshrined an ideology of free trade and a mythology of laissez-faire that accurately described neither the past from which industrialization had sprung nor the imperial nation then coming into being.

Suffragists were enraged by their opponents' tactics. Surveying Queen Victoria's accomplishments from the vantage point of the 1870s and 1880s, feminist activists could plainly see that Victoria was not merely the “figurehead” that so many anti-suffragists purported her to be. Yet, in their quest to challenge those who insisted that Victoria was merely a puppet, they faced a fresh dilemma: how to promote the rights of the sovereign in an increasingly democratic political culture? This chapter explores this conundrum, following women's rights activists as they tried to wrest the queen from their opponents during the Golden and Diamond jubilee celebrations of 1887 and 1897.

This chapter traces how critics of women's rights, and especially of women's political rights, used arguments about the limited and dependent role of the female sovereign to minimize the queen's feminist potential, and to erode faith in the larger aims of the women's movement more generally. It focuses especially on the later decades of Victoria's rule, from the 1860s, when anti-suffragists were particularly zealous in their efforts to mobilize Victoria for their own alternative purposes.

Feminist campaigners’ tactics during the jubilee celebrations may have attracted attention, but they did not ultimately change policies. This frustrated reformers – a frustration only exacerbated by the fact that Victoria had as yet given little open public encouragement to the Women's Movement and its projects. When Victoria died in 1901, therefore, women's rights proponents were at best ambivalent about the queen and her legacy. This concluding chapter traces how feminists struggled to keep Victoria in play during the Edwardian period. This was an initiative that only became more complicated once Victoria's own negative views on female suffrage became public knowledge in 1902.