Dr. Jill Bender

History

Associate Professor, 2017

Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire
by Tony Ballantyne

I first encountered Tony Ballantyne’s Orientalism and Race shortly after its publication in 2002. I had just begun my MA studies in Ireland, and I still imagined the empire simply as the ‘places painted red on the map.’ Ballantyne’s concept of the British Empire as a web, in which disparate locations were drawn together by fragile, yet dynamic, threads completely changed my perception of imperialism. His metaphor of the web challenged me to think of the empire as a constantly changing structure — one that people could (and did) create and recreate.

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