File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2000/postcolonial.0007, message 91


Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 14:16:55 -0400
From: Maria Lima <lima-AT-geneseo.edu>
Subject: RE: Empires Re-done


Actually, there is a huge difference bewteen Imperialism and Empire.  A
book that did help me a lot when I was trying to sort it all out is Michael
W. Doyle's EMPIRES (Cornell UP, 1986).  If I had the time I sould summarize
the chapters on "Rome" and "Great Britain," but I don't right now.  Sorry  :(

 At 12:42 PM 7/10/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>I had the same response...there's no real short answer to the question of
>how to compare Roman and British empires. You may, however, want to
>reconceive the quesiton a bit. Perhaps you could look at how the British
>themselves saw the comparison, and thus focus on how the Roman Empire was
>represented within British/English texts (the distinction is used to
>signify writing before the 18th century. As far as I know, there is only
>one queen of Great Britain named Elizabeth. That doesn't prevent people
>from talking about Elizabeth II--which says a lot about how the term
>"British" simply disguises the "English" conquest of the isles). 
>Renaissance literature could be a good place to start--Shakespeare's Roman
>plays as an example of proto-British Empire, for example. There's also the
>famous opening scene in *Heart of Darkness* Joe 
>
>
>
>
>     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
Maria Helena Lima
Associate Professor
Department of English
SUNY Geneseo
Geneseo, NY 14454

Phone: (716)245-5242
Fax #           5181
Email: lima-AT-geneseo.edu



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