Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire: Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, 1860-1950

This book looks back to the period 1860 to 1950 in order to grasp how alternative visions of amity and co-existence were forged between people of faith, both within and resistant to imperial contact zones. It argues that networks of faith and friendship played a vital role in forging new vocabularies of cosmopolitanism that presaged the post-imperial world of the 1950s. In focussing on the diverse cosmopolitanisms articulated within liberal transnational networks of faith it is not intended to reduce or ignore the centrality of racisms, and especially hegemonic whiteness, in underpinning the spaces and subjectivities that these networks formed within and through. Rather, the book explores how new forms of cosmopolitanism could be articulated despite the awkward complicities and liminalities inhabited by individuals and characteristic of cosmopolitan thought zones.

About the Author

Jane Haggis is Associate Professor in the School of History and International Relations at Flinders University, Australia.

Clare Midgley is Research Professor in History at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

Margaret Allen is Professor Emerita at University of Adelaide, Australia.

Fiona Paisley is Professor in Cultural History in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia.