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Publisher:Cambridge University Press
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Online publication date:December 2017
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Print publication year:2017
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Online ISBN:9781139814867
Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects examines the stories of ordinary people to explore the internal
workings of colonial rule. Chinese, Indians, and Malays learned about being British through the
plantations, towns, schools, and newspapers of a modernizing colony. Yet they got mixed messages
from the harsh, racial hierarchies of sugar and rubber estates and cosmopolitan urban societies.
Empire meant mobility, fluidity, and hybridity, as well as the enactment of racial privilege and rigid
ethnic differences. Using sources ranging from administrative files, court transcripts and oral
interviews to periodicals and material culture, Professor Lees explores the nature and development of
colonial governance, and the ways in which Malayan residents experienced British rule in towns and
plantations. This is an innovative study demonstrating how empire brought with it both oppression
and economic opportunity, shedding new light on the shifting nature of colonial subjecthood and
identity, as well as the memory and afterlife of empire.
Lynn Hollen Lees was born and raised in Akron, Ohio. After attending Swarthmore College, she studied at Harvard University, earning her Ph.D. in History in 1969. She taught for over 35 years at the University of Pennsylvania, from which she retired in 2013. While at Penn, she also served as Vice Provost for Faculty and as the Co-Director of the Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies. Her first book, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London, won the John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. Her major research interests are in urban history, European social history, and in the history of British colonial rule. Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rotary Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies helped her to do research in Britain, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
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