Starting with the premise that Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by events and conflicts in Europe, the contributors to Tensions of Empire investigate metropolitan-colonial relationships from a new perspective. The fifteen essays demonstrate various ways in which "civilizing missions" in both metropolis and colony provided new sites for clarifying a bourgeois order. Focusing on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they show how new definitions of modernity and welfare were developed and how new discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion were contested and worked out. The contributors argue that colonial studies can no longer be confined to the units of analysis on which it once relied; instead of being the study of "the colonized," it must account for the shifting political terrain on which the very categories of colonized and colonizer have been shaped and patterned at different times.

Preface Acknowledgments Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper Part I Framings 1 Liberal Strategies of Exclusion Uday S. Mehta 2 Imperialism and Motherhood Anna Davin 3 Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse Homi Bhabha Part II Making Boundaries Contents 4 Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa John L. Comaroff 5 Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia Ann Laura Stoler 6 "The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable": Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain Susan Thorne 7 Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire Lora Wildenthal Part III Colonial Projects 8 "Le bebe en brousse": European Women, African Birth Spacing, and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo Nancy Rose Hunt 9 Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 190G-1930 Gwendolyn Wright 10 Educating Conformity in French Colonial Algeria Fanny Colonna Part IV Contesting the Categories of Rule 11 The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal Dipesh Chakrabarty 12 The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa Frederick Cooper 13 Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and Central Africa Luise White Notes on Contributors Index