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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Annie TindleyORCiD
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This collection proposes a new historical and critical framework for British and Irish country house studies that reads the country house as a conjuncture between the history of landownership and the history of capital. At its core is a series of answers to the question: why does it matter who owns the land? It is an interrogation of the practices and ideologies of landed power across the UK and Ireland over four and a half centuries and one of its fundamental conclusions is that modern capital – associated with liquid and global capital – remains fundamentally shaped and characterised by landed power. The country house is the subject and object of colonisation: the space where the circular practices of imperialism are visible, rehearsed and refined and where estate practices become laboratories for tactics employed in imperial territories, at times on properties belonging to the same owner. Numerous contributors offer evidence of colonial practices which are exported to imperial contexts and then re-imported, not only in terms of consumer goods, animals, furniture but in attitudes to land, capital and people. Changes in the structures of landownership facilitate the consolidation of transnational landed elites, changes enabled and intensified by the finances and cultures of empire. The country house and its landed estate remain an object of cultural and political obsession because it is both a site of heritage and nostalgia and a site of visible imperial power in the landscape. The study of landed estates in their colonial contexts and over the long durée provides a way into understanding modern patterns and practices of landownership and the origins and potential outcomes contingent on this question, further transformed by the climate crisis into the most important geopolitical question of the moment.
Editor(s): Connolly R, Tindley A
Series Editor(s): Thompson,Andrew;Lester,Alan
Publication type: Edited Book
Publication status: In Press
Series Title: Studies in Imperialism
Year: 2026
Number of Pages: 344
Acceptance date: 06/04/2026
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Place Published: Manchester
URL: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/studies-in-imperialism/
