Abstract
This book begins by asking what race and empire meant to people living in the mid-nineteenth century. It ends by proposing to reconsider what imperialism signifies now. Specifically, what do the men and women who worked on behalf of a fraught institution mean to us living today? And how can we better understand the anticolonial struggles that emerged to contest growing European power and influence? Amplified by the rise of the sensationalist media in the later 1800s, the exploits of charismatic heroes of empire seemed to “expand the limits of human possibility and broaden everyone’s horizons.”¹ They were celebrated and