Introduction: place, network and the geographies of empire

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates the hybridity of ostensibly imperial urban geographies near the heart of Empire. It considers the local geographies of regulated prostitution, unpacking the micro-geographies of officially sanctioned sexual provision in Indian military cantonments in particular. In Ireland, in a perhaps rare valid example of the exceptionalism that has characterised that country’s historiography, geographical propinquity to the imperial metropolis, economic disadvantage, and prescriptive ‘pre-modern’ cultural authenticity, combined to create an unusually ambiguous transgressive colonial state. As polyvocal and inchoate sites of meaning, places were central to the formation, reproduction and contestation of individual and collective identities, of ‘selfhood’ and, consequently, alterity, among both the colonizing and colonized peoples of Empire. The book shows that the general importance of religious affiliation as a major driver of settler identities and, accordingly, as a source of cultural inscription in the ‘white spaces’ of Empire.