Hunting for Empire

Narratives of Sport in Rupert's Land, 1840-70

By Greg Gillespie
Categories: Environmental Protection & Preservation, World History, Sports, Environmental History, Canadian History
Series: Nature | History | Society
Publisher: UBC Press
Hardcover : 9780774813549, 200 pages, October 2007
Paperback : 9780774813556, 200 pages, July 2008
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774855600, 200 pages, January 2008

Table of contents

Contents

Figures

Foreword: Documenting the Exotic / Graeme Wynn

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 An Imperial Interior Imagined

2 The Prefatory Paradox: Positivism and Authority in Hunting
Narratives

3 Cry Havoc? British Imperial Hunting Culture

4 The Science of the Hunt: Mapmaking, Natural History, and
Acclimatization

5 Hunting for Landscape: Social Class and the Appropriation of
the Wilderness

6 From Colonial to Corporate Landscapes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Description

Hunting for Empire offers a fresh cultural history of sport
and imperialism. Greg Gillespie integrates critical perspectives from
cultural studies, literary criticism, and cultural geography to analyze
the themes of authorship, sport, science, and nature. In doing so he
produces a unique theoretical lens through which to study
nineteenth-century British big-game hunting and exploration narratives
from the western interior of Rupert’s Land. Sharply written and
evocatively illustrated, Hunting for Empire will appeal to
students and scholars of culture, sport, geography, and history, and to
general readers interested in stories of hunting, empire, and the
Canadian wilderness.

Reviews

This short work has much to commend it. For a start, it has an extremely clever title. […] Second, it is relatively concise, fluently written, and interestingly illustrated. And third, it has a thorough and valuable foreword (more substantial than many of the genre) by Graeme Wynn, the general editor of the Nature/ History/ Society series in which it appears ... This book would be of interest to all who work, on an international basis, on the relationship of Europeans to land, peoples, wildlife, and landscape. Where-as North American history is too often treated in isolation, here we have a serious attempt to set it into wider global phenomena.

- John M. MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh