Forms of Empire

Forms of Empire shows how the modern state's anguished relationship to violence pushed writers to expand the capacities of literary form. The Victorian era is often imagined as an 'age of equipoise, ' but the period between 1837 and 1901 included more than 200 separate wars. What is the difference, though, between peace and war? The much-vaunted equipoise of the nineteenth-century state depended on physical force to guarantee it.