Rule of Sympathy
Subtitle: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750-1850
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: June 15, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780312293932
Subjects: Asian / Middle Eastern history: c 1500 to c 1900; Colonization & independence; Social history; c 1700 to c 1800; c 1800 to c 1900; History - General History; History: World; India; United Kingdom, Great Britain; Anthropology - General; Europe - Great Britain - General; Interpersonal Relations; Social Science / Minority Studies; Minority Studies - General; 18th century; Europe; History; Race relations; Social values; Sympathy
First sentence: I begin with a set of orienting questions.
Description: "Rule of Sympathy is a social and historical critique of sympathy in British discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Although initially associated with feminized or effeminate forms of sentimental discourse (the romance, the novel, the gothic), sympathy came to function as a key technology of gender and race in new evangelical social movements, such as abolitionism and missionization. Amit Rai argues that sympathy was a paradoxical mode of power.

The differences of racial, gender, and class inequalities that increasingly divided the object and agent of sympathy were precisely what must be bridged through identification. Yet without such differences, which were differences of power, sympathy itself would be impossible. This paradoxical mode of power transformed the ways in which people came to think of how best to manage, order, and govern individuals and populations in the late eighteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.