Drink and Democracy - Allen, Matthew; - Prospero Internet Bookshop

Drink and Democracy: Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia
 
Product details:

ISBN13:9780228024743
ISBN10:0228024749
Binding:Paperback
No. of pages:304 pages
Size:229x152 mm
Weight:666 g
Language:English
Illustrations: 9 photos
700
Category:

Drink and Democracy

Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia
 
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Date of Publication:
 
Normal price:

Publisher's listprice:
GBP 34.00
Estimated price in HUF:
17 207 HUF (16 388 HUF + 5% VAT)
Why estimated?
 
Your price:

15 487 (14 749 HUF + 5% VAT )
discount is: 10% (approx 1 721 HUF off)
The discount is only available for 'Alert of Favourite Topics' newsletter recipients.
Click here to subscribe.
 
Availability:

Not yet published.
 
  Piece(s)

 
Short description:

Drink and Democracy traces the development of democratic ideas in a corner of the nineteenth-century British Empire through the history of drinking and temperance.

Long description:

The nineteenth-century spread of democracy in Britain and its colonies coincided with an increase in alcohol consumption and in celebratory public dinners with rounds of toasts. British colonists raised their glasses to salute the Crown in rituals that asserted fraternal equality and political authority. Yet these ceremonies were reserved for gentlemen, leaving others ? notably women and Indigenous people ? on the political margins.


Drink and Democracy traces the development of democratic ideas in New South Wales through the history of public drinking and temperance. As the colony transformed from a convict autocracy to a liberal democracy, Matthew Allen argues, public drinking practices shaped the character of the emerging political order. The ritual of toasting was a symbolic display of restraint ? drunkenness without loss of self-control ? that embodied the claim to citizenship of white male settlers. Yet the performative sobriety of the temperance movement was also democratic, a display of respectability that politicized its supporters around a rival vision of responsible citizenship. Drink was a way to police the limits of the political realm. The stigma of female drunkenness worked to exclude women from the public sphere, while perceptions of heavy drinking among Aboriginal people cast them as lacking self-control and hence unworthy of political rights.


Drink and Democracy reveals that long before the introduction of the franchise, colonists in Australia imagined themselves as citizens. Yet even as democracy expanded, drink marked its limits.



?The extensive archival research that underpins Drink and Democracy is interwoven into the historical narrative with a fluency that makes this book excellent to read. Allen?s analysis provides new and refreshing ways of approaching the study of public drinking practices.? Henry Yeomans, University of Leeds