Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America. By Michal J. Rozbicki. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. xiv, 221 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-8139-1750-6.)

Years ago in a literary competition in the English weekly The New Statesman, competitors had to suggest appropriate last words for notable personages. A winning entry attributed the following utterance to Noël Coward: "It's not dying that hurts—but in the provinces." We smile. But we should not forget how much cruel systems of empire are empowered by the contempt of metropolitans for those at the peripheries. 1

Polish-born Michal J. Rozbicki assuredly has knowledge of cruel imperialism. At the time when Americans were entering the struggle for independence that prepared them for the imperialism that they now practice, his ancestors were being parceled out into expanding empires. . . .

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