Peter McMurray is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge.
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.

• Acknowledgments


• List of Contributors


• Introduction: Imperial Sounds, c. 1797


• Peter McMurray and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay


• PART I. INFRASTRUCTURE AND CITIES


• 1. Grappling All Day: Towards Another History of Telegraphy


• Alejandra Bronfman


• 2. Encounter and Memory in Ottoman Soundscapes: An Audiovisual Album of Street Vendors' Cries


• Nazan Maksudyan


• 3. Listening to Infrastructure: Traffic Noise and Classism in Modern Egypt


• Ziad Fahmy


• PART II. AURAL EPISTEMOLOGIES


• 4. Colonial Listening and the Epistemology of Deception: The Stethoscope in Africa


• Gavin Steingo


• 5. Epistemological Jugalbandi: Sound, Science, and the Supernatural in Colonial North India


• Richard David Williams


• 6. Ramendrasundar Tribedi and a Sonic History of Race in Colonial Bengal


• Projit Bihari Mukharji


• PART III. MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS


• 7. Cosmopoiesis: Stories Sung of the Equatorial Gulf of Guinea, 1817


• James Q. Davies


• 8. Listening to Korea: Audible Prayers, Boat Songs, and the Aural Possibilities of the U.S. Missionary Archive


• Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang


• 9. Listening through the Operatic Voice in 1820s Rio de Janeiro


• Benjamin Walton


• 10. Ethnography and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century France


• Sindhumathi Revuluri


• PART IV. SILENCE AND ITS OTHERS


• 11. The Anacoustic: Imperial Aurality, Aesthetic Capture, and the Spanish-American War


• Jairo Moreno


• 12. pee ä wee, an Outrageous Clatter, and Other Sounds of Acclimatization


• Alexandra Hui


• 13. Gandhi's Silence


• Faisal Devji


• Afterword: Sound in the Imperial Archive


• Elleke Boehmer


• Index

How have sound and empire shaped one another historically? Acoustics of Empire recovers a sonic history that is bound up with imperial power and colonial rule. Bringing together contributions from historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars, this book emphasizes the entangled histories of sound and empire. The intertwined legacies of sound and power are not simply historical curiosities; rather, they stand as formative influences in cultural modernity and its discontents that continue to shape the ways we hear and experience the world today.