Introduction: around the world in eighty plays -- Imperial theatrics: spectacle and empire in the nineteenth century -- Pt. 1: Re-casting the castaway: the nineteenth-century theatrical robinsonade -- The novel is not enough: text and performance in the cataract of the ganges -- Adapting a nation to empire: the evolution of the Crusoe pantomime -- Crusoe's clothes: performing authority in the admirable Crichton -- Pt. 2: Theatrical nabobery: imperial wealth, masculinity, and metropolitan identities -- The stage nabob's eighteenth-century origins -- 'The yellow beams of his oriental countenance': the nabob as racial and cultural hybrid -- Australian gold rush plays and the Anglo-Indian nabob's antipodal antithesis -- Pt. 3: Staging the mutiny: ethnicity, masculinity, and imperial crisis -- India in the limelight: empire and the theatre of war -- The empire needs men: mutiny plays and the mobilization of masculinity -- Forging a greater Britain: the highland soldier and the renegotiation of ethnic alterities -- Conclusion: the Imperial encounter from stage to screen.