This book brings film adaptation of literature to bear on the question of how nineteenth-century imperial ideologies of progress continue to inform power inequalities in a global capitalist age. Not simply the promotion of general betterment for all, improvement in the British colonial context licensed a superior ¿master race¿ to ¿uplift¿ its colonized populations¿morally, socially, and economically. This book argues that, on the one hand, film adaptations of nineteenth-century novels reveal the arrogance and coercive intentions that underpin contemporary notions of development, humanitarianism, and modernity¿improvement¿s post-Victorian guises. On the other hand, the book also argues that the films use their nineteenth-century source texts to criticize these