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Scandal and Secrecy in the History of the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

Part of: Historiographical Reviews

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2021

Callie Wilkinson Open the ORCID record for Callie Wilkinson [Opens in a new window]
Callie Wilkinson*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
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Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

For historians of empire, scandals provide a useful starting point for investigating how the operations of imperial power were contested and reworked in moments of crisis. Yet, existing scholarship on imperial scandal consists mostly of case-studies that do not always reflect on the larger trend of which they are a part. This review draws on six accounts of imperial scandals to produce a general picture of the characteristics and functions of scandals in the historiography of the nineteenth-century British empire. What this comparison suggests is that imperial scandals possessed distinctive stakes and seem, as a result, to have represented periodic ruptures in longer-term patterns of local silence and complicity. Scandals, if used cautiously, can therefore provide evidence to support ongoing discussions about the logic of colonial concealment. At the same time, scandals also remind us that publicity is not a simple cure-all. By including a wider range of actors and non-governmental sources, future studies of scandal might elucidate the political limits of transparency, as well as exploring how imperial subjects negotiated gendered and racialized access to public and political platforms.

Type
Historiographical Review
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 65 , Issue 2 , March 2022 , pp. 545 - 569
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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References

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