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One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Richard Price
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , July 2006 , pp. 602 - 627
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

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References

1 This is by no means the first time that the postcolonial turn in history has been interrogated. Kennedy, Dane in particular has provided a wide-ranging and judicious review in “Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24, no. 3 (September 1996): 345–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For empire as another way of looking at world history, see Ballantyne, Tony and Burton, Antoinette, “Introduction: Bodies, Empires and World History,” in Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, ed. Ballantyne, Tony and Burton, Antoinette (Durham, NC, 2005), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the geographies of empire, see, e.g., Driver, Felix and Gilbert, David, eds., Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display, and Identity (New York, 1999)Google Scholar. For the “British World” initiative, see Bridge, Carl and Fedorowich, Kent, eds., The British World: Diaspora, Culture, and Identity (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

3 Robinson, Ronald and Gallagher, John, with Denny, Alice, eds., Africa and the Victorians (London, 1968)Google Scholar; Robinson, Ronald, “Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration,” in Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, ed. Owen, Roger and Sutcliffe, Robert (London, 1972), 117–42Google Scholar.

4 Ferguson, Niall, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 Or so I heard him say during the course of a lecture titled “Can the United States Be a Successful Empire?” (lecture, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington, DC, 1 December 2004).

6 Ferguson, Niall, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire (New York, 2004)Google Scholar.

7 Nasson, Bill, Britannia's Empire: Making a British World (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2004)Google Scholar. Nasson's first major work was Abraham Esau's War: A Black South African War in the Cape, 1899–1902 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar, which addressed the question of the appropriation of an imperial ideology for the creation of a colored identity politics in the Cape. His subsequent work along this same theme includes “Why They Fought: Black Cape Colonists and Imperial Wars, 1899–1918,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 37, no. 1 (2004): 55–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He has also written what is the latest standard work on the second Boer War, The South African War, 1899–1902 (London, 1999)Google Scholar.

8 Hay, Douglas and Craven, Paul, eds., Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004)Google Scholar.

9 There are, however, suggestions that historians are beginning to recognize that empire was a fragile project from the very outset. This is a theme of Colley, Linda's Captives: The Story of Britain's Pursuit of Empire and How Its Soldiers and Civilians Were Held Captive by the Dream of Global Supremacy, 1600–1850 (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; and of her student, Jasanoff, Maya, in Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

10 Lees, Lynn, “Colonial Towns as Middle Grounds: British Malaya, 1874–1920” (unpublished paper, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2005)Google Scholar. See Young, Robert, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

11 Guha, Ranajit, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry 23 (Spring 1997): 482–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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13 Ward, Stuart, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, 2001), 28, 128Google Scholar.

14 Wilson, Kathleen, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar, and The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

15 Wilson, A New Imperial History, 22.

16 Wilson, A New Imperial History, 9. In the Island Race the argument is made most fully about eighteenth-century modernities resting on empire.

17 Wilson, A New Imperial History, 2, 4, and Island Race, 2.

18 Nicholas Rogers, “Brave Wolfe: The Making of a Hero,” in Wilson, A New Imperial History, 239–59.

19 Colin Kidd, “Ethnicity in the British Atlantic World, 1688–1830,” in Wilson, A New Imperial History, 260–80; Margaret Hunt, “Women and the Fiscal-Imperial State in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in Wilson, A New Imperial History, 29–47.

20 Just to illustrate briefly the problems of the kind of historical reasoning that I have pointed to, we can note the following examples from Wilson, A New Imperial History. Thus, Gillian Russell's essay, “Entertainment of Oddities” (48–70), makes the point that Cook's voyages were a topic of women's salon conversation in the 1770s. But without any assessment of all the other things that were talked about in such settings, it is hard to take this seriously as an avenue where the empire made British gossip. If it could be shown, for example, that women's gossip over the garden wall in the nineteenth century was empire based, then we would have real evidence of empire as constitutive of sociability. Similarly, Michael Fisher, in “Asians in Britain” (91–114), rests his case about how Asians asserted their Asian identity in Britain in the eighteenth century on one case of an “Indian” who lived for ten years in Britain and was the first to write about it in an autobiography. Yet Emin turns out not to have been Indian. He was an Armenian from Iran who traveled to India. So it is not exactly clear what he may be taken to stand for in the context of Britain, unless we consider Iran or Armenia in the eighteenth century as part of the “empire.” Or, one could cite Eitan Bar-Yosef's essay on “England and the Holy Land in Plebeian Culture” (155–75). This essay uses the deranged rantings of Richard Brothers about building Jerusalem in England as evidence of how the Orient was occidentalized. Brother's imperial vision was gained from his experience in the navy. Exactly what standards of judgment are used to read the meaning of evidentiary connections in this and the other cases is not clear.

21 Harriet Guest, “Ornament and Use: Mai and Cook in London,” in Wilson, A New Imperial History, 317–44.

22 Kathleen Wilson, “Thinking Back: Gender Misrecognition and Polynesian Subversions aboard the Cook Voyages,” in Wilson, A New Imperial History, 345–62.

23 See Bayly, C. A., Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989)Google Scholar, or his more recent The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar, a truly major work of history.

24 Cain, P. J. and Hopkins, A. G., eds., British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 2002)Google Scholar.

25 SirSeeley, John Robert, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London, 1883), 10Google Scholar, for the remark that in the eighteenth century “the history of England is not in England, but in America and Asia.”

26 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000)Google Scholar, and Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar; Burton, Antoinette, “Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating ‘British’ History,” Journal of Historical Sociology 10, no. 3 (September 1997): 227–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Burton, A. (Durham, NC, 2003), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 This is a little-known incident that is quite fascinating in its implications for rewriting the history of the mid-Victorian state. There is a large volume of correspondence on this mad scheme in “Irish Female Settlers, 1857–58,” the Cape Archives, Cape Town, BK 41.

28 Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Armitage, David and Braddock, Michael, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2002)Google Scholar; Miller, Peter, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion, and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary,” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 490–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (April 1982): 311–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Some of the great works of an earlier generation of eighteenth-century historians were exactly on this issue. See Sutherland, Lucy, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century British Politics (Oxford, 1952)Google Scholar; and Harlow, Vincent, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1793, vols. 1 and 2 (London 1952 and 1964Google Scholar). More recently, see Sen, Sudipta, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York, 2002)Google Scholar, and Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia, 1998)Google Scholar; Bowen, H. V., Revenue and Reform: The India Problem in British Politics, 1757–1773 (Oxford, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Baucom, Ian, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van der Veer, Peter, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, NJ, 2001)Google Scholar; Attridge, Steve, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Identity in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds (Basingstoke, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Baucom, Out of Place, 67–71 for Ruskin and 150–51 for enclosure. For a very interesting discussion of cricket in the empire as hybridizing, see Nandy, Ashis, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (New York, 2000)Google Scholar. Likewise, see Cox, Jeffrey, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA, 2002)Google Scholar; Cox demonstrates more modestly but with greater intellectual persuasion the way British Christianity in India was reshaped by Indian realities.

32 Krebs, Paula, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse on the Boer War (Cambridge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mayhall, Laura Nym, “The South African War and the Origins of Suffrage Militancy in Britain, 1899–1902,” in Women's Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race, ed. Fletcher, Ian et al. (London, 2000), 3–17Google Scholar.

33 Good, short surveys of the empire in British politics have been provided by Kennedy, Dane, Britain and Empire, 1880–1945 (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Thompson, Andrew, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880–1932 (London, 2000)Google Scholar.

34 Burton, Antoinette, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994)Google Scholar. See also in this regard Koven, Seth, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 See, e.g., the introduction to Burton, After the Imperial Turn.

36 Porter, Bernard, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar. Porter's book may be seen as a prolonged engagement with the arguments of Catherine Hall, who has made extended attempts to link empire to the major themes of British politics in the nineteenth century. But Porter makes relatively few references to Hall's works, and he positions himself as writing very much from a British perspective against what he posits as the largely American scholarly argument that Britain and its empire have one big history.

37 Burton, Burdens of History, 104. On this same question of the relationship of empire to Britain's history, see also Thompson, Andrew, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005)Google Scholar. This book came to my attention too late to be considered in this essay, and its focus is mainly on the twentieth century. But it is an important contribution to the debate.

38 Hall, Catherine, “The Nation Within and Without,” in Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867, by Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall (Cambridge, 2000), 179–233Google Scholar.

39 Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 140, 159–60.

40 Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar.

41 Samson, Jane, “Are You What You Believe? Some Thoughts on Ornamentalism and Religion,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 1 (Spring 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history.

42 “From Orientalism to Ornamentalism: Empire and Difference in History,” special issue, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no. 1 (Spring 2002)Google Scholar: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history. In particular, see the essays by Antoinette M. Burton, “Déjà Vu All Over Again”; and Madhavi Kale, “OHBE Have! The Mini-Me Version.” The other essays, by Tony Ballantyne, Geoff Eley, Peter Hoffenburg, Mrinilini Sinha, Peter Hansen, Jean Allman, and Jane Samson, are more substantive in their objections.

43 Levine, Philippa, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003)Google Scholar, and Levine, Philippa, ed., Gender and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar.

44 The others that have been published are Morgan, Philip D. and Hawkins, Sean, Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; and Kenny, Kevin, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar. For a very sensible and balanced appraisal, see Kennedy, Dane, “Review Article: The Boundaries of Oxford's Empire,” International History Review 22, no. 3 (September 2001): 505–756Google Scholar. Whenever I pick up a volume of the Oxford History of the British Empire, I am reminded of its predecessor, the Cambridge History of the British Empire. The heavy set of books in the Cambridge series represented the state of the field in the 1930s and 1940s, and the priorities it displays are not those we would adopt today. Still, the comparison remains painful in terms of the sheer weight of historical knowledge those volumes contained.

45 See Wilson, Island Race, chap. 3.

46 Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar; Catherine Hall, “Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century,” in Levine, Gender and Empire, 45–76.

47 On Shaka, see Hamilton, Carolyn, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Imagination (Cape Town, 1997)Google Scholar.

48 Clendinnen, Inga, Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar.

49 For examples of this approach, see Lambert, David and Lester, Alan, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar; Lester, Alan, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London, 2001)Google Scholar, and “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 54 (2002): 25–48Google Scholar; Elizabeth Elbourne, “The Creation of ‘Knowledge’ about ‘Aborigines’ in the Early Nineteenth-Century British Empire” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, 30 May 2003), and “The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (2003)Google Scholar: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history. For phrenology, see Bank, Andrew, “Of ‘Native Skulls’ and ‘Noble Caucasians’: Phrenology in Colonial South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, no. 3 (September 1996): 387–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ballantyne, Tony, “Race and the Webs of Empire: Aryanism from India to the Pacific,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 3 (2001)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history. For a nice example of colony to colony networks, see Mackenzie, Kirsten, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne, 2004)Google Scholar.

50 Thus, Hall, Catherine's Civilizing Subjects (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar, a big, rich, wonderful re-creation of missionary culture in nineteenth-century Britain, works less well as a demonstration of how that culture was an example of the “mutual constitution” of Britain and empire. Indigenes play only a minor role in the historical dynamic that is presented in this book, and when they are activated it tends to be as negative forces only on the construction of missionary sensibilities. At the end, we are left with the sense that the story we have been told remains very much a British story even if its locale was Jamaica and the West Indies.

51 On the matter of imperial violence, it is interesting to note that Burn, William Lawrence in The Age of Equipoise (New York, 1965), 83–85Google Scholar, posed the question of how violence in the empire could be understood in relation to British domestic culture. Burn was presumably attuned to this issue because his early work had been on colonial policy in the West Indies. See Burn, William Lawrence, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (London, 1937)Google Scholar.

52 Kirkby, Diane and Coleborne, Catherine, eds., Law, History and Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester 2001)Google Scholar.