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Roundtable: Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin's The Empire Project. comment: Geostrategy (and Violence) in the Making of the Modern World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2015

Alan Lester
Alan Lester*
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Abstract

In an age when both the traditional book form and the world that the British Empire made are arguably in crisis, it is remarkable that big books on British imperialism abound. Contributors to this roundtable assess scale and genre as well as content in their discussion of the claims and impact of John Darwin's tome, The Empire Project. John Darwin's response is also included.

Type
Roundtable: Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin's The Empire Project
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 977 - 983
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015 

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References

1 See Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge, 2014) for the argument that humanitarianism and colonial governmentality need to be conceived in tandem.

2 See, however, the University College London's Legacies of British Slave-ownership project and its output for a wonderful example of a socially and economically integrated critical history: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/. See also Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010).

3 David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003), 192–93, 134.

4 Ibid., 19.

5 Legg, Stephen, “Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages: The League of Nations Apparatus and the Scalar Sovereignty of the Government of India,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, no. 2 (April 2009): 234–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 234; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York, 1974).

6 See Alison Blunt and Richard Dowling, Home (London, 2006).

7 Brenner, Neil, “Restructuring, Rescaling and the Urban Question,” Critical Planning 16 (Summer 2009): 60–79Google Scholar, at 71.

8 Legg, “Of Scales,” 238.

9 Ibid., 234.

10 Lucy P. Chester, Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of the Punjab (Manchester, 2009), 6–7.

11 Ibid., 3.

12 Cooper, Frederick, “Empire Multiplied. A Review Essay,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 2 (April 2004): 247–72Google Scholar, at 261. There is considerably more in Darwin's account on elite Indian activists than on other colonized peoples.

13 Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford, 2004).

14 Quoted in Harvey, The New Imperialism, 4.