Historians of the British empire recast their understanding of relations between the metropole and its peripheries in the late twentieth century, notably through the work of the ‘British world’ network and the ‘new imperial historians’. The former emphasized the material, emotional, and financial links between British colonizers across the imperial diaspora; the latter focused on the empire's impact on Britain, particularly in terms of ‘everyday’ experience. This article critically reviews recent interventions, which extend and challenge these approaches by seeking new ways to juxtapose the macro with the micro, and balance the exceptional with the quotidian; by adopting a more transnational (or global) approach to colonialism; and by rethinking the categories of ‘settler’ and ‘colonizer’. Collectively, these works question the traditional frameworks within which both colonialism and the British empire have been understood. In conclusion, the article considers their impact on the vibrant field of Britain's colonial legal history.

In the last thirty-five years there has been a fundamental reinterpretation of the history of Christianity in China. This reinterpretation has resulted from a changing atmosphere in China that has greatly reduced anti-Christian feelings and allowed for more extensive study of Chinese historical documents. In addition, there has been a remarkable growth among Chinese Christian churches. These changes have led to a reconceptualization of the role Christianity played in China's long-term history. As a result, there has been a transformation from viewing Christianity as a failed foreign graft to a creative indigenous force. This historiographical review surveys the evolution of this reinterpretation as well as the most significant recent publications on the topic.

This essay surveys literature on the engagement of different European empires, including the French, British, Dutch, Russian, and German, with Islam. While the history of Islam and empire has attracted the attention of scholars for decades, most of their studies have been written primarily as contributions to the historiography of a specific empire or a distinct geographic region and rarely refer to research on other imperial powers, even though the questions and themes raised are remarkably similar. The article brings together these studies, exploring the following topics: Islam and imperial rule and, in particular, the ways in which religious institutions were accommodated and controlled in the colonial state; Islam and anti-imperial resistance; and the relationship between Islam, information, and colonial knowledge. It assesses the dominant themes in the field and points to a number of questions that remain to be studied.

Writing the history of historiography is a tricky business. There is no unbiased way of doing it, and it can serve different goals that at best complement and at worst contradict each other. The genre can seem both suitable to promote one's own academic agenda and to reflect upon one's own ideological constraints, epistemological presumptions, and social aspirations. This article analyses the motivations and methods of recent authors in the field, and it does so principally by focusing on the roles they attribute to historians past and present. To enable comparisons, the article includes works with a national, European and global framework, on early modern and late modern historiography, by intellectual, cultural and post-colonialist historians. A general conclusion will be that while most publications use the genre to pursue academic interests with epistemic arguments, only few try to exploit its potential for critical self-reflexion. As a consequence, they tend to be of limited credibility and originality when it comes to describing historiography's functions and historians' roles. This article does not treat their lack of critical commitment as an isolated phenomenon in a historiographical sub-field, but as a symptom of a larger problem within academic scholarship today. There are, however, exceptions to the rule, and this article will also try to work out their particular strengths.