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Roundtable: Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin's The Empire Project. Comment: A Field Divided
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2015
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.
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- Roundtable: Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin's The Empire Project
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- Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015
References
1 Gallagher, John and Robinson, Ronald, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (August 1953): 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000, rev. ed. (Harlow, 2001).
2 As Darwin acknowledges, in recent decades these histories have emerged from the grip of an overly nationalist historiography, itself a reaction to a previous imperial emphasis. Ann Curthoys surveys the Australian example in “We've Just Started Making National Histories and You Want Us to Stop Already?,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, 2003), 70–89.
3 Ann Stoler's Foucauldian-inspired work insisted on this point two decades ago. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995).
4 Kennedy, Dane, “The Imperial History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 1 (January 2015): 5–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 8–9.
5 Stephen Howe, “Introduction: New Imperial Histories,” in The New Imperial Histories Reader, ed. Stephen Howe (London, 2010), 1–19, at 1.
6 See the useful discussion of Catherine Hall's “Introduction: Thinking the Postcolonial, Thinking the Empire,” in Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Catherine Hall (New York, 2000), 1–33.
7 For a striking example of the ways in which individual subaltern lives can be used to explicate globalized forces of change, see Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge, 2012).
8 It would be hard to overstate the strength of the historiography on gender and empire, not just in relation to the British example. Decades of development in the field were reflected in its inclusion among the first of the “Companion Series” to The Oxford History of the British Empire, an acknowledgement that nevertheless raised ongoing questions of marginalization. Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004).
9 John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London, 2012).
10 There are some exceptions, as, for example, when Darwin draws on the work of Andrew S. Thompson connecting public interest in empire to extra-parliamentary lobby groups such as those for women's rights. Darwin, The Empire Project, 96.
11 An outstanding example of both imaginative reach and archival depth is Catherine Hall's Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002).
12 Among the most influential (and endlessly reproduced and debated) early studies is Lake, Marilyn, “The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context,” Historical Studies 22, no. 86 (April 1986): 116–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also included in Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley, and Susan Sheridan, eds., Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (Sydney, 1993). For an excellent recent survey of this period and its historiography see Melissa Bellanta, “Rethinking the 1890s,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 1: Indigenous and Colonial Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge, 2013), 218–41.
13 Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (Basingstoke, 2006), 3.
14 For a survey of some of the key literature in the field, see Laidlaw, Zoe, “Breaking Britannia's Bounds? Law, Settlers, and Space in Britain's Imperial Historiography,” Historical Journal 55, no. 3 (September 2012): 807–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Laidlaw's pioneering 2005 study was deeply influential in developing new understandings of imperial governance and the interpersonal networks that bound it together. Zoe Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester, 2005).
15 Darwin, John, “Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion,” English Historical Review 112, no. 447 (June 1997): 614–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. David Lambert and Alan Lester eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2006), 5–6.