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Roundtable: Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin's The Empire Project. Introduction: Empire of the Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2015

Antoinette Burton
Antoinette Burton*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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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. 971 - 976
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015 

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References

1 Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, eds., Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham, 2014).

2 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York, 2003).

3 Linda Colley, “Into the Belly of the Beast,” Guardian, 18 January 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview5 (accessed 15 February 2015).

4 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (London, 2007); idem, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009); idem, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (New York, 2012). After Tamerlane has been translated into Chinese, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.

5 Indeed, it is a matter of great interest. As this forum was going to press, Darwin's work was the subject of another review. See Schwarz, Bill, “An Unsentimental Education. John Darwin's Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, no. 1 (January 2015): 125–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Susan Pederson, review of The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970, by John Darwin, Victorian Studies 53, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 321–23, at 321.

7 Ann Curthoys, “History from Down Under: E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Australia,” Historical Reflections/Reflections Historiques 41, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 19–39, at 26.

8 Naomi S. Baron, “The Plague of tl;dr,” The Chronicle Review, 9 February 2015, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Plague-of-tl-dr/151635, accessed 7 May 2015. See also Elaine Freedgood on “the brief consolations of short-acting texts” in Victorian Writing about Risk (Cambridge, 2000), 3, and Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, MA, 2013).

9 Pederson, review of The Empire Project, 322.

10 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, 2014); Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, The History Manifesto: A Critique, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwfV0JOkw-ehV0R1a1M5MFowb2c/view, accessed 7 May 2015.

11 Kennedy, Dane, “The Imperial History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 1 (January 2015): 5–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For big books that historicize interiority, see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002) and eadem, Macaulay and Sons: Architects of Imperial Britain (New Haven, 2012). For short textbooks that cover wide swaths of time and space, see Philippa Levine, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (Harlow, 2007) and Dane Kennedy, Britain and Empire, 1880–1945 (New York, 2002). For big books that analyze on multiple scales see Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003) and C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, 2003).

13 Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain's Empire in Asia (New York, 2007), 5.

14 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, “On Nonscalability: The Living World is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales,” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 505–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 By some definitions, this amenability to recontextualization is one characteristic of the global itself. See Aiwha Ong and Stephen Collier, eds., Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, 2004), 11.