| For
about thirty-five years, off and on, I have taught the history of the
British Empire while trying to teach myself about it. When I put together
my first course, the living British Empire had died, but its demise seemed
too recent to study it with the detachment afforded the ancient Roman
Empire. It was more fashionable to do area studies—notably, Africa
and South Asia. Much of the available literature still either carried
a triumphal tone, praising explorers and soldiers, or focused on the constitutional
development of the white settler colonies: representative government,
responsible government, Dominion status. Times have changed. Today the
British Empire may well be the "hot" field within the declining realm
of British historical studies. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, there
is no agreement about what British Empire history entails. Some historians
hurry past the white Dominions except for the story of the encounter with
aboriginal populations (First Nations, to use Canadian terminology). Others
insist on the importance of submerged nationalities in the British Isles,
certainly Ireland and sometimes Scotland and Wales, as instances of "internal
colonization," and also immigrants. Invoking the concept of "informal
empire," economic historians include countries (or parts of them) that
never lost their status as sovereign states in international law, as for
instance, southern China, Argentina, the Ottoman Empire. A few historians
look at the British Empire in comparative context, usually together with
the French Empire. Most important, historians of the British Empire, influenced
by today's globalization, have begun to break down the division between
domestic British history and that of the Empire. Intertwined with this
trend, cultural and feminist studies have reshaped both British history
and British Empire history.
The
new collection of essays edited by Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose is
part of this growing scholarly literature that seeks to end the rigid
distinction between the colonizing country and its empire. It also is
a clear example of the impact of feminist studies and of women scholars,
overlapping categories. Of the thirteen contributors only two are male,
and one of these men (a former editor of the journal Gender and History)
co-authors an essay with the volume's co-editor. The Hall and Rose collection
asks not whether empire had an impact at home but "how was empire lived
across everyday practices—in church and chapel, by readers at home,
as embodied in sexualities or forms of citizenship, as narrated in histories"
and as "part of the given world that made [people in the British Isles]
who they were." (3) Authors represented include well-known British Empire
historians such as Antoinette Burton, Philippa Levine, and Clare Midgley
as well as those better known for work in non-imperial British history
and a few younger scholars. Representative essays include "the condition
of women, women's writing and the Empire in nineteenth-century Britain,
"religion and empire at home," and "citizenship and empire." The level
of scholarship is high throughout the volume, too high for high school
and undergraduate students but suitable for graduate students and teachers
who wish to sample essays whose topics are attractive to them. Scholars
will appreciate more than thirty pages of select bibliography.
Instead
of providing potted summaries of the essays in the collection I want to
raise what I think for World History Connected is the relevant
question: how can study of the British Empire, especially that of the
British Empire viewed domestically, contribute to the study of world history?
Modern world history spends much time on European imperialism. After the
collapse of the Spanish Empire, if not earlier, the British Empire was
the largest and most important overseas empire. As the British boasted,
it was the empire over which the sun never set. Most world history textbooks
pay little attention to the parts of the British Empire where white immigrants
swamped indigenous populations, perhaps with the exception of the United
States. Textbooks are more interested in India and Africa, but these are
secondary topics for them when compared with China and Islam. Textbooks
may find "informal empire" the most congenial approach to the British
Empire as it fits well with our current enthusiasm for globalization.
I fear that it will take another ten or twenty years before world history
textbooks can absorb the new British Empire scholarship that blurs the
distinction between the metropole and its colonies. Yes, it fits the approach
that most world historians nominally endorse: world history as a perspective
and not as an aggregation of parts of the world. Yet it risks indictment
for the sin of Eurocentrism. Worst of all, it emphasizes a kind of social
and cultural history that many world historians, who regard economics
as what really matters, are likely to dismiss as "boutique" history. In
other words, if you are interested in modern British and British Empire
history, consider reading Hall and Rose for its first-rate essays. If
you instead are interested in teaching next semester's introductory survey
of modern world history, you probably should be practical and read something
else. |
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