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THE CHANGING SHAPE OF THE MODERN BRITISH EMPIRE AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2010

TONY BALLANTYNE
TONY BALLANTYNE*
Affiliation:
University of Otago, New Zealand
*
Department of History and Art History, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealandtony.ballantyne@otago.ac.nz
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Abstract

This historiographical review assesses recent studies of the development of the modern British empire. It appraises works that explore the transformation of the empire, its changing cultural pattern, and the forces that radically reshaped the empire during the twentieth century. I argue that within the clear shift towards cultural interpretations of the imperial past, three main areas of analytical concern have taken shape: the importance of information and knowledge in empire building, the centrality of cultural difference within imperial social formations, and the place of imperial networks and patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the operation of the empire. The review suggests that the relationships between the economic and cultural domains of empire require close examination and that historians of empire must remain attentive to the weight and significance of pre-colonial structures and mentalities in moulding the shape of colonial political and cultural terrains.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 429 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Nicholas B. Dirks, The scandal of empire: India and the creation of imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

2 Ibid., p. 8.

3 Ibid., p. 207.

4 In an endnote, Dirks does briefly note Anna Clark's monograph on the connections between sexual scandals and political culture: Ibid., pp. 344–5 n. 37. But he ignores Clark's earlier essays and the important 2003 essay by Kirsten McKenzie on colonial scandal. Clark, Anna, ‘Queen Caroline and the sexual politics of popular culture in London, 1820’, Representations, 31, (1990), pp. 47–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, ‘The Chevalier d'Eon and Wilkes: masculinity and politics in the eighteenth century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32, (1998), pp. 19–48; Kirsten McKenzie, ‘Discourses of scandal: bourgeois respectability and the end of slavery and transportation at the Cape and New South Wales, 1830–1850’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4 (2003), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v004/4.3mckenzie.html.

5 Dirks, Scandal, p. 29.

6 Ibid., p. 329.

7 H. V. Bowen, The business of empire: the East India Company and imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge, 2006).

8 P. J. Marshall, ‘The British in Asia: trade to dominion, 1700–1765’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford history of the British empire, ii: The eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 487–507; Bowen, Business of empire, p. 298.

9 Bowen, Business of empire, p. 295.

10 Ibid., p. 261.

11 Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial connections, 1815–1845: patronage, the information revolution and colonial government (Manchester, 2005).

12 Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and empire (Oxford, 2004).

13 Durba Ghosh, Sex and the family in colonial India: the making of empire (Cambridge, 2006).

14 Elizabeth Buettner, Empire families: Britons and late imperial India (Oxford, 2004).

15 Arnold, David, ‘Poor Europeans in India, 1750–1947’, Current Anthropology, 20, (1979), pp. 454–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, ‘European orphans and vagrants in India in the nineteenth century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 7, (1979), pp. 104–27.

16 Pamela G. Price, ‘Kin, clan, and power in colonial South India’, in Indrani Chatterjee, ed., Unfamiliar relations: family and history in South Asia (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004), pp. 192–221; Swapna Banerjee, M., ‘Down memory lane: representations of domestic workers in middle-class personal narratives of colonial Bengal’, Journal of Social History, 37, (2004), pp. 681–708CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Buettner, Empire families, p. 10.

18 John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of revelation and revolution (2 vols., Chicago, IL, 1991 and 1997); Susan Thorne, Congregational missions and the making of an imperial culture in nineteenth-century England (Stanford, CA, 1999); Catherine Hall, Civilising subjects: colony and metropole in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, IL, 2002); Jeffrey Cox, Imperial fault lines: Christianity and colonial power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA, 2002); Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood ground: colonialism, missions, and the contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal, 2002).

19 Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and empire (Oxford, 2005).

20 Etherington, ‘Education and medicine’, in Ibid., p. 261.

21 Etherington, ‘Introduction’, in Ibid., p. 4.

22 See C. A. Bayly, The birth of the modern world, 1780–1914: global connections and comparisons (Oxford, 2004), pp. 325–55; Elizabeth Harris, Theravada Buddhism and the British encounter: religious, missionary, and colonial experience in nineteenth century Sri Lanka (London, 2006).

23 Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and race: Aryanism in the British empire (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 83–145.

24 Amiya P. Sen, ed., Social and religious reform: the Hindus of British India (Oxford, 2003).

25 This body of work is surveyed in Tony Ballantyne, ‘Colonial knowledge’, in Sarah Stockwell, ed., The British empire: themes and perspectives (Oxford, 2008), pp. 177–98.

26 Saul Dubow, A commonwealth of knowledge: science, sensibility, and white South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford, 2006).

27 Kim A. Wagner, Thuggee: banditry and the British in early nineteenth-century India (Basingstoke, 2007).

28 Daniel J. Rycroft, Representing rebellion: visual aspects of counter-insurgency in colonial India (Oxford, 2006).

29 Mandler, Peter, ‘The problem with cultural history’, Cultural and Social History, 1, (2004), pp. 96–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Heather Streets, Martial races: the military, race, and masculinity in British imperial culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester, 2004).

31 David Omissi, The sepoy and the Raj: the Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Basingstoke, 1994).

32 Richard G. Fox, Lions of the Punjab: culture in the making (Berkeley, CA, 1985); Harjot Oberoi, The construction of religious boundaries: culture, identity and diversity in the Sikh tradition (Oxford, 1994).

33 Dirk H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput, and Sepoy: the evolution of the military labour market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge, 1990).

34 Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the godly empire: science and evangelical mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850 (Cambridge, 2005).

35 Ibid., p. 56.

36 Amiria J. M. Henare, Museums, anthropology, and imperial exchange (Cambridge, 2005).

37 Ibid., p. 286.

38 Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, 1750–1820 (Manchester, 2005).

39 Ibid., p. 5.

40 Ibid., p. 216.

41 Robert J. Blyth, The empire of the Raj: Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1850–1947 (Basingstoke, 2003).

42 Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial connections: India in the Indian Ocean arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley, CA, 2007); Sugata Bose, A hundred horizons: the Indian Ocean in the age of global empire (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Satia, Priya, ‘Developing Iraq: Britain, India, and the redemption of empire and technology in World War I’, Past and Present, 197, (2007), pp. 221–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly, eds., Modernity and culture: from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York, NY, 2002).

43 Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of empire: Freemasons and British imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007).

44 Vahid Fozdar, ‘Imperial brothers, imperial partners: Indian Freemasons, race, kinship, and networking in the British empire and beyond’, in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring empire: Britain, India, and the transcolonial world (London, 2006).

45 For evidence of heterodox Masonic interests in New Zealand see: Nelson Evening Mail, 1 May 1908, p. 4; Evening Post, 4 Jan. 1913, p. 6.

46 David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial lives across the British empire: imperial careering in the long nineteenth century (Cambridge, 2006).

47 See, for example: Claude Markovits, The global world of Indian merchants, 1750–1947 (Cambridge, 2000); Tony Ballantyne, Between colonialism and diaspora: Sikh cultural formations in an imperial world (Durham, NC, 2006); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the global colour line: white men's countries and the international challenge of racial equality (Cambridge, 2008); Rajesh Rai and Peter Reeves, eds., The South Asian Diaspora: transnational networks and changing identities (London, 2009).

48 Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, At home with the empire: metropolitan culture and the imperial world (Cambridge, 2006).

49 Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, eds., Borders and boundaries: women in Indian partition (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998); Urvashi Butalia, The other side of silence: voices from the partition of India (New Delhi, 1998); Suvir Kaul, ed., The partitions of memory: the afterlife of the division of India (Delhi, 2001); Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering partition: violence, nationalism, and history in India (Cambridge, 2001).

50 Caroline Elkins, Imperial reckoning: the untold story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (New York, NY, 2005).

51 Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten armies: the fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA,, 2005); and idem and idem, Forgotten wars: freedom and revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

52 Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: the global restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC, 2006).

53 Martin Lynn, ‘Introduction’, in Martin Lynn, ed., The British empire in the 1950s: retreat or revival? (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 11.

54 John Darwin, ‘Was there a fourth British empire?’, in Ibid., p. 22.

55 Stuart Ward, ‘Introduction’, in Stuart Ward, ed., British culture and the end of empire (Manchester, 2001), pp. 4–11.

56 Wendy Webster, Englishness and empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 164–7.

57 Stuart Ward, ‘“No nation could be broker”: the satire boom and the demise of Britain's world role’, in Ward, ed., British culture and the end of empire, pp. 91–110.

58 E.g. Porter, Bernard, ‘Empire, what empire?: or, why 80% of early- and mid-Victorians were deliberately kept in ignorance of it’, Victorian Studies, 46, (2004), pp. 256–63Google Scholar.

59 Phillip Buckner, ed., Canada and the end of empire (Vancouver, 2005).

60 E.g. Adele Perry, On the edge of empire: gender, race, and the making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto, 2001); Renisa Mawani, Colonial proximities: crossracial encounters and juridical truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (Vancouver, 2009).

61 Georgina Sinclair, At the end of the line: colonial policing and the imperial endgame 1945–80 (Manchester, 2006).

62 Brian Stanley, ed., Missions, nationalism, and the end of empire (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003).