Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2015
The key question posed by this essay is why historians' interest in Britain's imperial past has increased rather than diminished in recent decades. It argues that this interest has been sustained in part by a preoccupation with certain contemporary social and political issues, and differences of opinion about these issues have helped fuel the “imperial history wars.” The nature of the debate has differed for American- and British-based historians. For the former, British imperial history has served as an analogy for thinking about America's racial politics and its role as a global power. For the latter, it has served as a focal point for contending claims about Britain's past and deepening anxieties about its future. The essay concludes by urging historians to be more self-reflexive about their own practices and more rigorous in exposing presentist claims about the past.
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18 The report can currently be found on the North American Conference on British Studies' website, http://www.nacbs.org/archive/nacbs-report-on-the-state-and-future-of-british-studies, accessed September 2014.
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41 Quoted in Joan Walsh, “Mike Huckabee's Mau Mau Fantasies,” Salon, 2 March 2011, www.salon.com.
42 Quoted in Richard Reeves, “That Mau Mau in the White House,” Real Clear Politics, 15 September 2010, www.realclearpolitics.com.
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47 Benedict Brogan, “It's Time to Celebrate the Empire, Says Brown,” Daily Mail, 15 January 2005. Brown went on to say: “we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring… Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values.”
48 Andrew Gimson, “Conservative Party Conference 2011,” Telegraph, 5 October 2011; “British Empire Medal to Return says David Cameron,” BBC News, 28 October 2011, www.bbc.com/news/.
49 “William Hague Says UK Must Shed ‘Guilt’ Over Empire,” BBC News, 31 August 2012, www.bbc.com/news/.
50 Rory Baxter, “Pupils Should Be Proud of British Heroism,” PS Public Service.Co.UK, 23 April 2013; Laurie Penny, “Michael Gove and the Imperialists,” New Statesman, 1 June 2010.
51 Ferguson credited his sons with the inspiration for this idea, though he also acknowledged that his daughter showed less enthusiasm for video war games. See Jeevan Vasagar, “Niall Ferguson aims to shape up history curriculum with TV and war games,” Guardian, 9 July 2010.
52 Jeremy Paxman, “‘Our Empire Was an Amazing Thing,’” Telegraph, 16 February 2012.
53 Richard Eden, “Sir David Attenborough Battles Jeremy Paxman over the ‘Good’ British Empire,” Telegraph, 3 June 2012. In a rich irony, David Attenborough defended the 1973 BBC series “The British Empire” against critics who complained that it cast the empire in too negative a light: he was then the BBC's director of programming. See Fleming, “Echoes of Britannia,” 4.
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56 Ibid.
57 Rama Lakshmi, “In India, Cameron Voices Regret for 1919 Massacre,” Washington Post, 21 February 2013, A10.
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66 Robert D. Kaplan, “In Defense of Empire,” The Atlantic, April 2014, www.theatlantic.com/magazine.
67 Colin Freeman, “Britain May Have Invaded 90 Per Cent of the World, But We're Not Hated Everywhere,” Telegraph, 8 November 2012. The article was a commentary on Laycock, Stuart, All the Countries We've Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To (London, 2012).Google Scholar
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70 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, xii, xiii. Also see his The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar. Taken together, Darwin devotes nearly 1,300 pages to this ramshackle empire in these two books.
71 This is the subject of a forthcoming book edited by Antoinette Burton and me, titled How Empire Shaped Us (Bloomsbury), with contributions from a wide array of British imperial historians.