Writing imperial histories

By Manchester University Press

This book appraises the critical contribution of the Studies in Imperialism series to the writing of imperial histories as the series passes its 100th publication. The volume brings together some of the most distinguished scholars writing today to explore the major intellectual trends in Imperial history, with a particular focus on the cultural readings of empire that have flourished over the last generation. When the Studies in Imperialism series was founded, the discipline of Imperial history was at what was probably its lowest ebb. A quarter of a century on, there has been a tremendous broadening of the scope of what the study of empire encompasses. Essays in the volume consider ways in which the series and the wider historiography have sought to reconnect British and imperial histories; to lay bare the cultural expressions and registers of colonial power; and to explore the variety of experiences the home population derived from the empire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526112545

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Andrew Thompson

This collection of essays is to mark and reflect upon the fact that the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism series has passed its 100th publication. In the world of academic publishing, this is, by any standard, a rare and remarkable achievement. The longevity, vitality and extraordinary diversity of the Studies in Imperialism series owe a great deal to the pioneering spirit, eclectic vision and relentless energy of its general editor, John MacKenzie. Under his careful guidance, Studies in Imperialism has played a conspicuous role in reshaping both British and Imperial histories, partly by greatly expanding their respective repertoires to explore new and previously neglected subjects, and partly by fixing attention more firmly on their tightly interwoven relationship.¹

Over the years, the Series’ foundational concerns – that empire had ‘as significant an effect on the dominant as the subordinate societies’, and that culture was just as vital as politics to the production and circulation of imperial power – have become so familiar that it is worth reminding ourselves that to espouse these views was once to work against the scholarly grain.² When Propaganda and Empire and Imperialism and Popular Culture were first published (in 1984 and 1986 respectively), the discipline of imperial and Commonwealth history was by common consent atrophying. ‘British’ history had yet to be repositioned in a wider imperial and global framework, and empire was still something widely judged to have happened overseas and to have been mostly marginal to the lives of the British people. In so far as ‘British’ historians acknowledged imperialism, it was usually as an unpleasant ‘aberration’ that was ‘corrected’ by decolonisation, which reinstated a ‘normal’ course of national development.³ That imperial history is no longer held at arm’s length from national history, while by no means the achievement of the Series alone, is nonetheless one of its deepest and most enduring impacts.⁴ With the whirligig of time, the situation has indeed almost turned full circle. To question today the extent to which Britain was in fact ‘imperialised’ is almost to adopt a revisionist position.⁵ How, then, did this happen? Twenty-five years on from the birth of Studies in Imperialism, we now have the distance and perspective required for a critical evaluation of the Series and its responses to, and engagement with, wider, underlying trends in imperial historiography.

Writing Imperial Histories is therefore both commemorative and retrospective, in the sense that it marks and looks back at a hundred volumes of the Studies in Imperialism series in order to reprise, reflect upon and reappraise several of the key themes that John MacKenzie has been personally concerned to develop. In a discipline often felt to be dominated by more traditional concerns and practices, Studies in Imperialism has done much to expand our frames of reference, with welcome, far-sighted and sometimes controversial contributions to the new imperial histories of sexuality and gender; exploration, hunting and the environment; colonial armies and policing; and the media and communications – all of which form the subject of chapters in this volume. Indeed, in each of these fields, the Series that MacKenzie has so painstakingly built boasts a number of landmark publications, several of which are highlighted in the pages that follow. Diversity is a hallmark of the Series, which, subject to its general remit, has consistently sought to open itself to a range of different perspectives and approaches.

If imperial history as a discipline has shown a striking capacity to renew and even reinvent itself over the generations, so more recently has Studies in Imperialism. The Series’ original masthead unapologetically remains. Over the years, however, it has been amplified and extended in several ways. Alongside an early emphasis on popular imperialism, propaganda and social control, there have been rich veins of scholarship on cultural encounters between the coloniser and colonised, the circulation of power through the production and organisation of colonial knowledge, and the construction of identity at the heart and on the margins of empire. This process of refinement is likewise evident from the way the Series has, over time, ranged more widely geographically, with volumes focused on the imperial culture of metropolitan Britain increasingly matched by those focused on the history of one or more of the colonies. Of particular note is the number of volumes in the Series devoted to the Indian subcontinent – as much as a fifth of its total output. This emphasis has been welcomed, not least by scholars of South Asia, because it has countered the tendency evident in Western historiographical traditions to treat India as a ‘special case’ or ‘awkward relation’ in the imperial family, rather than to recognise the Raj for what it really was – ‘a key component of the empire’.⁶

The general thrust of Writing Imperial Histories is to think outwards and expansively to a wider historiography rather than to focus narrowly or exclusively on the Studies in Imperialism series itself. It is a book which is as much about how we have come to approach the writing of imperial histories in the early twenty-first century – and the problems and possibilities thereby entailed – as it is about situating a particular, if influential, body of scholarship in that landscape. Thus Dane Kennedy’s chapter on exploration and the environment and Alan Lester’s chapter on spatial concepts show how the insights provided by the Series have gained purchase as part of broader dialogue about empire. With respect to the Series’ overarching aim of bringing the empire back into the story of the making of modern Britain, Cherry Leonardi observes how not all of this scholarship would acknowledge any direct debt to John MacKenzie. Rather, she suggests, MacKenzie’s own research has been ‘amplified, complemented and in certain respects critiqued by this wider and increasingly varied scholarship on imperial culture and the colonial encounter’. Firmly situating the Series in its historiographical hinterland also helps to explain some of its silences and omissions. If the subject of political economy has figured little in the pages of Studies in Imperialism, Martin Thomas helpfully reminds us how, like other more wholly economic approaches, it has largely been absent in the innovative works of the ‘new’ imperial history.⁷ In short, whether speaking of the Series’ strengths or of its limitations, we have to take account of the wider intellectual context in which Studies in Imperialism first emerged and has subsequently evolved.

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The volume opens with an essay by Stuart Ward about the Studies in Imperialism series as a whole. This essay explores the deeper set of social and political contexts that informed the genesis and subsequent development of the Series, and, in particular, the conceptual links it has sought to forge between empire and metropolitan culture. It fleshes out the prevailing ‘end of empire’ climate in which Studies in Imperialism was conceived: imperial history, as a discipline, was in steep decline, sorely in need of new stimuli, yet rapidly fracturing into ‘area studies’, and largely and artificially sealed off from the history of Britain.⁸ During the Series’ formative years, there was little, if any, sense of anticipation of the reinvigoration of the discipline that would occur over the following two decades. Indeed, as Ward shows, the impression that the empire was a distraction and an irrelevance for the British people – something to escape from, or even perhaps to define themselves against – had been reinforced by the psychological reorientation required by the ‘onset of global decolonisation’. The apparent ease with which the colonies were cast aside nurtured the idea that metropolitan societies were ‘hermetically sealed from their dissolving empires’, with disgruntled and increasingly dejected settler and expatriate communities left feeling that their interests and identities were being marginalised by the British government’s lack of resolve to support them, by the British public’s lack of concern for their plight, and by Britain’s strategic and psychological realignment away from the Commonwealth towards Europe. And arguably many of those ex-settler nations were equally happy to disengage from their imperial past and strike out on their own with a new confidence, albeit also with a sense of historical amnesia. Either way, the mapping of new paths to modernity, of which greater European involvement was for some a key part, only served to reinforce the impression that the empire was a thing of the past, out of kilter with prevailing economic (‘the white heat of technology’) and social (‘the decline of deference’) values, and something which Britain felt more of a duty than a real desire to defend. For the first half of the twentieth century, empire had embodied ideas of Western civilisation, progress and technological prowess; across Europe, decolonisation saw an inversion of this relationship, so that empire was more likely to be seen as an obstacle than as an asset to the social and economic advancement of metropolitan populations.

Ward then skilfully unpicks several of the intellectual currents that were contemporaneous with the emergence of what he calls the empire and metropolitan culture ‘paradigm’ of the 1980s. The social, cultural and intellectual consequences of decolonisation for the British have only just begun to be effectively explored by historians, yet, as he makes clear, the lowering of the ‘interpretative barriers’ between British history at home and British history overseas was prefigured and arguably made possible by the publication of Tom Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain (1977) and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Both authors polemically asserted the importance of empire to the ways in which the inhabitants of the British Isles thought about themselves. Although a decade later Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) could still with conviction declare that the problem for the ‘English’ was that their history had taken place overseas and so they could not understand its importance, in the intervening years there had, however, been a considerable chiselling away at the assumptions that had up to this point underpinned the view that British and imperial histories could safely be confined to separate spheres. An intensifying concern with what it meant to be British, renewed racial anxieties after the 1981 Brixton riots, the press and popular endorsement of the 1982 Falklands war, and the growing influence of (and backlash against) ‘Raj nostalgia’ – all of these threw into sharper relief the presence in Britain of an imperial past. What Ward’s essay shows, therefore, is that the ‘MacKenziean moment’ itself needs to be read historically, as a product of the ‘delayed arrival of decolonising sensibilities’, in which contemporary popular phenomena and new types of scholarship came together in the 1980s to integrate Britain and its empire into a single field of enquiry in ways that promised to enhance our understanding of both.

The next set of essays – by Robert Aldrich, Dane Kennedy and Alan Lester – casts its net broadly to take stock of some of the major developments in imperial historiography and the Studies in Imperialism series. Aldrich’s chapter on sex in the colonies provides a compelling account of how this ‘novel and even provocative theme’ gained traction in a field ‘traditionally dominated by theories and practices of colonial governance, the economic balance-sheet of empire, and the collaboration and resistance of colonised peoples’. Imperial history’s slow embrace of sex as a subject, he explains, was anticipated by the social history of the Annales school, and by developments in the history of medicine and women’s and gender history, and therefore has to be read in the wider context of second-wave feminism and gay liberation. If sexuality made early appearances in the Studies in Imperialism series, it was the publication of Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality (1990) that was the ‘defining milestone in the history of sexuality and imperialism’.⁹ Aldrich’s re-reading of Hyam is careful to acknowledge the intolerant public attitudes of the day that he set out to challenge, as well as the later historical work that his book anticipated. Yet it also highlights the difficulties of Hyam’s ‘wholesale rejection of feminist studies’, and, moreover, the limited role he granted to sexuality in determining imperial policy.

Aldrich moves on to consider four subsequent volumes in the Series, all of which mark different moments in the development of the field. Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity (1995), Clare Midgley’s Gender and Imperialism (1998), Richard Phillips’s Sex, Politics and Empire (2006), and Kirsty Reid’s Gender, Crime and Empire (2007) shifted the focus of attention away from the opportunities empire offered colonisers for sexual gratification towards the sexualisation of debates about Indian social and legislative reform, gender as a crucial category and shaper of colonial experience, moral purity movements in the colonies and the diverse sexual cultures of the early colonial frontier. In doing so, they sometimes by-passed Hyam and sometimes took him to task. Aldrich then traces the variety of topics through which sexuality has been explored in several other works in the Series, as well as some aspects of sexuality that it has neglected, such as issues of abuse and exploitation, miscegenation and stereotypes of African and Asian sexuality and morality. He concludes by exploring some of the ways in which sexuality has more recently been looked at in colonial situations, thereby setting this theme within a wider historiography, highlighting the several traits about imperial sex that feature in this research and identifying the areas where further work remains to be done.

The themes of exploration, environment and empire are woven together in Dane Kennedy’s chapter, which clearly conveys the considerable impact of John MacKenzie’s own scholarship in this field. MacKenzie’s Empire of Nature (1988) opened up ‘a topic that had been hiding in plain sight’, namely imperial hunting; Imperialism and the Natural World (1990) established the role of science and learned institutions in the imperial engagement with the natural world; and Museums and Empire (2009) provided the first comparative study of natural history museums in the colonies and their reliance upon explorers for artefacts and specimens. Ranging across metropolitan popular culture, the institutionalisation of scientific practice and cross-cultural encounters, Kennedy points to the differential contributions of the Studies in Imperialism series in each of these spheres, as well as the broader dialogue – in particular with the work of historical geographers and historians of science – of which the Series forms a part. Epistemological issues loom large – even if they are not always well covered by the Series itself – whether with respect to the question of ‘ocular authority’ (how much credence should be given scientifically to explorers’ reports?), or with respect to the ways in which Europeans sought and struggled to make sense of unfamiliar and exotic overseas environments. Representations of the ‘tropics’ as innately different from Europe, and often deadly for Europeans, arose partly from acute concerns about European physical and mental health in zones of Western expansion – a point well made by an early edited volume in the Series, David Arnold’s Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (1988). Kennedy’s chapter concludes with a call for synthesis: ‘exploration as practice and as representation, as science and as spirit, as experience and as epistemology’. Here, in emphasising the importance of bringing different historical literatures into closer dialogue, he strikes a chord with other recent reflections on the state of imperial historiography – a call for more integrated histories of the experience of empire.

The historical geographies of British colonialism have long enjoyed a prominent place in the Studies in Imperialism series. Alan Lester’s chapter locates the Series in the wider body of scholarship responsible for the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in imperial history. If concepts of place and scale now seem just as important as those of chronology and periodisation, John MacKenzie and other contributors to the Series were important in effecting this transition. Rightly observing how geographical metaphors and frameworks have long been important to key developments in imperial history, Lester explores the ways in which different ‘spatial imaginations’ have been made possible by the ‘MacKenzie project’. He shows how that project, as it has moved beyond older binaries of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, as a means of diffusing modernity from the metropole, towards thinking of metropole and colony as two interacting entities, allowed metropolitan British history to be reconceived in the light of empire. Yet, if the empire markedly extended the boundaries of domestic British society, that still begs the question as to how imperial influences were absorbed, incorporated and assimilated: what were the mechanisms that mediated such influences or the channels along which they were carried? Through the optics of ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘scale’, Lester considers the type of conceptual apparatus required for a better understanding of the interconnectedness of various imperial worlds. With close reference to work published in the Series, he urges a more far-reaching geographical reorientation of imperial history. More attention, he argues, needs to be paid to the connections between colonial sites. The characteristics of places need to be seen as the products of broader spatial networks, with their social and racial privileges and uneven power relations. And units of scale, whether local, regional, national or global, need to be thought of relationally and seen for what they are – the constructs of government policy and projects, ‘with real effects in the world’, rather than ‘naturally occurring entities in their own right’, the existence of which can be taken for granted. In this way, Lester sketches out an exciting agenda for ‘where next?’, reflecting upon how geography and the new imperial history might continue to respond to and engage with each other.

* * *

Each of the above contributors provides the reader with a critical commentary on influential strands of scholarship within the Studies in Imperialism series, although they are equally mindful of work published beyond the Series, and of the counter arguments advanced by its critics. Chapters 6 to 10 proceed differently. While inspired by work in the Series, they cast their gaze forward, taking work within Studies in Imperialism as a point of departure in order to develop particular lines of argument and to suggest fruitful ground for a new generation of imperial historians to take the discipline in different directions over the next twenty-five years. If there is a thread running through these chapters it is their common search for a more productive framework for studying imperial histories – a framework more expansive than ‘empire’, yet not perhaps quite as all-encompassing as ‘world’ or ‘global’ history, or as open-ended as ‘interconnected’ or ‘networked’ history. Martin Thomas’s chapter on colonial policing during the depression years, and Jim House’s and Andrew Thompson’s on immigrant welfare during and after decolonisation, take their cue from John MacKenzie’s recently published European Empires and the People, which surveys in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public of six European countries.¹⁰ Such comparative studies, moving beyond the realm of the colonial ambitions of individual European powers, call into question notions of national exceptionalism, not least the idea that the imperial impulse was ‘presumptively English or British’.¹¹ According to MacKenzie, ‘fascinating trans-national similarities, as well as significant differences’ emerge from this comparative approach.¹² Far from being a purely national phenomenon, imperialism ‘often constituted a dominant ideology in these countries’, and European empires learned from and even copied each other.¹³

This, in turn, raises the question of whether and in what sense imperialism may be approached or conceived of as a ‘transnational’ phenomenon. Considering imperialism comparatively is a necessary and vital building block for considering it transnationally, and historical studies which compare and contrast discrete examples of empire-building are growing in number. They are, however, still vastly outweighed by single and largely compartmentalised country studies – in his chapter on sexuality, for example, Robert Aldrich notes that comparative studies of the subject in different empires would be enlightening. In other words, we need more histories that narrate European and non-European imperialisms not as the parallel experiences of individual nation-states but of Europe and the non-European world as a whole.¹⁴ The significance of non-national affiliations implied by the term ‘transnationalism’ forces us to ask in what ways the experience of empire transcended national cultures. For if, as it is now widely asserted, transnational impulses and operations were intrinsic to the operations of empire,¹⁵ this claim surely requires something more than the observation of patterns and parallels across the experiences of imperial powers.

Stephen Howe has spoken of the ‘trans-nationalism of empire’ – the idea that colonialism was as (or an even more) powerful a transnationalising force than was anti-colonialism. What is suggested here is a more radical re-orientation of imperial history – a greater recognition of how the networks of different empires overlapped and intersected with each other (as people, goods, ideas and practices moved between and beyond different sites of colonisation), and how such movement, in and of itself, shaped and re-shaped experiences of settlement and conquest.¹⁶ Recent writing in the Series has begun to give more emphasis to cooperation as well as conflict as a theme between imperial powers.¹⁷ There are telling examples of how the nationals of one state worked in the empires of others, such mobility of people (typically from the professional middle classes) enabling empires to learn and borrow from each other, and setting up a dialectic between rivalry and emulation that became an enduring characteristic of the ‘imperiality’ of several European powers. Yet these examples beg the bigger question of whether, in the words of Stuart Ward, imperial culture might itself be seen as inherently transnational, ‘permeating not only the borders between colony and metropole, but also the boundaries between the empire-building centres themselves’. How far did the racial beliefs, bureaucratic techniques and forms of military rule and repression of Europe’s imperial powers stem from common roots? How far can imperialism be seen as part of a wider European social or cultural formation, mobilising similar sentiments, legitimised by shared ideologies and lending new and related meanings and significance to what it meant to be British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Belgian or Dutch? And what happened on the borders of these empires? If historians have become more willing to think in terms of the transnational processes that gave rise to nation-states, should they not extend this insight and work through its implications for empire-states?

A macro-level comparison between colonies and empires with respect to patterns of policing is offered by Martin Thomas. Focusing on the European empires during the depression years, Thomas makes a convincing case ‘for considering political economy as an explanatory tool for colonial police action’. He shows how an early twentieth century transition from imperial soldiering to imperial policing can be observed across several western European empires – the British, French and Dutch especially – and seeks to explain this. Probing the key features of the late colonial state, he highlights the importance of the ‘combination of the political and economic’ – on the one hand, what was required to suppress internal disorder and, on the other, what exporters required to enhance their output. Colonial police forces were thus intimately involved in labour market regulation and in the industrial disputes which were increasingly commonplace in the interwar years. Indeed, after the depression, worker protest and anti-government protest became difficult to distinguish as targets of police repression in many colonies, with changing economic conditions and the consequent treatment of colonial workforces emerging as ‘recurrent markers’ of European colonial policing between the two World Wars.

In their chapter on multicultural urban experiences during and after decolonisation, Jim House and Andrew Thompson also seek to relocate the history of the British empire alongside that of other European empires. In so doing, they question the general historiographical tendency to separate European imperialisms into discrete national entities. Notwithstanding significant national differences in public discourse, they identify a deeper, underlying convergence in the assumptions and outcomes of British and French housing policies towards colonial and post-colonial immigrants. They show how, in both countries, such policies were formulated and delivered within a very similar set of constraints, and how the dynamic that developed in Britain between local and national governments in relation to the housing question (and, in particular, its local-level politicisation) paralleled that in France. They conclude that the pervasive idea that Britain and France operated two entirely distinct national ‘models’ towards housing provision in particular, and immigrant welfare systems more generally, after the Second World War is misleading. Rather, as Britain and France decolonised, and formerly colonised peoples settled in their major cities, the response to what was widely regarded as an unwelcome ethnic diversity was to a large extent shared.

State intervention, when forthcoming, fed off recurrent private and public concerns regarding ‘integration’, ‘assimilation’, ‘segregation’, ‘enclaves’ and ‘ghettos’, as run-down and overcrowded private rental dwellings and low-standard social housing became the main recourse for immigrant families. Furthermore, such concerns emerged from structural, largely unresolved, tensions in the policies designed to control the spatial distribution of immigrants between 1945 and 1974.

A raison d’être of empire lay in the constant shifting of people between different parts of the world in ways that were likely to destabilise old identities and forge new ones.¹⁸ Sunil Amrith’s chapter takes as its main theme the long history of imperial mobility which brought with it encounters of cultural difference that deeply shaped both European and non-European societies. Building on the ‘connected approach’ to imperial history pioneered by Studies in Imperialism, Amrith focuses on the later nineteenth century as a period in which the world witnessed the interaction of many diasporas, which in turn produced new modes of communication and new ‘global political imaginations’. He charts the rooting of diasporic cultures in their localities over time, conveying how, in the early stages of mass migration, diasporas were in flux, but later developed firmer contours, as ‘sojourning’ was replaced by ‘settlement’. The condition of ‘living in diaspora’ itself generated many debates: initially their focus was upon how far diasporic cultures should adapt to being practised in their host societies; it later shifted to the more fundamental question of whether descendants of migrants could ever truly belong within a national community. By comparing the experiences of Chinese and Indian diasporas within and beyond the British empire, Amrith also addresses the important question of ‘imperial cosmopolitanism’. If among British settlers imperial power promoted a form of cosmopolitanism that strengthened its own sense of national identity,¹⁹ so too in the port cities of Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon, Jakarta, Singapore and Shanghai did a non-European class of educated journalists, clerks and intellectuals, thrown together by the ‘uprooting force’ of colonial capitalism, engage in debates about social and religious reform and political legitimacy, and over questions of race, nationality and empire. The space thereby opened up for intercultural communication was, however, increasingly matched by a sharpening of ethnic and racial distinctiveness, especially as the idea of imperial citizenship came under attack from the early 1900s and settler colonies passed a raft of discriminatory immigration legislation – a precursor, as Adam McKeown and others have shown, to the later twentieth-century global history of migration control.²⁰ Diasporic peoples, who had previously and readily traversed the boundaries between colonies and empires, now came to be regarded as sources of destabilisation and potential disloyalty. They were marginalised as ‘orphans of empire’ in a new age of nation-states: some were ‘expelled to homelands they had never known’, while ‘others became permanently stateless’.

The ability to navigate a complex and shifting set of international forces was, as recent scholarship has shown, a prerequisite to the longevity of any imperial project.²¹ The chapters by Mrinalini Sinha on the ‘Third British Empire’, and by Chandrika Kaul on the role of the Indian press before and after independence, also seek to reposition British imperial histories within a broader set of global transformations. Developments in other empires were as likely to condition (and complicate) the ability of a metropolitan power to project its influence and secure its interests overseas as were the internal dynamics of its own imperial system. In a similar vein, Mrinalini Sinha presents the real challenge of bringing a global perspective to (and through) the study of the British empire as that of achieving a better appreciation of ‘the changing dynamics of the international order’. Building on the Series’ rethinking of the relationship between empire and nation (which she considers to be the most significant development in British imperial historiography since Robinson’s and Gallagher’s influential theory of the imperialism of free trade), her chapter revisits, yet expands, the idea of a ‘Third British Empire’ – the imperial system, as it reconfigured itself, in between the two World Wars. Sinha sees the interwar years as a moment when an imperial conception of citizenship was decisively defeated by a new nationalising vision of empire. This vision, she persuasively argues, was less the inevitable outcome of an evolutionary process than a controversial triumph of nation-state form over other possible futures. With reference to the status of Indians as British subjects, Sinha hones in on debates at the Imperial Conferences of 1911, 1917, 1921 and 1923, in order to reconstruct the ‘political evisceration of the lineaments of British subjecthood’, as the right to free mobility within different parts of the empire was withdrawn and hard-won recognition of the privileges of citizenship reversed. ‘Equality for British subjects’, she observes, was thereby turned into a question of ‘equality for constituent states within the empire’. Moreover, the legitimacy of this new global order of nation-states, as the optimum form of political belonging, derived not only from a series of resolutions at Imperial Conferences but from the ‘revolutionary upheaval’ caused by the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. In Sinha’s view, therefore, the ‘Wilsonian moment’ was as pregnant with possibilities for the re-ordering of empires as it was for the rise of anticolonial nationalism.²²

If empires were a vehicle for transnational forces, Chandrika Kaul provides a compelling case study in the form of the Empire (later Commonwealth) Press Union (EPU), whose ethos was ‘unashamedly imperial’, and whose remit was to incorporate and articulate the varied interests ‘of members differently situated in terms of power, resources, geography and media context’. Within this ‘imperial press family’ the concepts of a free public sphere and journalistic freedoms were vigorously debated. Confronted by a critical press furthering nationalist campaigns, the British government readily resorted to censorship and closures, press laws and detention, yet the EPU nevertheless held on to the notion that the world of empire and free enquiring journalism were compatible. Indeed, as Kaul makes clear, the fight for a free press was waged in India by British and European journalists as well as by their nationalist counterparts. To begin with the Indian wing of the EPU was small and dominated by representatives of the Anglo-India press, but over time the numbers of Indians grew, with a greater proportion coming from radical and indigenous papers. For many of these journalists, India’s independence witnessed a move away from the role of ‘anti-imperialist crusader’ to one of ‘partnership in national development’. Like his British predecessors, Jawarhalal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, saw the press in adversarial terms. When the EPU met in Ottawa in 1950, British and Dominion journalists parted company with their Indian colleagues. The former were acutely sensitive to the extension of wartime restrictions on the press into peacetime. The latter meanwhile were supportive of United Nations’ moves to lay down minimum standards on the part of the press and government, and, influenced by an emergent doctrine of ‘social responsibility’, were willing to accept the case for self-regulation on the grounds of preserving communal and religious harmony.

The relationship of the Studies in Imperialism series to the ‘new’ imperial history is touched upon at multiple points in this volume. In some respects, it is possible to argue that, from the very outset of the Series, the two have been closely aligned: for example, their shared emphasis on the interconnections between metropole and colony, as well as on the cultural dynamics of colonial power. A decade or so after the Series was founded, Christopher Bayly could declare John MacKenzie to be at the ‘very forefront of attempts to create a new type of imperial history’.²³ Similarly, Chandrika Kaul’s chapter points to the Series’ notable achievement ‘of integrating media history more fully with the growing field of the new imperial history’. She suggests that this paved the way for more persuasive critiques of the role of the media in the creation of imperial value systems and the propagation of imperial beliefs, as well as helping to realise the vision of prominent media and communications scholars for more historicised accounts of the media and its wider socio-political and economic impact. From such a perspective, Studies in Imperialism can be viewed as an integral part of the revitalisation of the genre that has come to be known as the ‘new’ imperial history. Elsewhere, however, it is what one contributor refers to as the ‘productive tensions’ between a more empirically and historically minded Studies in Imperialism, and the primarily literary and more theoretical orientation of post-colonial studies,²⁴ that come to the fore.

Cherry Leonardi’s chapter blends biography and historiography to return John MacKenzie to his Glaswegian, Lancastrian – and Southern African – roots. Her penetrating and nuanced analysis of the intellectual trajectory of MacKenzie’s own scholarship reflects on how this has been perceived and depicted by others. Leonardi provides a particularly insightful account of MacKenzie’s Orientalism (1995) -the problems of ‘power’ and ‘agency’ with which it sought to grapple and the sometimes hostile responses it provoked. By those frustrated by the separate paths taken by British and imperial histories, or by the latter’s preoccupation with political, diplomatic and constitutional narratives, MacKenzie could be hailed as the ‘leader of a revolution in imperial history’. But for others who felt that a conservative historical empiricism – to which the Series belonged, rather than necessarily exemplified – was at odds with a more politically oriented and methodologically reflexive study of the imperial past, MacKenzie was more easily cast in the role of the traditional or conservative, who was apt to take an overly benign view of imperial power and the contribution of artistic and cultural forms to its legitimisation. (It should be noted that the conflation in some of these debates of two forms of ‘conservatism’ – one a method of enquiry into the colonial past, the other a set of assumptions about colonialism’s consequences – can nonetheless be misleading, as they are not one and the same thing and do not always go together.) Meanwhile, notwithstanding his interest in the cultural forms and registers of imperial power, MacKenzie has been wary of the more polemical positions taken up by post-colonial criticism and, even more so, by what he has perceived to be its generalising and homogenising tendencies, which, in his view and that of others, seriously underplay the complexities and ambiguities of colonial encounters and relations.

Interestingly, Leonardi is joined by Amrith, Lester and Ward in positing a greater convergence between the agendas of the Studies in Imperialism series and the new imperial history over more recent times. This they partly explain in terms of the reaction to Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), with MacKenzie’s views on the extent of imperial culture in Britain, the ways in which British society incorporated and internalised imperial influences, and the definition of imperialism itself, all providing common ground with Porter’s post-colonial opponents.²⁵ There may also be merit in the view that the Series has generally been more open to post-colonial and feminist approaches since the mid-1990s,²⁶ and that, with its sustained interest in imperial migrations, the Series has broadened the dialogue about the different – and racialised – kinds of cultural circulations, encounters and practices that resulted.²⁷

Alan Lester sums up the relationship well when he writes that the ‘new’ imperial history has developed sometimes ‘in parallel’ with, sometimes ‘in tension’ with, and sometimes as an ‘integral part’ of the Series. Given the various ways in which the idea of a ‘new’ imperial history has been used, and its differences of emphasis and intellectual lineage, it perhaps could only be so.²⁸ Lester and others also rightly note that, twenty years on, the ‘new’ imperial history is not in fact so new anymore. Aldrich goes so far as to suggest that the post-modern moment, with an emphasis on representations of the ‘other’, may have passed as issues of governance and the law, and the social processes of institution formation, come back to the fore. Elsewhere Dane Kennedy has questioned how well, in the light of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the global financial crisis, post-colonial studies is placed to address questions of military and economic power.²⁹ If we are on the cusp of new departures, we might well ask whether there will be a return to an ‘ante-post-colonial’ version of imperial history, with an alternative emphasis on the political, military and economic side of empire, or a transition to a ‘post-post-colonial’ version, which seeks to integrate the different dimensions of imperial power in ways that remain to be resolved. There are several signs to suggest the latter rather than the former – a progression rather than a turning of the circle. Some of the general histories of Britain which have appeared over the last decade have been much more attuned to the imperial dimensions of its history than previously was the case, although there remain more insular strands of British history which have taken little or no account of the insights and contributions of MacKenzie’s work and that of the ‘new’ imperial history more broadly.³⁰

That said, as Ward and Leonardi suggest, our terminology and conceptual tools for understanding the metropolitan history of empire have evolved considerably since Studies in Imperialism was founded. The Series’ initial, top-down emphasis on the production and dissemination of various forms of imperial propaganda, which may at times have appeared to assume, rather than to account for, its impact, has given way to a more fruitful and far-reaching enquiry into the different types of imperial influence at work on Britain and the different ways in which empire can be read into its domestic culture. What one contributor describes as the ‘methodological cul-de-sac’ of the ‘maximalism’ versus ‘minimalism’ debate – an imperial Richter scale for measuring the magnitude of empire in national culture – has gradually been circumvented by a greater concern with the nature as much as the extent of imperial influences on Britain. Hence, rather than try to quantify imperial influences, and to enumerate the references to empire in British private and public life, we now have a different set of metaphors and devices for interrogating what the empire meant to the ‘mother country’. By examining the differentiated and uneven impact of imperialism – a product of the (increasing) diversity and plurality of both Britain and its colonies – we have become more attuned to the range of attitudes people held towards empire, the multiple