Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, And Teaching British Imperialism - Softcover

Burton, Antoinette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822349027 ISBN 13: 9780822349020

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Featuring essays written by the influential historian Antoinette Burton since the mid-1990s, Empire in Question traces the development of a particular, contentious strand of modern British history, the “new imperial history,” through the eyes of a scholar who helped to shape the field. In her teaching and writing, Burton has insisted that the vectors of imperial power run in multiple directions, argued that race must be incorporated into history writing, and emphasized that gender and sexuality are critical dimensions of imperial history. Empire in Question includes Burton’s groundbreaking critiques of British historiography, as well as essays in which she brings theory to bear on topics from Jane Eyre to nostalgia for colonial India. Burton’s autobiographical introduction describes how her early encounters with feminist and postcolonial critique led to her convictions that we must ask who counts as a subject of imperial history, and that we should maintain a healthy skepticism regarding the claims to objectivity that shape much modern history writing. In the coda, she candidly reflects on shortcomings in her own thinking and in the new imperial history, and she argues that British history must be repositioned in relation to world history. Much of Burton’s writing emerged from her teaching; Empire in Question is meant to engage students and teachers in debates about how to think about British imperialism in light of contemporary events.

About this title

About the Author

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has written and edited many books, including The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau and After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, both also published by Duke University Press.

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Empire in Question

READING, WRITING, AND TEACHING BRITISH IMPERIALISMBy Antoinette Burton

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4902-0

Contents

Foreword by Mrinalini Sinha................................................................................................................................................xiPreface A Note on the Logic of the Volume..................................................................................................................................xviiAcknowledgments............................................................................................................................................................xixIntroduction Imperial Optics: Empire Histories, Interpretive Methods.......................................................................................................11. Rules of Thumb: British History and "Imperial Culture" in Nineteenth-Century and Twentieth-Century Britain (1994).......................................................272. Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating "British" History (1997)............................................................................................................413. Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism, and the Domains of History (2001).....................................................................................564. Déjà All over Again (2002)....................................................................................................................................685. When Was Britain? Nostalgia for the Nation at the End of the "American Century" (2003)..................................................................................776. Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories (2004).........................................................................................947. Gender, Colonialism, and Feminist Collaboration (2008, with Jean Allman)................................................................................................1068. Fearful Bodies into Disciplined Subjects: Pleasure, Romance, and the Family Drama of Colonial Reform in Mary Carpenter's Six Months in India (1995).....................1239. Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make "Lady Doctors for India," 1874–85 (1996)...............................................................................15110. Recapturing Jane Eyre: Reflections on Historicizing the Colonial Encounter in Victorian Britain (1996).................................................................17411. From Child Bride to "Hindoo Lady": Rukhmabai and the Debate on Sexual Respectability in Imperial Britain (1998)........................................................18412. Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury's "Black Man" and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy (2000)...........................................................................21413. India Inc.?: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Empire of Things (2001)........................................................................................................24114. New Narratives of Imperial Politics in the Nineteenth Century (2006)...................................................................................................25715. Getting Outside of the Global: Repositioning British Imperialism in World History......................................................................................275Afterword by C. A. Bayly...................................................................................................................................................293Notes......................................................................................................................................................................303Index......................................................................................................................................................................381

Chapter One

Rules of Thumb British History and "Imperial Culture" in Nineteenth-Century and Twentieth-Century Britain

I cannot help thinking that in discussions of this kind, a great deal of misapprehension arises from the popular use of maps on a small scale. As with such maps you are able to put a thumb on India and a finger on Russia, some persons at once think that the political situation is alarming and that India must be looked to. If the noble Lord would use a larger map—say one on the scale of the Ordnance Map of England—he would find that the distance between Russia and British India is not to be measured by the finger and thumb, but by a rule. —Lord Salisbury (1877)

Historians have always been concerned with maps and mapping and British historians are certainly no exception. Because history writing in the West has been instrumental to the building of nation-states, historiography itself has become an institutionalized expression not just of national identity, but also of the geographical reach of national power. In the British context—where the very use of the term "British" denotes the coercive power of the English state to create a Greater Britain out of itself and the Celtic fringe—doing modern British history has implicitly meant accounting for what constituted Britain territorially and, not coincidentally, elaborating the territorial extent of British influence. While this preoccupation with geographical parameters may be attributed to Britain's insularity, it was also, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, a consequence of British imperial conquest and of the sense of historical mission that both motivated and sustained it. J. R. Seeler's The Expansion of England (1883) not only gave imperial history its "institutional life ... [and] respectability," but it helped to guarantee that the boundaries between the history of Great Britain and that of Greater Britain were clearly drawn.

Despite the fact that empire was believed to be "a determining fact in the life of both the metropolis and its dependencies," for almost a century the history of empire was treated as if it occurred on another planet, far away from England's "green and pleasant lands," disconnected in time and space from "the Mother Country"—that saccharine, stolid, and basically static imperial referent. It was not routinely the purview of conventional British historians; instead, it remained the territory of self-styled "imperial historians," the burra sahibs of the British historical establishment. It was often examined and interpreted from the vantage point of established university chairs in "imperial history," giving armchair imperialism a whole new meaning. Imperial history has historically been a kind of national subfield, albeit an important one, into which scholars who are not of the British Isles, and even some who are, wander at their peril. A. P. Thornton likened American students of Victorian imperialism to "tourists in an unfamiliar terrain," adding that "their academic forebears would as willingly have become Mexican citizens as have written books on the British Empire."

Until recently in historical terms, then, the rule of thumb in British history has been to map a set of quite differently imagined communities: "home," on the one hand, and "empire," on the other. "Home" itself was, of course, as falsely unitary as "empire," with England as the symbolic center and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland its "internal others." It is a testament to the power of a common racial heritage—and to the forces that invent it—that in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Britain, the domestic underclasses and white ethnic minorities who were prominent in the colonial enterprise could and did become the imperial "over-classes" by virtue of their essential Britishness. Home and empire have nonetheless traditionally been constituted as separate and distinct spheres: one, the source of Britishness, progress, and civilization; the other, precisely that—the other side of the world, the "dark continent," the as yet undomesticated space of cultural backwardness. For all Britain's claims to be the "mother country," there was no doubt among Seeley's contemporaries—or, for that matter, among generations of imperial historians after him—about where the "heart of darkness" lay on the map of Greater Britain. Staging Britain and its empire as dichotomous rather than as dialectic spaces was itself a technology of imperial rule—one of many "grandiloquent displays"—that called on Britons and others to recognize and, hence, to legitimate Britain's role as a world imperial power.

Generations of historians of the Victorian empire, more typically than not, have maintained these artificial distinctions, focusing on the geopolitical hows and whys of European imperial formations rather than on the domestic sociopolitical forces that enabled Britain's imperial projects in India and Africa and throughout the white settler colonies or, more subversively, on the extent to which neither society was purely, homogeneously either "home" or "empire." Historians of conventionally domestic British history, for their part, have been remarkably insular, so much so that "British historians have largely failed to ask what empire has done to 'us.'" Cecil Rhodes's conviction that the working classes' support for empire at home prevented civil war is an important clue to the centrality of empire to domestic social attitudes and domestic political ideologies, but his was an observation not much heeded by his contemporaries writing imperial history. The first modern imperial historians (J. R. Seeley, E. A. Freeman, Lord Acton) were more concerned with articulating the historical racial connections between Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, and Greeks to promote Britain's imperial greatness to the world than with examining popular manifestations of that racialism in their own historical present. History from the bottom up had yet to be invented, and in the meantime, imperial history, like "domestic" historiography, operated not just from the top down but also from the center outward. The Anglocentricity of the combined enterprise can hardly be in doubt. As J. G. A. Pocock observed more than a decade ago, it is largely as "English history" that the history of Britain and its settler colonies was, and to some extent still is, "historically intelligible."

That practitioners of imperial history ultimately have been concerned with the imperial nation at home there can be equally little doubt. Understanding how a small metropolitan state like Britain grew into a global empire was instrumental for sustaining those quintessentially Victorian myths of cultural and racial superiority that, after 1900 and especially after 1945, did not seem as historically guaranteed or as unshakable as they once had. But even when the security of the nation was a motive force behind the production of imperial history, it did not necessarily entail working to understand or to historicize the interactions between metropole and empire. This was ironic, since much of the business of colonial India was run from Whitehall, while the Office of the Secretary for India was known as "India in England." Failure to think and to write dialectically also tended to foreclose the role of the colonial dependencies in the historical development of British imperial power. Although the colonies-as-agent approach did find expression in the later work of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, tracing its particular was a task claimed largely by colonial nationalists. As Partha Chatterjee and others have insisted, interpretations of colonial agency have proved to be as influenced by Western imperial paradigms as by traditional "imperial history," though in significantly different ways. And in keeping with Whigs' historical notions of progress, the movement of ideas, culture, and "improvement" was presumed to flow in one direction: from home to away. P. J. Marshall rightly reminds us that British models—from utilitarianism to the welfare state—historically have been projected onto the empire, much as Lord Salisbury advised that the Ordnance Map of England be used to assess the true scope of territorial possession and any external threat to it. Historiographical practice to the 1950s neatly replicated the Orientalist frame out of which it distantly originated, so that the Otherness of empire became the natural possession of British national identity at the site of academic institutionalization, as well as at other institutional sites throughout the culture. All of this has led Salman Rushdie to remark, with his usual flippant accuracy, that "the trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don't know what it means."

Rushdie is correct in at least one important respect: empire still occupies a basically marginal place on the map of traditional British history. This is perhaps paradoxical, especially in light of the flurry of Raj memorabilia— the making of the film A Passage to India, the production of The Raj Quartet by British television, the re-release of Lawrence of Arabia—that emerged in the 1980s and that has been critiqued so effectively by Indian scholars and others who insist on its function as nostalgia and its uncritical reproduction of Victorian racialism, Orientalism, and convictions of cultural superiority. It may also seem an odd claim to make, in light of the volume of scholarship currently being produced on race and imperialism in the North American academy—a trend of which the conference in Cincinnati whence this collection emerged is self-consciously a part. But Rushdie's observation misses an important point. What both popular-culture productions and some of the recent scholarship (especially when it is concerned with European imperialist ideologies) have failed to recognize is that empire was not a phenomenon "out there." The consequences of empire—its attendant enterprises (such as the slave trade), its socio-cultural appendages (foreign missions, zenana teacher-training societies), and, most important, its colonial subjects—were everywhere in European culture at home. Empire was not a singular place but a set of geographical and cultural spaces. To borrow from Gyan Prakash's definition of the Third World, empire can be understood as "a variety of shifting positions which have been discursively articulated." Its history, therefore, is neither a distant cousin to that of Britain proper, nor a discrete dimension of the British historical experience. It is an integral part of "British" social, political, and cultural history because empire itself was the product of British national institutions and because "domestic" British culture was so thoroughly influenced by its apparently external empire. We can, and perhaps should, speak, as Helen Callaway does in her study of colonial Nigeria, of "imperial culture" at home. For if, as Shula Marks has argued, it is impossible to understand histories of Britain or historical notions of Britishness "outside of the imperial and post-imperial experience," it is equally impossible to conceptualize the map of Great Britain without appreciating that the cultural effects of imperialism historically have been inscribed on it.

There is much recent historical work suggesting that the nature and extent of imperial culture in the British Isles require the attention of British historians, whether their "field" is Great Britain or Greater Britain. Bernard Semmel's Imperialism and Social Reform was a breakthrough in 1960, insisting, as Benjamin Disraeli, the Webbs, and other less-well-known Victorians had, on the connections between domestic social reform and imperial ideologies, especially after 1895. While they echo many of the concerns raised by Semmel, John Mackenzie's Propaganda and Empire (1984) and Imperialism and Popular Culture (1986) have taken a different methodological tack, arguing for the notion of imperialism as a core ideology that could mediate class differences and thus worked to produce a unifying imperial British identity. By enumerating the ways in which empire and its signifiers were produced and manipulated at home—in music halls, on biscuit tins, through film and other avenues of popular culture—Mackenzie and his collaborators point to the artificiality of empire conceived of as exclusively "over there" and effectively refute the notion, so central to traditional imperial history, that "the man in the street cares more about the Australian cricket matches" than about imperial affairs. Indeed, the British culture of sport, as C. L. R. James clearly understood, has provided one of the most revealing arenas for analyses of imperial ideologies and practices during particular historical moments, down to and including the present day.

Historical work on white women active in the imperial enterprise has helped break down anther kind of separate spherism inherent in traditional imperial history by demolishing the assumptions that empire was "no place for a white woman" and was acquired "in a fit of absence of wives"—both convictions that were practically axiomatic among a certain generation of imperial historians. Jane Hunter's The Gospel of Gentility (1984), Claudia Knapman's White Women in Fiji (1986), and Helen Callaway's Gender, Culture, and Empire (1987) are each concerned with demonstrating that empire was not an exclusively white masculine space and that the export of both Victorian gender ideology and European women affected European communities and indigenous populations in colonial societies. As critics have pointed out, such attempts to re-map the colonial landscape can observe their own rules of thumb, privileging gender over race and, at times, failing to understand the cooperation of race, class, and gender systems in the production of culturally imperial ideologies and practices. They can also, by centralizing the experience of white women, marginalize Third World women (again) right off the proverbial map, thus "re-enacting their historical disenfranchisement" and illustrating that discourses in Western feminist studies and women's studies are no more exempt from the political impact of the locations that produce, without finally determining, them than those of traditional imperial historians have been.

Although it remains peripheral to the production of conventional British history, the influence both of empire at home and of gender on empire is beginning to be acknowledged and written into the historiography of Britain "at home." Suvendrini Perera has argued that the very form of the "English novel" was constituted with reference to imperial ideologies, while Jenny Sharpe demonstrates that the "colonial scene" shaped apprehensions of the sexual politics of empire in ways that were fundamental to the constitution of that "domestic" genre. Using other kinds of historical evidence, Catherine Hall, Leonore Davidov, and Mary Poovey have examined the links between gender, race, and class in part by foregrounding the imperial context in which domestic gender ideologies have been articulated, so that empire is not simply the backdrop for, but also an active agent in, the construction of cultural and especially social-reform discourses. For Poovey in particular, race and empire played a crucial role in the ideological work of gender in mid–Victorian England. Clare Midgley's Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870, continues in this direction, re-materializing the ways in which antislavery politics shaped both high politics and feminist discourses in Victorian Britain. Susan Pedersen's study of the sexual politics of colonial policymaking by feminists in the twentieth century and the essays in Michael Roper's and John Tosh's edited collection Manful Assertions are two more excellent examples of the ways in which British historians are working to understand the impact of imperialism on both dominant and oppositional discourses and to shed a longstanding cultural amnesia about the impact of whiteness on English/British history and, in turn, on its historiography.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822349027
• ISBN 13: 9780822349020
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416