How Empire Shaped Us - Hardcover

Antoinette Burton And Dane Kennedy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1474222986 ISBN 13: 9781474222983

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016

Synopsis

Few historical subjects have generated such intense and sustained interest in recent decades as the history of empires. While historians have approached this subject in very different ways, their shared preoccupation with the British imperial experienceits institutions, ideas and impact on peoples around the worldhas endured and given rise to a rich, varied, and influential body of historical scholarship. What accounts for this preoccupation? Why has it gained such purchase on the historical imagination? How has it endured as an active area of inquiry even as the empire it studies slips further into the past? In seeking to answer these questions, this volume brings together some of the leading figures in the field, historians of different generations, different nationalities, different methodological and theoretical perspectives and different ideological persuasions. Each addresses the relationship between their personal development as historians of empire and the larger forces and events that helped to shape how the subject and how it is studied. The result is a book that investigates the connections between the past and the present, the private and the public, the professional practices of historians and the political environments within which they take shape. This intellectual genealogy of the recent historiography of empire will be of great value to anyone studying or researching in the field of imperial history.

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Review:

This collection serves as a wonderful introduction to the broad field of British imperial history through the career-narratives of several generations of leading historians working on many different regions of the world. A valuable resource for students and scholars alike, it shows how the writing of imperial history was transformed in the aftermath of decolonization, and highlights the rich diversity of contemporary approaches to rewriting the history of the British empire. --Robert Travers, Cornell University, USA

A beautiful, insightful collection in which distinguished historians of empire reflect on the private and personal dynamics of their becoming often against all odds modern chroniclers of the imperial past. As an experiment in collective life-writing, its a book that excavates the deep, subjective reservoirs which underwrite the histories we know as decolonization. The connections between the past and the present, and the public and the private, intermingle in these pages, generating wonderfully unexpected vignettes. For our own dark times, the plurality of voices recorded here present a dazzling vindication of the practices of history. --Bill Schwarz, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Antoinette Burton and Dane Kennedy have hit upon the wonderfully original idea of asking fifteen other historians of the British Empire to contribute (along with them) essays on why and how they came to work on this vast topic, and on how empire has impacted on their own respective lives and careers. Scholars rarely get invited to attempt autobiography, and this explains some of the marked freshness and sense of involvement of the pieces gathered together here. But these are not exercises in self-indulgence. Rather, we are introduced to a sequence of scholars - born over a space of fifty years - who address different parts of the Empire and espouse different methodologies, and we learn about how the accidents of birth, place, friendships, chosen mentors, and influential books can all shape the minds and choices of historians. An absorbing read. --Linda J. Colley, Princeton University, USA

About the Author:

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, USA. She has written widely on modern Britain and empire. Her most recent publications include A Primer for Teaching World History (2012) and Brown Over Black: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (2012). Dane Kennedy is Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University, USA. His most recent publications include The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (2013) and The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (2005).

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1474222986
• ISBN 13: 9781474222983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232