Britain and empire

Until the 1980s imperial histories were premised on a basic spatial division between British core and colonial periphery. This convention served in unacknowledged ways to reproduce an imperialist view of the world.

It has always been the function of imperial ideologies to represent empire in terms of centre and periphery... empire is figured as the means of diffusing modernity from the metropolis... outwards: the motor of change is located firmly at the heart of empire.³

In a survey of the state of imperial history written in the aftermath of decolonisation, David Fieldhouse posited that only a superhuman scholar could attain the vantage point necessary to achieve an overview of developments in both of the spatial categories of core and periphery relevant to the imperial historian. His ideal imperial historian would have to be located ‘in the interstices of his [sz’c] subject, poised above the “area of interaction” [between centre and peripheries] like some satellite placed in space, looking, Janus-like in two or more ways at the same time’ and giving ‘equal weight to what happens in a colony and in its metropolis... intellectually at home in both’.⁴

However, with the beginnings of Manchester University Press’ Studies in Imperialism series, John MacKenzie pioneered a means of bringing empire and Britain, periphery and core, as well as British and imperial historians, closer together. Rather than thinking of core and periphery as two interacting but discrete spatial containers, each maintaining its own essential identity, he saw that one of these containers was actually constituted by the other. MacKenzie argued that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’.⁵ Driver noted that the series had ‘issued an important challenge to historians, most notably in Britain, given the separate paths taken by imperial and domestic history’.⁶ MacKenzie’s challenge to the boundary between Britain and its empire has since been amplified and extended by the emergence of a large and still growing body of work now conventionally referred to as the ‘new imperial history’.⁷

The ‘new imperial history’ had quite different points of origin from MacKenzie’s project.

Catherine Hall, for instance, took critical inspiration from Edward Said’s insistence on the process of identity formation through a constitutive outside, and from his point about the ongoing pattern of colonial relations which continues to define both the West and its Others.⁹ Hall’s work examined the dense set of connections between Britain and Jamaica which helped constitute the history of both sets of islands through a continual two-way traffic of people, ideas and policies. She focussed on debates over slavery and its aftermath prompted by Baptist missionaries who developed close ties with the mission- and abolition­supporting public of Birmingham. These debates criss-crossed the Atlantic, carried out in texts ranging from high literature to popular broadsheets. They helped inform discussions of the limits of freedom and responsibility for working-class men and women in Britain, as well as Jamaican former slaves.

The ‘new imperial’ historians were largely women pursuing feminist and anti-racist trajectories. They saw their work as having political relevance in the present as it helped shed new light on the past.¹⁰ As they criss-crossed between Britain and colonial sites, lar­gely in the West Indies and India, arguing that the social formations of race, class and gender that defined Victorian power relations were mobile across an imperial terrain, they were breaking down taken-for-granted assumptions about both the maleness and the whiteness of the key actors within imperial and British history. This project also entailed a broader progressive political agenda. As Doreen Massey notes, ‘The identity of places is very much bound up with the histories which are told of them, how those histories are told, and which history turns out to be dominant’.¹¹ The thrust of the ‘new imperial history’ was ‘to challenge the nationalist notion that places’ such as the British Isles ‘have fixed identities or personalities, the product of continuous and inward-looking histories stretching back for generations’.¹²

In linking British and imperial history, the ‘new imperial historians’ were not simply pointing out that popular British culture had an overlooked imperial dimension; they were consciously seeking to undermine versions of British history that created racial outsiders. They recognised that insular island narratives rendered black and Asian former subjects of empire, whose ancestry was fixed in the ‘peripheries’ of empire, out of place within the British Isles. Revealing the ways in which the experiences of excluded others were and are intrinsic components of Britain’s history was intended to contribute to a new collective understanding of Britain—one in which post-war migration flows from the ‘new’ Com­monwealth simply added to a Britain that was ‘always already’ constituted by flows of people, ideas, practices, objects and images from other lands, and especially from lands over which it exercised imperial dominion.

Despite their different points of origin, ‘new imperial historians’ and empirical historians of the empire in Britain like MacKenzie have been encouraged to converge on their common ground in recent years in response to critics who allege that empire played little role in British history. Bernard Porter in particular has vocally rejected the assertion that British social, cultural and political life was irredeemably bound up with imperial relations. Examining education, parliamentary debates, newspaper coverage (selectively) and other media through which imperial matters were debated explicitly in Britain, Porter argues that ‘the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad’, and that therefore, empire ‘had no appreciable impact’ on metropolitan Britons’ thinking’.¹³ Hall and Sonya Rose responded to this challenge, arguing that it was not so much explicit discussion of imperial affairs of the kind that Porter had studied which indicated the effects of imperial relations in Britain, but rather the ways in which colonial relations were ‘lived through everyday practices—in church and chapel, by readers at home, as embodied in sexualities or forms of citizenship, as narrated in histories’. ‘People thought imperially’, they asserted, ‘not in the sense of political affiliations for or against empire, but simply assuming it was there, part of the given world that had made them who they were’.¹⁴

As Andrew Thompson notes, ‘there was not, and never could be, a monolithic response to imperialism [in Britain]. Rather, the empire markedly extended the boundaries of British domestic society, and its meaning was contested by different social groups’.¹⁵ Much of the resolution of the debate about Britain and Britishness within empire probably now hinges on studies that narrow down their focus in one respect, to follow particular sets of trajectories and relationships across imperial space, but broaden them in another respect, analysing the ways that these trajectories and relationships join up with and reshape social relations in each place that they connect.

The ‘new imperial history’, together with the Studies in Imperialism series, then, has been significant in recasting Britain’s national history. This, of course, was the intention for scholars who remain primarily historians of Britain, and whose work is informed by the politics of that location.¹⁷ However, when the ‘new imperial history’ is taken as a paradigm for colonial studies in general, as it undoubtedly has been, its limitations need to be recog­nised. First, the onus is still on history and identity in Britain rather than on the spaces, places and experiences that colonial relations (re)created in other sites of empire.¹⁸ Although it has the theoretical potential to ‘provincialize’ Britain within broader studies of former colonial sites, that potential has yet to be realised.¹⁹ Secondly, and relatedly, the repositioning of Britain as a nation constituted through empire has not necessarily resulted in a thorough­going adoption of a more relative conception of space and place in imperial studies.