INTRODUCTION
Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie
Colonial expansion—from the era of the Greeks and the Romans down to the hegemonic manoeuvres of international powers in the twenty-first century—is one of the most far- reaching processes in human history.
From an infinity of possible topics that form part of the domain of colonial and imperial history, this volume presents thirty-three chapters that illustrate some of the themes and methods of contemporary history writing about colonialism. The collection does not claim to be comprehensive in presenting all the methodologies that historians employ, the theories they have proposed or the terrain they have covered. Those who wish, for instance, to read overviews of the colonial history of key imperial powers, particularly Britain or France, are fortunate in having a large number of books from which to choose. The burgeoning of colonial history as an academic field— alongside books targeted at a more general market—means that there are stacks of volumes and reams of journal articles devoted to themes introduced here and ones for which there was no room in an already weighty volume.Though focussing primarily on the history of European imperialism since the 1500s, the chapters in The Routledge History of Western Empires range across time and space. They show how empires of Antiquity provided templates for later expansion, and how both theorists and practitioners formulated and implemented global expansion from the early modern period of Western history to the ‘new’ imperialism of the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. They explore imperial interventions from the Arctic to Oceania, in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, in Asia, Africa and Australasia. The cast of characters that play a part in these chapters include adventurers, missionaries, traders, colonial (and anti-colonial) theorists, indigenous populations, slaves and indentured labourers.
We track motivations ranging from the ‘civilising mission’ and economic development to antiimperial resistance and the genesis of ideas about human rights.Given this breadth, we have divided the volume, after an essay on colonial historiography, into eight sections, a grouping inspired by some (though, of course, not all) of the more significant areas in contemporary colonial history writing. The chapters in each section complement each other in approach, topic and conclusions. Many of these themes, however, overlap from section to section. Indeed one of the recent innovations in imperial history writing that this volume underscores is the networks and experiences connecting diverse regions and binding distinct imperial powers together. Historians are increasingly cognisant of the links between cultural, political, social, international and economic history, and of the movement backwards and forwards of people, commodities and ideas between imperial centres and peripheries and (very importantly) between various parts of the colonised world itself.
Each of the sections begins with a brief introduction that points to several key issues raised in those chapters. Appended to the individual chapters are lists of about a dozen works for further reading; these are far from exhaustive lists, of course, but do provide a guide for those whom, we hope, these chapters will inspire to continue their investigations of colonial history.