Introduction

In 1978, Edward Said, a Palestinian exile living in the United States, published Orientalism, an account of French and British engagement with the Arab and Islamic world. Both controversial and hugely influential, it argued that culture and knowledge were as much a part of imperial power as military conquest or economic exploitation.

Mary Roberts begins her chapter with Jean-Leon Gerome’s late nineteenth-century painting The Snake Charmer, an iconic Orientalist image. Yet Roberts’ essay demonstrates how far the elaboration and critique of scholarship linking culture with colonialism has come since Said chose The Snake Charmer as the cover image of his book. Roberts explores Ottoman Istanbul to demonstrate how visual art was central to diplomatic relations, the creation of Ottoman history and the representation (including the self-representation) of Ottoman women. By turning the Occidental—Oriental dichotomy on its head, her work is an answer to one of the key criticisms of Said’s approach—his failure to account for indigenous agency.

Susie Protschky follows the theme of imperial art into an entirely different context, the Netherlands Indies. By linking environmental and cultural history, Protschky’s focus on visual sources provides a window into colonial modes of seeing the Indies landscape. How did Europeans imagine themselves in the tropics, how were the tropics conceived as distinctive in Dutch colonial culture and how were images linked to wider discourses of difference that determined colonial actions? By demonstrating the disjunctures between artistic representation and economic reality, she throws up a deep ambivalence in European visual culture about imperialism in the tropics.

If sport is a cliche of empire and muscular Christianity, football (perhaps the most ubiquitous world sport spread by European expansion) has not attracted great scholarly attention. Yet it played a highly significant role through the nineteenth century, and its cultural legacy is arguably as great as any other cultural impact of the West. John Connell’s chapter examines the role that football played in shaping colonial states, empowering local people and both building and challenging empire.

How was empire imagined? Patricia Lorcin considers the question of culture and identity in the use Britain, France and the United States made of the Roman Empire in their own imperial imaginings. All three aspired to an end-product of peace and stability, be it the Pax Britannica, Americana or Gallica, but the conceptual underpinnings of each were distinctive. In tracing these differences, Lorcin shows how there were both cautionary and celebratory elements to the discourse in all three examples.