In recent decades the boundaries that used to delimit separate domains of British history, imperial history, area studies and the histories of former colonies have been traversed promiscuously.1
Where to limit certain avenues of historical investigation has become as significant as when. ‘New imperial historians’ have established that, in order to understand British history, one must imaginatively travel in and out of the British Isles, weaving imperial relations overseas into the fabric of the national story.
Area studies specialists have been persuaded that we cannot fully understand colonial relations within any one region without tracing entities that move in and out of that region. Historians of the former colonies have begun to think in terms of the transnational processes which gave rise to their nation-states. While, formerly, most historians had generally taken ‘social geographies... entirely for granted... viewing space and place as a relatively passive backdrop’, increasing numbers have now begun seriously to consider the issues that preoccupy geographers.2 With this ‘spatial turn’, concepts of place, space and scale now seem just as integral to British and imperial history as do those of chronology and periodisation, and spatial chains of causation just as relevant as temporal ones.No single chapter can comprehensively track the geographical understandings at play in thousands of texts written on the British Empire, let alone the Western empires over the last thirty years. The intention here is to provide some examples of different spatial imaginations within that body of literature and to set these examples in the broader context of developing notions of space and place in and beyond recent imperial historiography.