WHY COLONIALISM?

Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie

I do not understand what drives your countrymen, Mr Fry. Or indeed the French. Why are they here? Or India? Or the British, the Portuguese and the Hollanders in Ceylon? Is it really for a peck of pepper? A few sticks of cinnamon? Cardamon pods? You, Mr Fry, are travelling thou­sands of miles to feast on the prospect of new knowledge, to reach the far recesses of human history, as I understand it.

Such is the question asked, in a 2012 novel by Romesh Gunesekera, by a man exiled by British colonial authorities from Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) to a British scholar passing through Mauritius, another British outpost in the Indian Ocean, in the 1820s. The Sri Lankan’s puzzlement is understandable. After all, arriving in the colonies from Europe involved a long and arduous journey. Then there were the hazards of tropical countries: wild beasts, nasty diseases such as cholera and malaria, punishing heat and drowning monsoons. The natives, as the colonialists called the inhabitants of the lands over which they raised their flags, were not always friendly—predictably so when their countries were being invaded. For the aspiring settlers, land had to be cleared, labour engaged and the rudiments of European civilisation implanted. Isolation and loneliness were the daily lot of the interlopers, with catastrophic failure the destiny of many. Even those who did succeed had to stand guard against insurrection by the conquered peoples, disinterest in their mother-countries, and the vagaries of climate, economic cycles of boom and bust and adverse political circumstances.

Why, then, did Europeans expend so much time, money and energy promoting the establishment and extension of overseas empires? Why did almost all of the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australasia and Oceania come under the sway of European colonial rule from the 1500s through the early 1900s? While the period 1500—1900 was dominated by European expansion (the subject of this book), empire-building was not of course a practice confined to Europeans.

What were the consequences of this process both for those caught up within it, and for our own day? While the chapters in this volume examine aspects of these questions from a multiplicity of directions, here we offer some general perspectives on the ways in which historians have sought to make sense of this global transformation.³

Though much work of lasting value was done by colonial-era historians, most (though not all) proceeded from the assumption that expansion was an integral and natural part of European development.⁴ While they increasingly deplored and condemned violent excesses like slavery, the march of history was assumed to mean European expansion and the subjection of other continents, bringing the benefits of civilisation, modernisation, devel­opment and progress to the rest of the globe. These suppositions, which veered off to straightforward propaganda in some versions of history, ultimately failed to satisfy students and scholars interested in uncovering the motivations of colonialists and analysing the dynamics of imperialism. Scholars began to take apart the colonial mechanism, to look at its component sections and to try to determine what were the major, or the real, causes of colonialism. They seldom agreed in their conclusions, but it is possible to identify several approaches and focusses in the historiography, which correspond to different aspects of the colonial effort.

Economics has long offered one perspective on empire. No imperialist denied that money-making was part of the imperial impulse. Europe was not a poor continent, but it did lack many things for which consumers developed a taste and in which entrepreneurs saw a profit. Europeans long searched for El Dorado, ‘the gilded one’, a symbol of fabulous mineral wealth; in South America, the Spanish at least found enormous reserves of silver in the 1500s.

In many instances various forms of coerced labour underpinned these economic ven­tures. Many ‘colonists’ (in the broadest sense) were forcibly incorporated into imperial systems. Eight or nine million Africans were sold (sometimes by their compatriots) into slavery, transported across the ocean and put to work as slaves in plantations or mines. European slave-trading began in the 1500s and was not abolished until the nineteenth century, as late as 1888 in Brazil. As slavery declined, Europeans increasingly relied upon forms of indentured labourers, mostly from South Asia. Though nominally free rather than slave, millions were carried overseas, bound to their masters for the terms of their contracts and generally paid minimal wages. Other workers, indentured or free Indians and Chinese in particular, moved around the continent of Asia and further afield in the nineteenth century, and in numbers even higher than those Europeans who migrated to the Americas.

Not surprisingly, therefore, historians of colonialism often focussed on commerce, industry and empire. Some celebrated colonialism as an economic mainstay, the source of new wealth for modernising nations. Others, however, damned profit-making that they judged as enriching the few rather than the many (both at home and in the colonies), that led to dispossession and exploitation in the conquered lands, and that channelled money at home away from the pressing needs of the metropolitan poor. J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study, published in London in 1902 and one of the most famous texts in the debate on imperialism, argued that economics provided, in his famous phrase, the ‘taproots’ of imperialism, the lowest common denominator of colonialism even when papered over with more noble-sounding rhetoric about the civilising mission and the white man’s burden. Yet, Hobson added, the financiers were the true profiteers, the City accrued wealth and the ordinary Britons paid the cost; furthermore, complementing his economic arguments, he railed that a Britain that proclaimed itself democratic was losing its soul in the heinous rule of foreign places. Imperialism might provide extraordinary opportunities for business faced with changing situations in late nineteenth-century Europe, but it produced economic (and moral) corruption.⁵ A few years later, Vladimir Lenin, just before leading the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, revised these economic arguments to write of imperialism as the ‘highest stage of capitalism’, the last gasp of an industrial bourgeoisie who had to search further and wider for sources of profit in an attempt to preserve their economic and political system doomed by the logic of Marx’s version of history to fail.⁶

Later writers often took a cue from Hobson and Lenin, but they did not always agree with the tenets of their conclusions.

Debates on economics and empire are far from being resolved, and the literature ranges from commissioned and generally laudatory company histories to esoteric accounts larded with statistics and equations. All the writers agree that business was an integral part of empire, a conclusion with which those promoting imperial expansion would have been in hearty agreement, and most see in the network of international business woven in the colonial era the fabric of today’s globalised economy.

Complementary to economics, both in colonialism itself and in the writing about empire, was politics. The early modern period was the era of great royal dynasties, repre­sented by sovereigns such as Elizabeth I of England, Charles V of Spain and Louis XIV of France, all eager to expand their domains. Napoleon, new-regime republican become self-crowned emperor, tried to conquer an empire in Egypt and then in Europe. That Queen Victoria ruled over a fifth of the world’s surface, her realms and territories enjoying a pax Britannica, provided a source of immense pride and potency for the British. The later nineteenth century was the time of the new nationalism, in which both veteran and emerging nation-states sought overseas possessions: a proper, or at least powerful, European country needed a proper empire. The Netherlands had punched above its weight since the 1600s with its East Indian Empire, and little Belgium could boast of an African colony, the Congo, that was over seventy times the size of Belgium itself.

Given the perceived and real big-power benefits, several historians, such as Henri Brunschwig in France, therefore argued that politics rather than economics ought to be seen as the prime mover in imperial expansion.⁹ Though business and politics were not mutually exclusive, in this view, raison d’etat and the machinations of international and domestic politics most exercised the chancelleries of European countries as they drew lines on maps, especially at the Berlin conferences of the 1870s and 1880s that divided the world among them. Extending the empire could be part of a leader’s or party’s attempt to secure votes; over-extension might bring his downfall, but lack of resolve to defend the empire could impugn his character and electoral chances. Reluctance to relinquish those gains, and thus perhaps to lose big-power status, helps explain the unwilling decolonisation that took place less than a century later. In the 1860s the historian Sir Charles Dilke popularised the phrase ‘Greater Britain’ to encompass a British world of peoples and provinces under the Union flag,¹⁰ and, in the 1940s, Sir Winston Churchill said that he had not become prime minister of the United Kingdom in order to preside over the dis­solution of the British Empire. Colonies, in short, were always seen in terms of national assets, meaning that colonial countries could fight over every square metre of territory they wanted to possess or intended to retain; it also meant, on occasion, that they could exchange one colonial strip of land for another in order to effect better relations with their neighbours or, they hoped, improve their standing in the comity of nations. Imperialism never had a set credo or an immutable set of regulations, and historians have documented the mutations in imperial policy, for instance, from ‘assimilation’ to ‘association’ in the French Empire, the development of the ‘ethical policy’ in the Dutch East Indies, and the devolution of political power to the British dominions.

An understanding of the politics and geopolitics of empire requires an understanding of the local as well as the national and the international, the Realpolitik of European capitals and the struggles of the dynasties and countries that the colonialists sought to conquer. Many historians of the non-European world, writing in the wake of decolonisation after the Second World War, no longer thought of themselves as specialists in colonial history. They considered themselves to be historians of particular regions or countries. Imperial histories were disaggregated into studies that charted the history of individual nation-states. Often their approach, in exact counterpoint to that of those who had been defenders of colonialism, underlined the destructive effects of European expansion: political disen­franchisement, economic exploitation, cultural alienation, social disorientation. Many also wrote from an overtly nationalistic point of view, tracing resistance to European conquest, seeing colonial-era insurrections to foreshadow wars of national liberation and charting the evolution of nationalist consciousness. The old colonial heroes became the villains, and rebels against European control were heralded as achievers of emancipation. Such a view fitted well with the ideas of the New Left and with interest in the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s influenced by Marxist analysis of colonialism.

Geo-strategic discussions about the ‘why’ of empire have gained renewed popular interest in recent years, perhaps because of present-day worries about the ‘clash of great powers’, the decline of the Western superpowers and the rise of Asia.¹¹ Popular historians, as well as soothsayers, are drawn to discussions about the rise and fall of empires, though most card-carrying academic historians pay as much if not more attention to the ‘how’ as well as the ‘why’ of colonial rule, the governance of empire, issues of law and administra­tion, the role of imperial proconsuls, the debates about colonial doctrine.

In addressing the question of how colonialism operated, in recent decades culture has loomed increasingly large as an explanatory framework. Culture, of course, is an especially broad term, encompassing not only such forms of expression as art, literature and music, but also natural science and other types of scholarship (including history itself), ideology, education, health practices, aspects of daily life such as food, clothing and housing, recreation and sport. It is about attitudes and behaviours, about how groups of people see themselves and how outsiders view them, about material life and the life of the spirit, about private affairs and about the public sphere. It is about the way people engage with each other and the environment in which they live.

Notions of the superiority of European civilisation, from forms of government to technological prowess, contrasted in European minds with ideas about the primitivism, savagery or decadence of non-European cultures. These ideas were sometimes expressed in religious terms of Christianity versus paganism. They could also juxtapose the supposed refinement of European manners and morals with the imagined vice of foreign peoples. European misapprehensions, it should be recognised, were mirrored by those of the people whom they encountered; Pacific island peoples, lightly clad, were bemused by the panoply of European clothing, and vegetarians among Buddhists and Hindus were horrified by European consumption of meat; the Chinese regarded those who did not benefit from the culture of the Middle Kingdom as barbarians. Cultural certainties were not the province of one group alone.

Increasingly in the colonial era, ethnocentric ideas that formed part of the Europeans’ baggage came to be cast in racial terms. Ideas about the inferiority of those with darker skin, and Africans in particular, had been used to justify the slave trade. By the mid­nineteenth century, so-called scientific racism posited a difference between branches of the human race or about wholly variant races, proved, said its exponents, by measurements of everything from crania to genitals. Races formed a hierarchy, not surprisingly with Europeans at the top, and the theorists voiced doubt about whether the lower races possessed the intellectual or moral capacities to be civilised. Sometimes racism was paternalistic, with arguments about the laziness of natives or their childlike nature; at other times, it became hideously violent, leading to corporal punishment, massacres and genocide. Almost always, ideas about racial inferiority were used to justify political disenfranchisement: civilised Europeans had a racial right, often thought to be God-given in the very order of creation, to rule over those beneath them.

European views of indigenous peoples and their cultures were nevertheless ambivalent. For many, foreign cultures held great interest as they marvelled at such sites as Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal and the pyramids. European scholars learned the most challenging foreign languages, natural scientists classified flora and fauna according to Western scientific systems, ethnographers did field work among native peoples. Groups such as the Royal Geographic Society and the Paris Geographical Society, and their fellow organisations in other countries, mounted expeditions, hosted lectures, exhibited artefacts, photographs and maps, and helped create what the French called the ‘colonial sciences’.

Colonial culture touched much of the Western European population. It is difficult to imagine, for instance, a Victorian breakfast deprived of tea from India and sugar from Jamaica or Mauritius, or to picture a mid-nineteenth-century drawing room without a Turkish carpet, a Chinese vase, a Japanese screen or a curio from a colony. For a number of Europeans, colonialism was more than decorative. They flocked to the great colonial exhibitions, the colonial pavilions at the Crystal Palace in 1851 and at the Paris exhibitions of 1869, 1878 and later years leading up to the grand International Colonial Exposition of 1931. They signed up to various colonial committees and societies and subscribed to colonial journals. They read novels by Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling in English, Pierre Loti and Victor Segalen in French, or Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker) in Dutch. ‘Boy’s Own’ stories kept children and adolescents rapt with tales of derring-do in the wilds of the world. Those who attended church heard tales of blessed missionaries and prayed for the conversion of those heretofore deprived of the Gospel message. With increasing facilities for international transport with rail and steamship lines, Europeans began to travel in larger numbers to foreign parts. Tourists sent home the picture postcards of colonial scenes that became popular in the late 1800s, and stay-at-homes soon began to enjoy moving-pictures of the wider world, from films about sheiks of Araby to documentaries (often propaganda-laden) made by government offices.

How have historians dealt with culture as a mechanism enabling imperialism? In 1978 Edward Said, a Palestinian exile, scholar of Conrad and connoisseur of classical music who taught in the United States, published a book entitled Orientalism.¹² It became, in the words of one of the most influential historians working in this field, ‘the iconic text which linked culture with colonialism’.¹³ As we have pointed out, culture had always been central both to colonialism and to colonial scholarship. The word ‘Orientalism’ once meant the scholarly specialisation in non-European cultures (especially those of the Arabic world and Asia). Now Said’s analysis linked culture explicitly to power. Influenced by the theory of structuralism and the ideas of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Said argued that much of Western Orientalism (in the old sense of the word) was part and parcel of the phenomenon of imperialism, a view of the Arabic and Islamic world in which images of despotic potentates, licentious harems, fatalistic religion and a primitive peasantry legiti­mated aggression and conquest. Reading between the lines, even in the most supposedly objective scholarly texts, Said discovered ideas that served as rationales for imperialism. And in a later volume, Culture and Imperialism, Said found colonialism almost omnipresent in Western art, literature and culture, whether evident, hidden or coded in references and allusions.¹⁴ European views of the rest of the world, cultural perspectives embedded in notions of inherent racial and political superiority, spurred on Western conquest; much of society, including the scholars, fiction-writers and artists, were complicit. Coinciding with a broader turn towards these approaches in the discipline more generally, from the 1980s culture became a new way to study how imperial power operated.

Said modified and modulated his ideas in later writings, but his provocative early views ignited debates about Western perceptions of other cultures. Countless studies followed about the representation of colonies in art, literature, film, advertising and most other media. Some writers, such as John MacKenzie, disagreed with Said, critiquing his writings for the same sort of essentialism that he had discerned in Western works.¹⁵ Others found his views confirmed by their research, and, for better or worse, Orientalism as limned by Said, became a trope in colonial history writing, cultural studies and post-colonial approaches.

Meanwhile, other scholars, such as Homi Bhabha, began to theorise about the hybridity of culture in the colonial and European worlds.¹⁶ Individuals and groups in the colonies had actively sought out European goods and ideas. Adopting Western customs, from dress to ideologies, was seen by some as emancipation from feudal hierarchies, the regimens of class and caste, and stagnant cultures. Yet even those who campaigned against the Europeans often took advantage of European technologies, philosophies and forms of political militancy. Asians, Africans and others, even within the confines of colonial overlordship, exercised a margin of action, a degree of agency that made it possible for them to adopt, resist, assimilate or syncretise foreign commodities and perspectives. Africans could on occasion dress in coats and ties rather than flowing robes, Vietnamese ate baguettes and drank coffee and Indians adopted the quintessentially British pastime of cricket as their national sport. Anti-colonialists drew on Western ideologies, from liberalism to socialism.

Historians of colonial culture, in the widest sense of that term, have opened the archives on previously unexplored subjects. Indeed, influenced by theories connecting knowledge and power, historians have increasingly insisted that imperial structures must be sought in the very way that these archives are assembled and maintained.¹⁷ Sexuality provides one of these new topics. Before the publication of Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality in 1990, few respectable historians dared to peer into the sex lives of the colonials and the native women and men with whom they had intercourse.¹⁸ Over the past twenty years, studies of sexuality in colonial situations have multiplied, some of the scholars taking issue with Hyam’s interpretations. Such research provides a novel approach to colonialism, one that would not have been comprehensible or acceptable to most of the pro-colonialist histor­ians or to many of the anti-colonialist ones; sex would not have appeared in the works of those focussing on the economic or political taproots of empire. Yet peering into the bedchamber reveals much about colonials’ behaviour, relations between the Europeans and the indigenous people, different codes of sexual conduct, prostitution and venereal disease, the emergence of specifically colonial sexual cultures, and about the place and destiny of mixed-race children who were the products of unions between Europeans and natives.¹⁹

A related and particularly fertile area of investigation for historians of colonialism, including practitioners of cultural history, has been gender. Early historians of empire paid little attention to gender except for an underlying assumption that colonialism was largely men’s business. Historians of gender, however, have not only revised that view but also have analysed the masculine and masculinist bases of colonial ideology. They have added great depth to the issue of gender in a colonial context: gender roles in the colonies (both male and female), the place of women in the empire, expectations of gender and challenges to gender behaviour. They have discovered how European gender issues were translated to the colonies, from moral purity campaigns to the women’s suffrage movement.²⁰

The cultural history of colonialism, only broadly outlined in the preceding paragraphs, has in many ways revivified the study of imperial history, moving discussion away from the time-honoured, if somewhat creaky, debates about economic taproots and about Realpolitik, nationalism and empire-building. Some further new trends have emerged in recent years: a renewed political and economic history of colonialism, and exploration of issues of governance and the economic restructuring of the colonial world (and of the metropoli­tan world, thanks to colonialism). A corollary is a new effort to integrate economic, political, social and cultural history; for instance, to move cultural history away from an emphasis simply on European representations of foreign places and peoples to see how these perceptions were received, how they were acted upon by local peoples, how they contributed to currents of modernism in indigenous artistic life. Where biographies once emphasised colonial worthies like Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone, histor­ians using the techniques of life writing increasingly emphasise the importance of unco­vering marginal and subaltern lives as engines of historical change.²¹ New areas of study have achieved prominence in the field of colonial history. One of them is the history of medicine in the colonies: medical theory, diagnosis, therapy and prophylaxis, the role of medical doctors and institutions. Another is the history of the environment: the reorder­ing of nature in the colonies with the import of new species and the extinction of some native ones, deforestation and reafforestation, interventions such as the building of dams, pollution but also conservationist movements. A further new area, of increasing moment fifty years after the round of decolonisation of the early 1960s, has been study of the legacy of colonies, the ways that the colonies are remembered, commemorated and judged by both colonialists and colonised people and their descendants, the links between the former colonies and their former colonial masters, and vestiges of colonialism in contemporary life. In carrying out this research, the new imperial history tries to recover and interpret the extraordinarily variegated experience of empire around the globe and across half a millennium of history.

These themes and approaches are part of what has been labelled the ‘new imperial history’, which has become one of the most vibrant areas in historical research.²² The new imperial history has tried to move away from binaries—natives and colonialists, heroes and villains, collaboration and resistance, metropole and colony, pro- and anti-colonialist, even the chronology of colonial and post-colonial—to look at the thick texture and complex grid of colonial encounters and relations. It stares into the recesses of colonial life, looking at subjects that once were hidden from sight or considered unworthy of scrutiny. It attempts to reconstruct the lived experiences of the people of empire, famous, infamous or largely unknown—indigenous people, settlers and migrants transported around the empire—and to identify networks that bound people together across oceans and around the world: net­works of trade, religion, families, diasporas, occasionally networks of crime. It moves beyond traditional boundaries, either those that divided the colonising countries from each other or the borders that they imposed on their colonies; it discovers many transnational commonalities and links. It tries to bring the indigenous people and the foreigners into the same analytical ground, and to discover the way that they and their cultures mixed toge­ther, from biological metissage to hybridities in everyday life and artistic creations. It pays much attention to images, pictorial or literary, seeing them not just as colourful illustra­tions but as vital and autonomous parts of the imperial archive. It listens to the sometimes muted voice of the colonised, reads between the lines of the documents, and questions official sources. It looks not only at the impact of the European countries on the conquered world, but also at the very important influences that colonialism had in Europe itself: the interchanges and exchanges between colony and metropole. It does not assume that mod­ernity, innovation or new ideas always began at the centre, but locates currents that found their origins at the periphery of empire. The new imperial history is much concerned with the exercise of power and agency, but not in a simple ‘top-down’ imposition; rather it seeks to understand the strategies that individuals and groups deployed to advance their causes, and to map out the terrains in which they manoeuvred. It looks at groups that have sometimes been neglected in the study of imperialism, particularly women but also religious, ethnic and sexual minorities. It endeavours to decipher the underlying social and cultural attitudes that promoted colonialism, sustained imperial rule and impelled opposition to it. The new imperial history does not leave nationalism unquestioned, either that of the colonialists or the anti-colonialists. And it does not hesitate to trace continuities in situations and issues between the heyday of empire and the period subsequent to decolonisation, for it looks, too, at the legacies of empire.

Underlying much of this work, and a theme animating much debate, including discus­sions not limited to scholarly circles, is how important the colonies were in metropolitan life. For Said and many who have followed in his path, but also for dissenters from his views, such as Andrew Thompson, to cite a British historian, the ideas, artefacts and effects of empire can be seen in almost every aspect of British life.²³ For others, such as Bernard Porter, however, that is an exaggerated view; Porter argues that colonialism, even in its heyday, directly touched only a relatively small part of the population.²⁴ Many in the body politic, he suggests, had far graver concerns than the frontier wars in Asia or the British policies in sub-Saharan Africa; certainly they partook of the products of empire, such as the comestibles in their pantry, but colonialism did not dominate their everyday lives, determine the way they voted at elections, or provide a career for most Britons. The debate between a maximalist and a minimalist view of empire has not been settled, and like most good academic controversies, probably will never be.

Lying at the base of all of these historical interpretations is the need to come to some kind of assessment of both imperialism and its legacy. Empire was not just an economic, political, geopolitical or cultural issue; it was, as well, a moral issue, and this was recog­nised from the start. The debate on the morality of conquest was intensely waged in the colonial era: defenders of slavery versus abolitionists, promoters of expansion against opponents of the spread of empire, those who wanted to grant rights to native peoples and those who considered them irredeemable, those who defended local cultures and those who thought the path to progress lay through adoption of European beliefs and institu­tions. Yet in most real-life cases, the issues did not resolve into a neat ‘either/or’ set of choices, just as the motivations of the colonialists were seldom wholly altruistic or exploitative, and the responses of the indigenous people cannot be simply characterised as collaboration on the one hand or resistance on the other. The colonial world, and the dilemmas it posed, was more complex, both in the history and, increasingly, in the histor­iography. These debates, both historiographical and political, point to the real and perceived pertinence of colonialism as a heritage for most of the world in the present day. Migrants from many former colonies arrive in the European countries that once colonised their home countries; debates about the practice of non-Christian religions, about cultural customs (such as the wearing of head-coverings by Muslim women) reoccur regularly in European politics. Political and commercial relations between European countries and their ex-colonies spark criticism both of perceived European neo-colonialism and of the corruption and cronyism of comprador elites in Africa and Asia. Demands have been made, sometimes successfully, for expressions of regret about the slave trade, massacres and colonialism in general. Campaigns for financial compensation have been notably less successful. There have been requests for repatriation of artefacts, including human remains, taken by the Europeans for their museums and laboratories. In Africa, Asia and the Middle East, there have been attempts to valorise what are seen as indigenous forms of ideology and practice, from ideas about an ‘Asian way of life’ to Islamism. At another level, world music and the writings of diasporic authors have never before achieved such a level of popularity. Films and novels with colonial themes proliferate. Travel to see the sites that so enthused the colonials, and also to visit some of the colonial-era ones, attracts planeloads of tourists. The study of colonial history thrives in universities, testimony to the fascination and complexity of encounters that brought together East and West, North and South in one of the most momentous relationships in the modern world.

Notes

1 Romesh Gunesekera, The Prisoner of Paradise (London, 2012), pp. 301-302.

2 See C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780--1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004); John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (London,

2008) ; Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010); and Jim Masselos (ed.), The Great Empires of Asia (London, 2010).

3 Of necessity these comments can only be partial and schematic. For reasons of accessibility we focus here on English-language scholarship.

4 Criticism of European expansion emerged contemporaneously with its practice. The Salamanca School included thinkers such as the Spanish historian and reformer Bartolome de Las Casas (c. 1484-1566), a Dominican friar whose works documented what he saw as Spanish destruction of the Americas.

5 J.A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902); though best known for his argument about the ‘economic taproots’ of imperialism, based on his observations during the South African War, Hobson’s study devoted considerable attention to the social, political and cultural effects of expansion at home and abroad.

6 Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, first published in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in 1917 and then in countless editions and translations, became the standard Marxist work on expansion.

7 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1953), pp. 1-15.

8 PJ. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688--1914 (London,

1993) ; and British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914--1990 (London, 1993).

9 Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism, 1871--1914: Myths and Realities (London, 1966 [first published in French in 1960]).

10 Charles Dilke, Greater Britain (London, 1868).

11 See Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—for.Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal about the Future (New York, 2010); Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London, 2011). These debates are not new. See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1989); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992).

12 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).

13 Catherine Hall, Cultures of Empire: A Reader (Manchester, 2000), p. 14.

14 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993).

15 John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995).

16 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994).

17 Among a large and increasing literature see Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham, NC, 2006); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2010).

18 Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1990).

19 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley,

2002) ; Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (Routledge, 2003).

20 Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004), provides a good introduction to the British case.

21 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York, 2007); Kirsten McKenzie, A Swindler's Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790--1920 (Cambridge, 2012).

22 Stephen Howe (ed.), The New Imperial Histories Reader (London, 2009).

23 Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005).

24 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004).

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