The British Empire
Historiography
• Robin Winks- how the study of Empire has evolved from a narrow focus on
constitutional issues to a wide-ranging enquiry about international relations, the uses of
power, and impacts and counter impacts between settler groups and native peoples.
• Historians in the nineteenth century generally held that British rule brought to
indigenous peoples the benefits of civilization. British colonies would advance towards
self-governing status, or what was later called Dominionhood.
• The outbreak of the First World War marked the beginning of a new phase in the
historiography of the Empire, in part because historians began to undermine the popular
view that British rule had entered a golden age. They and other writers dissented from
the myth of the Pax Britannica establishing peace and harmony in India and Africa,
though their work did not find full expression until the inter-war period. It is useful also
to note the two novelists who most contributed to the anti-Empire spirit of the times: E.
M. Forster, in A Passage to India (London, 1924), and George Orwell, in Burmese Days
(London, 1935).
• Robinson and Gallagher overturned the traditional historiographical assumption that
European expansion originated wholly within Europe. From Robinson and Gallagher
onwards, the history of British imperialism would be the history of the interaction
between the British and indigenous peoples.
• The suggestion that modern science helped to construct the racial ‘Other’ was rapidly
absorbed in the 1970s into the mainstream of Imperial history.
• The significance of gender as a social construct is one of the most important new
contributions to the history of Empire. It was not analysed during the Imperial zenith
itself, largely because the Empire was assumed to be a naturally male domain.
• In the 1980s and 1990s feminist scholars saw the work and identity of British women
as fundamentally related to the purpose of British imperialism, even though women had
been relegated to more private roles than men.
• Riley- “imperial nostalgia”. There was certainly a moment where British pop culture
seemed rooted uncritically in the vintage – matte red lipstick and beards, bunting and
gin-and-tonics drunk from teacups – with this aesthetic perhaps culminating in street
parties celebrating the wedding of Will and Kate in 2011. Six years later, this seems to
be playing out in a harder cultural turn. The vote to leave the European Union was
framed by many as going “back” to some moment of mythical British power. The
paradox of plucky little Britain, standing alone against the bureaucratic monolith of
Europe, yet backed up by a vast imperial network (now repackaged as a Commonwealth
of equals), pervades politics, media and culture. It’s also interesting that this nostalgia
apparently imagines a moment in history where Britain was not a multicultural society.
Actually, we would have to go back centuries to find a moment when Britain was not
multiracial. The 1950s, for instance, were a decade of mass migration from all over the
world, building on 200 years of imperial migration, and a much longer legacy of people
coming to Britain from Europe and other places. So this imagined picture of Britain
created through imperial nostalgia is wilfully ignorant, as well as erasing the
experiences of people who aren’t white male elites.
, • One of the lessons of feminist history has been about the dangers of too readily
assuming that group identifications always work: that all men, for example, opposed
greater female participation in the public sphere or liked to play sports, that all Britons
supported colonial expansion, or that all colonized peoples found colonial rule an
encumbrance. Such generalizations are invariably inaccurate, yet historical writing is
often surprisingly full of claims that come close to stating such bald fictions. The
relevant point here is that in invoking gender as a significant historical consideration
by no means presupposes that experiences of colonial practice were common to all
women or all men. Instead, what this analytical tool signifies is ‘the multiple and
contradictory meanings attached to sexual difference’, and how these multiplicities
shaped and influenced the way people lived their daily lives and how they thought about
the world around them.
• Equally important in emphasizing the rejection of universalist explanations is the view,
that an understanding of gender does not stand alone or somehow ‘above’ other factors,
such as class and race, also at work. In particular, the emphasis on inequalities, which
gendered interpretations necessarily highlight, reminds us that other important divisions
also structure colonialism. Differences in material wealth and social status, hierarchies
based on race and skin colour, and other such divisions are also always at work in social
relations.
• It is more accurate to think about the impact of empire on multiple, plural British
cultures and identities, and to avoid the assumption that evidence relating to one
particular culture or identity applies equally to the wider picture. For imperial
influences were also multiple. They were shaped by various colonial contexts, and
worked on different aspects of British society in multifarious ways. Moreover, imperial
influences interacted with various other trans-national connections, which linked
Britain for example with Europe and the United States.
• It is unlikely that any one example, any one set of connections, will provide us with the
key to understanding the part played by empire in shaping all cultures and identities in
nineteenth- or twentieth-century Britain. We need to be wary of basing wide
generalisations upon limited case studies, and we must pay careful attention to how we
contextualise source material. In many instances we also need to recognise that the
available evidence, while often beguilingly suggestive, is ultimately not of a kind
capable of providing hard-and-fast answers to the questions that some historians have
posed. Crucially, as is the case when we approach most topics in cultural history, we
need to distinguish between evidence for the existence of particular influences on
British cultures, and evidence for how those influences were received by different
audiences and thus may have shaped the way that British people thought about
themselves and the world around them. It is relatively clear that imperial influences
reached Britain through a number of channels; what historians most frequently debate
is whether those influences had a significant impact or not, a question that raises the
difficult issue of audience reception.
