Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882-1956. By Martin Thomas and Richard Toye.

Abstract

Not so long ago it seemed enough of a methodological challenge to position a single empire and its metropole within the same analytic frame. But the idea of writing on just one empire is fast becoming outmoded. The preoccupation now is with the ways in which imperialisms intersected: with connected and comparative histories of empire, with trans-imperialism and co-imperialism and sub-imperialism. So Arguing about Empire, a book about the rhetorical and political interdependence of British and French imperialism between the invasion of Egypt and the nemesis of Suez, is decidedly on-trend. It is based on excellent scholarship and makes important points. It is not entirely clear, however, what its principal objectives are. The book deals with the arguments made by British and French writers and politicians about a series of imperial crises, all involving both countries, all generating a significant volume of public discussion. Each of the book’s seven chapters deals with a specific crisis, namely, the 1882 invasion of Egypt; the Fashoda incident of 1898; the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911; the Chanak crisis of 1922; World War II (two chapters); and Suez. The focus, then, is on arguments about North Africa and the Middle East, which is justified on the basis that these were the regions in which British and French imperial interests came most closely into contact. The authors contend that looking comparatively at how British and French actors wrote and spoke about imperial crises helps us to grasp the specificities of the two nations’ imperial rhetorics, and the ways in which those rhetorics came to intertwine and to condition one another. The book further suggests that such an analysis can illuminate the gaps between the reality of ‘co-imperialism’ and the oppositional public language with which it was cloaked, and that examining imperial rhetoric can offer us insights into the real, unstated motivations behind empire. Arguing about Empire, then, is by no means the pure discursive history that its title might seem to imply. It seeks not only to reconstruct arguments about empire, but also to connect them with imperial realities and practical political decision-making.