At home with history Macaulay and the History of England

Abstract

How has the relation between nation and empire been imagined by British historians? What part has history played in the construction of a binary divide between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘home’ and ‘away’? In what ways has the discipline of history constituted metropole and colony as intimately linked, or distinct and unconnected? These are the questions raised in this chapter, which takes Thomas Babington Macaulay's History of England as an exemplary case study to explore the split that was created between domestic history (which became defined as national history) and the history of empire. Macaulay, I suggest, wrote a history of the nation (England) that banished the Empire to the margins. Yet empire was critical to Macaulay's own life experience and its presence essential to his narrative of the English as an imperial race. For how could a race be imperial without an empire? History was immensely popular in the mid-nineteenth century, a time of self-conscious nation formation and of nationalist enthusiasm, and historians played a vital part in defining this nation. Macaulay's narrative of England was designed to give his readers a confidence in themselves and their future, for he told ‘how our country … rose … from a state of ignominious vassalage … to the place of umpire among European powers’. His ‘island story’ profoundly influenced English common sense and historiography.