Making Empire Visible or Making Colonialism Visible? The Struggle for the British Imperial Past

Abstract

British Empire history is a scholarly field with considerable genealogy and longevity, certainly in comparison to the historiographies of other modern empires. However, despite this long history, the frameworks within which this historiography has considered the formation, significance and implications of the empire have been limited. The dominant historiographical interpretation has either accepted the empire as a political and economic past to be studied but not interrogated, or has exhibited nostalgia for Britain’s lost imperial greatness. Since the dramatic reinvigoration of the field in recent years by new approaches, such as postcolonial and feminist theories, historians of Britain and its empire now hold radically competing visions. Much of the new scholarship identifies the British Isles themselves as a site of the empire, asserting the metropole’s implication in aspects of imperial history from slavery, to Orientalist and racial thinking, to colonial hierarchies. Other historians reject contentions that the empire was a part of British metropolitan history, seeing instead a separation between “home” and “away,” and emphasizing positive legacies of the empire—an insistence that has provoked charges of nostalgia. This historiographical debate, labelled by Catherine Hall as Britain’s own version of the “history wars,” 1 has played out in monographs,