Making Empires and Colonialisms Visible - Or, the Evidence of Things Not Seen

Abstract

Angela Woollacott’s polemical article ‘Making Empire Visible or Making Colonialism Visible’ raises important questions.1 Unfortunately – as I shall seek here to show – her own answers to these questions are often less than convincing, and indeed her way of posing the questions is sometimes unhelpful. Woollacott’s perspective on the current state, and stakes, of play in scholarship about British imperial history, and the history of colonialism, is a stimulating intervention. Yet it is also a notably over-simplified view, and in part a puzzlingly combative or aggressive one. Why, one wonders, does she choose to write of ‘the struggle for’ the imperial past, rather than ‘the debate over’ or better still the conversation or dialogue about it? Hers is also an oddly outdated argument both in terms of her perception of major relevant intellectual trends, and in her evaluation of how some pertinent institutions, notably journals and museums active in the field, have developed. Two of the institutions on which Woollacott focuses are ones with which I have a close personal involvement. These are the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (JICH), of which I have been co-editor since the start of 2008, and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (BECM), for which I have served as an academic advisor and under whose auspices I have several times talked, written