The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain by Bernard Porter (review)

Abstract

452 Рецензии/Reviews Kavita DATLA Bernard Porter, The AbsentMinded Imperialists: Empire, Society , and Culture in Britain (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 475 pp., ill. Bibliography , Index. ISBN: 0-19-929959-5. For historians of the formerly colonized world, those of Asia and Africa especially, the impact of empire has been central to their scholarly concerns. In Britain, on the other hand, as Bernard Porter himself points out, this has not necessarily been the case – as witnessed by the fact that study of the empire has been for the most part conducted by a limited number of specialists. In the 1980s, and most notably in the work of Edward Said, the question of empire’s effects on Europe, and European culture and scholarship, began to be raised forcefully and persistently by academics. It is not without some irony then, that one of the most respected of British Empire historians, Bernard Porter, should turn to the questions raised by Edward Said and colonial studies more generally in order to argue that nineteenth and twentieth century British society was much less affected by empire than in many cases it is assumed to be. Absent-Minded Imperialists brings together a wide variety of British cultural artifacts, from school land of industry, worker activists, liberated women, and socialist intellectuals . In other words, in his scholarly and literary works Franko created a social and cultural space for a new generation of patriots to inhabit . In the process, he also proved that these modern realities could be described in the Ukrainian language, no longer just a peasant vernacular. Hrytsak argues, in contrast to much of the previous scholarship, that it was the radical political culture (identified primarily with Franko) rather than the cumulative result of the Ukrainian national movement that caused the final transition from pre-national Ruthenian to a modern, national Ukrainian identity in Galicia (P. 435). Based on more than a decade of painstaking research, Hrytsak’s book stands out among other recent works by Ukrainian historians for its conceptual vigor, impressive erudition , and beautiful writing style. Ukrainian research centers in North America would do a great favor to the profession by publishing an English translation of this work. 453 Ab Imperio, 3/2007 textbooks and newspapers, to films, musical compositions, festivals, and architecture, in order to understand whether they, and therefore Britain itself, were influenced by the empire. Along the way, Porter pays close attention to how these different texts, performances, and monuments might have affected their multiple audiences. Porter is also careful to place these various artifacts within a larger context, attempting to understand how reflective they were of print, audio, or visual culture more generally, and to think about the multiple influences that might have had a hand in creating them. Porter assembles this great body of evidence in order to argue that the vast majority of British people were unaware of the British Empire (absent-mindedness does not capture this exactly), and that of the remainder, many were critical of the empire, or imperial policy. Lending texture to Porter’s account are the two principle themes around which his argument is organized : chronology and class. So while Porter argues that “Britain had never been a convincing imperial society” (P. 282), he is also committed to thinking through the variety of responses evoked by empire both across society and across time. The book itself is divided into thirteen chapters. The first seven of these chapters, along with providing an overall introduction to his argument, are roughly devoted to examining the influence of imperialism in nineteenth century Britain up to the period of the 1880s. These seven chapters are further divided to pay special attention to different classes of British society – a decision that Porter justifies by virtue of their separate schooling systems, levels of literacy, and access to the British political system. Chapters eight through eleven take up the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early half of the twentieth. Here, Porter argues that imperialism became more prevalent – appearing more often in textbooks or finding expression in propaganda societies for example – though he would caution against overstating the influence of imperialism on society at home even in this...