Cultural Entanglements Research Articles

The Rise, Success and Dismantling of New Zealand's Anglican-led Māori Education System, 1814–64

Anglican missionaries, serving under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), were the first Europeans to settle in New Zealand. Within months of arriving in the country in 1814, they began to convert the language of the indigenous Māori into a written form in order to produce religious texts that would assist with Māori education and conversion. The CMS missionaries also established schools for Māori which later grew into a de facto state education system until the colonial government accelerated its plans for a secular school regime from the mid-1840s. Despite the sometimes awkward religious and cultural entanglements that accompanied missionary proselytizing in this era, the mission schools established by the CMS flourished in the succeeding decades, elevating Māori literacy levels and serving as a highly effective tool of Anglican evangelization. This article traces the arc of the CMS mission schools from their inception in 1814 to their demise in the early 1860s, a period during which the British, and later New Zealand, government's stance towards the mission schools went from ambivalence, through assistance, to antipathy.

Recent Publications on Archaeological Ceramic Analyses and their Contributions to the Study of Ancient Pottery Technology

Recent Publications on Archaeological Ceramic Analyses and their Contributions to the Study of Ancient Pottery Technology

British Film Propaganda in the Netherlands: Its Preconditions and Missed Opportunities

British film propaganda directed at neutral countries was meant to strengthen the pro-British attitude or at least weaken pro-German sentiments in the neutral countries. Directed at the wide strata of neutral societies as well as at intellectual, military and economic elites, factual films from the battle lines were believed not only to counteract German propaganda but also to overshadow hostile actions taken by British government against economic and political freedoms of the neutrals. This article is an attempt at understanding the reasons for the eventual failure of British film propaganda in the Netherlands. While mentioning various conflict areas between the countries, it focuses on cultural entanglements and cultural networks that developed, though precariously, throughout the war. The neglect of existing connections between British and Dutch filmmakers and the hesitant if not hostile attitude of War Office Cinematograph Committee towards expensive adaptations of literary works, and feature films in general, might be perceived, the article argues, as one of the core reasons, along political and economic tensions, why Britain lost the battle for Dutch cinema audiences.

Building the Visible Immortality of the Nation: The Centrality of ‘Rooted Modernism’ to the Third Reich’s Architectural New Order

This article sets out to contribute conceptual clarity to the growing recognition of the modern and futural dynamic behind fascist cultural projects by focusing on projects for architectural renewal under the Third Reich. It starts by reviewing the gradual recognition of the futural temporality of the regime’s culture. It then introduces the concept ‘rooted modernism’ and argues for its application not only to the vernacular idioms of some of the Reich’s new buildings, but also to the International Style and machine aesthetic deployed in many Nazi technological and industrial buildings. The article’s main focus is on the extensive use made in the new civic and public architecture under Nazism (and Fascism) of ‘stripped classicism’. This was a form of neo-classicism widely encountered in both democratic and authoritarian states throughout the inter-war period, and which can be understood as an alternative strand of architectural modernism co-existing with more overtly avant-garde experiments in reshaping the built environment. The case is then made for applying a new conceptual framework for evaluating the relationship to modernity and modernism of architectural projects, not just in fascist cultural production, but that of the many authoritarian right-wing regimes of the period which claimed to embrace the national past while striving for a dynamic, heroic future. This opens up the possibility for historians to engage with the complex cultural entanglements and histoires croisées of revolutionary with modernizing conservative states in the ‘fascist era’.

The Metaphor of Cultural Entanglement in Northeast African Archaeology

The Metaphor of Cultural Entanglement in Northeast African Archaeology

Eggs on Ice: Imaginaries of Eggs and Cryopreservation in Denmark

While Denmark is widely known as a global exporter of cryopreserved sperm, Danish women’s eggs face a very different fate. This paper combines legal and rhetorical analyses with the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. In establishing the genealogy of the sociotechnical imaginaries that shaped Danish regulation of the cryopreservation of eggs, we analyse the relevant Acts, Bills, preparatory work, and readings in Parliament, along with the concurrent public and ethical debates that over time relaxed the legal limit for the cryopreservation of eggs to the current five years and today continue to ignite discussions on elective egg freezing. We rely on welfare-state perspectives to discuss why reproduction, in the Danish context, is seen as a legitimate and appropriate sphere to regulate, and we turn to feminist theorizing to discuss the gendered implications captured in the sociotechnical imaginaries of the “Moral State”, “technologies to be tamed”, “the nuclear family”, and “technology as equality and hope”. We end by discussing how an interdisciplinary approach enriches our understanding of the legal, cultural, and political entanglements related to putting eggs on ice.

An Interview with Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor and Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he teaches comparative history of early modern empires, the history of European expansion, and South Asian history. He is also Professor at the College de France in Paris, where he teaches the global history of the early modern period. His work addresses the economic, political, cultural, and intellectual entanglements of Europe and South-East Asia in the early modern world. Subrahmanyam was trained in Economic History at the Dehli School of Economics (PhD 1987), where he became a professor, before joining the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1995, and Oxford University in 2002. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and a member of the British Academy. His most important publications include: Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Mary Flexner Lectures) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History (London and New York: Longman, 1993; 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Deep sea writing: recent conversations with Lindsey Collen, writer and activist from Mauritius

ABSTRACTOceans have occupied our imagination since time immemorial, both in symbolic and in practical ways. The Indian Ocean is a region characterized both by complex economic, historical, cultural, and social entanglements. Memories of recent and distant pasts plumb oceanic depths, needing to be carefully recollected and sieved to make sense of the present, and imagine possibilities for the future. The ocean is thus read as a site of contested struggles, a space where historical identities and stories interconnect. Storytelling is one device through which personal and collective memories can resurface and be questioned, as can be observed in the work of South African-born Mauritian writer and activist Lindsey Collen. This essay discusses Collen’s outlook on the Indian Ocean region, and on Mauritian literature and socio-political landscape. Building on previous work and research on Collen as a major activist and literary figure in Mauritius, this paper is based on a series of interviews and conversations with Collen and the two authors.

Across Fields: Sound, art and technology from an electromechanical perspective

This article follows electromechanical technologies through different contexts of electronic and experimental music, sound art and kinetic art as well as through parts of their industrial development and application. The aim is to explore connections between these different fields which are often obscured by disciplinary and genre divides, and which are typically unrepresented by critical and historical accounts. The approach is influenced by the field of science and technology studies (STS, also science technology and society) where technical and cultural entanglements are seen as crafting particular truths, and where the method of following a technology across disciplinary boundaries is found. By taking this approach to identify connections between the areas of electronic music, sound art and kinetic art, new and rediscovered critical appraisals of the use of electromechanical technologies as tools in creative sound production are identified. These positions are then applied to a selection of contemporary practitioners who continue to work with and forefront electromechanical technologies within the fields of electronic music and sound art.

The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics

The underlying premise of this article is that the social meanings and cultural entanglements of the so-called super-rich or 1% reach far beyond any specific people or place. To be sure, the tightly managed, tailored spaces of super-elites are often less exclusive than first meets the eye, and the markers of super-elite status circulate in quite informal, banal ways. Drawing on a combination of textual and fieldwork data, we map three interlocking semiotic landscapes: the Luxury Travel Fair in London, the Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai and then ‘elite’ signage and ‘luxury’ labelling from around the world. Using this kind of discourse-ethnographic evidence, the point we make is a simple but, we believe, important one: the geographies of eliteness are deliberately permeable just as its rhetorics are strategically slippery. Indeed, the hegemonic power of contemporary class privilege lies precisely – albeit paradoxically – in a constantly maintained appearance of ubiquity, inclusivity and ordinariness.

Europe at the End of the Chunnel: Malcolm Bradbury’s and Tim Parks’s Eurosceptic Albion

ABSTRACTThe outcome of the Brexit referendum is the apex of a long history of Euro-British relationships characterised by two opposing but coexisting stereotypes. On the one hand, England appears as the freedom-seeking nation resisting restrictive collective policies imposed by a totalitarian EU regime of faceless Brussels bureaucrats. On the other hand, England seems to resurrect its imperialistic superiority against the purported democracy and horizontality of European institutions. Adopting the notion of “cultural intimacy”—with which Michael Herzfeld addresses the mutual engagement of contrasting positions in political and administrative practices—this paper addresses the equally stereotypical images of an indifferent, inhuman European bureaucracy and of an insular, cynical Great Britain in the works of Malcolm Bradbury and Tim Parks. Be it the allegedly liberal yet nationalistic stance of Thatcherist anti-Europeanism in Bradbury, or the British disaffection with the purported identitarian and cultural levelling within the common borders of the Schengen area and of the single currency, both authors’ symbolic constructions of European institutions and of British Euroscepticism are built as cultural entanglements of these two realities, and show the need to overcome the reductive conception of Europe as a failed super-state.

Resistant actors, resistant landscapes? A historical political ecology of a forested conservation object in exurban southeastern Pennsylvania

Exurban political ecologists (ExPE) are interested in landscape contestations, particularly where material–cultural entanglements play out through land-use decision-making processes. ExPE research highlights the role in-migrants and long-time residents play in the balance between conservation and development of landscapes, often highlighting informal and formal advocacy that shapes specific outcomes. These entanglements often appear to hinge on attempts to integrate conservation science into planning. Drawing on a case from south-eastern Pennsylvania, USA, this article examines the ways that exurban actors, histories of land-use and in-migration and county planning practice produce place-specific conservation objects. Success here derives from realising long-standing landowner desires through social intervention, rather than implementation of science-informed planning. This case demonstrates the role of geologically distinctive landforms in exurban advocacy, which enable a particular landscape history of urbanisation in Metropolitan Philadelphia.

Cosmopolitan English & Transliteracy by Xiaoye You

Xiaoye You. Cosmopolitan & Transliteracy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2016. 284 pp. Many of the criticisms surrounding translingual perspectives in writing studies have centered on usefulness and intention. While adopting a translingual approach to academic writing challenges dominant monolingual ideologies about writing, examples of practice have been necessary. A more political critique of translingualism examines whether or not adopting translingual perspectives may align with neoliberal, product oriented purposes for economic gain. his book Cosmopolitan and Transliteracy, Xiaoye You uses these claims as a starting point to ask: How do we understand meaning making in a local-global context? What is our moral obligation in globalization? The answer to these questions is embedded in an understanding of language practice that he calls Cosmopolitan (CE). The book is broken up into eight chapters, in addition to a preface and conclusion, which provide several examples of language practices and pedagogies in multiple modalities. Chapters 1 through 4 establish the ethical, social, and literary implications that a CE perspective may offer, while Chapters 5 through 8 offer examples of pedagogical practice. Chapter 1, Cosmopolitanism and the Future of Writing Studies, introduces a conceptual framework for CE based on two different philosophical traditions. this chapter, You argues that people do not need to be separated by differences imposed by ideology if they act in a way that is considerate to others, and if they develop practices that are sensitive to difference. Taking his argument a step further, You bridges the Confucian concept [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]: men are brothers with the Greek concept kosmopolites, introduced by Diogenes the Cynic and bolstered by the Stoics. Connecting to the Greek paradigm, You, drawing on David Held, explains Allegiance is owed, first and foremost, to the moral realm of all humanity, not to the contingent groupings of nations, ethnicity, and class (7). The shared connection between Confucian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and Greek (kosmopolites) concepts provides a historically relevant example, from the bedrock of both traditions, into how people might relate to one another despite their differences. To create a case for CE, in the second chapter, 'Arts of Dwelling Place, You provides specific examples of ethos as dwelling and moral character by analyzing the discussions of an online study group interested in the Start with Simple Stories (SSS) method of communicating in English. The online message board, started by Professor Akio Furukowa in 2002, was examined by You to show how an English using community deals with conflicts and tensions arising in cultural encounters and how the cultural entanglement leads to cultural synthesis (38)--a reality of the contact zone that is not emphasized in contact zone theory or contrastive rhetoric. These constructs only emphasize the clash between cultures or the transfer of textual choices that writers from non-English dominant countries make when they write in English. Through his analysis of this online message board, You was able to identify the way that members' use of code-meshing gives way to cultural synthesis, too. As he explains, In the case of the SSS community, has deeply percolated local practices, mediating the construction of a virtual dwelling place (55), one in which a new culture has formed. a similar way, in Chapter 3, Linguistic Creativity in the Diaspora, You examines the multimodal exchanges between Chinese white-collar workers on the 21st Century Community Forum, a platform offered by 21st Century Newspapers in China. An examination of these narratives shows the fluidity of language practice among these multilingual language users. While is the dominant language on the forum, it does not adhere to fixed or predictable features that are often associated with nation-based understandings of practice, such as Chinese English. …

Ways of doing, ways of thinking, ways of moving together: Considerations for cross-cultural encounters and exchanges in and through dance practice

Abstract In each of the encounters that were and continue to be facilitated through the project ArtsCross/Danscross, sets of relational agendas are being instigated, which tie into complex historical and current political as well as cultural entanglements between the countries of origin of the practitioners involved. In integrating dance practitioners from the cities of Beijing, London and Taipei, who work together towards publicly performed choreographic works, the project is set to involve processes of cultural translation between practitioners from specific places that bring with themselves equally specific ways of doing and thinking. In this article I extend my thinking around the issues arising from and within the cross-cultural encounters, building on a previously written chapter published in the co-edited collection Collaboration in Performance Practice: Premises, Workings and Failures (Sachsenmaier in Colin and Sachsenmaier (eds.) 2016). More than bringing practitioners from different localities together to create dance works, the project ArtsCross/Danscross set up spaces of encounter of practitioners as well as practices as such – practices as established in varying ways of doing in different places. I discuss examples of choreographic practice with a focus on issues identified in the related fields of Global and Translation Studies, while arguing that these practices retain their own logic and ways of working, as well as producing ‘new forms of experience’, which are ‘extra-linguistic’.

Indo-Iranian Linguistic, Literary, and Religious Entanglements

It is often assumed that Indo-Iranian cultural entanglements disappeared by the early twentieth century because of the rise of imperialism and colonialism, exclusionary forms of nationalism, and the accompanying loss of certain linguistic competencies. This article calls into question the supposed disappearance of exchange between Iran and India in linguistic, literary, and religious realms. Instead, it posits that earlier sets of debates between Iranian and Indian authors, particularly on the status of the Persian language, were now inflected through nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism. It traces how these new cultural articulations were often the outcome of crossings among Iran, India, and Europe for educational, journalistic, and missionary purposes. Through these crossings, cosmopolitan understandings of language, religion, and politics, albeit with their own hierarchies and exclusions, often coexisted paradoxically side by side with nationalism. Shared Indo-Iranian religious connections, either through Zoroastrianism or Islam, became grounds for new modes of imagining transnational solidarities, while viewing Persian as a beleaguered Asian lingua franca became a way of challenging the imperial hegemony of the English language.

Approaching Shared Heroes: Cultural Transfer and Transnational Jewish History

This special issue of Jewish History is devoted to shared heroes in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It explores diverse images of heroes that are shared by at least two of these religious traditions by comparing each figure’s origin, inventions, and reinventions within varying cultural contexts in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period and by highlighting the cross-cultural significance of their counterstories and entangled histories. The construction and deconstruction, interpretation and reception of these heroic figures and their sociocultural roles over time and space bear witness to the encounters of Jews and Judaism with neighboring cultures. The approaches to our subject presented in this collection illuminate how the long-established rubric of “the hero” benefits from a cross-cultural approach. In turn, empirical data culled from the cross-cultural study of heroes demonstrate the inner workings of cultural transfer and, we believe, contribute an original perspective to the field of transnational history, which focuses on cultural entanglement.

Entanglement and the Formation of the Ancient Nubian Napatan State

Through the concept of entanglement, archaeological indications of cultural identity and skeletal evidence of biological and geographic interaction are used to explore the development of the Nubian polity who ruled as the 25th Dynasty of Egypt (Napatan period, ca. 750–656 B.C.E.). In this article, we examine the ways in which cultural and biological linkages affect the political, social, and cultural trajectories of the political entities in the ancient Nile Valley. Early studies of political developments in this region have often focused on Egypt, ignoring the aspects of power formation that may have developed independently and the long tradition of established local institutions in Nubia. The present research uses evidence from the site of Tombos, located in Upper Nubia, to investigate the processes of identity formation and population composition during the Egyptian colonial occupation and the subsequent rise of the Nubian Napatan polity. We address the impact of Egyptian and Nubian immigrants on the political developments, finding strongest support for the influence of Nubian-Egyptian communities established in colonial times on the character of the Napatan polity. [cultural entanglement, Egypt, 25th Dynasty, Tombos, mortuary practices, state formation]

Cosmopolitan Criminality: Cultural Entanglements and Globalised Crime in Imraan Coovadia’s Green-Eyed Thieves

Imraan Coovadia is fast becoming one of South Africa’s most celebrated contemporary novelists. Scholarship centred on his work is, however, in short supply. This article, through its focus on Coovadia’s second novel, Green-Eyed Thieves (2007), aims to explore the extent to which this prolific voice in the South African literary landscape is able to reflect complex (inter)national and cultural entanglements in his novel. The following analysis of Coovadia’s characters in terms of their geographical flexibility, cultural plasticity, and hybridity is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome as applied to culture. This application demonstrates how each of the characters, whether conscious thereof or not, is a complex cultural rhizome that exists as a hybridised entanglement of culture. While Coovadia’s transcontinental caper comedy has been labelled as “migrant literature”, this article suggests that this novel is better classified (albeit tentatively) as a cosmopolitan post-transitional novel that differs greatly from his debut novel, The Wedding (2001). What sets Green-Eyed Thieves apart from Coovadia’s debut offering is the absence of longing associated with migrant literature. The process of “fitting in” in a new environment is also often accompanied by difficulties and even a failure to adjust. Coovadia eschews any notion of entropic homogeneity by maintaining a local specificity by crafting characters and a city that exist as rhizomian entanglements, which exhibit identifiable yet inextricable cultural threads linking South Africa and its inhabitants to the rest of the world.

Diaspora and Trust: Cuba, Mexico, and the Rise of China by Adrian H. Hearn

Adrian H. Hearn, Diaspora and Trust: Cuba, Mexico, and Rise of China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 280 pp.China and Future of History in Latin AmericaChina's global rise forces politicians, businesspeople, and researchers to debate and formulate fresh solutions to an old problem: what balance of state, market, and civic inputs can best harness world's shifting economic currents? (3). This especially holds true for Latin America. is challenging national economic policies throughout region, and efforts to block its influence on domestic markets appear certain to fail.This is message of anthropologist and political sociologist Adrian H. Hearn's book Diaspora and Trust: Cuba, Mexico, and Rise of China. He challenges entrenched debates about China's role and influence in latin America that have tended to vacillate between opposing visions of a promising China Model of South-South relations versus a Beijing Consensus as imperialistic and threatening as Washington one. Hearn goes beyond these contrasting visions rooted in policy debates. He takes Chinese migrant communities as entry point to look at larger economic, political, and cultural entanglements between China, Mexico, and Cuba. After nearly two centuries of Chinese diaspora settlement in both countries, these migrant communities make encouraging transnational bridging figures that promise to facilitate economic development. Moreover, as the Chinese government now looks outward with a brand of economic pragmatism unknown to Cold War contenders, it is forged through Chinese diaspora [that] is advancing a unique blend of materialist and idealist agendas (209f). In order to exploit this human and social potential, Latin American states have to learn how to engage with Chinese migrant associations, brokers, and business owners more effectively. This means creating a climate of general trust and legal protection for a minority group historically mistreated and discriminated against, as well as offering predictable public-private cooperation to enhance vertical trust with community leaders and local entrepreneurs. Not an easy task. The overall picture at present, as Hearn suggests, is quite different from such a rosy socio-economic future.Both Cuba and Mexico share a complicated history of Chinese immigration, and their current economic outlook is closely tied to (who is second largest trading partner of both countries). They differ starkly, however, in their economic policies. Neoliberal Mexico and state socialist Cuba stand at opposing ideological ends within Latin America, yet policy makers in both countries recognize need for forms of public-private cooperation that diverge from conventional development models (3).With comparison of Cuba and Mexico, Hearn not only contrasts two countries that face similar challenges from very different historical and political standpoints, but goes beyond conventional analysis of Chinese interest in natural resources. The book is a timely reminder that China's role in Latin America is not limited to extractivist practices. Research in emergent field of China-Latin America has been greatly centered on statebacked Chinese investments and loans in agricultural, hydrocarbon, and mining sectors. This engagement in resource extraction is certainly significant and politically and socially explosive, but there is more going on in Latin America-China relations. The two national contexts that Hearn compares embody trans-Pacific relations beyond resource extraction, as their economic relations with are multi-sectorial, and - in contrast to other, especially South American, countries-their problems with do not seem to rest on a re-primarization of their economies.The book can be seen as a response to repeated calls to go beyond macroeconomic and geopolitical analysis and to explore potential mutual benefit of rapid growth of China-Latin America trade relations in last decade (Strauss and Armony 2012). …

Where to now?: The Cultural Turn and the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism Series

Where to now?The Cultural Turn and the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism Series Stephen Heathorn Visions of Empire: Patriotism, popular culture and the city, 1870–1939 By Brad Beaven. Studies in Imperialism series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Curating Empire: Museums and the British imperial experience Edited by Sarah Longair and John McAleer. Studies in Imperialism series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Exporting Empire: Africa, colonial officials and the construction of the imperial state, c. 1900–1939 By Christopher Prior. Studies in Imperialism series. Manchester University Press, 2013. Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The promotion of British and French colonial histories, 1870–1939 By Berny Sèbe. Studies in Imperialism series. Manchester University Press, 2013. Writing Imperial Histories By Andrew S. Thompson. Studies in Imperialism series. Manchester University Press, 2013. In late 2012 the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism series (hereafter, the MUP series) published its 100th volume, and its founder, John M. MacKenzie, passed the general editorship of the series on to Andrew S. Thompson, to take effect in 2014. In marking this milestone, Thompson edited a volume of essays on the contribution of the MUP series, entitled Writing Imperial Histories, which was published in 2013. The MUP series has been closely associated with the emergence of the so-called “new imperial history” of Britain, which is neither a singular approach nor a definable school, and moreover should not be confused with recent overt apologists of the British Empire like Niall Ferguson.1 Rather it refers to those who have championed putting a critical view of empire at the centre of British historiography, with some taking highly theorized position influenced by postcolonial and feminist approaches—Antoinette Burton and Catherine Hall, although quite different in their methodology, come to mind2—while others seek to demonstrate the significance of empire through extensive empirical analysis. It is this latter approach that has been more predominant in the MUP series, which although not adverse to theory, has tended to promote empirical research into questions about the historical breadth and depth of British cultural entanglement in their empire. Given its recent publishing milestones, it seems appropriate to review some of the more recent volumes in the MUP series in light of the claims for the continuing significance and relevance of the series made by Thompson and the other contributors in the retrospective Writing Imperial Histories volume. As remarked by Thompson and others in Writing Imperial Histories, in current historiography, and indeed in much historical popular culture, “seeing” the influence of empire on domestic British developments has become an almost commonplace position. Barely twenty years ago, however, this was not the case and the MUP series is one, but not the only, body of scholarship that brought imperial issues into a more central position within British historiography. The broader context to this historiographical change was rooted in the seemingly paradoxical place of the empire in Britain after decolonization. As has been pointed out by critics of the new historiography, except for periods of overt crisis and military action—such as the Mau Mau in early 1950s Kenya, Suez in 1956, and UDI in Rhodesia in 1965—the period of decolonization did not throw up major domestic upheaval in Britain as it did in other European empires such as France and Portugal. Outside of Whitehall, the last gasps of empire and decolonization seemingly registered little in public consciousness, and from the 1970s onwards, at least outside of the realm of sport, when the British public thought about overseas (if at all) it was more likely to think of Britain’s relationship with the new Europe rather than with the old empire. In fact, as Thompson summarizes in his introduction to Writing Imperial Histories, in the first half of the twentieth century, the British public saw their empire as embodying the ideas of Western civilization; in the second half, it was thought by many to have been an atavistic obstacle, a relic that impeded rather than advanced social and economic progress. Historiographical interest in the British Empire correspondingly waned to the point of atrophy by the 1970s, with the (sometimes fallacious) assumption made that the remaining imperial historians tended to be those with...