Imperial Historiography Research Articles

The inscitia rei publicae ut alienae in the Preface to Tacitus’ Histories Revisited

The inscitia rei publicae ut alienae in the Preface to Tacitus’ Histories Revisited

How Russian Historians Searched for the “Good Empire”: Liquidation of the Hetmanshchyna in the Light of the “New” Imperial Historiography (2014-2022)

How Russian Historians Searched for the “Good Empire”: Liquidation of the Hetmanshchyna in the Light of the “New” Imperial Historiography (2014-2022)

Sovereignty and imperialism: International business, finance and the position of Sudan in the British empire

This article examines the relationship between Sudan and Egypt during the colonial period to explore how control over international business and finance integrated Sudan within the British empire. We examine how the locus of power and control over these economic factors began to change, and how this altered the position of Sudan. To do this we explore three areas. First, we examine how the field of international relations has considered the question of sovereignty. We use this to problematise how imperial relationships influence notions of sovereignty in the context of a colonial state. Secondly, we examine the business history of Sudan in relation to the structure of the Sudanese economy. Third, we explore how finance shaped the relationship between Sudan and the British empire. Finally, we discuss the implications of the business and financial history of Sudan in relation to the historiography of imperialism and coloniality in the MENA region.

The whole earth and apartheid: Media, peer-production, segregation

This article revisits arguments in new media studies regarding how the Whole Earth Catalog and publications from the appropriate technology (AT) movement established models of networked media communication antecedent to peer-production. By emphasizing the agricultural pedagogy of back-to-the-land and rural developmental print-based communication networks, this article traces how a group of White, educated South African environmentalists, the Environmental and Development Agency (EDA), produced humanitarian AT manuals to circulate in the segregated areas of apartheid in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Reading together archival materials with Stuart Hall’s theoretical response to the historiography of imperialism and land dispossession in South Africa, Pringle argues that EDA’s print-based media communication network enacted a cultural effort consistent with what would become peer-production, and that this case study is instructive for contemporary critiques of capital-intensive digital agriculture in postcolonial contexts.

The foreign policy of Klemens von Metternich in the works of V. K. Nadler (1840–1894)

The foreign policy activities of Klemens von Metternich, the main organizer of the Congress of Vienna, the true architect of the post-Napoleonic international order, and minister of foreign affairs and chancellor of the Austrian Empire, attracted the attention of many researchers, especially on the eve of his 250th birthday anniversary. The first monograph in Russian imperial historiography entirely devoted to Metternich's diplomacy was authored by the Kharkiv University professor V. K. Nadler (1840–1894); but this aspect of Nadler’s scholarship is largely unknown today. The purpose of this article is to comprehensively analyze Nadler's works dealing with Klemens von Metternich's diplomatic legacy and its significance for the further development of the post-Napoleonic international order. The author employs the methods of historical and comparative analysis, systematization and generalization, and retrospective analysis. The article shows that, in addition to the specialized study on Metternich and the European Reaction (1882), Nadler partially devoted the multi-volume monograph Emperor Alexander I and the Idea of the Holy Alliance to the analysis of the foreign policy of the Austrian Empire in the first years of the Vienna System of international relations. Nadler tried to avoid exaggerating the role of the individual in history, in the best progressive tradition of the historiography of his day. However, to denote the new international order, Nadler usually used the name «Metternich's political system», thus stressing the crucial importance of the Austrian minister as the organizer of the Congress of Vienna, the guarantor of the implementation of its decisions, and the driving force behind the fight against any dissent in European countries. According to Nadler, while the Vienna international order initially developed precisely in the reactionary direction mapped out by Metternich, the Greek Revolution and the Adrianople Peace Treaty of 1829, which confirmed the autonomy of Greece, struck a real blow to the «Metternich system».

Archiving the audible debris of empire: on a mission between Africa and Britain

ABSTRACT Derrida’s work on ‘archive fever’ has prompted a great deal of academic reflection about the archive and what a critical ‘archiving’ of the past can imply for our understanding of the present. And yet, if the object of historical study is musical sound, what can a ‘fevered’ approach to the archive tell us through the silence of its dusty materials? When adding in the further complexity of a colonial context, the archiving of what Stoler has termed the ‘imperial debris’ of empire brings up a further conundrum: that of what I call here the ‘audible debris’ of empire: i.e. the sonic traces of power and resistance through musical sound that are otherwise absent from traditional historical narratives. In this article, I examine nineteenth-century British attitudes about music at the South African mission station of Lovedale in order to interrogate what a ‘destabilised’ archival awareness can bring to postcolonial musical scholarship. I ask how the structures of colonial archiving that created the imperial historiography of Lovedale (the ‘archival imaginary’) have influenced and reinforced the ‘disciplining strains’ of Lovedale’s musical activities. In turn, I also consider how these ‘disciplining strains’ have created audible legacies that are themselves musical archives of imperial processes.

Процесс по делу об отравлении каана Угедея в контексте противоречий разных групп источников

Research objectives: The article provides an analysis of conflicting reports in the sources on the trial for the poisoning of Khan Ögedei, who died at the end of 1241. Research materials: Although the sources of the imperial circle (Juvaini, Rashid al-Din) describe in detail the trials of individual representatives of the nobility after the son of Ögedei, Guyuk, came to power in 1246, they do not report anything about the trial regarding the violent death of the former ruler. Nonetheless, direct information about the arrest of a certain daughter of Chingis Khan on charges of murdering Ögedei, which occurred immediately after the enthronement of Guyuk, is contained in the report of Plano Carpini, present at the kurultai. Rashid al-Din’s report, which is an example of imperial historiography, does not contain direct references to this but provides indirect reports about the murder of Chingis Khan’s daughter by the Ögedeids. Simultaneously, the official imperial texts date the most high-profile trial of Chingis Khan’s brother Temuge-Otchigin and his execution to the time after enthronement, but Plano Carpini refers to this event as happening before that. Results and novelty of the research: The author concludes that the report of the papal legate reflects real events to a greater extent, while the versions of Juvaini and Rashid al-Din are the result of imperial censorship, which purposefully concealed events that were contrary to Chingisid intra-family ethics.

The Author as Cannibal: Rewriting in Francophone Literature as a Postcolonial Genre, 1969–1995. By Felisa Vergara Reynolds

In this monograph, Felisa Vergara Reynolds develops a compelling framework for analysing postcolonial francophone literature — ‘literary cannibalism’ — to foreground the political dimensions of novels that explicitly rewrite canonical works from hegemonic cultures. Through Vergara Reynolds’s new theoretical lens, the pejorative label traditionally used to justify colonization and denigrate indigenous peoples is transformed into a mode of critique, through which authors may absorb and assimilate imperial canonical works to subvert them and destabilize their supposedly inviolable status. For Vergara Reynolds, the postcolonial text that devours another literary work constitutes a form of ‘postcolonial revolt’ (p. 31) that surpasses the dialogic relation of intertextuality underpinning all literary creation. While this gesture of re-inscription raises the question of colonial mimicry, Vergara Reynolds convincingly argues that literary cannibalism is no mere submissive imitation but, rather, ‘an act of menace’ (p. 27; original emphasis) that actively seeks to upend dominant power relations within a canonical text to restore agency to marginalized or oppressed characters. This is exemplified by Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623) as Une tempête (1969), in which the author empowers the most oppressed character, Caliban, who vomits out the colonizer in his first act as a free man — an apt metaphor for the liberating effect of literary cannibalism itself. The remaining chapters explore similar instances of literary cannibalism in works from across the former empire — Senegal, Algeria, and Guadeloupe — that all grapple with the implications of writing and publishing in the language of the colonizer, and also contribute distinct approaches to literary cannibalism. For example, Boubacar Boris Diop’s cannibalization of Prosper Mérimée’s Tamango (1829) in Le Temps de Tamango (1981) parallels Césaire’s critique of departmentalization to denounce the residual colonialism in post-independence Senegal, but Vergara Reynolds contends that Diop’s method of literary cannibalism also decolonizes the novel. In L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), Assia Djebar shifts our focus to imperial historiography as the source of literary cannibalism, constructing her novel as a means of restoring silenced female voices and writing women of colour back into history. Finally, a distinct aspect of this book that sets it apart from traditional literary criticism is the fact that Vergara Reynolds has drawn her theorization from a close working relationship with Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé, which has allowed for a more collaborative development of the concept of literary cannibalism. The last chapter draws on personal interviews with Condé on the rewriting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) into La Migration des cœurs (1995), during which the author reflects on literary cannibalism’s emancipatory potential within the narrative. While this monograph focuses on francophone authors of the former French colonial empire, Vergara Reynolds’s elaboration of literary cannibalism will certainly be of interest to other scholars of global postcolonial literatures: as Oswald de Andrade declared in the Manifesto antropófago (1928), ‘Only cannibalism unites us.’

Africa’s Revolutionary Nineteenth Century and the Idea of the “Scramble”

Abstract This paper seeks to position the Scramble for Africa in the context of the continent’s transformative, global nineteenth century. While imperial historiography develops apace, Africa-facing analyses of the continent’s partition and the processes which led to it are increasingly rare. European expansion into Africa was characterized by an aggressive dynamism, and millions of Africans experienced profound crisis in the process of the establishment of colonial rule. Yet Africa’s revolutionary nineteenth century was both driven by, and culminated in, complex processes of co-option on the part of Africans and Europeans. The paper proposes that a more Africa-centered assessment of the Scramble is possible, one which aims to contextualize the partition of the continent as part of an ongoing, endogenously shaped but often exogenously connected, transformation in political, economic, and social organization and behavior. While no single overarching theory can apply to the entire continent, it is possible to identify dynamics and processes for change that recur across Africa, from political and military reform to economic innovation. These point toward possibilities for reframing Africa’s development in the late precolonial period, and enable us to challenge the hegemony long enjoyed by scholars of European empires.

Constructing global missionary families: Absence, memory, and belonging before World War I

The separation of parents and children was a quite common imperial family constellation before World War I. Many children left the respective colonial or mission territories at the beginning of their seventh year. They were sent to their parents’ regions of origin in Europe to spend their childhood and youth in the households of relatives or in missionary boarding schools specially set up for them. This article examines German-speaking missionary families in the imperial context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and focuses on letter communications between parents and children as an expression of family construction at a distance. I will mainly focus on two families (Kaundinya, Nommensen) in order to examine from a micro-historical perspective, the construction of missionary families in a transimperial framework. Rooted in the pietistic milieu of German-speaking missionaries from the Basel Mission and the Rhenish Mission, these families enable us to compare the results of imperial and missionary family historiography, which has developed over the last 20 years within the British context, with empirical material from other national and imperial contexts.

An ‘Incalculable Blunder’: Empire and the British Public School, 1896–1914

ABSTRACT This paper examines Edwardian public schools’ relations with Empire. It does so by focusing on their students’ perceptions of the imperial enterprise and participation in Empire-relevant schemes. For, current scholarship has, almost without exception and in-depth investigation, presumed the Empire’s popularity and pre-eminence within such institutions. However, this paper, drawing on new archival research and Eton College source material, argues a strong anti-Empire minority was present among public school students. Likewise, it suggests various imperial schemes and institutions, impacting public schools, met significant student detachment or subversion. These conclusions, then, inform and enhance the historiography of British imperialism. In particular, they indicate that Edwardian imperialist propaganda was, in the public school case, unable to entrench a ubiquitous, pro-Empire ideology. Moreover, Britain’s upper and upper-middle classes, as embodied by Edwardian public school students, comprised not only reluctant or ‘secondary’ imperialists, but also multiple anti-Empire advocates. Therefore, this presents Edwardian British society’s Empire-engagement as much more amorphous and fragmentary than previously thought.

Truth, Facts, and Authenticity in Russian Imperial Jurisprudence and Historiography

Truth, Facts, and Authenticity in Russian Imperial Jurisprudence and Historiography

Periodizations in Crisis: Early Modernity and Ottoman Imperial Historiography

Periodizations in Crisis: Early Modernity and Ottoman Imperial Historiography

The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire, by Dane Kennedy

Reviewed by: The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire by Dane Kennedy Sascha Auerbach (bio) The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire, by Dane Kennedy; pp. vii + 217. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, £65.00, £21.99 paper, $88.00, $29.95 paper. Dane Kennedy’s The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire provides insightful and compelling analysis of the historiography on the British Empire, one of the most contested topics in the discipline of history. Far more than a simple overview, the book offers a fascinating and astute investigation of the culture of historical discussions about the British Empire and the ways in which they have evolved over the last half century. The introduction and chapters 5 and 6 are new pieces, whereas the others have been published previously. Regardless, they work well together as a stand-alone volume, representing the author’s impressively broad intellectual engagement with the field. The focus throughout is on the developments of the last three decades, when the study of the history of the British Empire, which had “long remained close to familiar shores,” once again rose to scholarly prominence (2). Chapter 1, originally written in 1996, offers a “critical reconnaissance” of postcolonial theory (9). In the 1980s, this intervention prompted a reenergizing of scholarly interest in imperialism, but also catalyzed a fierce debate over its focus on texts and its employment of approaches drawn from literary and cultural theory. Kennedy’s tone here is critical, but constructively so, reflecting the author’s view that, although postcolonial theory had much to offer historians at the time, there were elements that made its full incorporation into historical approaches problematic. Chief among these were a tendency to essentialize the West, a recourse to specialized and nigh-impenetrable jargon, the abstraction of the colonized “other” as an “undifferentiated, unknowable category,” and the misapprehension that textual analysis alone could serve as a pathway to liberation from the cultural and political oppression of the West (16). Kennedy, at the time, was more persuaded by the work of literary scholars such as Mary Louise Pratt and Patrick Brantlinger, whose attention to historical context and respect for historical evidence dovetailed nicely with historians’ traditional penchant for archival sources, concrete analysis, and chronological specificity. The relationship between history and postcolonial theory is revisited in chapter 3, which was written initially in 2013. The tone here is very different, reflecting how dramatically the interaction between the two had changed in the interim. As Kennedy explains, by that time the attitude of many historians of empire toward postcolonialism had shifted “from suspicion and antagonism to tolerance and even fraternization” (39). The contemporary engagement between postcolonial studies and history is most evident in the study [End Page 659] of identities, geographies, and epistemologies. This chapter benefits from both hindsight and a much broader embrace of the varied influence that postcolonialism has exerted on the historical analysis of topics such as gender, race, ideology, and modernity. Though less overtly contentious, the chapter is hardly uncritical, and Kennedy takes postcolonial studies to task both for its “preoccupation with individual consciousness” (47) and its insistence that “subaltern peoples have been rendered invisible in the archives” (54). Chapter 2 is another standout of the volume, offering a keen critique of the more traditional imperial historiography that guides The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998–99). Kennedy contrasts the approaches embodied in that book with the new imperial studies, more formally known in North America as the new imperial history. While the OHBE still operates in the longstanding empiricist tradition of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher—reflecting their interest in “informal empire,” the “official mind,” and the role of politics on the periphery—new imperial studies/history takes a much broader and more interdisciplinary approach to the historical analysis of imperialism (29). The latter has embraced the influence of gender studies, postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, and cultural studies. Incorporating these approaches, those working in the field have engaged the reciprocal influence of empire on domestic affairs and deepened the historical understanding of the culture of imperialism. The greatest contrasts between the OHBE and the new imperial studies, Kennedy concludes, lie in their disagreement...

The Birth of Christian History: Memory and Time from Mark to Luke–Acts

Eve-Marie Becker explores in Birth of Christian History genres, subgenres, and literary forms in Hellenistic and Roman historiography in order to draw out and compare the processes that shaped the social and cultural memory of the earliest Christian literary culture. This three-chapter volume focuses particularly on the influence of early Roman Imperial historiography on the NT writings beginning with the Gospel (Mark) to the starting point of early Christian history (Luke–Acts).In ch. 1 (pp. 1–33), Becker discusses the interdependent relationship between memory and history writing. She teases out the philosophical constructs that undergird the Roman conception of memory and how the early NT writings demonstrate some similarity to Roman memorial culture. After defining and explaining the differences between counter-memory, visual memory, ritual memory, and exemplary memory in relation to early Christian literature against Roman history writing, Becker elaborates on the purposes that literary memory serves in the Gospels and Acts: (1) a didactic purpose—the involvement of memory in education; (2) an entertainment function—as later apocryphal works supplement perceived historical gaps, such as Acta literature; and (3) an authoritative function—when later Christian Fathers refer back to early Christian literary memory in claiming normative and heretical errors.In ch. 2 (pp. 34–129), Becker looks extensively into how ancient historians explain/interpret the past and how they paraphrase the narrativized past. The Hellenistic and Roman historians—such as Velleius, Sallust, Strabo, Livy, Dio Cassius, and Appian—reference an existing master plan behind the narrative while also claiming their own view. In this sense, historians choose topics and subgenres according to the moral value that they aim to depict; thus, they assert their own moral value on different levels (causality in the narrative, use of rhetorical forms and genre, and interpretation on a metahistorical level) in order to affect their contemporary and future audiences. Becker finds the most prominent comparison in Velleius Paterculus’s catalog of virtues and values in his description of Tiberius’s reign. Becker applies a form of Vellieus’s approach to Mark’s Gospel and discerns literary causal connections and patterns, such as how Mark’s metahistorical interpretation—the “way of the cross”—serves as an overarching moral value in the narrative.In ch. 2, Becker also approaches an understanding of NT historiography from two levels—discussing the theoretical contributions of ancient historians and philosophers (those before and contemporary with Mark and Luke–Acts) while also examining ancient historiography through the ideas and opinions of contemporary scholars and theorists. For example, when discussing “person-centric” historiography, Becker consults the writings of Ivo Bruns (1896) in relation to personhood and concerning the distinction between major characters and minor characters as distinct from biography. She draws out Bruns’s conclusions about direct depiction of characters (e.g., Polybius’s narrative Scipio) and indirect evaluation of characters that lie hidden within the narrative (e.g., Livy on Scipio) which can be traced back to Thucydides. Becker then takes these observations and guidelines for analyzing the manner in which persons act as protagonists in the framework of history writing (judgment by contemporaries, impact on contemporaries, and the person’s attributed speech) and applies it to Mark’s Gospel: where Jesus evokes judgment (Mark 8:27–29) and Jesus’s impact on others is through action and through speeches (1:18–34). From this perspective, Jesus’s personhood is evidence that he is the acting protagonist within a historiographical account.In ch. (pp. 130–53), the abstract concept of time and its relationship to historiography is assessed. Since memory gives access to the perception of time as well as structuring it, time becomes an object of interpretation that gives shape to identity (the “golden age” in Virgil, Ecl. 4.4–10). Becker analyzes the relation between memory, time, and history in considering the earliest Christian shape of history writing, its Hellenistic-Roman setting(s), and its impact on the construction and understanding of “Christian” time. Becker concludes that the motivating factor for Hellenistic and Roman history writing is the conceptualization of time. She holds that this is also true of Mark and Luke–Acts. More specifically, Luke participates in Mark’s conceptualization of time and motion—Mark 1:15 and Luke 21:8—yet perception of time in Luke–Acts differs from Mark: Mark and Luke–Acts are linear and causal, but the Markan concept of narrative temporality is not yet fully defined (p. 137). Mark’s readers are forced to look back to chs. 1–9, whereas Luke gives shape to a narrative that stresses temporal and historical progress toward the apostolic age.Eve-Marie Becker sifts through an extensive amount of research from primary and secondary sources to provide relevant comparative insights on the influence of Roman and Greek historiography on early Christian history writing. The nature of the topic requires an appreciation for theory and abstractions, but the author’s acute ability to gather, collate, and explain nuanced differences of genre and form within an overarching discourse of ancient history engages the reader and contributes to a better understanding of the historiographical approaches of Mark and Luke–Acts.

Culture as Imperial Synapse: Pre- and Post-Foucauldian Approaches to Culture in British Imperial Historiography

The study of British imperial culture is heavily attributed to the field of imperial that became defined in the 1990s, yet theories of imperial cultures date back to at least the 1950s. Furthermore, a recent cadre of new imperial historians has broken away from what might be called imperial history proper to suggest a revised theory of imperial culture. This paper compares the theoretical influences and the methodologies of these three approaches, which I have termed the materialist approach, the discursive approach, and the localized approach, in order to show how pre-Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian imperial histories are not so diametrically opposed between materialism and culturalism as is commonly perceived. Instead, this paper argues that these three approaches all adopt a theory of imperial culture, each different and yet each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Imperial ardor or apathy? A Comparative international historiography of popular imperialism

AbstractWere the ordinary citizens of imperial metropoles during the 19th and 20th centuries arduous supporters or apathetic observers of their country's colonial expansionism, or did their relationship to empire fall somewhere in between? Although this is a central question for understanding the how and why of modern imperialism and evaluating responsibility for colonial wrongs, scholars in the only loosely knit field of popular imperialism have arrived at widely divergent answers. Complementing its companion article, “By Jingo! Methods for Researching Popular Imperialism,” this article will present an overview of the conclusions of existing studies and present ways that future studies can become more theoretically and methodologically sophisticated through inspiration from comparative and transnational history, nationalism studies, and genocide studies.

By Jingo! Methods for researching popular imperialism

AbstractThe study of popular imperialism, or the extent to which the ordinary citizens of an imperial metropole were aware of and supported their country's imperial expansion, provides a crucial empirical basis for evaluating the causes of and responsibility for colonial aggression. Nevertheless, this topic has received considerably less attention than comparable topics like fascism, genocide, or nationalism, and a comparative conversation between scholars of different empires is largely lacking. Together with a companion article, “Imperial Ardor or Apathy? A Comparative International Historiography of Popular Imperialism,” this article will provide inspiration for future studies by summarizing different approaches to and methodological problems involved in the study of popular imperialism, drawing on a wide range of research on several empires.

How to Rule the World: Occult-Scientific Manuals of the Early Modern Persian Cosmopolis

AbstractImperial grimoires—that is, manuals on various forms of magic and divination written for or commissioned by royal readers—proliferated across the early modern Persianate world, more than paralleling the (decidedly non-imperial) grimoire boom in Renaissance Europe; but only the latter has been studied to date. This programmatic essay diagnoses the colonialist-Orientalist causes for this wild imbalance in comparative early modern Western intellectual and imperial historiography and outlines a philological way forward. Far from being evidence for “the superstition of the Moslem natives,” such manuals are an indispensable aperture onto precisely those processes—common to Islamdom and Christendom alike—by which we define Western early modernity: textualization, canonization, standardization, confessionalization, centralization, imperialization, bureaucratization, democratization, and mathematization. Yet they also record the religio-cultural and institutional divergences that so distinguish the Islamicate and especially Persianate experience of early modernity from the Latin Christianate.

Liberal Empire, Geopolitics and EU Strategy: Norms and Interests in European Foreign Policy Making

ABSTRACTThe European Union (EU) is an imperial power. Building on the EU-as-empire paradigm and Manners’ concept of ‘normative power’, this article argues that owing to the institutional set-up of its governance and its discursive strategies, the Union resembles an imperial polity which has to adopt an interest- and norm-driven ‘dual strategy’. EU scholarship has been exploring the tensions between short-term security interests and a long-term reformist agenda in the Union’s external strategies for the last two decades. The argument presented in this article is novel as it is informed by findings from a new imperial historiography which has revisited the imperial governance and discourse of former European empires—for example the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian empires. The first part develops a definition of the EU as a liberal empire based on strategies of geopolitical modelling of hierarchy in centre-periphery relations and normative discourses to legitimise that hierarchical order. The second part explores the impact of strategic environments on EU strategy. An analysis of the ENP reviews of 2011 and 2015 suggests a resilience of the EU’s ‘dual strategy’ despite a geopolitical turn in strategic thinking. Thus, the supranational identity building capabilities of the EU’s ‘normative power’ are retained. At the same time, its impact propensity in the neighbourhood appears significantly weakened.