Metropolitan Savages

John Marriott, The Other Empire. Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2003; xii + 241 pp., £49.99; ISBN 0719060184.

Over the last fifteen years or so, historians have attempted to put the history of Britain and its colonial possessions on to the same page. Trying to undo the historical separation between imperial history and the different national historiographies of Britain, South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, this literature has forcefully argued that metropolis and colony inhabited a 'unitary epistemological field' during Britain's imperial nineteenth century.¹ The concepts of 'representation' and 'imagination' are given particular prominence within this literature. Influenced in part by the dominant role of literary studies in the initial development of a new intellectual repertoire for studying the colonized world, historians particularly concentrate on the images and stereotypes through which both colonial and British subjects were imagined and represented in a variety of texts.² Attending to the confluence between the 'imagination' of Britain and its colonial territories allows the 'new imperial historians' to move beyond the frontiers of outdated national historiographies. 'Empire' was not merely a peripheral concern; as Antoinette Burton argues in her introduction to the essays collected in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (2003), 'Empire was, in short, not just a phenomenon "out there", but a fundamental and constitutive part of English culture and national identity at home'.³.

These claims have been contested by historians who argue that empire was not fundamentally 'constitutive' of British 'culture' or 'national identity'. Critics of the 'new imperial history' argue that whilst empire did influence the dynamics of British politics and culture, it did so at particular times and particular places. Burton and colleagues would suggest that this critique is an attempt to deny the barbarous facts of empire, or efface the role of non-white populations in the making of Britain. Yet, the argument that empire was constitutive of 'English culture' or 'English national identity' seems to revolve around the claim that there was a homogenous English (or British) national culture and identity that could have been constituted by a single causal force – namely, empire. It is this assumption, about the homogeneity of 'Englishness' (or 'Britishness'), that the mainly British critics of the 'new imperial history' contest.⁴ Despite the seemingly 'post-modern' language of the new imperial history, with its talk of contestation, fragmentation and hybridity, its advocates seem to take for granted the thoroughly old-fashioned claim that the 'nation' existed as a homogenous entity constituted by a unitary historical force.⁵ Here, the debate seems to be one between the advocates of two rival, though thoroughly 'modernist' styles of historical thought. On the one hand, the new imperial historians, most of whom inhabit American academic institutions, are comfortable with a sociological vocabulary in which entities such as 'nations' and 'cultures' have essential characteristics that endure through time – however ambivalent those characteristics might have been. On the other, scholars trained in a more pragmatic, British empirical style of scholarship are sceptical about the kind of sweeping generalizations that these new perspectives adopt.

The problem, of course, is that whilst an emphasis on the 'constitutive' power of empire in forging Britain relies on the altogether problematic assumption that 'Britain' had a stable identity, a more minutely empirical approach makes it difficult to say anything coherent about the relationship between empire and Britain during the nineteenth-century at all – hence Burton's claim that British empiricists don't believe there was a connection. There, are, however, other subjects and other approaches that do allow general conclusions to be reached in a more nuanced fashion.

John Marriott's The Other Empire offers one such approach. Instead of arguing that empire 'constituted' British culture, Marriott looks for homologies between the way elite Britons perceived their British and colonial subjects and looks for their structural roots. Marriott's book compares the way the poor of London and the South Asian subjects of British rule were...