Imperial Possessions, Cultural Histories, and the Material Turn: Response

What we might call the material turn in history—richly displayed at this year's NAVSA Conference, in several important recent publications, and in forthcoming journal issues—is not new. It is, indeed, a cliché to say that the Victorians themselves were fascinated by things. And it has been nearly two decades since Asa Briggs asked historians to contemplate Victorian materialities. Since Briggs published his study, however, the discussion has turned to foreign objects and what they can tell us about Britain's imperial and world histories. As it has made this turn, the study of material culture has drawn out competing ideas about historians' attitudes towards historical subjects, the nature of evidence, the aims of historiography, and the integration of analytic frameworks.

Some have declared that sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, shawls, and calicoes were among the most pervasive and everyday expressions of imperialism in Victorian Britain.¹ For these scholars, commonplace commodities tell extended yet far from obvious stories about Britain's overseas possessions. They reveal imperialism as an act of acquiring and collecting places, people, and things (Jasanoff 10–12). In this formulation, imperialism is consumption, ingestion, and decoration. These everyday commodities taught Britons (and at times their colonial subjects) to be at home or comfortable with their Empire (Hall and Rose 1–31; de Groot 166–90; Burke). Yet, as these historians also note, some of these commonplace things became quite painfully weighed down with the meaning of colonialism, and their rejection helped articulate political interests and ignite colonial rebellions (Breen 294–331; Bayly 285–321; Cohn 303–53).

Heretofore, the everyday and the rare have occupied separate analytic frames; foodstuffs and works of art have seemed to suggest different kinds of colonial relationships. If, for instance, the everyday, mass commodity symbolized the frenetic acquisition of colonies at the end of the nineteenth century, the rarified object in a collection—the mummy, the oriental rug, or the Andamanese weapon—elicited the fantasies, fears, and pleasures associated with gaining and losing imperial possessions. I would like to propose, however, that by focusing on the production, circulation, and consumption of both the unique and the common, cultural historians studying material objects can respond to critics who have remained skeptical about their methods and conclusions and can argue more forcefully about the domestic impact of imperial conquest. By looking more explicitly at the marketplace as a source of things and meanings, we can return in a new way to an old question and ask precisely what was at stake for the Victorians when they built their Empire.

The souvenirs, gifts, art objects, and commodities studied in "Hands of Beauty, Hands of Horror: Fear and Egyptian Art at the Fin de Siècle"; "Spinning Cotton: Domestic and Industrial Novels"; and "Career Development: Domestic Display as Imperial, Anthropological, and Social Trophy" from the 2007 NAVSA Conference convey strikingly different stories about England's relationship to its Empire. Yet the authors of these works of cultural criticism can teach historians something about how material objects narrate meanings through different modes of representation and genre. These authors point out that objects do not reveal their meanings in the transparent or obvious ways often desired by most historians. Instead, Aviva Briefel, Suzanne Daly, and Claire Wintle all argue that the meanings of foreign objects are mediated by specific cultural forms—even as those objects also help structure the forms through which they are perceived. This issue—of mediation and transparency—has been a concern of late for literary critics as well as historians. Recently, the literary critic Elaine Freedgood has called upon scholars to return to the literal and has argued that symbolic readings have tended to obscure some of the ways in which the Victorians understood the meaning of things (29). That point is well taken. Among historians, however, the demand for the literal has served political purposes that denigrate the cultural turn, especially in imperial history. If cultural critics have spent too much time with symbolic readings, historians have perhaps spent too little.

Literary scholars, cultural anthropologists, and art historians have devoted some two decades or more to...