At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (review)

This collection of essays examines a subject at once ubiquitous and illusive, an empire taken for granted in the everyday life of the British metropole between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. It is an intriguing variation upon developments in the fields of British and British imperial history over the past few decades. Prior to the 1980s, the fields were neatly divided. The history of Britain then began its slow imperial turn under the influences of interdisciplinary studies, especially of Foucauldian and gendered kinds. After 1986 John Mackenzie's Imperialism and Popular Culture and numerous publications in the series, Studies in Imperialism, also drew these fields together. This collection owes much to the groundwork laid by this earlier scholarship; in fact, some of the distinguished contributors to this volume made their reputations in British history before taking an imperial turn themselves. All of the contributors agree that one can no longer write British history without the Empire. However, the editors propose a distinctive approach, a history of the unconscious acceptance of the Empire; a history of how Britons lived at home with the Empire without explicit, political deliberation.

There are four general, recurrent subjects that substantiate the subtle claims of this volume and provide it with clear coherence. First, the anti-slavery movement and overseas missions brought the Empire home to Britons. Claire Midgley demonstrates the critical role of anti-slavery in the development of women's activism, which she then follows along both progressive and conservative lines into the 1930s. As James Epstein asserts in his wide-ranging discussion of class and empire, anti-slavery was the most sustained movement in which class and imperial relations converged. Susan Thorne argues that missions brought the Empire home to Britons across class lines, at the same time that missions privileged bourgeois values. It is noteworthy that she understates the influence of missions in British society between 1870 and 1914, as one sees in their continued, prolific fund raising, their successful launching of new overseas initiatives, and their leading role in the Congo reform campaign in the decade before the Great War.

Secondly, the politics of suffrage brought the Empire home, as Antoinette Burton explains in her essay on new narratives of imperial politics in the nineteenth century, and as Keith McClelland and Sonya Rose show in their chapter on the politics of citizenship and imperial duty between 1867 and 1928. The politics of suffrage were inextricably linked to the political status of Ireland in the United Kingdom, to the politics of race, and to more progressive expansions of the franchise in the dominions, which then served as models for Britain itself. Turning to the third general subject of the volume, reading brought the Empire home to Britain's growing literate public, ranging from women reading novels to school children reading adventure tales. In perhaps the best chapter of the collection, Jane Rendall illuminates many ways in which the Empire infused women's writing in the nineteenth century, while Cora Kaplan offers a strong discussion of the Empire in fantasy, history, and literature. Domesticity and consumption are the fourth subject area that pervades the book. At the outset, Catherine Hall demonstrates how Macaulay's hierarchical construction of the homely British nation depended on both the amalgamation of some races, such as the lowland Scots and the Welsh, and the exclusion of others, such as the Irish, the highland Scots, and Indians. Turning to a crucial, constitutive element of domesticity, Joanna de Groot presents a fine discussion of consumerism, and particularly the role of tea in British domestic economy and culture.

This book also usefully illuminates the experience of not being at home with the Empire in Britain. Philippa Levine's essay on sexuality conveys the importance of racial boundaries in sustaining the Empire and protecting the British home. Taking up the issue of domesticity, Levine explains that policing sexuality was critical to protecting domestic virtue, which was central to British conceptions of...