The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, and: Burden or Benefit?: Imperial Benevolence and Its Legacies (review)

The edited collection of essays has been a productive genre for studies of colonial and imperial history. These collections allow scholars of different regions, specialties, and generations to engage a set of issues from several perspectives. Given the chronological and geographical spread of the British Empire, the magisterial and comprehensive fivevolume Oxford History of the British Empire (2001) is the best known of the genre, in part because it caused a heated debate about what was left out. It has been followed (and perhaps superseded) by a companion set of edited volumes on gender, race, missions, Ireland, Australia, and Canada. If we stacked the OHBE from floor to ceiling, and added a few other renowned collections, we could create a sizable monument to the edited collection and its contribution to the scholarship on British imperial history.

These two volumes seek to engage and stretch the form of the edited collection in new ways. The British Empire, edited by Sarah Stockwell, seems like a pocket edition in comparison to the OHBE: its spare title and rather trim size (a mere 350 pages) make it a more suitable resource for those of us with small offices (or small book budgets). It covers the modern British Empire, from 1700 onward through decolonization, and aims to bring together the “old” with the “new” imperial history. By putting the “old” political, economic, intellectual history in conversation with newer concerns about culture, gender, race, sexuality, identity-formation, and migration, this approach might be a very important way of reinvigorating the study of empire, as Dane Kennedy first suggested in his “Imperial History and Postcolonial Theory” (Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24 [1996]). Indeed, Stockwell no doubt imagines such synergy when she writes in the introduction that there are no essays devoted to gender, race, and postcolonialism because she wants to create an “integrated history of empire that does not maintain artificial boundaries between ‘new’ and ‘old’ imperial histories” (xiii).

But Stockwell’s well-intentioned gesture overlooks how little progress there has been in integrating the old and the new in the field of imperial history. Indeed, Stephen Howe’s essay, “Empire and Ideology,” notes the “atmosphere of mutual inattention or even enmity” and offers a way of reading the debates between the different types of imperial history (164), but it resists integrating the two or smoothing over the differences.

John Darwin’s essay, which starts out the volume, is like bedtime reading for those who would like to imagine that the British Empire was so weak that it barely made an impact. It will put the keenest reader to sleep and reactionaries into a happy dreamland. There is no whiff of gender, cultural, or discursive analysis as Darwin builds a brick wall of facts to suggest that the British Empire’s political arrangements were so diverse that one might wonder whether we can classify a thing such as “the British Empire.” In arguing that Britain’s colonial Empire was based on “skeletal” resources always stretched thin in places as far flung as Argentina, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Malaya, Darwin makes a case that the presence of the British Empire was ad hoc and provisionary, lacking a bureaucratic structure and, by extension, a will to exist. He notes sarcastically, “But only a dreamer would have imagined that the mass of illassorted administrative zones into which those were often divided (often with skeletal governments and still more skeletal revenues) could be driven and drilled by a fiat in London” (2). Who are these dreamers and why aren’t they cited?

Darwin’s essay sets the scene in which the political structure of empire is intended to serve as the...