Where to now?: The Cultural Turn and the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism Series

In late 2012 the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism series (hereafter, the MUP series) published its 100^th volume, and its founder, John M. MacKenzie, passed the general editorship of the series on to Andrew S. Thompson, to take effect in 2014. In marking this milestone, Thompson edited a volume of essays on the contribution of the MUP series, entitled Writing Imperial Histories, which was published in 2013. The MUP series has been closely associated with the emergence of the so-called “new imperial history” of Britain, which is neither a singular approach nor a definable school, and moreover should not be confused with recent overt apologists of the British Empire like Niall Ferguson.¹ Rather it refers to those who have championed putting a critical view of empire at the centre of British historiography, with some taking highly theorized position influenced by postcolonial and feminist approaches—Antoinette Burton and Catherine Hall, although quite different in their methodology, come to mind²—while others seek to demonstrate the significance of empire through extensive empirical analysis. It is this latter approach that has been more predominant in the MUP series, which although not adverse to theory, has tended to promote empirical research into questions about the historical breadth and depth of British cultural entanglement in their empire. Given its recent publishing milestones, it seems appropriate to review some of the more recent volumes in the MUP series in light of the claims for the continuing significance and relevance of the series made by Thompson and the other contributors in the retrospective Writing Imperial Histories volume.

As remarked by Thompson and others in Writing Imperial Histories, in current historiography, and indeed in much historical popular culture, “seeing” the influence of empire on domestic British developments has become an almost commonplace position. Barely twenty years ago, however, this was not the case and the MUP series is one, but not the only, body of scholarship that brought imperial issues into a more central position within British historiography. The broader context to this historiographical change was rooted in the seemingly paradoxical place of the empire in Britain after decolonization. As has been pointed out by critics of the new historiography, except for periods of overt crisis and military action—such as the Mau Mau in early 1950s Kenya, Suez in 1956, and UDI in Rhodesia in 1965—the period of decolonization did not throw up major domestic upheaval in Britain as it did in other European empires such as France and Portugal. Outside of Whitehall, the last gasps of empire and decolonization seemingly registered little in public consciousness, and from the 1970s onwards, at least outside of the realm of sport, when the British public thought about overseas (if at all) it was more likely to think of Britain’s relationship with the new Europe rather than with the old empire. In fact, as Thompson summarizes in his introduction to Writing Imperial Histories, in the first half of the twentieth century, the British public saw their empire as embodying the ideas of Western civilization; in the second half, it was thought by many to have been an atavistic obstacle, a relic that impeded rather than advanced social and economic progress. Historiographical interest in the British Empire correspondingly waned to the point of atrophy by the 1970s, with the (sometimes fallacious) assumption made that the remaining imperial historians tended to be those with...