Deja Vu All Over Again

When I read David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire late in the summer of 2001, I was overcome by a sense of déjà vu. Those who have followed the scholarship which has emerged under the rubric of “the new imperial history” in the last decade or so no doubt had much the same experience. The preface to the book rehearses the central themes of that scholarship — the importance of women and gender as analytical categories in imperial narratives, the role of race and of “native” peoples in imperial histories, the emphasis on archives other than those produced by the colonial state as sites of evidence for histories of empire in all its geographical diversity — in order to clear the way for what Professor Cannadine trumpets as a “new,” more definitive, agenda. This new history is, apparently, the tale of an “interactive system,” a “vast interconnected world”: a world in which Britain and its empire were “very much” a part of each other. ¹ Cannadine acknowledges Philip Morgan’s work as the source of this model of interconnectedness, and he is generally gracious about citing the variety of historians upon whose research he has relied for this synthetic and highly derivative study. Hardly original in its suggestion that metropole and colony must be understood in relation to one another, Ornamentalism struggles to characterize that relationship without advancing a sustained analysis (let alone a theory) of how such dependence worked itself out in concrete or even symbolic terms. Never mind that an antipathy to theoretical engagement (as opposed to that highly preferable method, “atheoretical” empiricism) has been the occasion for occupational pride and even defiance among imperial historians right across the 20th century. ² Continuities of methodological conviction aside, readers of P.J. Marshall’s 1996 Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Isles (to name just one of a number of such sweeping accounts published in recent years) will recognize in Ornamentalism the same unresolved tensions which beset that ambitious and equally synthetic book. There, as in Ornamentalism, an attempt is made to grapple with the long-term ramifications of a post-Robinson/Gallagher model of imperialism without sufficient acknowledgment — among other things — of the possibility that “domestic” Britain may in fact have been not merely historically dependent on empire, but may indeed have been significantly, if not fully, constituted by it. ³

Astute readers will be alive to an astonishingly similar oversight within both projects. For Marshall and Cannadine, each in his own way, mistakes the scholarship of, say, Mrinalini Sinha and Catherine Hall, for an attempt merely to register the claims of gender and race on imperial experience, rather than seeing it as an argument, however controversial, about the constitutive nature of empire on the whole sphere of the “domestic” — whether the domestic is conceived as parliamentary politics, social relations or cultural mores. ⁴ To read the likes of Sinha and Hall more accurately would be to grant colonialism — and, heaven forefend, “natives” of all status positions, rather than just elites — an active, even at times a collaborative, role in the process of nation -building (rather than empire -building per se). It would be to interrogate as well the imperial historicity — us first, then them — which continues to undergird all manner of imperial history-writing today, and to acknowledge what Gyan Prakash calls the “uncanny doubleness” of imperial/colonial processes. ⁵ Admittedly, such doubleness, and the terrain of imperial social formation which it presumes, is virtually unrecognizable territory for traditional imperial history in Britain. The reactionary character of Ornamentalism is, meanwhile, all too familiar to students of volumes 3 and 5 of the recent Oxford History of the British Isles (“The Nineteenth Century” and “Historiography,” edited by Andrew Porter and Robin Winks, respectively) — a massive project totaling over 6000 pages, which was overseen by William Roger Louis and funded jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rhodes Trust. There, Cannadine’s skepticism about the enduring value, as well as the full explanatory capabilities, of the new imperial history was anticipated in far more dyspeptic and, it has to be said, spirited and provocative ways...