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  • David Cannadine and The Decline and Fall of Britain’s Imperial Aristocracy
  • Peter H. Hoffenberg

“Empire” is back on our minds, although one might counter that it never truly left. Recent concerns about globalized economies, military interventions, and fractured societies have provoked widespread interest in imperial polities and their cultures. This is the case from the Balkans to Australia, the former Soviet Union to Hawaii, where legacies about land, labor and rights under previous imperial regimes persist in allegedly post-colonial nation-states. Empire and imperialism remain of great political significance and historical controversy in those areas and elsewhere, topics of a contemporary conversation colored by nostalgia as much as skepticism. Not surprisingly, activists and scholars from nearly all fields are surfing this stock-taking tide, riding it for as long as the waves last. Among those surfers is David Cannadine, perhaps the most recognized and prolific historian of Modern Britain over the past decade, or so. 1 Never bashful and never reluctant to join the fray, Cannadine publicly throws down the gauntlet in Ornamentalism, a study about how some of the British elite saw their Empire at its height, between the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857–58 and the Independence and Partition of British India nearly one hundred years later. Is this conversational volume a meaningful contribution to the current discussion about Empires, past and present?

At the heart of Cannadine’s public duel with Edward Said and others beats uneasily the question of how we write “imperial” or “colonial” history and thus understand the meaning of imperialism and colonialism, whether in the seemingly receding past of High Victorian Britain or the starkly onrushing present of the Long American Century. The stakes remain high when writing about the British Empire and not only personal, professional and political ones. There are equally, if not more enduring, intellectual and historiographical ones, as well, evidenced by the scholarly engagement in so many different fields of the question of “empire” itself, not to mention the attention paid to the British Empire by historians, economists, literary theorists and others. 2 Those stakes and the possibility of using Ornamentalism as a way to compare the British Empire with other modern empires make this volume of interest to world historians as well as scholars of Britain and its Empire. The depth and breadth of that interest rest in good measure on the intellectual merits and historiographical positioning of the volume. Where does Ornamentalism fit in the longer-term historiography of the British Empire and the current debate about “Empires,” the British one among many? Will this volume “reorient” our understanding of how elites envisioned and understood their vast and diverse empires? In doing so, can it contribute to both our knowledge about the past and the ways by which we think about and represent that past? That is, does Cannadine break “new ground,” as he boldly claims (xviii)?

Such ground breaking is no easy task in British imperial studies. After all, imperial and colonial historians must contend with what the literary scholar Walter Jackson Bate once termed “the burden of the past,” the Herculean if not Faustian struggle to write with originality within a daunting tradition of scholarship. 3 Eighteenth-century poets suffered under that burden, as do contemporary historians of the British Empire. We only need to ask the score of contributors to the recent “British Empire” volumes from Cambridge and Oxford University Presses, all of whom wrestled with innovation and tradition. 4 Cannadine is no exception to the rule. Can one write something new and provocative about race and/or class in defining and ruling the Empire? Can one write something new and provocative about the relationship between metropole and periphery? To paraphrase Mencken: does Cannadine comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable?

It is to such issues of historiographical originality and intellectual provocation that I would like to address my brief remarks on Cannadine and his Ornamentalism. I do so as an historian of Modern Britain and its British Empire thinking through this book and how it exists in relation to other works on similar issues. Answering such questions suggests not only pairing Ornamentalism and Orientalism, a pairing explicitly made by Cannadine, his publishers...

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