OHBE have! The Mini-Me version

Other people will undoubtedly address the central conceit of this book — that it is a companion piece or response to Said’s Orientalism, so I shall steer clear of these well-plumbed depths, and try instead to understand or propose perspectives from which I can most productively view this cheeky, and ultimately disappointing book.

Having read newspaper puff pieces and reviews before I had agreed to write this essay, I expected the tone I encountered when I picked it up, and anticipated some fire for all the smoke the book had generated. What I discovered instead was a readers’ digest of the ponderous Oxford History of the British Empire (OHBE). ¹ The book is structured like a popular, high-enrollment introductory survey course at some ‘highly competitive’ academic institution for well-heeled and ambitious students, and reads like lecture notes (a diligent student’s or a perfectionist instructor’s) for such: entertaining and informative in a glib and easily digestible way — not a mere puree of substantive work and debates, but rather a tasters’ menu, full of piquant anecdotes but short on methodological or substantive intellectual engagement.

The debt to the latest edition of the far less accessible and far more expensive five-volume OHBE is evident both in Ornamentalism’s organization, and in the references and bibliography that, in accordance with the conventions of contemporary historical practice, accompany it. The endnotes — dominated as they are by articles from the OHBE itself and, in that familiar move undergraduates make in term-papers to diversify their references, by other publications of OHBE authors — also make it clear that Cannadine isn’t serious about engaging with the epistemological currents he unceremoniously and untidily bundles under the sign of Said. ² Conceding, with appropriate caution, that “even in the heyday of empire” his story of the “hierarchical structures, constructs, impulses and images, imaginings and ideologies, based on status rather than race,” was “never wholly pervasive or persuasive,” Cannadine nonetheless insists that “they were the conventional wisdom of the official mind in the metropolis, and of their collaborators on the peripheries, and of many people in Britain and the empire who also envisaged this ‘vast interconnected world’ in traditional, Burkeian terms.” Italicizing the declarative verb doesn’t make the proposition more persuasive, as we all routinely remind our students; guild rules require us to provide evidence. This, however, Cannadine is not inclined to do, informing readers that in lieu of developing an argument, Ornamentalism “will sketch out, in a necessarily abridged and schematic form, an account of the British Empire in which the concept of hierarchy as social prestige is brought more closely to the centre of things than historians have generally allowed.” ³ This artful dodge, as no doubt countless others have observed, allows Cannadine to evade the tedious documentation and systematic development of an argument that amounts in the end to little more than prejudice and anti-intellectualism — or, more generously, personal preference — dressed up as Art (or at least historian’s craft).

At the beginning of Disney’s 1964 Mary Poppins, the appropriately named Mr. Banks (father, banker, employer, husband) exclaims that, “Its grand to be an Englishman in 1910/King Edward’s on the throne, its the Age of Men/I’m the lord of my castle, the sovereign, the liege/I treat my subjects — servants, children, wife — with a firm but gentle hand,/Noblesse oblige.” ⁴ Reading Ornamentalism is not unlike watching Disney’s 1964 Mary Poppins, but without the women, the workers or the “Hottentots” of retired Admiral Boom’s superannuated delusions. Absent from Ornamentalism are the maids, wives, suffragists, chimney-sweeps and nanny who kept the Banks household running — through sleight of hand, collusion, and a spoonful of sugar (or rum punch) — like a clock (although not necessarily one pegged to GMT). Equally absent from Ornamentalism are the things that, as social historians have demonstrated for more than forty years, they both inhabited and animated. Class may appear in Cannadine’s book as ornament, but the relations and the languages of class are veiled along with race. As for gender, it is nowhere at home in Cannadine’s cover...