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  • Upending the Telescope
  • Yasmin Khan (bio)
Race, Empire and First World War Writing, ed. Santanu Das, Cambridge University Press, 2011; 334 pp.; 978-0-521-50984.
Antoinette Burton ,Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism, Duke University Press, 2011; 392pp.; 978-0-8223-4880-0

In September 2010 at a conference at the British Library in London, ‘Bharat Britain: South Asians Making Britain 1870–1950’, the historical significance [End Page 259] of the South Asian presence in Britain was made clear in no uncertain terms. Building on Rozina Visram’s seminal text, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (2002), the conference showed conclusively the extensive reach of Indians in British life before the migration watershed of 1945.1 The myth of a white pre-1945 Britain was exploded. Some papers traced the visits of eminent Indians to London such as Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, while others looked at the presence of lascars and merchants, Indian women travellers and settlers in Britain. Still others explored mixed-race marriages, mosque-building in the UK before the First World War and Indian scientists in London during the Second World War. There was no singular ‘South Asian experience’ of coming to the UK. From princes to paupers, from religious mendicants to oriental scholars, the Indian presence was richly diverse. It also had complex implications for whites in the metropole.

It was a great conference but the collective impact of all these papers – invariably well researched and interesting as they were – was unsettling. What did it mean, all these stories of voyages across vast expanses of territory? How could individual life histories remain unique while at the same time being understood in terms of their class, gender and racial dimensions? What did these men and women share apart from originating in places that would later be hammered into the nation states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh?

The literary scholar Santanu Das and the historian Antoinette Burton were both speakers at the conference. Each has, in a variety of ways, grappled with these questions. In their new books, discussed here, they have shifted the vantage point from which the imperial ‘metropole’ is perceived, in order to inject a new vigour into the tired dichotomies of metropole and periphery. In particular, they both argue that Britain was only one nodal point in a matrix of imperial relationships. Indians (as omnipresent as they were and are) had their identities constituted through a multiplicity of encounters with empires and cities, and through comparisons and conversations with other colonized peoples. Networks and transnational connections define the latest shift in imperial studies. Burton’s book can be read as a closure of the first wave of new imperial historiography as she moves in these innovative directions, while Das’s edited volume is an exemplary study of global First World War encounters that implicitly suggests how some of the ‘new’ new imperial historiography might continue to unfold.

Race and gender now play such a key role in new cultural histories of empire that their importance does not need to be restated here. Non-white, non-elite residents of the empire; transnational networks and missions; women’s organizations and welfare societies – all these are now the basic stuff of not-so-new imperial histories published in journals like this one. Yet this is a relatively recent shift, one that has occurred only over the last two decades. Antoinette Burton has been at the cutting edge of this change. Her writings have been in the vanguard of new critical histories that decentre the [End Page 260] nation, treat race with sensitivity and historicity, and make feminist gendered analysis an indispensible tool for historians of empire.

This new book by Burton is a collection of previously published essays and articles, mainly from between 1994 and 2008. Several of the articles are staple reading for university courses about British imperialism. Many trace the making of gendered history through the interplay between ‘home’ and ‘empire’. ‘Contesting the Zenana’, for instance, describes the training of ‘lady doctors’ in late nineteenth century Britain, showing how it drew on notions about the need of Indian women for specialized medical assistance; and how contests over the promotion...

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