British Imperialism (review)

As courses on the histories of particular empires, comparative imperialism and colonialism, and world history proliferate, many of us who teach such courses continue to cast about for appropriate texts. Textbooks for survey courses on long spans of world history have also proliferated, yet texts focused on shorter time periods or particular empires are still in short supply. Those of us who work on the British empire have recently been able to choose from a growing number of collections of documents, and a few chronologically focused books such as Dane Kennedy’s Britain and Empire, 1880–1945 (Longman, 2002). But the number of textbooks on even just the modern British empire, especially any that incorporate “the new imperial history,” is woefully small. For these reasons, we might reasonably be expected to have welcomed the arrival of Robert Johnson’s British Imperialism.

Johnson’s book launches a new Palgrave series titled Histories and Controversies edited by Jeremy Black, a series intended to introduce “key questions and debates surrounding major historical themes and events” (ii). In the tradition of Cain and Hopkins, Johnson has titled his work to reflect a focus on British Imperialism, rather than the broader histories of the empire and its constituent parts. Thus his subject matter comprises the motivations and nature of British imperialism from the latter eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, and the political and historiographical debates that have surrounded it. Chapters cover all of the standard fare for the modern period, from slavery and anti-slavery, to the “Indian Mutiny,” the colonies of settlement, capitalism and trade, missionaries, the world wars, decolonization, and a concluding chapter on the cultural legacies of imperialism and the effects of imperialism in Britain.

Interwoven within and between these expected topics are Johnson’s assessments of relevant historiographical debates. The character of these assessments is summed up in Johnson’s first paragraph, where he refers to “a sharp division between those who claim to practise Imperial History and those who challenge the very basis of its methods, such as post-colonial theorists, subaltern studies scholars, and the large group inspired by Edward Said” (viii). Many readers who see on the back cover that one of the book’s signal questions is “Do post-colonial theories assist or mislead historians?” will know instantly the proposed answer. Thus they won’t be too surprised to learn that “Post-colonial scholars tend to draw no distinction between imperial discourse of the 1790s and the 1890s, even though there were huge differences in attitude towards race, reform and colonisation” (94). They might be a little more surprised, though, to be informed that “historians of empire invariably would prefer to focus on the local people anyway, not the discourse itself, just as they were already doing before the advent of post-colonial ideas” (94).

With the battle lines so starkly drawn between “real” imperial historians, on the one hand, and “post-modernists (a term used here to embrace post-colonialists and post-structuralists)” on the other, Johnson’s evaluations constitute a defence of the imagined community of the former. This imagined community excludes not only those who succumb to the folly of studying language and discourse, but anyone with a serious interest in women’s and gender history. Historians of gender and empire will be interested to learn that the major theorists responsible for this field’s growth from the 1970s were Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said (122). In the end, Johnson considers, women’s history is simply not important to the history of the empire: “The problem which arises is that in trying to write in a role for women, there is a risk of exaggerating their importance. This might result in a history that suits modern sensibilities, but not one that is really a typical or representative account of the past” (127).

The chapter which evaluates the question “Was the British Empire racialist or racist?” leans towards the brighter side of issues such as racially exclusive clubs (“an opportunity to be ‘amongst your own kind’” (113)) and segregation (to...