Questions of Empire: Reflections from an Open Frontier

This volume offers a valuable contribution to current work on imperial, gendered, global, and postcolonial aspects of modern history, and welcome access through a single text to the evolving work and thought of an important historian. Over two decades Antoinette Burton has provided stimulating and enriching informed insights into those topics. The gathering together of many of her most important articles, framed by current reflections on her own intellectual pathway and on the state of history writing on empire, is a service to all who share such interests. The combination of personal biography with the "biography" of a scholarly field is particularly effective and useful. Going beyond the mere assemblage of her writings, it offers a reflective and thought-provoking view of crucial aspects of history writing in the last two decades, from the imperial and cultural turns to the impact of gender and post-colonial scholarship. It is also a pleasure to find Burton's work presented within both a conceptual and a chronological structure. The organization of the volume foregrounds the shaping and re-shaping of her thinking over time, as well as the distinct but interdependent roles of ideas, archives, and methodological questions within historical practice.

The pieces in this collection show how Burton's work has advanced our ability to think about empire in several significant ways. She has invigorated gendered analyses of empire by exploring both British women's engagement as feminists or reformers with imperial aims and activities and the contradictions of their position as challengers to the dominant gender order in nineteenth-century Britain who simultaneously contributed to its colonial projects and ideologies (see especially chapters 3, 6-9, 11).¹ She has worked to dissolve conventional scholarly boundaries between national, imperial, and global histories by arguing for the mutually constitutive roles of metropole and colony in British history, for the challenges posed to these categories by gender and transnational analyses, and more recently for the embedding of that history in de-centered comparative analyses of other imperial histories (see introduction, chapters 1, 5, 12, 14).² She has helped to shape a complex discussion of categories like "nation" and "empire" as units of investigation and analysis, and engaged creatively with debates around the cultural turn and with historians' use of, and relationship to, archives.

Burton's work is characterized by its commitment and also by its subtlety and sophistication. The end of her introductory essay to Empire in Question exemplifies this powerful combination, as she distances herself from twenty-first-century liberal internationalism and its hubris, while offering a complex critique of the achievements and difficulties of the feminist and postcolonial traditions of scholarship within which she has worked (22-23). Coming from a generation shaped politically and academically by anti-racialism, feminism, and postcolonialism, she uses deconstructive and cultural analyses to reveal and critique the power relations underpinning colonial and postcolonial practices. Reflections on Tom Stoppard's raj play Indian Ink and David Cannadine's book Ornamentalism locate these works historically and politically in the twenty-first-century post-imperial and racialized culture of the United Kingdom. Discussions of the social reformer Mary Carpenter, the politician Dadhabai Naoroji, and the woman campaigner and doctor Rukhmabai explore the colonial, gender, political, and racial dynamics of what Burton calls "the transnational communities of colonial culture that the imperial social formation generated" in the second half of the nineteenth century (212). These close readings of particular episodes stand beside methodological and conceptual critiques of historical practice, whether gendered postcolonial analysis of the archive, discussion of the state of "British studies," or commentary on the construction of a comparative and transnational syllabus on gender and colonialism.

Responding to this body of work, I would like to comment on some of the areas of complexity and tension to which Burton draws attention, notably the domain of the...