Understanding the British Empire (review)

Calling this collection of essays his "swansong" as an historian of the British Empire (xiii), Ronald Hyam provides a rich and representative sampling of his work over a long, productive, and occasionally controversial career. The volume consists of a lengthy introduction and eighteen essays grouped into categories that reflect what he identifies as his main historical concerns: imperial "Geopolitics and Economics," "Ethics and Religion," colonial "Bureaucracy and Policy-making," "Great Men," "Sexuality," and Oxbridge "Imperial Historians." Six of the essays are previously unpublished, including both of those in the "Ethics and Religion" section; the others have appeared in journals, edited volumes, and, in two instances, as chapters in his successful survey, Britain's Imperial Century (1976). Taken together, they run to over five hundred pages of scholarship, much of it lively if limited in its methodological and analytical horizons.

As Hyam sees it, Understanding the British Empire requires little more than the rigorous application of the tool kit developed by his mentors, Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, the influential Oxbridge imperial historians who in the late 1950s and early 1960s transformed the field with their bravura work, introducing terms such as informal empire, the official mind, and collaboration into the lexicon of the field. Hyam's concluding essay is an homage to Robinson and Gallagher, and their influence is especially evident in the attention much of his work gives to the official mind of cabinet ministers and government bureaucrats. He is a strong proponent of the view they advanced in Africa and the Victorians (1961), their book on the scramble for Africa, that British imperial policymakers were motivated mainly by geopolitical concerns about prestige and power, while economic considerations, public opinion, and special interests had little sway over their decisions. Hyam's own commitment to this interpretive stance has led him to acquire an almost unrivaled familiarity with Colonial Office files and other government records concerning the Empire, especially late-nineteenth-and twentieth-century Africa, and the policies of the post-war Labour government; it has also led him to place particular methodological weight on such records in explaining British imperialism. By extension, he gives corresponding attention to statesmen ("Great Men") such as Winston Churchill (the subject of two essays) and Jan Christian Smuts (one essay), as well as to those lesser colonial officials who influenced and implemented the policies of these men. Needless to say, there is a self-fulfilling quality to Hyam's approach, which often operates in a hermetically sealed archival chamber where the autonomy and importance of officials are taken for granted.

Robinson and Gallagher at least acknowledge in their famous essay "The Imperialism of Free Trade" (1953) that the broader contours of British imperial expansion were shaped by economic forces. Hyam will have none of such quasi-Marxist apostasy. One of the previously unpublished essays in the volume is a critique of P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins's British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (2001), itself deeply informed by Robinson and Gallagher's idea of informal empire. Hyam's objection to this important work is that it "confin[es] discussion to economic elements" of the British Empire, an approach he condemns as "monocausal" (137). Readers may find this a curious complaint coming from someone who places such monocausal emphasis in his own work on geopolitical forces.

It is perhaps not surprising to find that Hyam is equally antagonistic to the so-called new imperial history and the broader postcolonial turn that inspired it, which has done so much over the past two decades to reshape how historians have grappled with the issue of empire. Unlike the extended critique he directs at Cain and Hopkins, he dismisses the new imperial historians and their work in a few paragraphs in his introduction and in occasional asides elsewhere in the volume. Apart from endorsing Bernard Porter's The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), which argued contra the new imperial historians that empire had little impact on...