Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire ed. by Mark Bradley (review)

This book has a fascinating but challenging topic. Greeks and Romans both founded colonies, but these were unlike one another, and unlike the colonies settled by the British. The Romans and the British each had an empire, but how often were they explicitly compared? As Mark Bradley puts it, “Discourses of empire and of classics were not, generally, formally interwoven” (10). And it is not enough to describe the activities of the British Empire’s heyday; one needs to show that such activities were distinctively imperialist. To say that the British Museum’s natural history collections “provide a splendid example of imperial command over the natural world” is obvious special pleading (21).

Bradley devotes much of his introduction to discussing the Museum but does not explain the ways in which its acquisitiveness differed from that of the Metropolitan or the Getty in more recent times. If the latter museums were imperialist too, the word has lost much of its meaning. The issue arises again in David Fearn’s account of how that unscrupulous idealist E. A. Wallis Budge acquired the papyrus containing the works of the Greek poet Bacchylides for the British Museum by smuggling it out of Egypt. Like Heinrich Schliemann smuggling artefacts out of Ottoman Turkey, however, Budge was flouting imperial authority rather than exercising it. Fearn has a good story and tells it well, but his essay is marred by interpretative crudity and a witch-hunting that finds the “oppositional discourse of British colonialism,” “British hegemonic discourse,” and the like in some surely innocuous language (163, 172).

It is important to take empire and its ideology seriously. Bradley’s claim that “The idea that Calgacus put up a jolly good show appealed to the contemporary public-school militarist ethic of British imperialism” is the note to avoid (146). The most successful chapters are those which find eighteenth- and nineteenth-century people who thought intelligently or creatively about the comparison between empires ancient and modern. As a whole, the book is stronger on description than analysis; it explores a number of interesting byways, and all readers can expect to be introduced to much that they did not know, but the quality of the interpretation is mixed. Relevance is sometimes an issue too: several chapters include one or two anxious sentences insisting that their subject is significant for imperialism after all.

The most penetrating chapter comes from Kostas Vlassopoulos, on the uses of ancient history in eighteenth-century discourse on empire. He notes that the idea of empire as overseas rule, which seems natural to us, was a novel discovery at that time, and explores the consequences of so much of the “first British Empire” (in North America) being lost (43). He concentrates on five men—four British, one French—who wrote intelligently about the nature of empire, ancient and modern. These were serious thinkers. Bringing out the variety in their analyses, Vlassopoulos shows a sense of nuance and differentiation that some of his collaborators lack. The chapter by Adam Rogers and Richard Hingley on ideas of imperial decline in Edward Gibbon and the later historian Francis Haverfield might have been a good companion to this, but it is disappointingly thin.

Rama Sundari Mantena writing on the “uses of Rome” in relation to the Indian Empire also has some meaty matter. Thomas Babington Macaulay and Charles Trevelyan brought powerful intellects to bear on the question of what the Roman Empire could teach the present day. She sees two principal uses of the ancient world. In the earlier nineteenth century the discovery of the Indo-European language group stressed affinity between British and Indians; in the later century, the stress was rather on the distance between ruler and ruled, with the Roman Empire as a model of the ways in which difference might gradually be eliminated. In this latter picture the modern Indians have the role that the Britons had once taken. Bradley’s own...