Archives of Empire. I. From the East India Company to the Suez Canal. II. The Scramble for Africa (review)

This valuable collection of documents from and about the British Empire will prove useful to students and scholars. The first volume provides, inter alia, lists of governors, governors-general, and Bengali newabs; excerpts from George Alfred Henty; letters from James Mill and sections from John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (New York, 1873); Thomas Babington Macauley on John Clive; a slice of Adam Smith; Fanny Burney and Edmund Burke (and others) on Warren Hastings' impeachment; a section on Tipu Sultan; Georg Friedrich Hegel and Mary Shelley on Orientalism; William Sleeman and others on thugs; Charles Dickens and Jules Verne (and others) on sati/suttee; a long section with many excerpts on the mutiny; three sections on the Suez Canal; and a short section on travelers to the East, such as Richard Burton.

The second volume has even greater subject interest. But just as the first volume includes nothing from the indigenous (or subaltern) perspective, and not one non-British entry (except for Ferdinand de Lesseps, Hegel, and Karl Marx), so the second volume is entirely British and Irish in origin, except for selections from Joseph Conrad, Hegel, Wilhelm Junker, Joseph Gobineau, Olive Schreiner, Rudolf Slatin Pasha, and Mark Twain (on King Léopold's Congo). The section on the"civilizing mission" includes the writings of David Livingstone andHenry Morton Stanley, but nothing of the likes of Robert Moffat, John Hanning Speke, Burton, Verney Lovett Cameron, or Joseph Thomson—each of whom would have had something of importance to add. Where are the criticisms of Cecil Rhodes (in the section on Rhodes) from Afrikaners (Schreiner excepted) or from Cape Liberals? And why is Joseph Chamberlain totally absent from a compilation of imperial documents? Or Lord Salisbury, Harry Johnston, Alfred Milner (not even in the Anglo-Boer War section), and any number of siege victims and commentators?

If these volumes (two more are in the press—The Great Game and Jubilee) have the telling document that a student or a researcher needs, they will greatly be appreciated. But as evenhanded or marginally representative portrayals of the British Empire's reach and impact, they are profoundly limited. They are strikingly myopic, and therefore wanting in their ability to present a deep and full picture of what the Empire meant and what it did. They also puzzle: Why have a section on the non-British Congo and nothing at all about Britain and, say, the French Empire (except for the competition over the Suez Canal) or the Dutch and Portuguese empires? Overall, these two volumes offer a highly distorted picture of empire, imperial rule, motivation and consequence, as well as of the interaction of imperial figures and their subjects.