How Empire Shaped Us ed. by Antoinette Burton, Dane Kennedy (review)

How Empire Shaped Us, edited by Antoinette Burton and Dane Kennedy, is a collection of seventeen autobiographical essays written by scholars who broadly, if not always comfortably, sit within the field of British imperial history. Born between 1934 and 1984, these historians span three generations and four continents. All of the contributors situate themselves in their political, social, intellectual, and cultural contexts, discussing the influences that shaped their historical interests and interpretations. Together, these lively, autobiographical essays chart the changing shape of global-imperial power relations from the Suez Crisis to the ongoing refugee crisis, and its impact on the historiography of the British Empire.

In its aim and rationale, How Empire Shaped Us is itself born of the postcolonial and feminist theories that have informed New Imperial history. As many of the contributors to the volume acknowledge, Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) inspired a generation of historians to research the role of culture, including literary culture, in the constitution of British imperial power. Said showed the ways in which Western Orientalism constructed the East as effeminate and irrational. Yet it was postcolonial feminists who argued that so-called objective and universal knowledge was premised on the colonizing gaze of the white, male observer. To decolonize knowledge, they argued, one must situate the observer in the intersecting social, political, and cultural contexts that shaped him (and sometimes her). This has led to a biographical turn in histories of imperialism, including, most recently, Adele Perry’s Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (2015) and Catherine Hall’s Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012). How Empire Shaped Us employs this methodology and turns it inward, asking its contributors to think about the ways in which the histories that they have produced are themselves contingent on the contributors’ personal situations and locations, their identities, and the shifting social, political, and intellectual landscapes in which they have lived.

Despite the relative diversity of ages and backgrounds, the majority of the contributors identified an early awareness or experience of racism as a key factor in their paths to becoming historians of the British Empire. Wm. Roger Louis, for example, begins his essay with an anecdote about his childhood spent playing with Native-American and African-American friends. Yet he suggests that even at a young age he knew his friendships with non-white children to be unusual and not necessarily to his parents’ liking. Similarly, Philippa Levine discusses her memories of playing with her Jamaican friends who lived in the council block across the street in Hackney. She too was one of very few, white-passing children from her own predominantly Jewish and Irish council block, who were allowed to mix with neighboring children of color; her white friends shunned her for doing so. John M. MacKenzie’s awakening to the existence of racism came when he “stumbled” onto a mixed-race community on one of his walks with his dog in Ndola (in Northern Rhodesia, present-day Zambia). “Although I was only about twelve,” he explains, “such experiences lodged in corners of my mind, making me aware of some of the social and racial realities of colonial rule” (38).

Whiteness, Hall notes, quoting James Baldwin, is about never feeling oneself to be a stranger in the world, of being able to assume a sense of belonging. Her own lived experience of the power of whiteness came for the first time when she visited Jamaica with her husband and found herself stereotyped and out of place, an embodiment of the colonial relationship. The title of Bridget Brereton’s essay, “inside/outside,” points to the sense of hybridity that she experiences as a British-born woman, living and working in Trinidad with her Trinidadian husband and multicultural family. For Jonathan Saha, racism came primarily in the form of the perennial demand to account for himself that lay behind...