Ornamentalism and Orientalism: Virtual Empires and the Politics of Knowledge

David Cannadine might be surprised to learn that he has written a curiously post-modern book. This is not really as odd as it sounds. Of course, Ornamentalism is so readable and easily digestible that it might be mistaken for post-prandial rather than post-modern. And, of course, Cannadine contends that rank and status were more important to the British Empire than race, a category given undue prominence, he believes, by “post-modern” literary scholars. Cannadine aims to correct the excesses of “American” scholars who see the production of derogatory racial stereotypes as constituting a “hegemonic imperial project.” Cannadine confesses that he does not know what an imperial project is, and doubts that one ever existed. (pp. 197–8) Yet, almost in spite of himself, Cannadine argues that the British Empire existed to promote what must surely be called a hegemonic imperial project: to order into a unified hierarchy all the subjects of the British Empire across the globe — imperialism as ornamentalism. ¹

Ornamentalism surveys the efforts to export and represent this hierarchy through public pageants, the honours system, and elaborate ceremonials. Cannadine asks what the Empire “actually looked like” from the 1850s to the 1950s and replies that “the British” saw the Empire as a vast, interconnected hierarchy with the monarchy at its apex, radiating authority downwards and outwards from the metropolis to the periphery. When George VI surveyed Westminster Abbey after his coronation, he thought “the whole Empire” was gathered within its walls. “Virtually it was, and visually it was,” agrees Cannadine, “with its whole diverse social hierarchy unified, ranked, ordered, layered, and arranged.” (p. 120). To preempt critics, Cannadine admits that efforts to create a unified global hierarchy outside the walls of Westminster Abbey were never successful. Indeed, his discussion of the limitations of ornamentalism leads to a broader and more subversively post-modern conclusion (though he does not state it in these terms): the failed attempt to create a vast, unified hierarchy created simply a simulacrum of a social order, and imperialism as ornamentalism represented little more than a “virtual empire.”

Cannadine frames his argument with polemical references to Edward Said’s Orientalism, suggesting that “there were other ways of seeing the empire than in the oversimplified categories of black and white with which we are so preoccupied. It is time we reoriented orientalism.” (p. 125) Apart from alliterative allusions and rhetorical references, however, Cannadine does not directly engage Said’s arguments in Orientalism, which were not about “race,” but rather discourse, representation, and power in the West’s production of the “Orient” as an object of knowledge. Crucially, Said employed an expansive, Foucaultian notion of power, which defined orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.” (p. 3) Almost 25 years after it was published, Said’s book remains a bracing and invigorating critique of the politics of knowledge.

Orientalism has been extraordinarily influential in many fields of the humanities and social sciences, especially in the interdisciplinary study of colonialism and its forms of knowledge. ² Said was criticized for concentrating on Western representations of the Orient and neglecting the role of the “other” as an agent. Partly in response to such critiques, many subsequent studies have attempted to understand imperialism and colonialism as a back-and-forth process of contact, encounter, and exchange. In Culture and Imperialism, Said adopted just such a “contrapuntal” perspective. ³ Within British history, Cannadine is also responding to a local version of this broader intellectual trend, and he thus situates Ornamentalism as an attempt to put the history of the empire back into the history of Britain and vice versa. That metropolis and periphery should be studied together in the same analytical field has become one of the most widely shared assumptions in the study of the British Empire and British history.

Cannadine’s most persuasive argument is that empire sustained hierarchy in Britain. But the interplay between metropolis and periphery appears to be a British monologue rather than a process of dialogue or exchange. This is because Orientalism and Ornamentalism seriously diverge in their treatment of power and...