"Signs Taken For Wonders": The Stakes for Imperial Studies

“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World”

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth¹

“The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins ²

When David Cannadine turns his attention to the history of the British Empire, there is reason to pay attention. Both Cannadine’s well-deserved reputation as a leading historian of modern Britain and his self-conscious echo of one of the most influential books on European imperialism in the last couple of decades, Edward Said’s Orientalism, guarantee that much ink will be spilled on evaluating and debating the contribution of Ornamentalism: How The British Saw Their Empire. The bouquets and brickbats, in fact, began pouring in even as the book was still hot off the press. Yet the basic argument of Ornamentalism, shorn of some of its rhetorical flourishes and polemical edges, is neither revolutionary nor even particularly controversial. Few scholars, for example, would dispute Cannadine’s central contention — despite differences in emphasis — that class (which, in Cannadine’s treatment, stands exclusively for “status” or “rank”) was as important as “race” in British perceptions of the peoples in the empire. Similarly, Cannadine’s attempt to restore Empire to British history follows on a well-worn and familiar path, especially in the wake of almost a decade of scholarship that has been devoted specifically to challenging the artificial disciplinary divide between “domestic” British and colonial or imperial history. Neither the buzz surrounding the book nor the seeming innocuousness of its argument, however, should distract us from the fact that the book merits serious and careful attention.

The assumptions that underlie Ornamentalism represent a subtle re-working of contemporary scholarship that points to a new direction for imperial history. The charming and often light-hearted tone of the book thus masks a sophisticated intervention with implications for the future of imperial studies. As such, Ornamentalism approaches a seriousness even beyond the recently published, and much more scholarly, five-volume series of the Oxford History of the British Empire. The latter, as Dane Kennedy points out, is “more a monument to a particular generation of scholarship than a signpost pointing towards the future.” ³ Ornamentalism, however, represents a different sort of intervention. It takes on many of the challenges and opportunities created by the contemporary scholarship on imperialism in order to rework them for a revised agenda for imperial studies.

This may seem like putting too much weight on a book that, as David Armitage in his endorsement of the book points out, is “written [as] an essay [and] not meant to be a total history.” ⁴ Cannadine, indeed, is too sophisticated a historian to claim comprehensiveness for his admittedly partial interpretation of the British Empire. The concluding remarks of Cannadine’s wistful recollection of his “imperial childhood” appended at the end of the book may be extended to the book as a whole: “This is my version of empire and the imperial events of my childhood, and that is theirs” (197). He also disarms us in the penultimate section of the book in a chapter appropriately titled ‘Limitations” with the warning that his concern has been primarily with “perception” and not with all that actually went on in the empire. He is thus careful to note that even as the British sought to escape to, and reconstruct, a familiar, hierarchical, rural Arcadia in their empire, the processes set in motion by the contradictory forces of empire simultaneously undercut the very possibility of this wishful “ruritania.” He also acknowledges that for the most part this view of the Empire full of “faux anachronistic paraphernalia of old-new hierarchies, chivalric sovereigns and glittering ceremonies” (149) contained a great deal of ignorance, self-deception, and make-believe.

Furthermore, notwithstanding the inflation of the subtitle “How the British Saw their Empire,” Cannadine would be quite willing to concede to his critics that his book really focuses on...