Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press (review)

Consumers of the Victorian and Edwardian press enjoyed ready access to an unparalleled variety of publications, including national papers, illustrated weeklies, learned periodicals, and missionary journals. Like this literature which it analyzes, Julie Codell’s edited volume contains wide-ranging essays representing several academic disciplines. The contributors take as their shared starting point the relationship between Britain and its Empire. They demonstrate the multifarious roles played by the press in transmitting colonial news, facilitating imperial identities, and enabling colonial critique. The volume to which they have contributed is, itself, testimony to the enduring legacies of empire. It counts scholars from Great Britain, Australia, India, Canada, and the United States among its contributors. Together, their essays transport us well beyond the frameworks of Jurgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson. No mere artifact of the public sphere or the nation, the press as discussed by the contributors to Imperial Co-Histories was itself a tool of empire.

In the introduction to this volume, Julie Codell builds upon the work of notable imperial scholars to introduce the notion of imperial co-histories. She begins with the understanding that metropole and colony were overlapping, rather than discrete formations. Given this fact, Codell holds that imperial identities were “always in process and always multi-voiced” (15). She argues that the press offers an ideal source for understanding these complexities. To be sure, Codell might define the press as an entity with greater precision. That said, it is indisputable that its seemingly countless pages recorded colonial happenings and kindled imperial imagination. Even more significant is the fact that the press replicated imperial processes in print. Like the imperial project itself, the press was “dialogic,” episodic and “discontinuous” (16). And, like the British empire, the press was characterized by “fumbling,” rather than certitude (18). As a printed rendition of empire, the press generated what Codell calls “co-histories.” This concept, taken from Fanon via Said, allows us to think simultaneously and dialectically about multiple places, constituencies, and identities. The press, in other words, was a contact zone on the printed page. This is, ultimately, an intricate and intriguing argument, if one that could be laid out more clearly.

Some of the essays that follow join explicitly and eagerly on Codell’s platform, while others participate in more implicit or reserved fashion. The book’s two sections consider the press under the broad rubrics of authority and resistance. Another potentially more revealing schema might cluster the essays under the rubrics of image, institution, and identity. This arrangement would allow readers to better appreciate the simultaneity of the press’s heyday with the high noon of empire. It would also enable us to understand how the technologies of the press themselves enabled the production of co-histories.

Several interesting essays address the constitutive relationship between the imperial project and the illustrated press. Michael Hancher, Deepali Deewan, and Catherine Pagani examine gazettes, art journals, and illustrated newspapers that brought the Indian subcontinent and China to the attention of metropolitan readers. These sources spotlighted the geography, art, and material culture of the East. Through a canny juxtaposition of word and image, they stimulated a metropolitan appetite for empire and generated imperial knowledge. Such publications flourished at times of crisis, like the Opium Wars and the Indian Rebellion, when they held out the chimerical promise of governing a disorderly world. Indeed, the illustrated press performed this work well beyond the metropole itself, as Tony Hughes-D’Aeth shows in his examination of the Picturesque Atlas of Australia. Published during the Australian Centenary, this source made use of text and image to produce a “visible, showable history” of what had once been a land of convicts (236).

If the age of high imperialism witnessed the rise of the illustrated press, it also saw the development of important media institutions, as Alex Nalbach and J. Lee Thompson demonstrate. Respectively, they describe the fascinating roles played by telegraph companies and colonial journalists in shaping...