Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World, and: Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (review)

Empire and Superempire belongs to the growing genre of essays comparing the "new" American imperialism with the British variety. Bernard Porter improves on works like Niall Ferguson's Empire (2003) by being neither Colonel Blimpish nor in favor of the Bush regime's misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is too good a historian to be an uncritical admirer of empires or imperialism, even of the pith helmet and jodpurs British variety. For example, Porter rightly observes that "Nothing coming from Abu Ghraib . . . exceeded in horror certain crimes that were perpetrated under the British in post-Mutiny India, or in 1950s Kenya" (120).

Porter is often an astute observer of the politics of both imperialisms. The main drawbacks of Empire and Superempire are Porter's aversion to theory, particularly of the postcolonial sort, and his inclination to overstate the degree to which the British, including the Victorians, were "absent-minded imperialists." Paradoxically Porter's ideas about America are often more persuasive than those about Britain, because he insists that imperialism was never "a 'big deal' for the British people as a whole" (136). Indeed, "Britain never turned into a genuinely imperialist society" (33)—an astonishing claim for any historian to make about that society. If Britain "never" measured up, what does it take to be "a genuinely imperialist society"?

In over-arguing his case for "absent-mindedness," Porter targets the "school of thought" named "postcolonial theory," which he also does in his previous work, The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004). According to Porter, "postcolonial theory" paints nineteenth-century British "society" as "imperialist" from start to finish and "top to bottom"; this is "simply wrong" (25). He declares he is often "baffled" by postcolonial theory, and yet also claims to know that its proponents err by "not reading enough, jumping to conclusions, using words like 'imperialism' loosely, and reading things 'into' texts" (25). Unfortunately, these criticisms can be applied to aspects of both The Absent-Minded Imperialists and Empire and Superempire. Thus, it does not appear that Porter has read enough postcolonial theory, or read it carefully enough, to be a reliable critic of it. He often (though not always) uses the term imperialism so narrowly that it can only mean jingoism, while charging those whose definitions of it are more inclusive of being slipshod. And as for "reading things 'into' texts," Porter is more inclined to ignore "things" that are manifestly in them.

Like a number of other old-fangled imperial historians (Ferguson, for example, or many of the authors of the latest Oxford History of the British Empire [1998–99]), Porter sees himself as an empiricist. How could a historian be otherwise? Evidence alone is insufficient, however, without some "theory" or method of interpretation—especially when the evidence accumulates against the very case a historian wishes to make. In her review of The Absent-Minded Imperialists (Victorian Studies Summer 2005), Antoinette Burton correctly notes that Porter provides massive evidence of the cultural influence of imperialism well before 1880, yet discounts the relevance of that evidence. In the introduction to that book, he even declares that before the 1880s the Empire "hardly features at all in any obvious way in British literature and art" (vii). That bizarre claim means that Porter is discounting (assuming he has read) the many studies that demonstrate the centrality of imperial themes and issues in early- and mid-Victorian literature and art (many of the not particularly postcolonial studies in John MacKenzie's series for Manchester University Press, for example). What does Porter make of the hundreds of poems, novels, and melodramas about India, written before, during, and immediately after the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58? And how does he understand the [End Page 563...