The Past and Present Society, Oxford University Press Past & Present

The Past and Present Society
Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History

Author(s): A. G. Hopkins
Source: Past & Present, No. 164 (Aug., 1999), pp. 198-243
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/651279
Accessed: 06-05-2020 07:53 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/651279?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Past and Present Society, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Past & Present
This content downloaded from 83.44.97.245 on Wed, 06 May 2020 07:53:11 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
VIEWPOINT
BACK TO THE FUTURE:

FROM NATIONAL HISTORY TO
IMPERIAL HISTORY*
At first sight, the timing of this prospectus is unpropitio

the end of a century that has seen the demise of the empir
ruled so much of the world for so long, scholarly interes
shifted, understandably, to the history of the states that succ
them. The view from a once dominant centre is now
seen to be an unacceptable anachronism, perpetuating a fo
Eurocentrism and possibly covert racism that has no plac
post-colonial world. Of course, historians of empire remain
across a range of centuries and continents, and their contri
are often fresh and illuminating, as we shall see. But their visi
is now much diminished. Once they occupied a prominent
respected position in the discipline; today, they no longer
station above their ideas.
The institutional and intellectual trends that have accompanied
this change of focus appear to offer little support for any attempt
to rebuild a view of the world from the perspective of an imperial
centre. Regional specialists have constructed impressive fortresses
of knowledge that can easily withstand efforts to incorporate
them into any wider union. In practice, moreover, they have
become increasingly involved with the writing of national histor-
ies, with the result that peripheries have become detached, not
only from former centres of influence, but also from one another:
east and west Africanists scarcely communicate; India and Burma
are studied by separate groups of scholars. The current fashion
in post-colonial studies has reinforced this decentralized view of
the world by attacking 'structuralism' and by rejecting the 'total-
izing project' associated with it. For many younger historians the
* This essay draws on some of the themes of my inaugural lecture as Smuts

Professor of Commonwealth History, University of Cambridge, published as The
Future of the Imperial Past (Cambridge, 1997), but has been expanded and substantially
revised. I am grateful to P. J. Cain and K. Sugihara for their valuable and constructive
comments.
BACK TO THE FUTURE 199
only point of studying European imperialism is to unma

derogatory racial stereotypes encoded in the modernizing
of the Enlightenment: hence the flood of publications d
with 'representations' of 'The Other' that have appeared i
years. By studying images and symbols, scholars can avoi
pling with reality while being au courant in doubting its exis
The new scepticism has enabled researchers to retreat fr
hard political and economic questions that were once cen
imperial history. Modes of production have been repl
modes of discourse; ideas have become material forces; m
forces, as once understood, have become epiphenomena.
The obstacles to preparing a fresh agenda for imperial
are therefore intimidating. Inevitably, too, the attempt will
the suspicion that the aim is to push back the frontiers estab
by a generation of scholars, perhaps by challenging the p
upheld by programmes of Area Studies, or possibly by o
a semi-veiled apologia for empire. Although an approach
this direction is probably the most readily accessible
restating the case for studying imperial history, it is also
least likely to carry conviction. Its predictability immed
suggests that counter-arguments are already in place; it
novelty means that it is more likely to comfort old Chr
than to inspire Young Turks. If the study of imperial
empires is to flourish, the existing historiography will
find new sources of inspiration.
A start can be made by recognizing that the imperial experience,

which inspired the major debates on empire, is no longer to hand.
In consequence, the long-running battle between conservative
and radical theories that dominated so much of the historiography
for so long cannot simply be re-enacted. This is not to deny that
forms of imperialism still exist and may even expand in the
coming century. Nor is it to claim, in the aftermath of the collapse
of the Soviet empire, that we have reached 'the end of ideology',
and henceforth will bask in the warm rays of capitalist tri-
umphalism. The future is likely to play tricks on the present
1 For a recent discussion from this perspective, see Patrick Joyce, 'The Return of
History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Academic History in Britain', Past and
Present, no. 158 (Feb. 1998), especially the claims made on 209 and 223.
200 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 164
generation of soothsayers and historians, just as it has in the past.

Nevertheless, the age of great empires and their combative ideolo-
gies is now over. All future accounts of the British empire will
be uninfluenced by its presence and, before long, will be distanced
from its shadow too.
It might be claimed at this point that an alternative source of
inspiration is already with us in the shape of the postmodernist
influences noted above - despite their hostility to the European
'master narrative'. Postmodernism has undoubtedly helped to
inspire a new generation of researchers whose work has enlarged,
though not created, the field of cultural history. But it provides
an insubstantial basis for the new agenda that the study of empires
now needs. The postmodernist attack on European racism and
other forms of cultural domination has produced a 'totalizing
project' of its own. Practitioners have been drawn into generaliz-
ing about Western views of the rest of the world by assembling
a composite known as Orientalism.2 The result is undoubtedly a
type of imperial history, but one that is confined to a narrow
range of topics within the field of cultural history and is frequently
based on a highly selective reading of historical sources.
Postmodernism has been able to rise above these (and other)
limitations by identifying with sensitive current issues, notably
minority rights, and by providing, through the concept of cultural
oppression, a lifeline to critics of Western domination following
the collapse of standard radical analyses of capitalist exploitation.3
It is important to recognize here that the issue of minority rights
is of huge significance in the United States, where it stands at the
centre of an intense debate about the future composition of society
2 The most influential study is Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978); on
which see John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester,
1995); also James G. Carrier (ed.), Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford, 1995).
A further irony is that the postmodernist critique of Euro-centred studies of other
societies is itself based almost entirely on Western authorities (most of whom had
little or no interest in imperialism). See also the interesting corollary, Tapan
Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century
Bengal (Oxford, 1988); W. G. Beasley, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese
Travellers in America and Europe (New Haven, 1995); James G. Carrier (ed.),
Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford, 1995).
3 An analysis of the titles of articles published in journals specializing in the history
of the world outside Europe and North America shows that peasants, proletarians
and class vanished in 1989 and were replaced thereafter by asylums, knowledge
(especially science and medicine), and a plenitude of representations.
and location of political authority,4 and that the Un

sets the international agenda for an increasing range
programmes, including much that can be placed unde
ing of imperial history. These circumstances help to
influence of writers such as Edward Said, Michel Fou
(more distantly) Jacques Derrida, whose ideas chim
mood of the moment, as those of Andr6 Gunder Fran
Marcuse, and Talcott Parsons did, in different ways, b
The historiography of development is one of success
that break; accordingly, there remain good grounds for c
to separate the issue of the day from the riddle of th
pite the weighty political and academic pressures tha
conflate them.
To re-enact the intellectual battles inspired by the presence of
empire is to be quixotic; to channel the subject into postmodern-
ism is to be over-influenced by the fashion of the moment. A
research programme is needed that encompasses the large themes,
incorporates the existing historiography, and offers the possibility
of taking a new look at old problems, including those that have
ceased to be in vogue. A fresher and more illuminating perspect-
ive on how these issues have emerged from the imperial past can
be obtained from the vantage point of the present by considering
the provenance of the issues that characterize the post-colonial
world order, or disorder, as it has been called.5 The possibilities
are multiple. But any uncontroversial list is bound to give promin-
ence to the current clutch of questions surrounding the future
of the nation-state and the prospects for global economic
development.
The democratic nation-state, long considered to be the natural
vehicle for delivering stability and progress, and the accredited
successor to empire, is now thought to have a fragile and uncertain
future.6 Part of the problem, the unpredicted appearance of a
virulent strain of assertive ethnicity, has engulfed not just very
4 Brief introductions include Michael Walzer, What it Means to be an American
(New York, 1992); David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multicllturalism
(New York, 1995).
5 Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, 1992).
6 A fuller discussion of the concept of the state is needed than is possible here. The
literature on this subject is vast, even if it is confined to its contemporary setting.
Points of entry include Michael Mann (ed.), The Rise and Decline of the Nation State
(Oxford, 1990); Crawford Young (ed.), The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism: The
Nation State at Bay? (Madison, 1993); Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The
Dlffusion of Power in the World Econolmy (Cambridge, 1996).
different and very distant peoples but also societies whose prox-
imity to our own is sufficiently close to suggest, not just that the
barbarians are inside the walls, but that we are the barbarians.7
In less dramatic ways, too, questions of identity, regionalism and
devolution have been added to the political agenda of states that
were assumed to be moving towards a future of increasing assim-
ilation and integration. Transnational influences, known collect-
ively as globalization, have created channels of transmission that
are now capable of spreading pollution and disease across defence-
less national frontiers with unprecedented speed, while the dif-
fusion of nuclear weapons beyond the membership of an elite
club of great powers has enabled once subject peoples to acquire
sufficient military capacity to threaten a new war of the worlds.
The task of economic development, which was supposed to be
eased, if not immediately solved, by decolonization, remains
intractable. The impressive record of the tiger economies should
be acknowledged, but so too should their fragility, and not least
their dependence on inflated credit ratings. Elsewhere, population
growth, indebtedness, the role of transnational corporations, the
history of recently independent governments, and what might be
called malign neglect, are among a long list of explanations for
the failure of large parts of the world to succeed in raising living
standards during the past half-century.
It is apparent that these issues are infra-national or supra-
national. They are not captured by or emphasized fully in stand-
ard national histories, which are inclined to minimize or even
edit out countervailing themes. The pronounced bias that allowed
English history to become a misnomer for British history has long
been acknowledged, but has only just begun to be corrected.
Similarly, it is only very recently that indigenous people have
begun to take their place in the history of countries settled by
European migrants. Preoccupation with the national epic has also
endorsed a degree of insularity that has tended to marginalize
international influences - where it has not stereotyped them.
Most history continues to be written within a national framework
that derives its inspiration from nineteenth-century state-building
7 See, for example, Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge, 1981), a
pioneering work that has not received the credit it deserves; Charles A. Kupchan
(ed.), Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe (Ithaca, 1995); also the historical
perspective provided in J. A. Mangan (ed.), Tribal Identities: Nationalism, Europe,
Sport (London, 1996).
and state-reforming movements in Europe. The inspiratio

been replenished in the twentieth century following the
of new states within and beyond Europe as a result of tw
wars and decolonization. This, too, is history with a purpo
seeks to minimize centrifugal forces within the state and
tional connections beyond it - except where they can be held
responsible for domestic difficulties. Yet, as the previous examples
have shown, the most pressing of the world's problems are those
that occur either below or above the level of the nation-state.
The implication, and the theme of this article, is that a different
organizing framework is needed if we are to understand the
present, encompass the past and consider the alignment of future
loyalties in a world in which the nation-state may no longer be
either the dominant political institution or the basis for economic
development.
Specifically, it will be argued that the big issues of the post-
colonial era cannot be understood without acknowledging the
extent to which they are a legacy of the empires that dominated
the greater part of the world during the past three centuries. If
the legacy was not always created by imperial action, it was
invariably influenced subsequently by the imperial presence; if it
was not exclusively a product of imperial expansion, it was
undoubtedly a manifestation of imperial decline. Indeed, the
history of international relations during this period can be read
as the story of the interaction of competing and complementary
empires, though such is the grip of national historiographical
traditions that examples of this approach are not easily found.
Imperial history remains largely the history of the extension of
the nation-state beyond its borders; international history deals
with points of intersection.
What is needed is a fundamental reappraisal of world history
to bring out the extent to which, in recent centuries, it has been
shaped by the interaction of several types of empire at various
stages of development and decay. Such an approach would capture
both the differences between empires and their dynamism, and
would leave few parts of the globe untouched. Furthermore, it
reminds us that imperial history does not have to be Western
history. It offers the prospect of adopting a non-European stand-
point - whether from other centres, such as Manchu China or
the great Islamic empires of the Mughals, the Safavids and the
Ottomans - or from the perspective of the myriad subject
peoples of the world.8 Other empires also expanded by developing

forms of commercial capitalism, by promoting military and bur-
eaucratic innovations, and by spreading belief systems across
diverse cultures. Their decline was the product of internal as well
as of external forces; their reconstruction, first as colonial and
then as independent states, was the outcome of multiple inter-
actions among indigenous groups whose long lines of continuity
threaded their way through successive manifestations of alien
rule.9 Nationalism was not invariably a European export.
To recast world history in this way is a formidable undertaking
that is beyond the scope of this article. For present purposes, and
as a starting point for further enquiry, it is sufficient to establish
a link between the history of empires, which embraces the world,
and the universality of the problems that are the residue of their
demise. From the perspective of historical research, the subjects
listed for consideration here have the merit of appealing to a
broad constituency. In doing so, they move less fashionable
branches of the discipline, such as economic history, towards the
centre of the stage currently occupied by cultural history. They
also suggest the need to find ways of reintegrating these sub-
divisions rather than of asserting the paramountcy of one over
another. The connections made here draw on what has been
termed the new institutional history, because its emphasis o
property rights and transactions costs seems particularly we
suited to the problems of studying how resources are activat
over long distances and among different cultures, while its str
on the role of government and politics in introducing and ma
aging institutional change offers a means of linking state act
8 See, for example, S. A. M. Adshead, Central Asia in World History (Lond

1993); Kaoru Sugihara, 'The European Miracle and the East Asian Miracle', San
to Keizai, 11 (1996).
9 Imperial tribute should be paid to Michael Adas for his innovative work in
area. For a recent statement, see 'Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparati
Perspective', Internat. Hist. Rev., xx (1998). Peter C. Perdue makes the impor
point that placing Manchu imperialism in a comparative perspective will bring Ch
history more fully into world history and also oblige sinologists to re-think con
tional assumptions about the fit between national and imperial history: see Pete
Perdue, 'Comparing Empires: Manchu Colonialism', ibid. Very few of the m
studies of the Soviet empire that have appeared since its demise in 1991 discuss
concept of empire or place the Russo-Soviet experience in a comparative perspect
An illuminating exception is Dominic Lieven, 'The Russian Empire and the So
Union as Imperial Polities', Jl Contemporary Hist., xxx (1995).
to long-run development.'1 However, it should be sai

that, for the purpose of the present exercise, this appro
be regarded as an organizational aid, not a theory on w
argument depends. On this occasion, the means are less im
than the end, which is to show how imperial history can illu
the issues identified here in ways that conventional nati
tory cannot.
Empires were transnational organizations that were cr
mobilize the resources of the world. Their existence and their
unity were made possible by supranational connections. Their
longevity was determined by their ability to extend the reach and
maintain the stability of these connections. Consequently, empires
faced transactions costs on an unprecedented scale. Imperialism
was a means of increasing the flow of resources by cutting these
costs or by annexing rents, and by amending or introducing
appropriate property rights; colonial rule was a formal, organiza-
tional device for achieving the same result.11 Empires were also
multi-ethnic conglomerates that expanded from an ethnic core or
from a base in the patria or nation. Imperial expansion was
accompanied by a legitimating ideology, typically couched in the
form of a civilizing mission, which expressed and reinforced the
character of the imperial power itself. The extension of imperial
control was bound up with the ability to dominate or at least to
manage other ethnic groups, and sometimes even to liquidate
them. But the degree of political incorporation was limited by
the subordination of subject states and peoples, while the degree
of social integration was restricted by lack of penetrative capacity,
by local resistance, or by the priorities of the imperial power
itself, which came to realise that the needs of taxation, trade,
strategy and civil order were frequently consistent with, indeed
frequently required, the toleration and even the reinforcement
of different ethnicities, religions and customs. Typically, associ-
ation was more prominent than assimilation; ethnicity survived
1O The literature is now extensive: Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional

Change and Economic Performance (London, 1990), is one of the main starting points;
Robert H. Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market (Cambridge, 1989), is important
for bringing politics into the analysis. For the international context, see John Harriss,
Janet Hunter and Colin M. Lewis (eds.), The New Institutional Economics and Third
World Development (London, 1995).
11 For a more extended discussion, see P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, 'The Theory
and Practice of Imperialism', in Raymond E. Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism
and British Inmperialism (London, 1999), 202-6.
the end of empire often because it had been reinforced by imper-

ial policy.
This general framework allows for considerable variation. Two
ideal types, at each end of the spectrum of possibilities, can
be identified: the one, predatory; the other, developmental.
Predatory empires were predominantly redistributional. They
functioned in a world in which there was commercial exchange
but no record or expectation of cumulative economic develop-
ment. Consequently, their main concerns were to improve the
efficiency of tax-gathering and revenue allocation, and to promote
other rent-seeking activities. These aims often led to institutional
change, whether to reform a currency system or to codify land
rights. The mercantilist empires of the eighteenth century com-
bined (most perfectly in India) the predatory function of captur-
ing revenues with an expanding commercial interest that sought,
by influencing government policy, to limit competition in
exchange for bearing the cost of cutting transactions costs and
expanding markets overseas.
Developmental empires, whether liberal or dirigiste, were com-
mitted to activating latent or underused resources in a world that
was becoming increasingly specialized. They were able to reduce
transactions costs and to engage in a more thorough-going trans-
formation of property rights because they possessed greater pen-
etrative capacity than did their predatory predecessors. Their
emergence was associated with the growth of a national economy
and a nation-state at home; abroad, it involved not only the
further expansion of export agriculture, following the green
revolution in the New World in the eighteenth century, but also
the need to create institutions to secure the unprecedented flows
of capital that financed new development and new states in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is not to say that devel-
opmental empires abandoned predatory activities or to deny that
they imposed costs of their own; it is rather to suggest that the
balance of advantage between the two shifted in favour of devel-
opment strategies as the prospects for raising the productivity of
resources grew. Moreover, the penetrative capacity of modern
empires increased with the passage of time, as technological
innovation delivered first railways and machine guns, then tele-
phones and aeroplanes. Their adaptability suggests that their
demise should not be signalled prematurely, as scholars intent on
establishing the longevity of nationalist movements ar

inclined to do.
The approach outlined here lacks the economy and elegance
of a model that is abstracted from reality. Despite its capa-
ciousness, it is evident, too, that it cannot possibly encompass all
aspects of state-building and economic development. On the other
hand, its empirical base ought to be congenial to historians, and
its ideological neutrality allows the analysis to be pursued without
commitment to a particular view of the morality of empire.'2
More important still, the revival of imperial history offers the
prospect of overcoming the limitations of the national epic.
Ideally, the scope of this article should be commensurate with its
subject, and should encompass both European and non-European
empires. On this occasion, however, the discussion will be con-
fined to one case, that of Britain. Although this is a sizeable
limitation, it has the compensating advantage of enabling the
analysis to look beneath the surface of international relations
at the domestic roots of policy - both at home and abroad.
Moreover, the scale of the British empire was unparalleled in
modern times, while its longevity was matched only by the
empires of Spain and Portugal. The British case therefore offers
plenty of scope for taking a fresh look at the relationship between
the state, development and empire to see how their treatment
has begun to be influenced by new approaches to the past, and
how it might be further illuminated by ideas whose time has not
yet quite come.
II
One of the most striking features of the study of modern British

history is the way in which the history of the nation-state has
been separated from the history of the empire. Non-specialists
will probably be surprised by this assertion; non-academics even
more so. If a small island acquires a large empire, it seems obvious
enough that the two cannot be understood in isolation. Specialists,
however, know better. Of course, the empire has been wheeled
on stage from time to time, usually in connection with a major
12 Although the debate on public choice is influenced by beliefs about the appropriate
role of governments in the economy, the present discussion is free from the obligation
to make normative statements of this kind.
crisis, such as a world war, or in relation to particular develop-

ments, such as the causes of the industrial revolution, but it is
hard to find an influential general interpretation of modern British
history that is based on a close reading of imperial history.
Historians of empire, on the other hand, have long been aware
of problems such as identity and nationality through their studies
of migration, state formation and devolution, but have been
limited by their focus on the world beyond Europe from con-
necting their work to Britain's internal development.
A promising attempt to repair this omission has been made
recently by historians who have applied the concept of military
fiscalism to state- and empire-building movements in the eight-
eenth century.13 Their aim is to identify the connections between
war, finance and overseas expansion in order to explain the huge
extension of trade and empire after 1750. This approach brings
the roles of the military and public finance in the growth of the
state to the fore; in doing so, it offers a fresh way of integrating
political and economic elements in the process of modernization.
The military-fiscal state was a European phenomenon, not simply
a British one. Nevertheless, the British experience remained dis-
tinctive because no other country on the continent was capable
of operating on such a scale or so efficiently, and because Britain
was far more successful than her rivals in laying down the institu-
tional bases of success. The settlement that followed the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 united the kingdom by integrating Scotland
and by consolidating control over Ireland. It confirmed estab-
lished land rights, incorporated new forms of property in money
and other financial instruments, and devised a 'balanced' constitu-
tion that set limits to the ambitions of the powerful, including
the monarch. The notion of British exceptionalism can still be
retained. However, instead of being tied to the causes and con-
sequences of the rise of an industrial bourgeoisie, it can now be
located in the conditions that led to the emergence of an efficient
system of public finance, an expanding market economy, and a
13 C. A. Bayly, 'The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 1760-1830', Jl Imperial and

Commonwealth Hist., xxvi (1998), is a valuable recent guide; see also his Imperial
Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London, 1989); P. J. Cain
and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914, 2 vols.
(London, 1993), i, 71-84, 320-27; Patrick O'Brien and Philip A. Hunt, 'The Fiscal
State in England, 1485-1815', Hist. Research, lxvi (1993); Lawrence Stone (ed.), An
Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689-1815 (London, 1994).
political elite that ensured stability and continuity by its ef

management of potentially destabilizing forces.
This approach has the additional advantage of cross
great divide between historians of the eighteenth and ni
centuries, thus providing a link between the so-called 'f
'second' empires. Winning the peace after 1815 was b
with the introduction of a set of reforms that dismantled the
military-fiscal state without also liquidating privilege. As Old
Corruption was replaced by New Probity, established interests
were invited or obliged to adjust to the principles of Gladstonian
finance, to the idea that merit was necessary for official appoint-
ments, and to the uncertainties of free trade.'4 The monarchy
itself was refurbished, removed from the political fray and made
a symbol of national unity. The gentlemanly elite was enlarged
and its composition altered by the addition of new urban recruits.
The Protestant version of the Christian order was confirmed and
reinforced; Anglican Britons became, in their own eyes, God's
Elect.'5 The emergence of a sense of British identity during this
period was greatly helped by the centralization of the main chan-
nels of political information. The English language was gradually
standardized on terms set by London and the Home Counties.
Governments appropriated the rhetoric of patriotism from their
critics in the late eighteenth century and deployed it with increas-
ing effect to foster unity at home at times of crisis, whether to
hold the line during the year of revolutions in 1848, to deal with
German expansionism at the turn of the century, to fend off
Bolshevism after 1917, or to counter the fascist menace in the
1930s.16 After 1815, the new agents of 'improvement' promoted
the liberal version of what might be called, from then on, the
14 A. C. Howe, 'From "Old Corruption" to "New Probity": The Bank of England
and its Directors in the Age of Reform', Financial Hist. Rev., i (1994); Philip Harling
and Peter Mandler, 'From Fiscal State to Laissez-Faire State, 1760-1850', Jl Brit.
Studies, xxxii (1993); Philip Harling, The Waning of 'Old Corruption': The Politics of
Economical Reform in Britain, 1779-1846 (Oxford, 1996); also the pioneering study
by W. D. Rubinstein, 'The End of "Old Corruption" in Britain, 1780-1860', Past
and Present, no. 101 (Nov. 1983).
15 J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832 (Cambridge, 1993).
16 Derek Jarrett, 'The Myth of "Patriotism" in Eighteenth-Century English
Politics', in J. H. Bromley and E. H. Chessman (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands
(The Hague, 1975); David Eastwood, 'Robert Southey and the Meanings of
Patriotism', Jl Brit. Studies, xxxi (1992); J. M. Winter, 'British National Identity and
the First World War', in S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting (eds.), The Boundaries of
the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1996); also, more generally, R. Colls and
P. Dodds (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920 (London, 1985).
British way of life, pursuing progress with stability at home and

charting abroad a course between what Canning referred to in
1825 as the 'youthful and stirring nations', such as the United
States, and the surviving 'league of worn-out governments' on
the continent of Europe whose future lay all too clearly behind
them.'7 Seen in this long perspective, the year 1914 may not be
as clear a dividing line as is conventionally claimed: institutions
and elites survived; the priorities of international policy were
unchanged; imperialism and empire remained strong in sentiment
and reality.l8 The era of expansion was not replaced, readily or
even steadily, by one of decline.
As well as helping to generate the revenues that funded the
state, imperial expansion gave key interest groups a stake in Great
Britain plc by providing opportunities for creating private wealth.
The tobacco lords of Glasgow, the jute manufacturers of Dundee,
the steel magnates of Sheffield, the millocracy of Manchester (as
Marx called them), the merchant princes of London and the
outports, and the discreet bankers of the City are just a few
prominent examples of a cast of many thousands whose wealth
was derived directly from the world of empire and informal
influence overseas.19 Ernest Cassel, the upwardly mobile banker
who had a strong financial interest in the empire, was so close to
King Edward VII that he became known - inevitably - as
Windsor Cassel.20 The empire also became, in John Bright's well-
known phrase, 'a gigantic system of out-door relief for the
aristocracy of Great Britain'.21 This function has been clearly
demonstrated by research on recruitment into the colonial civil
17 Quoted in William W. Kaufmann, British Policy and the Independence of Latin
America, 1804-1828 (New Haven, 1951), 201.
18 This is one of the main themes of Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, ii. For
complementary arguments stressing the continuity of civic values and elites, see Peter
Mandler and Susan Pederson, 'The British Intelligentsia after the Victorians', in their
After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (London,
1994); W. D. Rubinstein, 'British Elites in the Inter-War Period, 1919-39',
Contemporary Brit. Hist., xii (1998).
'9 The part played by these interest groups in the formulation of policy has been
neglected in recent years, notwithstanding some valuable research on the eighteenth
century and on the period of decolonization. There is considerable scope, for example,
for revisiting the political role of the great staple industries in the nineteenth century.
20 Anthony Allfrey, Edward VII and His Jewish Court (London, 1991), 138. Behind
these luminaries stood the anonymous but numerous ranks of employees in manufac-
turing centres, the great ports and the City of London.
21 Speech in Birmingham, 29 Oct. 1858, dealing with foreign policy and the empire
generally, in James E. Thorold Rogers (ed.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by
John Bright (London, 1869), 470.
service,22 and by new work on military history,23 wh

revealed the extent to which the army and navy provided
ment for officers - who were then, of course, gentlem
and how the military ethos was cultivated and admired
liberal, free-trading Britain, as well as manifested in n
colonial wars. Social historians have shown how aristocratic for-
tunes were revived in the late nineteenth century partly by being
redeployed into overseas and imperial investments. The fourth
earl of Carnarvon, a Tory grandee and cabinet minister, chan-
nelled funds into colonial investments in the 1870s, when the
agricultural depression struck; his son, the fifth earl, married a
daughter of Alfred de Rothschild in 1895, principally 'to induce
solvency'.24 Three generations of Elgins, originally Scottish out-
siders, took more direct action, turning to imperial service to
rescue their debt-ridden estates:25 the first purloined the marbles;
the second (having burned the emperor of China's summer palace
in 1860) was named 'The Uncontrollably Fierce Barbarian', an
appellation that helped qualify him to become Viceroy of India;
the third, having a head start, became Viceroy without, seem-
ingly, needing to destroy anything. Even cosmopolitan liberals
found that high politics, personal wealth and a justificatory ideol-
ogy fitted all too well with imperial expansion. When Gladstone
authorized the invasion of Egypt in 1882, he declared that he was
launching a just war, a holy war, against militant Islam - and
he meant what he said. He also had 37 per cent of his personal
portfolio in Egyptian stock.26
22 See, for example, Richard Symonds, Oxford and Empire: The Lost Cause?
(Oxford, 1986).
23 For an outline of the way in which the subject has changed and been enlarged
see John W. Chambers, 'The New Military History: Myth and Reality', Jl Military
Hist., Iv (1991); John W. MacKenzie (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military,
1850-1950 (Manchester, 1992); Edward M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868-
1902 (Manchester, 1992). Case studies include J. A. de Moor and H. L.Wesseling
(eds.), Imperialism and War: Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa (Leiden,
1989); Douglas Peers, Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Making
of the Garrison State in India, 1819-1835 (London, 1995).
24 Andrew Adonis, 'The Survival of the Great Estates: Henry, 4th Earl of Carnarvon
and his Dispositions in the 1880s', Hist. Research, Ixiv (1991).
25 S. G. Checkland, The Elgins, 1766-1917: A Tale of Aristocrats, Proconsuls and
Their Wives (Aberdeen, 1988).
26 The Gladstone Diaries, x, January 1881-June 1883, ed. H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford,
1990), lxxi-lxxiii.
In paying the rent, empire also shaped the mind.27 The two
were synthesized in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries to produce a British elite and a British identity. The
predominantly English empire became increasingly British fol-
lowing not only the loss of the mainland colonies, but also the
growing contributions of Scots, and, to a more limited extent,
Irish and Welsh.28 This process represented, not the substitution
of one nationality by another, but the development of multiple
or layered identities. According Scots and provincials generally a
stake in an expanding empire helped to unite the kingdom and
to develop a British identity that promoted unity at times of
national danger and acted as a counterweight to potentially divis-
ive class and regional allegiances. The desperate struggle with
France between 1792 and 1815, a war for empire as well as for
Europe, was an especially formative influence in this regard. The
threat of radical republicanism from abroad caused the monarch-
ical, propertied and Christian order at home to close ranks and
engendered an unprecedented sense of national solidarity among
the wider public.29 But the British empire, as it became, was still
run from London and managed by English gentlemen whose
natural habitat was found in the Home Counties. Even the Scots,
who were present on every frontier, served mainly as adjutants
rather than as pro-consuls. However, integration into the empire,
far from destroying a Scottish identity, helped to mould it, both
in colonies of settlement and at home.30 In this respect, the Scots,
the Ukrainians and the Yoruba have more in common than they
realise.
If the concept of 'other' is necessary to the definition of 'self',
then those who stood and waited throughout the empire also
27 p. J. Marshall, 'Imperial Britain', Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xxiii
(1995), argues that the empire reflected British society more than it transformed it.
This view seems to me to underestimate the domestic consequences of empire.
However, the important point is that the elements needed to discuss this question are
now in place.
28 Huw Bowen, Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire,
1688-1775 (London, 1996); John MacKenzie, 'On Scotland and the Empire', Internat.
Hist. Rev., xv (1993); Keith Jeffrey (ed.), An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the
British Empire (Manchester, 1996).
29 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1992). See
also Jl Brit. Studies, xxxi (1992), a special issue on 'Britishness'.
30 A fascinating account that brings out both the diversity of Scottish ideas of
nationality and the extent to which the concept itself was half-formed or even absent
before the Union is Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians
and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-c. 1830 (Cambridge, 1993).
served, usually to illustrate qualities of inferiority that co

with and reinforced Britain's own sense of superiority an
precisely, to manifest the characteristics of fortitude and fa
that made us, in our own estimation, a people peculiarly
govern less advanced societies. In the late nineteenth
phrenologists measured skulls throughout the world and
the conclusion that the largest brains were to be found i
west Europe, and - such was the objectivity of the new
were especially capacious in and around London and Pari
new science of eugenics carried this conclusion well
twentieth century. Work on the history of science, beside
ing bogus claims, has also revealed how genuine advances
a wide range of issues, from medicine to engineering, wer
lated by the possession of empire, and how in turn sc
knowledge was used to demonstrate Britain's superio
others, while confirming it to ourselves.32 The civilizing
became a strategy for improving the world on lines laid
figuratively as well as literally, by Britain, and a comm
that was revitalized and updated during and after the tw
wars. In 1945, having regained her lost colonies, Britain's
tive reaction to the problem of administering Germany
treat the country as if it were a colony in need of firm, imp
government, and to import experts from India to un
the task.
If the guardians of the nation devised the strategy, Bri
all classes were given a psychological stake in the mission
Lord Lugard regarded as being peculiarly fitted to the 'ge
our race'.33 National liberty and the possession of empir
already linked in the popular mind by the close of the eig
century - in the provinces as well as, predictably, in Lo
Early in the nineteenth century, the movement to aboli
31 Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes towards Race (London, 1971), ch

discussion of the 'sciences' of craniometry and phrenology.
32 Introductions to what has now become a considerable literature in
Macleod, 'Passages in Imperial Science: From Empire to Commonwealth'
Hist., iv (1993); Richard Drayton, 'Science and the European Empires', J
and Commonwealth Hist., xxiii (1995).
33 Frederick Dealtry Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa
1922), 618. Such sentiments, which were a commonplace of the day, made
raising appearances: see, for example, J. A. Cramb, The Origins and Destiny of
Britain and Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1915).
34 Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Impe
England, 1717-1785 (Cambridge, 1995).
slave trade and slavery generated an extraordinary degree of

popular support that had a unifying effect across class and
county.35 Recent research has drawn attention to the massive
scale of missionary activity promoted in the nineteenth century
by a society that was, supposedly, becoming increasingly secular,
and the extent to which work among the heathen upheld Christian
values at home.36 Images of empire and the imperial ideal sub-
sequently entered the British soul and influenced its character,
not only through novels and the popular press, as is well known,
but through museums, exhibitions, advertisements, theatre,
radio, film and sport, and through the unashamedly ideological
content of much of the educational curriculum, not least in
history.37
This heightened consciousness of empire was not just a passing
phenomenon, a phase of jingoistic emotion that was inflated
during the Anglo-Boer War and punctured by the barbed wire
of the Somme. Patriotic displays, political oratory and media
invocations continued to touch the imperial button. However, far
from being free-floating images appealing increasingly to nostal-
gia, these representations were expressions of tangible realities,
whether in the business world or in the departments of state that
implemented government policy. Economic ties between Britain
and the empire remained strong from the First World War right
down to the 1950s; the political commitment to empire remained
firm and bipartisan. Empire Day was celebrated to the end
because the empire was a material force that still mattered.
III
The emergence of the nation-state at home was accompanied by

the creation of different kinds of states abroad: those produced
35 Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in

Comparative Perspective (London, 1986).
36 Andrew Porter, '"Cultural Imperialism" and Protestant Missionary Enterprise,
1780-1914', Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xxv (1997).
37 Reba N. Sofa, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of
an English Elite, 1870-1930 (Stanford, 1994); John. W. MacKenzie, Propaganda and
Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester, 1984).
This is an appropriate point to pay tribute to the series of complementary studies on
the social and cultural history of empire edited by MacKenzie and published by
Manchester University Press.
by colonial rule.38 Where white settlers became numer

dominant, colonial rule made peoples out of new state
indigenous societies remained the basis of government
was fashioned from existing peoples. Much recent histo
ing has tended to assume, in both cases, that colonial go
enjoyed comprehensive powers, having the capacity to
indigenous economies and to create ethnicity - to not
widely cited examples. Yet the capacity itself is often
granted:39 matters of high policy are now thought to be t
and too remote to merit detailed attention; colonial adm
is considered to be a dry and dated subject; constitutio
died many years ago.40 It is therefore worth re-emphas
ought to be a commonplace: empire was an act of in
involving the mobilization of economic resources; i
political intervention to create and protect property
control transactions costs, to shape co-operative inter
and to manage opposition. Accordingly, there is a case i
for restoring the 'imperial factor', as it used to be ca
position of prominence in the history of states th
independent.
This claim presents a challenge to the historiograph
ex-colonial nation-state, which is bound up with the ac
of independence and with the need, accordingly, to
imperial influences, or at least to shape them to fit a
mould.4' The aim here is not to restore an older style o
that treated the history of dominions and dependenc
being outgrowths of broadly progressive imperial infl
assigned a low priority to other themes, where it did n
them altogether. However, the steady reduction to th
38 And were sometimes helped into being by British influence, as in
South America. On the relationship between the state, the nation an
grande, see David Brading, 'Nationalism and State-Building in Latin
History', Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv, xx (1994).
39 As C. A. Bayly has observed: see his 'Returning the British to
History: The Limits of Colonial Hegemony', South Asia, xvii (1994).
40 And lies buried in older and largely unread texts. However, constit
have now come to the fore as a result of movements towards devolution and new
regional economic groupings, and this would seem to be the right moment for new
researchers to reinvigorate the subject. See, for example, the stimulating study by
Peter Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians be a Sovereign People? (London,
1992). A parallel literature on Australia has been generated by the debate over the
replacement of the monarchy by a republic.
41I am in accord here with Philip Buckner, 'Whatever Happened to the British
Empire?', Jl Canadian Hist. Assoc., iv (1993).
elimination of an imperial perspective from an emerging national

history.since the 1950s has brought costs as well as benefits.
These can be seen especially in the growing provincialism that is
the inevitable counterpart of the search for a national identity.42
Historians of India know little of Africa and vice versa; historians
of Australia and New Zealand rarely make cross-references; his-
torians of Canada have ceased, typically, to look beyond North
America. In a world that is visibly shrinking, this is paradoxical,
to say the least. Yet the issues presented by globalization have
still to stimulate a response from historians on the international
scale required, and the understandable fear of being caught writ-
ing, in effect, a form of imperial history may have helped to deter
the attempt. Fifty years on, however, it ought to be possible
to restore the international and essentially imperial dimension
to national history without installing its former accompanist,
deference, too.
In what used to be called the white empire, where states were
first claimed and then populated, time and resources have enabled
a rich national historiography to raise its own flag of independ-
ence. As if acknowledging defeat, imperial historians have alloc-
ated less space and weight to Canada, Australia and New Zealand
in the history of the empire, despite their immense importance,
and have migrated to the still-developing states of India, south-
east Asia and Africa, where much work remains to be done.43 In
doing so, they have missed the emergence of new approaches
that have caused national schools of historical writing to be ques-
tioned from within.44 The story of the welding of the settler
nation has been riven by the emergence of disharmonious themes,
such as region, class and gender; more important still, it has been
confronted recently by the need to take account of what are now
42 There has been little discussion of this point. An exception is Donald Denoon,
'The Isolation of Australian History', Hist. Studies, xxii (1986-7). See also n. 41 above.
43 The indigenization of Canadian and Australian history has reached the point
where it is scarcely studied elsewhere. When measured by the indices of trade,
investment and migration, the British connection with Canada, Australia and New
Zealand was so strong that it is hard to see how its demotion can be justified. For a
fuller statement see Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, i, ch. 8.
44 And has caused considerable anguish. See, for example, Michael Bliss, 'Privatizing
the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada', Jl Canadian
Studies, xxvi (1991); Veronica Strong-Boag, 'Contested Space: The Politics of
Canadian Memory', Jl Canadian Hist. Assoc., v (1994); Stuart Scott, Travesty of
Waitangi: Towards Anarchy (Dunedin, 1995); Geoffrey Blainey, All for Australia
(North Ryde, NSW, 1984).
referred to as the 'First Nations'.45 Although the

revisionism is still in its early stages, it has already en
significantly modified the familiar and once rather co
story of the rise of the white, male, settler nation. M
claims have transformed the historiography of New
recent years;46 the new history of Australian aborigin
ning to have a similar effect;47 there is a parallel tre
study of Indians and Inuit in Canada.48 However, eve
of recent studies deal with these events entirely within
framework, thereby conveying the impression tha
unique. Consequently, Maoris, Aborigines, Indians
remain subordinated to a historical tradition that pur
emancipate them. An understanding of the imper
would remove this false sense of isolation, open new p
for comparative studies of both settler communities an
ous peoples, and underline the widespread and growin
ance of non-national affiliations in a world divided for
nation-states. It would also avoid the needless dupl
effort whereby, to take just one example, historia
Nations discover for themselves the pitfalls of oral traditi
out referring to the very considerable literature on t
produced by specialists on Africa during the last forty
45 Gail C. Brant, 'National Unity and the Politics of Political History

Hist. Assoc., iii (1992).
46 Among many contributions, see James Belich, The New Zealand W
Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Oxford, 1986); Anne Salmond,
First Meetings Between Maoris and Europeans, 1642-1722 (Wellingto
Fairburn, The Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Foundation of Modern
Society, 1850-1900 (Auckland, 1989). The best way of following this
through the pages of the New Zealand Jl Hist.; Erik Olssen, 'Where to
Reflections on the Twentieth-Century History of Nineteenth-Century
New Zealand Jl Hist., xxvi (1992), provides a helpful entry into the lit
47 A major turning point, though it took a long time to turn, was th
of the journal Aboriginal Hist. in 1976. The issues are discussed in A
Studies, especially in the 1990s. An indication of the importance of the
writing a new form of indigenous history is provided by the distingui
historian, Noel G. Butlin, who produced Economics and the Dream Time: A
History (Cambridge, 1993), after a career devoted to the application
economics to the study of the growth of Australia's modern sector in t
and twentieth centuries. A key work on land rights is Henry Reynold
the Land (Ringwood, Victoria, 1987).
48 George E. Sioui, For an Amerindian Autohistory (1989); Olive Patr
Canada's First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from the Earliest
also the survey by Robin Brownlie and Mary-Ellen Kelm, 'Desper
Absolution: Native Agency as Colonialist Alibi?', Canadian Hist. Rev.,
Seen from an imperial perspective, Canada, Australia and New

Zealand were designed to be developmental states on the British
model. Greater Britain was to produce good Britons, and, if
possible, better Britons. The ideal colony of settlement was to be
a suitably docile copy of the home country, though one assisted,
of necessity, by social engineering. The ethic of individualism
associated with frontier societies was a reality, but the privatiz-
ation of rights that accompanied the expansion of settlement was
inseparable from the growth of the state and the public agencies
needed to define and enforce individual claims.49 The 'noble
dowry', as Charles Dilke called Britain's generosity in giving
settlers other people's land, was the basis of the colonial economy,
and was intended to sustain a class of gentry and supportive
yeomen. Missionary influence was enlisted in the tasks of holding
settlers to the faith and of 'Anglicizing' those who had not been
fortunate enough to emigrate from the British Isles.50 Social con-
servatism was linked to constitutional liberalism. Responsible
government, when conferred, was entrusted to property-owners;
land values played a correspondingly important part in colonial
politics. New urban elites and new economic activities were tied
into the political system by their property rights and growing
wealth, and were expected to learn the arts of imitation and
deference in a multitude of ways, from the introduction of a local
honours system to the cultivation of attitudes of self-deprecation
summed up in the cruel - but perfectly formed - concept of
cultural cringe.51
The broad tendency of the national histories of Canada,
Australia and New Zealand is to show how and when this intended
duplication was modified by the settlers and their environment
to produce separate states and, eventually, nations. The revision
is a necessary one, but it has led to an over-correction that is
49 Alastair Davidson, The Invisible State: The Formation of the Australian State,
1788-1901 (Cambridge, 1991), traces the shift from autocracy to local self-
government, emphasizing the role of lawyers in masterminding the construction of a
strong and unresponsive state in the second half of the nineteenth century.
50 The term came into use in the late eighteenth century, initially with reference
to French settlers in British North America and Afrikaners in southern Africa: see
James Sturgis, 'Anglicisation at the Cape of Good Hope in the Early Nineteenth
Century', Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xi (1982).
51 The phrase is generally attributed to A. A. Phillips, The Australian Tradition
(Melbourne, 1958). For one of many case studies, see Bruce Knox, 'Democracy,
Aristocracy and Empire: The Provision of Colonial Honours, 1818-1870', Australian
Hist. Rev., xxv (1992).
now largely unnoticed and is therefore scarcely quest

the simplest check-list shows, a variety of evidence att
continuing vitality of the imperial connection long aft
sible government and dominion status had been c
Canadian confederation in 1867 led to an increase in Britain's
economic influence; Australia and New Zealand were integrated
more closely as economic satellites in the late nineteenth century,
even as they moved towards dominion status.52 Recent work has
shown that the monarchy remained a powerful influence, not just
as a popular symbol, but as a force shaping the constitution and
the law.53 Its associate, British liberalism, promoted administrat-
ive reform and infused the ethos of public servants in Canada in
the nineteenth century.54 In the private sphere, the continuing
importance attached to the British connection by colonial business
interests has been established,55 and the enduring significance
of English culture for settler elites confirmed.56 Moreover, the
growth of colonial nationalism proved to be compatible with the
imperial connection, and could even reinforce it.57 Hard-headed
calculations, whether about defence needs in the case of Australia
or concern about US protectionism in the case of Canada, gener-
ated considerable interest in imperial federation in the late nine-
teenth century; the creation of an imperial economic bloc drew
all the dominions closer to Britain in the 1930s; the two World
Wars heightened the sense of mutual interest and solidarity;
52 For an attempt to re-emphasize the importance of these links in the wider context
of imperial history see Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, i, ch. 6; ii, ch. 8.
53 David E. Smith, The Invisible Crown: The First Principle of Canadian Government
(Toronto, 1995).
54Ken Rasmussen, 'Administrative Reform and the Quest for Bureaucratic
Autonomy', Jl Canadian Studies, xxix (1994). Allen Greer and Ian Radforth (eds.),
Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto,
1992) emphasizes the role of Benthamite thinking on the creation of the Confederation.
55Judith Teichmann, 'Businessmen and Politics in the Process of Economic
Development: Argentina and Canada', Canadian JI Politics, xv (1982); Michael Bliss,
A Living Profit: Studies in the Social History of Canadian Business, 1883-1911 (Toronto,
1974); W. D. Rubinstein, 'The Top Wealth Holders of New South Wales, 1817-
1939', Australian Econ. Hist. Rev., xx (1980).
56 See, for example, the studies surveyed by Elwood Jones, 'English Canadian
Culture in the Nineteenth Century: Love, History and Politics', Jl Canadian Stud.,
xxv (1990); also Patrick A. Dunae, Gentlemen Emigrants: From the British Public
Schools to the Canadian Frontier (Vancouver, 1981).
57 John Eddy and Deryck Schreuder (eds.), The Rise of Colonial Nationalism (Sydney,
1988); Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand's Search for National Identity
(Wellington, 1986); also his, The Native Born: Origins of New Zealand Nationalism
(Palmerston North, 1986).
international economic ties, as we shall see later, remained robust

for much longer than is often allowed. But the notion of a Greater
Britain extended beyond these examples of formal relations to
include family ties and popular pride in being part of the empire.58
These sentiments were felt, strongly and widely, at least down
to 1945.59
Considered as a whole, the decisive break, as far as Australia
and New Zealand were concerned, and, arguably, even in the
case of Canada, did not occur until the 1950s.60 Effective decolon-
ization therefore occurred at the moment when the remaining
colonies were also securing their release from empire. Whether
conjuncture or coincidence, the similarity of timing passes unre-
cognized in studies of decolonization. It provides further grounds
for supposing that the historical links between Britain and the
white empire should occupy a larger place in the literature than
they now do, and suggests in particular that the current debate
over nationality and identity in all three countries would benefit
from paying closer attention to the consequences of the relatively
recent severance of the ties that once bound.
Elsewhere, in the absence of significant numbers of white
settlers, the empire assumed a different character. Where First
Nations were the only nations, the white representatives of empire
formed a self-conscious ethnic minority, though one with purpose
and power. In both cases, state-building required revenues, and
revenues could be raised only by predatory means or by develop-
ment. The revenue-raising imperative links the state and the
economy, and suggests a way of rewriting colonial history so that
it can be connected both to the developments in British history
referred to earlier and to new research into indigenous history.
However, in the absence of settlers, policy-makers were obliged
to rely upon indigenous societies, and this distinction led to a
different set of strategies for mobilizing resources and maintaining
order. In these circumstances, it was often possible to harness
58 The white population of Australia and New Zealand remained almost exclusively
British in origin until well after the Second World War.
59 See, for example, E. R. Forbes and D. A. Muise (eds.), The Atlantic Provinces
in Confederation (Toronto, 1993). James Belich observes that official communications
between New Zealand and Britain were more combative and less deferential from the
1850s to the 1870s than they were from the 1900s to the 1940s: James Belich, Making
Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders (London, 1996), 449.
60 For a recent case study, see Christopher Waters, The Empire Fractures: Anglo-
Australian Conflict in the 1940s (Melbourne, 1996).
existing revenue-raising instruments. This starting

a way of tracing the extension of the military-fi
domestication abroad, and its subsequent evolution
of India, for example, the export model took over
counterparts in the eighteenth century, expanded
mid-nineteenth century, but faltered thereafter a
ran into difficulties.61 A comparable approach has
states of this type were established in Africa early in
century.62 The Indian case illustrates the export of
cern; the African example deals with its revival abr
the metropolitan prototype had been transformed
modernizing state.
Sooner or later, however, governors throughout
empire faced the problem of engineering the tran
predatory to developmental policies. Revenue ne
the change, whether they were driven by populat
rising expectations, external pressures, a re-definition
izing mission or budgetary imperatives. At this p
rule faced its greatest challenge before the final ac
tion: how to shift to a policy of development w
control over the potentially destabilizing socio-po
that followed in its train. In non-democratic states, where rulers
lacked legitimacy and direct political accountability, the strategy
typically involved giving subject peoples a stake in the colonial
enterprise by drawing them into export production, whether as
independent farmers or as wage-labourers. Since this aim could
only be achieved by external borrowing to provide the necessary
social overhead capital, debt service became a new and increas-
ingly important burden on public revenues and a key element in
balancing the budget and maintaining political stability. In this
way, colonial rule became, directly or indirectly, a large gamble
on the success of international trade. This is not to claim that
continued economic prosperity would have kept the empire afloat
in perpetuity. A much more likely hypothesis is that economic
development was incompatible, in the long run, with colonia
rule. What can be said, however, is that effective decolonization
61 See C. A. Bayly, 'The British Military-Fiscal State and Indigenous Resistance:
India, 1750-1820', in Stone (ed.), Imperial State at War; also his, 'Returning the
British to South Asian History'. For an analysis of the consequences of increasing
demands for tribute, see Michael Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the
Residency System, 1764-1857 (Oxford, 1991).
62 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, ii, ch. 9.
occurred at a point either when development had become success-

ful, as in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, or when it was
insufficiently advanced to contain countervailing forces, as in Asia
and Africa.
The shift from predatory to developmental policies is a good
starting point for considering the emergence of a new style of
colonial history aimed at understanding power in the colonial
state. One line of enquiry involves reviving the study of official
policy and action. Colonial governments were authoritarian in
conception, if often merely paternal in daily practice. What they
did mattered, even though (as we now know) there were sizeable
limits to what they understood and could achieve. Where 'back-
ward' peoples were concerned, the 'duty of care' required inter-
vention - first to pacify and then to improve. The shift to
policies of development necessarily enhanced the role of govern-
ments, because private enterprise was often unwilling to invest
on the scale required and because there were far fewer 'ideal
prefabricated collaborators'63 present than in the colonies of white
settlement. Colonial rulers (and in some cases settlers too) may
have been escaping from an urban, industrial world that they
sometimes feared and often despised, but they were not fleeing
from all forms of capitalism, and they carried abroad a long and
strong domestic tradition of improving the land while preserving
social order.64 In the poorer parts of the empire, economic devel-
opment with limited supplies of private capital caused colonial
governments to become investment agencies and involved them
in codifying and often manipulating land and labour markets, as
well as in improving the infrastructure and associated public
works. Even where small farmers remained the basis of export-
crop production, governments followed where they did not always
lead, and were obliged to regulate or otherwise manage the con-
sequences of changes in land-holding, the division of labour and
the monetization of the economy. Many of the subjects derived
from these themes have long ceased to arouse interest; others
have scarcely been looked at at all.65
63 R. E. Robinson, 'Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch
for a Theory of Collaboration', in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds.), Studies in
the Theory of Imperialism (London, 1972), 124.
64 This argument should be related to Terence Ranger, 'The Invention of Tradition
in Colonial Africa', in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of
Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), esp. 220.
65 Colonial legal history is one topic that has been signalled but scarcely explored;
money, in all its dimensions, is another. Some signposts can be found in: Kristin
(cont. rn p. 223)
One subject that has attracted attention recently is inter

through coercion.66 Given the alien and undemocratic n
colonial governments, force was an essential and visible
of the colonial presence in both its predatory and develop
phases. As the military arm was being brought under state
and strengthened at home in the eighteenth century, so
also being extended through the foundation of a string of 'ga
states' overseas.67 Control over the means of destruction, com-
bined with a sharp reduction in the costs of coercion as a result
of technological progress, enabled vast extensions of colonial rule
to take place in the second half of the nineteenth century and -
a point that is less well emphasized - to be perpetuated in the
twentieth century. When the first sea-plane reached East Africa
in 1916, 'the natives stood spell-bound gazing upwards with arms
extended, eyes bulging and mouths agape', before they 'bounded
into the bush, terror lending wings to their progress'.68 If familiar-
ity reduced the fear, it never engendered contempt: air power
became the 'swift agent of government',69 extending the reach of
colonial authority at the very moment when its retreat before the
forces of nationalism is said, conventionally, to have begun.
Coercion, however, was a costly and often politically fraught
option; it was also increasingly inappropriate in states that were
adopting development strategies. Subtler forms of power had
therefore to be devised if the subordinate majority was to be
persuaded to accept the dominance of a small minority of foreign
rulers. Recent studies have revealed the important part taken by
the manipulation of symbols and the management of information
in this process, especially in cultivating a sense of ethnic superior-
ity. The elaboration of public ceremonial, imitating the re-created
panoply that surrounded the British monarchy in the nineteenth
century, elevated colonial rulers above their subjects and endowed
them with powers that, being largely spiritual, also had the merit
(n. 65 coit. )
Mann and Richard Roberts (eds.), Law in Colonial Africa (London, 1991); Jane
I. Guyer, (ed.), Money Matters (London, 1995).
66 Stimulated by interest in non-economic forms of oppression and by the revival
of military history; see above, n. 23.
67 Peers, Between Mars and Mammon.
68 Quoted in Byron Farwell, The Great War in Africa (New York, 1987), 239.
69 David Killingray, ' "A Swift Agent of Government": Air Power in British Colonial
Africa, 1916-1939', Jl African Hist., xxv (1984). See also David E. Omissi, Air Power
and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919-1939 (Manchester, 1990).
of being cheap.70 The agents of the Raj extended their control of

India by taking over, directing and improving sources of political
and military information, drawing on both indigenous scripts and
the expanding use of English as the new language of record-
keeping.7' Medical knowledge was deployed to justify the separa-
tion of the races by emphasizing the need for cordons sanitaires
to halt the spread of disease, to promote deference by imposing
distance, and, in the last resort, to prevent the white man from
'going native'.72 Environmental awareness was harnessed to con-
trol the use of forests, to create game reserves and to scale
mountains. Mastering nature involved mastering people too, and
entailed material consequences that far exceeded their symbolic
significance.73 In controlling the environment in the interests of
development, state intervention intruded on established property
rights, disturbed the economy of cultivators, hunters and gather-
ers, and provoked protest and resistance across the empire.74 In
promoting exports, colonial policy often crossed existing lines of
division within the labour force, whether between slave and free,
between seniors and juniors, or between men and women.75 The
70 Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds.), Invention of Tradition; Alan Trevithick, 'Some
Structural and Sequential Aspects of the British Imperial Assemblages at Delhi, 1877-
1911', Mod. Asian Studies, xxiv (1990).
71 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social
Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge, 1996).
72 David Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies: Disease, Medicine
and Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, 1988); also his,
Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India
(Berkeley, 1993). Roy Macleod, 'Passages in Imperial Science: From Empire to
Commonwealth', Jl World Hist., iv (1993); Drayton, 'Science and the European
Empires'.
73John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British
Imperialism (Manchester, 1988); William K. Storey, 'Big Cats and Imperialism: Lion
and Tiger Hunting in Kenya and North India, 1899-1920', Jl World Hist., ii (1991);
Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism (Cambridge, 1995); David Arnold and
Ramachandra Guha (eds.), Nature, Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental
History of South Asia (Oxford, 1995); David Arnold, The Problem of Nature:
Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford, 1996); Peter H. Hansen,
'Vertical Boundaries, National Identities: British Mountaineering on the Frontiers of
Europe and the Empire, 1868-1914', Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xxiv (1996).
74 See, for example, Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, 'State Forestry and
Social Conflict in British India', Past and Present, no. 123 (May 1989); T. N. Harper,
'The Politics of the Forest in Colonial Malaya', Mod. Asian Studies, xxxi (1997);
Donald S. Moore, 'Clear Waters and Muddied Histories: Environmental History and
the Politics of Community in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands', Jl Southern African
Studies, xxiv (1998).
75 Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine (Cambridge, 1987), explores
the pre-colonial antecedents of an event that occurred in 1949, towards the close of
the colonial period; Jean Allman, 'Rounding Up Spinsters: Gender and Unmarried
(cont. on p. 225)
best new work on these subjects has begun to alter b

content of colonial history and many stereotyped expec
about the effects of European rule.76
It is at this point that the view from above is being re
by a second perspective that looks at the colonial orde
below. One example of how an effective junction betw
two can be made is provided by a controversy that h
profound impact on the historiography of South Africa in
years. The debate concerns the mfecane, the term used
to the Zulu expansionist movement of the early nineteen
tury associated with the state-building activities of the le
leader, Shaka, and his successors.77 The historiography o
movement is saturated with representations, symbols and
tures that have reflected the dominant and subordinate p
and political programmes of the participants and their i
makers. The controversy has produced heroes and vil
each side of the frontier, and it remains a highly visible i
on the politics of the new South Africa today. Two conf
views of the emergence of the Zulu state have becom
lished. One emphasizes indigenous causation and local ini
in creating a Zulu identity; the other stresses the role of e
proto-colonial demands in causing the mfecane, as white s
penetrated the interior in search of labour supplies. Recen
however, has revealed new layers of causation on both si
is now apparent that the debate was not a modern invent
had its origins in the language and politics of the time.
also jointly produced: some European sources respect
defended Shaka; some African sources produced critical a
of his activities. An awareness of the subtlety of the
material has alerted scholars to its potential for moving
(n. 75 cont. )
Women in Colonial Asante', Jl African Hist., xxxvii (1996), shows how colo
had the unplanned consequence of increasing the opportunities open to wo
76 Some examples are given in nn. 74-5 above. Francesca Bray's impressiv
Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkel
provides an integrated account of technology, production, reproduction and
77 An exceptionally valuable introduction to the literature is now available
Hamilton (ed.), The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Souther
History (Pietermaritzberg, 1995). The comparative possibilities have so
wholly neglected, even though they lie readily to hand: see, for exampl
Parsonson, 'The Expansion of a Competitive Society: A Study in Nineteenth
Maori Social History', New Zealand Jl Hist., xiv (1980); Peter Cleave, 'T
State-Like Political Formations in New Zealand and Maori Society, 1
Jl Polynesian Soc., xcii (1983).
the analysis of representations. The result has been the appearance

of innovative and carefully crafted empirical contributions to the
history of both Africans and white settlers. One line of research
has shown that state-building among the Zulu was not a unique
event, but followed a chain of wider military and political move-
ments among the Nguni during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Another has proposed a revision of conventional
approaches to the settler presence by suggesting that the Great
Trek of the 1830s was not a conservative movement of Afrikaners
trying to escape modernity, but a pre-emptive strike launched to
take advantage of new opportunities thrown up by the mfecane.
Evidently, ethnicity and identity were neither fixed nor shapeless,
but were evolving continuously if also irregularly, as a result of
the inter-action, in hitherto unsuspected ways, of African and
European forces.78
A different example, in the private sphere, is provided by the
revival of interest in the history of Christian missions, reflecting
the renewed emphasis that historians have placed on religion in
nineteenth-century Britain.79 This research extends well beyond
the role of missionaries, female as well as male, as purveyors of
education and ethics of the kind that complemented the secular
interests of the colonial state, important though this was, and
now takes account of the means by which missionaries helped to
shape identities by codifying languages. But it has also gone on
to show how the Christian message was interpreted, selected and
applied by indigenous peoples, not least to strengthen their resist-
ance to colonialism. The African Church movement in Nigeria,
the Maori cult of Ringatu and the reception of Christianity
in south India are just three of many possible illustrations of
the exercise of local agency and initiative.80 Beyond the fragile
78 As were gender roles, too: see Sean Hanratta, 'Women, Marginality and the Zulu
State: Women's Institutions and Power in the Early Nineteenth Century', Jl African
Hist., xxxix (1998).
79 For example, Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and
British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1990).
80 J. D. Y. Peel, Aladura: A Religious Movement Among the Yoruba (London, 1968);
J. Bertin Webster, The African Church Movement Among the Yoruba, 1880-1901
(Oxford, 1964); Judith Binney, 'Maori Oral Narratives, Pakeha Written Texts: Two
Forms of Telling History', New Zealand Jl Hist., xxi (1987); also her, 'The Ringatu
Traditions of Predictive History', Jl Pacific Hist., xxiii (1988); Bronwyn Elsmore,
Mana from Heaven: A Century of Maori Prophets in New Zealand (Tauranga, 1989);
Susan Kaufman Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South
India (Cambridge, 1989).
Christian frontier lay the vast world of Islam, which un

considerable expansion under the protection of a Pr
empire - in ways that are only now beginning to be inco
into Western-orientated histories of imperialism.81
Studies of this kind, rooted in the locality and based on
ical research, have demonstrated that colonial rule, like W
influences generally, was negotiated as well as imposed.
Co-operation was the preferred strategy on both practical and
ideological grounds. Since colonial governments were never
required to submit to the discipline of the ballot box, legitimacy,
such as it was, had to be established by indirect political means.
Proconsuls reflecting on their achievements assumed that colonial
rule was also popular, but we cannot be sure whether the crowds
who waved Governor Cameron goodbye when he left Tanganyika
in 1931 were sorry that he was leaving (as he thought), or glad
to see the back of a ruler who made sure that the books were
balanced even during the world slump.82 The success, or at lea
the longevity, of colonial rule depended on striking a series o
deals with key interest groups and on incorporating or placatin
the less visible majority who stood behind them. Accordingly,
efforts were made throughout the empire to build up alliance
with local elites - whether princes, sultans, chiefs, or, increas
ingly, westernized elements who represented or influenced sign
ficant segments of the local population - and to harness diaspor
and other cultural networks that spread beyond colonial bounda
ies under the aegis of imperial rule.83 The resulting patron-clien
relationships, in which colonial rulers were clients as well
patrons, were an essential part of the construction of the colon
state and of the machinery of administration.
These networks are already familiar through the literature o
indirect rule and collaboration. However, they acquire new sign
ficance as agencies of the ethnic and regional groupings that oft
81 Bayly, Imperial Meridian, chs. 1-2; John O. Voll, 'Islam as a Special Worl
System', Ji World Hist., v (1994). Case studies include: Barbara D. Metcalfe, Islam
Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton, 1982); Gregory C.
Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge, 1985); C. N
Ubah, 'Colonial Administration and the Spread of Islam in Northern Nigeria', Musli
World, lxxxi (1991).
82 Sir Donald Cameron, My Tanganyika Service and Some Nigeria (London
1939), 280.
83 T. N. Harper, 'Globalism and the Pursuit of Authenticity: The Making of
Diasporic Public Sphere in Singapore', Sojourn: Jl Social Issues in Southeast As
xii (1997).
provide such an awkward fit with unitary states today, whether

by acting as centrifugal forces seeking local autonomy or by
perpetuating supranational loyalties.84 Colonial governments
formed states but they failed to form nations because they were
unable to create a public sphere that was large enough either to
weld local ethnic affiliations or to contain disaporas. Success,
moreover, carried the risk of promoting a degree of unity, if only
of a temporary kind, which could be turned against the colonizers,
as indeed eventually happened. Consequently, it is easy to see
why the maxim of divide-and-rule is commonly invoked to
explain the management strategy of colonial governments and to
account for the fragmentation that has so often accompanied
independence.
Without denying the force of this claim, it is also worth con-
sidering a complementary argument, namely that colonial govern-
ments devoted much energy to uniting indigenous people so that
they might be ruled more effectively. Nomads and small-scale,
scattered or remote societies were the ultimate administrative
nightmare because they could not readily be counted or taxed.
Larger units, providing they were not strong enough to be
threatening, could be governed more easily. Consequently, the
process of subduing, classifying and 'civilizing' indigenous
peoples often helped to give them a stronger sense of identity
than they had before. Chief Commissioner Elliot's finest achieve
ment in India, so he thought, was to constrain and consolidate
the 'warlike' Nagas in the 1880s.85 In Africa, existing polities,
such as Buganda and Asante, were endorsed, and newer ones
solidified, as in the case of the Yoruba, or even created, as were
the Luba in the Belgian Congo. Instability in post-colonial states
has arisen not just from the fragmentation of pre-colonial ties,
but from political inequalities that colonial rule either endorsed
or created.
The broad outcome of this research has been to increase the
importance attached to ethnicity, both as an aid in constructing
colonial states and as an obstacle to nation-building today. At the
84 The most recent statement is Bruce J. Berman, 'Ethnicity, Patronage and the
African State: The Politics of Uncivil Nationalism', African Affairs, xcvii (1998),
though it should be noted that the older literature dealing with big men, brokers and
gate-keepers, is also relevant.
85 Peter Robb, 'The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An
Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s', Mod. Asian Studies, xxxi (1997)
256-7.
same time, it is also easy to see how questions of cultural

and political control can be linked to problems of ec
development, thus holding out the prospect of producin
and more integrated account of the colonial experien
for example, the question of taxation, which was fundam
colonial rule everywhere, yet is currently an unfash
research topic.86 Acceptance of taxation, like the adoptio
currency needed to pay it, symbolized submission to col
and conversion to the ethic of improvement. As fiscal
was a moral imperative for colonial governments, so
taxation was a civilizing discipline for individual sub
Equally, the operation and effectiveness of the tax
depended on extending the arm of government, not just
the formal administrative machinery, but also by connectin
cials to the network of local brokers and clients who made colonial
rule work. Evidently, too, tax-gathering was vital to state rev-
enues, and the incidence of taxation had a direct bearing on
incentives and living standards. Images of colonial peoples were
related to these indices of utility and conformity to colonial prior-
ities. After proving their loyalty during the rebellion of 1857,
Punjabis had a consistently good press and regular employment
in the Indian Army, which, with farming incomes, helped them
to pay their taxes.87 On the other hand, the defiant Tiv of central
Nigeria resisted Islam, Christianity and colonial tax-gatherers
alike, and finished up being classified as obtuse, primitive
pagans.88
These examples demonstrate that regional specialists writing
indigenous history have nothing to fear from a revival of colonial
history: the two are complementary. A greater cause for concern
arises from the widespread adoption of stereotypes that reduce
colonial policies and the colonial presence in general to acts of
oppression, assume that colonial power extended to the wholesale
invention of indigenous identities - and indeed history - and
imply that colonial subjects were helpless victims. Colonial rule
influenced ethnic identities and occasionally even fabricated them,
86 For further references, see Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, ii, 172-3,
178-9, 185-6, 200, 204-11, 216, 224-6, 230-31.
87 Tan Tai Yong, 'Punjab and the Making of Pakistan: The Roots of a Civil-Military
State', South Asia, xviii (1995); David Omissi, 'Martial Races', War and Society,
ix (1991).
88 D. C. Dorward, 'Ethnography and Administration: A Study of Anglo-Tiv
"Working Misunderstanding" ', Jl African Hist., xv (1974).
but the idea that it was capable of manufacturing ethnicity in any

general sense is too simplistic. Such claims diminish the indigen-
ous past, minimize, without good cause, the continuities between
pre-colonial and colonial history, and ignore the interaction
between internal and introduced influences.89 If colonial subjects
are portrayed as victims, they cannot be agents too; if they cannot
be agents, their history becomes a truncated, one-dimensional
version of what we now know was a rich and diverse past.
This assumption can also become an unspoken excuse for evad-
ing some of the most difficult issues in researching pre-colonial
history - not least how to write it without necessarily adopting
the western canon.90 Postmodernists have made little progress in
this area, apart from discovering, belatedly, the respected school
of Indianists engaged in what is known as subaltern studies, a
local variant of the wider and established enterprise of trying to
write the history of non-elite groups whose voices have not been
heard and may not have been recorded.91 The difficult problem
is not to unmask European racism, but to acquire a better grasp
of the basis and purpose of colonial rule, and to relate both to
the indigenous history of subject peoples. Only if the truly hard
questions continue to be asked of the reconstruction of indigenous
89 Traditions are also invented and manipulated by those who seek to use them
against their oppressors or simply to gain an advantage. This is as true today as it
was during the colonial period. See Tipene O'Reega, 'Old Myths and New Politics:
Some Contemporary Uses of Traditional History', New Zealand Jl Hist., xxvi (1992).
90 The alternative is to work through the methodology of the indigenous histori-
ography, where this permits some depth of detail and chronology. See, for example,
Grant Hardy, 'Can an Ancient Chinese Historian Contribute to Modern Western
Theory? The Multiple Narratives of Ssu-ma Ch'ien', Hist. and Theory, xxxiii (1994),
though it is not clear that Ssu-ma's method was as different from Western 'modes of
historical writing' as Grant claims. But what happens where this is not possible? Do
we then jettison the greater part of the history that has been reconstructed since the
rise of Area Studies thirty years ago? For different perspectives on this problem, see
Finn Fugelstadt, 'The Trevor Roper Trap or the Imperialism of History', Hist. in
Africa, xix (1992); Jan Vansina, 'Lessons of Forty Years of African History', Hist. in
Africa, xxv (1992); Marilyn Strathern, Writing Societies, Writing Persons', Hist.
Human Sciences, v (1992).
91 Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, i-ix (Delhi, 1982-95). The work of the
subaltern studies group has been ardently promoted in recent years by influential
literary specialists, notably Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha.
Subalterns can now be sighted in places as varied as China and Puerto Rico, and seem
poised to invade Africa. Yet another alien category is to be clamped onto the continent
in the name of liberation. The liberators include those who, not so long ago, preferred
modes of production to modes of discourse. Some of the issues are discussed in the
'Forum on Subaltern Studies', Amer. Hist. Rev., xcix (1994).
history will it also be possible to envisage a new colo

of the kind that will be worth reading as well as writ
IV
The international ties between Britain and the diver

her empire have so far been implied or mentioned in
noted at the outset, however, they merit separate tre
to emphasize the nature and scale of the transnational
made the empire cohere, and to consider how they r
supranational influences known today as globalizatio
discussion of these influences has given rise to tw
debates: one concerns the extent to which establishe
and economic institutions have been affected by our
shrink the world;92 the other deals with the role of
in economic development.93 Since both debates ha
meeting place in the state, it is advantageous to b
together here because the nature of the state was deep
by imperial ties both at home and abroad. If 'bringin
back in'94 is important for solving development prob
evidently, it is also necessary to know whether th
sovereign states to act independently (or, in some inst
at all) is being compromised, whether from without b
ration of global influences or from within by ethnic
loyalties. In the imperial age, transnational connection
the emerging British state and helped to create new s
seas, whereas in the post-colonial world global influe
lenge national boundaries and identities. Some well-p
may be able to respond by reinforcing the authority of t
others may find that their nationality is eroded.
92 For a balanced introduction and further references, see Ian Clark
and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (
93 See, for example, Brian Van Arcadie, 'The Role of Institutions in
in Proceedings of the World Bank Conference on Development Econom
1989); also subsequent 'Comments'; Amartya Sen et al., 'Developme
The Roles of the State and the Private Sector', ibid. (1990), and the
'governance' in Edgardo Boeninger, 'Governance and Development: Issues and
Constraints', in Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Developnient
Economics (Washington, 1991), 267-87; Pierre Landell-Mills and Ismail Seragelding,
'Governance and the External Factor', ibid., 303-20; Denis-Constant Martin, 'The
Cultural Dimensions of Governance', ibid., 325-41.
94 The phrase is as important to the World Bank in the 1990s as 'getting prices
right' was in the 1980s. The original source was Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer
and Theda Skopol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985).
happens, the weakness of the centre may encourage the revival

of more localized affiliations that further sap the unity of the
state, and may even cause it to implode.
The international aspects of Britain's economic development
deserve emphasis in this connection, even if many of them are
well known to specialists, because the current emphasis on cul-
tural history has pushed them into the background. In the eight-
eenth century, the mainland colonies provided markets for new
manufactures; imports from the colonies shaped the tastes of
a new consumer society, especially in and around London;
re-exports of colonial produce boosted the distributive trades and
foreign earnings. In the nineteenth century, overseas markets and
resource pools grew increasingly important in the later stages of
the industrial revolution; the City of London became the financial
centre of the world; the pound sterling, backed by the Gold
Standard, emerged as the premier currency of international trade.
Britain's balance of payments came to depend on a complex
network of multilateral settlements that was underpinned by a
distinctive pattern of specialization between exporters of manu-
factures and primary producers, and the system as a whole was
linked to the expansion of empire and to the spread of influence
beyond it.95
One refinement of this general theme has investigated the rise,
in Britain, of transnational corporations, from the East India
Company in the eighteenth century to the multi-national banks,
investment groups and other vehicles of direct investment abroad
that appeared in the late nineteenth century.96 Another has pur-
sued the developmental consequences of this pattern of specializa-
tion for different parts of the empire. However, as in the case of
state formation, the imperial dimension of the economic history
of the empire has often been underestimated or reduced to a
stereotype. Historians of Australia, New Zealand and Canada are
interested mainly in tracing the development of the domestic
95 A fuller account of how Britain established the 'rules of the game' is given in
Cain and Hopkins, 'The Theory and Practice of Imperialism', 202-6.
96 Neils Steensgaard, Carracks, Caravans and Companies: The Structural Crisis in
European-Asian Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century (Copenhagen, 1979); Leonard
Blusse and Femme Gastra (eds.), Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading
Companies During the Ancien Regime (Leiden, 1981); Geoffrey Jones, British
Multinational Banking, 1830-1990 (Cambridge, 1993); Mira Wilkins and Harm
Schroter (eds.), The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy, 1830-1996
(Oxford, 1998).
economy and its increasing independence from Britain.9

remaining parts of the empire, the economic connection
been given prominence since the hey-day of the depe
thesis, when it was assigned the primary responsibility for c
underdevelopment.
In the case of the white empire and other countries dom
by European settlers, such as the Latin American rep
British capital played a major part in creating the state,
as in promoting agricultural and mineral exports. Withou
there could be no public guarantee of debt service and th
no prospect of sizeable public foreign borrowing; without
of capital, principally from London, development prospec
limited. As Old Corruption withered, so responsible gover
came to embrace the obligation to service external de
the colonists discovered that constitutional freedoms were accom-
panied by growing financial subordination. Diversification from
staple exports, as well as their growth in the first place, also owed
a great deal to the imperial connection, and especially to continu-
ing supplies of British investment.98 Moreover, economic ties
were maintained for much longer than is often assumed. Canadian
development, like the creation of Canada itself, relied on the City
at least down to 1914;99 the other dominions remained dependent
on the London capital market for some time after that, despite
having attained self-government.10° Canada's exports to Britain
97 The potential for writing a new comparative history of white settlement has been
recognized but not yet realised: see Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics
of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford, 1983); D. C. M. Platt
and Guido di Tella (eds.), Argentina, Australia, and Canada: Studies in Comparative
Development, 1870-1965 (1985); Carl E. Solberg, The Prairies and the Pampas: Agrarian
Policy in Canada and Argentina, 1880-1939 (Stanford, 1987); Jeremy Adelman, Frontier
Development: Land, Labour and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada,
1890-1914 (Oxford, 1994).
98 On staple theory and more recent approaches, see M. H. Watkins and H. M. K.
Grant (eds.), Canadian Economic History: Classic and Contemporary Approaches
(Toronto, 1993); Graham D. Taylor, 'Restructuring Canadian Business History: A
Review Essay', Jl Canadian Studies, xxvi (1991-2); C. B. Schedvin, 'Staples and
Regions of Pax Britannica', Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xliii (1990).
99 The link between railways, City finance and Confederation can still be made,
despite recent attempts to install a wholly political interpretation: see P. J. Cain,
'Colonies and Capital: Some Aspects of Anglo-Colonial Financial Relations after 1850',
in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), Landowners, Capitalists and Entrepreneurs: Essays for Sir
John Habakkuk (Oxford, 1994); D. C. M. Platt and Jeremy Adelman, 'London
Merchant Bankers in the First Phase of Heavy Borrowing: The Grand Trunk Railway
of Canada', Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xviii (1990).
100 Further references are given in Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, ii, ch. 6;
Cain, 'Colonies and Capital'.
helped to service her loans from the City and to settle her trade
deficit with the United States long after the First World War.
Indeed, it was not until the late 1940s, after the failure of Britain's
experiment with convertibility, that Canada faced the prospect
of suffering 'the dreadful loss of the British market' and turned
decisively towards the United States. 101 It is clear, too, that Britain
remained Australia's main trading partner and supplier of foreign
capital right down to the 1960s; it was only in the 1950s that
Robert Menzies began reluctantly to formulate an alternative
policy that eventually took Australia into the orbit of the United
States and the dollar. 102 New Zealand remained tied to the 'mother
country' for even longer.103
Elsewhere in the empire, states were also created at least partly
to establish security for foreign borrowing and to guarantee the
repayment of loan interest. There, too, British trade and finance
remained dominant down to the end of World War II and often
beyond. India began a process of diversification after 1947, but
the results were slow to appear; other colonies experienced a
'second colonial occupation'104 that bound them to the Sterling
Area and its associated patterns of trade until the close of the
1960s. When the parting of the ways came, many smaller, poorer
ex-colonies were unable to strike out successfully on their own.
Their problem today is not that they have been impoverished by
international trade, as used to be widely claimed, but that they
have been bypassed by trade and investment flows that move
increasingly among the larger, richer countries.
Mass movements of people accompanied movements of goods
and finance. If capital 'knows no frontiers', neither did migrants,
at least in the imperial age. The combination of the two created
new societies, new states and, inevitably, new boundaries too, as
101 B. W. Muirhead, 'The Politics of Food and the Disintegration of the Anglo-
Canadian Trade Relationship, 1947-1948', Jl Canadian Hist. Assoc., ii (1991); also his
'Britain, Canada and the Collective Approach to Freer Trade and Payments, 1952-57',
Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xx (1992). The quotation is from the Economist,
30 June 1951, cited in Muirhead, 'Britain, Canada', 123.
102 David Lee, 'Australia, the British Commonwealth, and the United States, 1950-
1953', Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xx (1992).
103 John Singleton, 'New Zealand, Britain and the Survival of the Ottawa
Agreement, 1945-77', Australian Jl of Politics and Hist., xliii (1997). I am grateful to
John Singleton for discussing some of the wider implications of his work with me.
104 D. A. Low and J. M. Lonsdale, 'Towards the New Order, 1945-63', in D. A.
Low and Alison Smith (eds.), The Oxford History of East Africa, 3 vols. (Oxford,
1963-76), iii, 12-16.
people migrated outwards from the centre to the e

beyond, and as labour was moved into and around the
from western Africa to the New World, from China
East Asia, from India to East Africa. In the case of Britain,
research has revealed who these migrants were, where they came
from and where they went.105 We know, too, that they con-
structed new identities for themselves without discarding their
old personae. Quite where the balance between these multiple
identities was struck is less certain, though since the problem has
been addressed more from a national than from an imperial
perspective, there is a case for suggesting that we may have lost
sight of the shared values that settler societies and some indigen-
ous elites held in common.
These values can be considered, in the language of today, as
marking the emergence of a 'global civil society','06 albeit one
that was largely a projection of Britain overseas. When a purely
English empire ceased to exist with the loss of the American
colonies, attempts were made to recreate it by trying to 'Anglicize'
others.'07 This policy was scaled down and in places aband-
oned as the difficulties of implementing it became apparent.
Nevertheless, a cosmopolitan elite modelled on the British
example emerged in the nineteenth century. This development
could be seen in the diffusion of a gentlemanly code of honour,
which was an essential feature of business transactions across
continents and cultures, in the adoption of London fashions by
wealthy urban families from Vancouver to Sydney, in the expo
of political ideas, especially constitutional liberalism and the eth
of improvement, and in the spread of the English language, th
emblem of national achievement that set standards of progres
for the rest of the world. This archetypal British mix was exempli-
fied in the constitutions of colonies that acquired 'responsible'
government and, even more so, in the social conservatism of the
o05 Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of North America: An Introduction (New York
1986); also his, Voyagers to the West (New York, 1986). Recent work on the nineteen
century is examined by Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigratio
and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861-1901 (Cambridge, 1985); Walt
T. K. Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914
(Bloomington, 1992).
106 Ronnie D. Lipschutz, 'Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global
Civil Society', Millennium, xxi (1992).
107 As mentioned earlier: Sturgis, 'Anglicisation at the Cape of Good Hope'.
political elites, at least until recently,108 while in the dependencies,

Britain's cultural imprint was placed on the westernized elites
who acted as intermediaries between rulers and ruled. These
influences extended to areas outside the formal empire as we
The needs of wealthy consumers in Argentina were met by ope
ing a branch of Harrods in Buenos Aires in 1912.109 Across t
border, the eminent Brazilian politician, Joaquim Nabuc
declared that 'when I enter the Chamber of Deputies I am entir
under the influence of English liberalism, as if I were worki
under the orders of Gladstone. This is really the result of m
political education: I am an English liberal in the Brazilian
Parliament'.110 Subservience of this order was as gratifying as
was exceptional, but the general sentiment was echoed elsewhe
and serves as a reminder of the extent to which Britain influenced
the character as well as the form of the international order
throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, at least to 194
The scale of these flows of goods, finance, migrants and idea
was greatly enhanced, from the mid-nineteenth century onwar
by technological improvements, notably railways, steamships
submarine cables, telegraph facilities and refrigeration, all
which tied the empire together more closely than before, cut t
cost of transactions and began to create, for the first time,
integrated world market.l" These innovations were pioneer
and for long dominated by Britain, as is well known. But signif
ant implications of these developments have yet to be fu
explored. One is the extent to which local officials, the 'men
the spot', were made more immediately accountable and broug
108 Ged Martin, Bunyip Aristocracy: The New South Wales Constitutional Debate
1853 and Hereditary Institutions in the British Colonies (London, 1986); Bruce Kno
'Democracy, Aristocracy and Empire: The Provision of Colonial Honours, 181
1870', Australian Hist. Studies, xxv (1992).
109 Roger Gravil, The Anglo-Argentine Connection, 1909-1939 (Boulder, 1985), 94
11 Richard Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, 1850-191
(Cambridge, 1968), 263. No date is given but the statement would have been m
in the early or mid-1880s.
1" Different perspectives on these developments can be found in Michael Ad
Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western
Dominance (Ithaca, 1989); also Michael Adas (ed.), Technology and European Overse
Enterprise (Aldershot, 1996); Roy Macleod and Deepak Kumar (eds.), Technology a
the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700-1947 (New Del
1995); Daniel Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and Internatio
Politics, 1851-1945 (New York, 1991); K. T. Livingston, 'Anticipating Federation
The Federalising of Telecommunications in Australia', Australian Hist. Studies, xx
(1994).
RACK TO THE FUTUTTRE 237
under greater central control; another is the way in whi

teenth-century developments were extended into the pre
tury and how, in the 1920s and 1930s, a new type of im
rivalry arose, as competing powers battled for contro
airways and airwaves of the world.112
Other innovations of comparable significance have yet
given prominence in either national or imperial histories
development of imperial postal services, for example, was
importance from the late nineteenth century onwards
effective conduct of business and for connecting emigra
their families in Britain at a time when telephones were
Postage stamps, moreover, had a symbolic importance m
only by coins and notes: they kept the monarch's pre
circulation and promoted a sense of unity across the em
further and more dramatic illustration of the economic,
and cultural consequences of improvements in communi
is provided by the way in which time was brought under
or, put another way, colonized.11 The transition from l
standard time occurred in Britain in the 1840s to meet the needs
of the railway timetable. The potential benefits of the spread of
communications technology throughout the world in the second
half of the century could not be realized unless time was standard-
ized: the noon gun was scarcely a sophisticated signal, and it was
112 The basic point is made in Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, ii, and
summarized on 310. An interesting recent case study is Robert Boyce, 'Canada and
the Pacific Cable Controversy, 1923-28: Forgotten Source of Imperial Alienation',
Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xxvi (1998).
113 Besides the two examples given here, there is scope for further work on the
standardization and spread of imperial measures in the nineteenth century (in opposi-
tion to the metric system introduced by the French Revolution). Britain's surrender
to the metric system in 1963 coincided with the end of empire and moves towards
entering the European Economic Community.
114 For one of the few studies of this subject, see Robert M. Pike, 'National Interest
and Imperial Yearnings: Empire Communications and Canada's Role in Establishing
the Imperial Penny Post', Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xxvi (1998).
115 Eric Pawson, 'Local Time and Standard Time in New Zealand', Jl Hist.
Geography, xviii (1992); Graeme Davison, 'Punctuality and Progress: The Foundations
of Australian Standard Time', Australian Hist. Studies, xxv (1992); also his, The
Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (Oxford, 1993). More
generally, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Place, 1860-1918 (London,
1983). Australia moved to standard time in 1895. The trend continued during at least
the first quarter of the twentieth century: Nigeria joined in 1920; Tanganyika in 1925.
The interesting question, which provides a bridge between colonial and indigenous
history, is how the innovation affected local concepts of time and time-keeping, on
which see Ivor Wilks, 'On Mentally Mapping Greater Asante: A Study of Time and
Motion', Ji African Hist., xxxiii (1992).
fired at different times in different places. The problem was

resolved in 1884, when an international conference agreed that
British Standard Time should be the point of reference for all
other time zones, and that Greenwich should become the zero
meridian. The consequences of this silent partition of the world,
which we now take for granted, were extraordinarily far-
reaching: they not only greatly increased the efficiency of interna-
tional business but enabled administrative services to be
co-ordinated too, thus assisting the imperial state to integrat
overseas subsidiaries more effectively. The growing availab
of clocks and watches also gave substance to statehood b
reminding inhabitants, in dominions and colonies alike, that
was no longer their own.
These examples are all indicative of the growth of a cohe
international order, but they also illustrate the extent to which
mindedness', as it would be termed today, was created, man
and financed by Britain. National frontiers were made good a
national identity was formed partly as a result of crossing the bou
aries of others. The imperial form of integration promoted
Britain reflected the pattern of specialization that characterized
modern age of empires: the exchange of raw materials for manu
tures funded and directed by one metropolitan centre. This patte
contrasts with the design of contemporary globalization. The
lines of integration that have developed in the second half of
twentieth century are a function of inter-industry trade. T
and notwithstanding the massive influence of the United States,
world economy is multi-centred, being driven by complemen
and competing financial centres, and by a multiplicity of tr
national corporations whose allegiance to different national bases
diluted by local and other affiliations - and may even be rootless
Financial instruments, such the Eurobond, are divorced from
nation-state; a new currency, the Euro, circulates in the vi
reality of Euroland; the pound sterling, one of the most endu
symbols of Great and Greater Britain, may not long survive
turn of the century. As the message has changed, so has the med
The English language has acquired an international life of its
and can no longer be read as a proxy for British interests; e-
unlike snail-mail, does not bear the stamp of monarchical author
116 Susan Strange, 'Finance, Information and Power', Rev. Internat. Studie
(1990); David G. Becker, et al., Post-Imperialism: International Capitalism a
Development in the Late Twentieth Century (London, 1987).
The main result of inter-industry trade has been to join

countries to one another and to promote new post-imp
symbolized by the North American Free Trade Agreem
the United States, Canada and Mexico, and by the E
Community. Such regional economic groupings inevit
threat to national sovereignty; they also stimulate loca
that may begin with chauvinism and may end by retr
sub-national loyalties.117 As English Canada embraces the A
way of life - a fate long averted by her ties to Britain
is forced into a final defence of its integrity.118 As Brita
less willingly, into Europe - a fate forestalled for centu
possession of the empire - so her own identity is called
tion. Plans for the devolution of authority come to th
only for the recognized components of the disunited king
for parts of England, too.119
As these trends unfold, they enable us to see more cl
modern empires end at least partly because they have s
purpose. By the middle of the twentieth century, the hist
of imperial integration was breaking down. International s
tion between modernizing states that supplied manufac
and capital, and backward states that supplied primary exp
ceased to be the engine of growth of world trade. Dev
states within the empire (notably Canada, Australi
Zealand) had sizeable manufacturing sectors and capital
their own, and could make effective the political independ
already possessed. A number of other states, tigers large a
were sufficiently far up the development ladder to ma
after independence, and now place their bets in the ris
international credit.120 But poorer states trying to follow
path of export-led growth were checked at a much earl
117 Countervailing tendencies are also present. Alan Milward has dra
to the role of national aspirations in the early stages of the movem
European integration: Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europ
(London, 1984).
118 Lawrence Martin, 'Continental Union', Annals Amer. Acad. Pol
Science, dxxxviii (1995).
119 For a recent discussion of some of these issues, see David Mar
Reckoning: Capitalism, State and Citizens (Cambridge, 1997), 186-203.
120 Further research may show that the 1930s were a turning point i
This period saw the growth of import-substituting manufactures, joint
the beginnings of independent capital markets in the advanced parts o
This hypothesis is advanced in Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialis
123, 131-2, 143, 153, 159-60, 169, 191-4, 238-9, 254-6, 262, 313.
development, as trade and financial flows were redirected towards

the advanced economies of Europe, North America and Japan. For
many of them, the gamble on international trade has failed, as in
the end it did for their colonial precursors.
The ensuing marginalization of large parts of the world has
had far-reaching political as well as economic consequences. The
removal of the imperial power, the main focus of discontent, and
the inability of new states to meet the expectations of their
subjects has led to disillusion with central governments, to the
strengthening of the regional and ethnic affiliations that flourished
under colonial rule, and to increasing competition among such
groups for control of the often diminishing resources at the
disposal of the state. The collapse of central authority is fre-
quently associated with the rise of warlordism - a term first
used to describe China in the years after 1911 and now applied
to parts of Africa and former Yugoslavia. The Manchus, the
Ottomans, the Habsburgs and the British all permitted or encour-
aged regional and ethnic groupings under their aegis, providing
they kept the peace and paid their taxes. As the age of empires
came to an end, liberation, accompanied by new global forces,
made it inevitable that issues of sovereignty and identity would
move to the top of the agenda.
The purpose of this article is not to attempt to displace the long

and estimable tradition of writing national history, but to show
that it is not designed to encompass substantial issues of world
political and economic development. The national tradition has
of course already been subjected to a process of disaggregation
that has produced sub-histories of localities, class and gender, to
name just three of many examples. But these specializations
seldom look beyond the history of the nation-state; typically,
they contribute to it by amplifying the existing text. International
history has also become a specialism with defined limits. Studies
of foreign policy and diplomacy are rarely traced to their domes-
tic roots and generally leave economic issues to others; studies
of economic development are more likely to project domes-
tic impulses abroad, but do so usually by omitting politics -
in the manner sanctioned by economists; studies of cultural
transmissions are only exceptionally allocated a sizeable

standard texts.
A case for reviving imperial history has been advanced here as
a way of overcoming these in-built limitations. When the empire
broke up, so did the cohesion of the subject. Faced with new and
compelling priorities, the need to write indigenous and national
histories, the centre could no longer hold.121 Admittedly, a large
number of scholars have produced excellent work on imperial
history in the period since decolonization, and examples of their
research have been cited here. With notable exceptions, however,
historians of empire have become regional specialists. This article
has suggested ways of arresting this process of continental drift
by showing how imperial history provides a means of understand-
ing some of the large problems facing today's world - from the
future of the nation-state to the prospects for world economic
development. At the same time, it ought to be apparent that this
agenda does not authorize a return to an old-style history of the
empire in which the white man conquered all, deservedly, and
the black man carried his bags, gratefully. There are new issues
to be discussed; there are also new ways of discussing them.
Making this case has also involved some criticism of the cur-
rently influential brand of cultural history associated with post-
modernism. The purpose was not to attack novelty, but to
encourage it by drawing attention to the manner in which fashion
imposes its own ephemeral conformities.122 As far as imperial
history is concerned, postmodernists have narrowed the range of
approved subjects to a limited number of cultural themes, and
their treatment of these is frequently flawed, unoriginal or
needlessly complex.123 Meanwhile, long-term issues affecting the
121 David Fieldhouse addressed this problem in his inaugural lecture (delivered in
1982): 'Can Humpty-Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the 1980s',
Jl Imperial and Commonwealth Hist., xii (1984).
122 As Oscar Wilde observed: 'It is only the modern that ever becomes old-
fashioned': 'The Decay of Lying', Intentions (London, 1891), 44.
123 Foucault, who was not especially interested in either colonialism or racism, has
been taken up enthusiastically by those for whom it is a major concern. B. Jewsiewicki
and V. Y. Mudimbe, for example, declare that Foucault's notion of 'epistemological
archaeology' is 'essential to current efforts to reclaim African history', though it needs
to be supplemented by the notion of 'fabula', borrowed from Umberto Eco and (if
Coplan's advice is followed) by the concept of 'auriture' too. Whether these recom-
mendations will amplify rather than muffle the voice of the oppressed is, however,
open to doubt. See V. Y. Mudimbe and B. Jewsiewicki, (eds.), 'History Making in
Africa', Hist. and Theory, Beiheft 32 (1993), 4-5; David B. Coplan, 'History is Eaten
Whole: Consuming Tropes in Sesotho Auriture', Hist. and Theory, Beiheft 32 (1993).
poverty of nations have ceased to be of prime concern to the

present generation of research students. Economic history, in
particular, has become detached from the history of colonial rule,
just as it has from broad interpretations of the emergence of the
British state. In doing so, it has also lost some of its appeal.
Indeed, anyone scanning the lists of doctoral theses in progress
today might be forgiven for thinking that the problem of poverty
had been solved. In reality, Marx has given way to Foucault
simply because material forces have ceased, momentarily, to be
ideas that matter.
The alternative prospectus laid out here draws on contempor-
ary issues to reinvigorate the study of the British empire and also
puts a case for reintegrating the sub-disciplines that currently
divide historical practice. The distinction drawn between predat-
ory and developmental states and empires was intended to make
this connection by suggesting ways of linking the economy and
the state, and by providing a mechanism for tracing their evolu-
tion. This starting point led to a consideration of issues of nation-
ality and international development, which were grouped, for
purposes of discussion, into three themes.
The first theme, the emergence of a British state, was essentially
a plea for integrating metropolitan and imperial history to ensure
that due weight is given to the role of the empire in creating a
sense of British nationality, and to extend the analysis beyond
representations and cultural artefacts to include the political and
economic dimensions of integration. The second theme, state-
building in the colonial context, related politics and economics at
the local level by connecting them to the revenue-raising function
of government. This priority determined the means of control
and the pattern of growth; it was used to unite and develop, as
well as to divide and rule. Seen from this perspective, empires
were conglomerates whose primary task was to manage multi-
ethnic groups. In areas of British settlement, the strategy of
management produced nations out of imposed states; elsewhere,
it imposed states on existing nations and peoples. Representations
of dominant and subordinate societies have a part to play in this
story, but they should not be allowed to dictate the text, still less
to replace it. The final theme, globalization, examined the interna-
tional connections between the imperial centre and its satellites.
The argument advanced in this connection was that the imperial
power promoted a form of cosmopolitanism that strengthened its
own sense of national identity, whereas the global fo

impinge on the world today have challenged and often
national institutions and identities. Regional and ethni
have grown in response to the decay of the imperial
once tolerated or encouraged them; they have been r
subsequently because they have become a form of
insurance against the penetrative consequences of
influences.
The great age of empires came to an end in the mid-twentieth
century, following a historic shift in the nature of international
specialization. The type of integration that had long linked
Europe to the rest of the world was replaced by new connections
that strengthened ties between the advanced industrial and post-
industrial states. In the post-imperial era, economic union
requires joint management, which in turn implies an erosion of
the long-established basis of national sovereignty. The issues
raised by these momentous developments call for a reappraisal of
their antecedents. No doubt there are ways of uncovering the
origins of present discontents, and indeed of writing world his-
tory, that point in directions other than the one marked out here.
But the tradition of arranging history so that it fits within national
borders surely needs to be revised. It is increasingly at variance
with the state of the world as it stands at the end of the twentieth
century and it captures only a part of the past that it seeks to
explain. A revitalized history of empires provides a powerful
means of encompassing and ordering the major themes that arise
within and beyond the nation-state. In doing so, it offers a chal-
lenge that should attract a new generation of researchers in the
century that is about to begin.
Pembroke College, Cambridge A. G. Hopkins

The Past and Present Society, Oxford University Press Past & Present

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Past and Present Society, Oxford University Press Past & Present

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Past and Present Society, Oxford University Press Past & Present

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Past and Present Society

Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History

BACK TO THE FUTURE:

At first sight, the timing of this prospectus is unpropitio

* This essay draws on some of the themes of my inaugural lecture as Smuts

only point of studying European imperialism is to unma

A start can be made by recognizing that the imperial experience,

generation of soothsayers and historians, just as it has in the past.

and location of political authority,4 and that the Un

and state-reforming movements in Europe. The inspiratio

peoples of the world.8 Other empires also expanded by developing

8 See, for example, S. A. M. Adshead, Central Asia in World History (Lond

to long-run development.'1 However, it should be sai

1O The literature is now extensive: Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional

the end of empire often because it had been reinforced by imper-

establishing the longevity of nationalist movements ar

One of the most striking features of the study of modern British

crisis, such as a world war, or in relation to particular develop-

13 C. A. Bayly, 'The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 1760-1830', Jl Imperial and

political elite that ensured stability and continuity by its ef

British way of life, pursuing progress with stability at home and

service,22 and by new work on military history,23 wh

served, usually to illustrate qualities of inferiority that co

31 Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes towards Race (London, 1971), ch

slave trade and slavery generated an extraordinary degree of

The emergence of the nation-state at home was accompanied by

35 Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery: British Mobilization in

by colonial rule.38 Where white settlers became numer

elimination of an imperial perspective from an emerging national

referred to as the 'First Nations'.45 Although the

45 Gail C. Brant, 'National Unity and the Politics of Political History

Seen from an imperial perspective, Canada, Australia and New

now largely unnoticed and is therefore scarcely quest

international economic ties, as we shall see later, remained robust

existing revenue-raising instruments. This starting

occurred at a point either when development had become success-

One subject that has attracted attention recently is inter

of being cheap.70 The agents of the Raj extended their control of

best new work on these subjects has begun to alter b

the analysis of representations. The result has been the appearance

Christian frontier lay the vast world of Islam, which un

provide such an awkward fit with unitary states today, whether

same time, it is also easy to see how questions of cultural

but the idea that it was capable of manufacturing ethnicity in any

history will it also be possible to envisage a new colo

The international ties between Britain and the diver

happens, the weakness of the centre may encourage the revival

economy and its increasing independence from Britain.9

people migrated outwards from the centre to the e

political elites, at least until recently,108 while in the dependencies,

under greater central control; another is the way in whi

fired at different times in different places. The problem was

The main result of inter-industry trade has been to join

development, as trade and financial flows were redirected towards

The purpose of this article is not to attempt to displace the long

transmissions are only exceptionally allocated a sizeable

poverty of nations have ceased to be of prime concern to the

own sense of national identity, whereas the global fo

Pembroke College, Cambridge A. G. Hopkins