Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has written and edited many books, including The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau and After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, both also published by Duke University Press.

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Empire in Question

Duke University Press

Contents

Foreword by Mrinalini Sinha................................................................................................................................................xiPreface A Note on the Logic of the Volume..................................................................................................................................xviiAcknowledgments............................................................................................................................................................xixIntroduction Imperial Optics: Empire Histories, Interpretive Methods.......................................................................................................11. Rules of Thumb: British History and "Imperial Culture" in Nineteenth-Century and Twentieth-Century Britain (1994).......................................................272. Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating "British" History (1997)............................................................................................................413. Thinking beyond the Boundaries: Empire, Feminism, and the Domains of History (2001).....................................................................................564. Déjà All over Again (2002)....................................................................................................................................685. When Was Britain? Nostalgia for the Nation at the End of the "American Century" (2003)..................................................................................776. Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories (2004).........................................................................................947. Gender, Colonialism, and Feminist Collaboration (2008, with Jean Allman)................................................................................................1068. Fearful Bodies into Disciplined Subjects: Pleasure, Romance, and the Family Drama of Colonial Reform in Mary Carpenter's Six Months in India (1995).....................1239. Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make "Lady Doctors for India," 1874–85 (1996)...............................................................................15110. Recapturing Jane Eyre: Reflections on Historicizing the Colonial Encounter in Victorian Britain (1996).................................................................17411. From Child Bride to "Hindoo Lady": Rukhmabai and the Debate on Sexual Respectability in Imperial Britain (1998)........................................................18412. Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury's "Black Man" and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy (2000)...........................................................................21413. India Inc.?: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Empire of Things (2001)........................................................................................................24114. New Narratives of Imperial Politics in the Nineteenth Century (2006)...................................................................................................25715. Getting Outside of the Global: Repositioning British Imperialism in World History......................................................................................275Afterword by C. A. Bayly...................................................................................................................................................293Notes......................................................................................................................................................................303Index......................................................................................................................................................................381

Chapter One

I cannot help thinking that in discussions of this kind, a great deal of misapprehension arises from the popular use of maps on a small scale. As with such maps you are able to put a thumb on India and a finger on Russia, some persons at once think that the political situation is alarming and that India must be looked to. If the noble Lord would use a larger map—say one on the scale of the Ordnance Map of England—he would find that the distance between Russia and British India is not to be measured by the finger and thumb, but by a rule. —Lord Salisbury (1877)

Historians have always been concerned with maps and mapping and British historians are certainly no exception. Because history writing in the West has been instrumental to the building of nation-states, historiography itself has become an institutionalized expression not just of national identity, but also of the geographical reach of national power. In the British context—where the very use of the term "British" denotes the coercive power of the English state to create a Greater Britain out of itself and the Celtic fringe—doing modern British history has implicitly meant accounting for what constituted Britain territorially and, not coincidentally, elaborating the territorial extent of British influence. While this preoccupation with geographical parameters may be attributed to Britain's insularity, it was also, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, a consequence of British imperial conquest and of the sense of historical mission that both motivated and sustained it. J. R. Seeler's The Expansion of England (1883) not only gave imperial history its "institutional life ... [and] respectability," but it helped to guarantee that the boundaries between the history of Great Britain and that of Greater Britain were clearly drawn.

Despite the fact that empire was believed to be "a determining fact in the life of both the metropolis and its dependencies," for almost a century the history of empire was treated as if it occurred on another planet, far away from England's "green and pleasant lands," disconnected in time and space from "the Mother Country"—that saccharine, stolid, and basically static imperial referent. It was not routinely the purview of conventional British historians; instead, it remained the territory of self-styled "imperial historians," the burra sahibs of the British historical establishment. It was often examined and interpreted from the vantage point of established university chairs in "imperial history," giving armchair imperialism a whole new meaning. Imperial history has historically been a kind of national subfield, albeit an important one, into which scholars who are not of the British Isles, and even some who are, wander at their peril. A. P. Thornton likened American students of Victorian imperialism to "tourists in an unfamiliar terrain," adding that "their academic forebears would as willingly have become Mexican citizens as have written books on the British Empire."

Until recently in historical terms, then, the rule of thumb in British history has been to map a set of quite differently imagined communities: "home," on the one hand, and "empire," on the other. "Home" itself was, of course, as falsely unitary as "empire," with England as the symbolic center and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland its "internal others." It is a testament to the power of a common racial heritage—and to the forces that...