How Empire Shaped Us

by Antoinette Burton, Dane Kennedy

Overview

Few historical subjects have generated such intense and sustained interest in recent decades as the history of empires. While historians have approached this subject in very different ways, their shared preoccupation with the British imperial experience-its institutions, ideas and impact on peoples around the world-has endured and given rise to a rich, varied, and influential body of historical scholarship. What accounts for this preoccupation? Why has it gained such purchase on the historical imagination? How has it endured as an active area of inquiry even as the empire it studies slips further into the past?

In seeking to answer these questions, this volume brings together some of the leading figures in the field, historians of different generations, different nationalities, different methodological and theoretical perspectives and different ideological persuasions. Each addresses the relationship between their personal development as historians of empire and the larger forces and events that helped to shape how the subject and how it is studied.

The result is a book that investigates the connections between the past and the present, the private and the public, the professional practices of historians and the political environments within which they take shape. This intellectual genealogy of the recent historiography of empire will be of great value to anyone studying or researching in the field of imperial history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474222976
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/28/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, USA. She has written widely on modern Britain and empire. Her most recent publications include A Primer for Teaching World History (2012) and Brown Over Black: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (2012).

Dane Kennedy is Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University, USA. His most recent publications include The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (2013) and The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (2005).

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors
Introduction

1. From Empire to India and Back: a Career in History - Thomas Metcalf (University of California at Berkeley, USA)
2. Seven Pivots Toward Empire - Wiliam Roger Louis (University of Texas, Austin, USA)
3. Empire from Above and from Below - John MacKenzie (University of Lancaster, UK)
4. Empire and Class: The Making of a History Boy - Richard N. Price (University of Maryland, USA)
5. Inside/Outside: A Non-Native Caribbeanist's Jourbaney - Bridget Brereton (University of the West Indies, Trinidad)
6. With and Against the Grain - Catherine Hall (University College London, UK)
7. In and Out of Empire: Old Labels and New Histories - Marilyn Lake (Melbourbane University, Australia)
8. An Education in Empire - Dane Kennedy (The George Washington University, USA)
9. A Child of Decolonisation - Philippa Levine (University of Texas, Austin, USA)
10. From South Asian Studies to Global History: Searching for Asian Perspectives - Shigeru Akita (University of Osaka, Japan)
11. Crooked Lines and Zigzags: From the Neocolonial to the Colonial - Mrinalini Sinha (University of Michigan, USA)
12. Some Intimacies of Anglo-American Empire - Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois, USA)
13. Homes and Native Lands: Settler Colonialism, National Frames, and the Remaking of History - Adele Perry (University of Manitoba, Canada)
14. Empire Made Me - Clare Anderson (University of Leicester, UK)
15. Paths to the Past - Tony Ballantyne (University of Otago, New Zealand)
16. Conversations with Caroline - Caroline Bressey (University College London, UK)
17. Dis-Oriented in a Post-Imperial World - Jonathan Saha (Bristol University, UK)

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"How Empire Shaped Us ... provides fascinating insights into the production of British imperial history at the intersections of the personal, political, and intellectual. As such, it offers a flavor of the personal investments, the embodied experiences, and the political passion that goes into intellectual labor, all of which get lost in the more traditional, historiographical accounts." - Victorian Studies

"At the heart of How Empire Shaped Us, then, is an ongoing effort to renew imperial history by unsettling it--to distance the field from its imperialist origins through the pursuit of methodological and perspectival pluralism." - Journal of World History

"This collection serves as a wonderful introduction to the broad field of British imperial history through the career-narratives of several generations of leading historians working on many different regions of the world. A valuable resource for students and scholars alike, it shows how the writing of imperial history was transformed in the aftermath of decolonization, and highlights the rich diversity of contemporary approaches to rewriting the history of the British empire." --Robert Travers, Cornell University, USA

"A beautiful, insightful collection in which distinguished historians of empire reflect on the private and personal dynamics of their becoming - often against all odds - modern chroniclers of the imperial past. As an experiment in collective life-writing, it's a book that excavates the deep, subjective reservoirs which underwrite the histories we know as decolonization. The connections between the past and the present, and the public and the private, intermingle in these pages, generating wonderfully unexpected vignettes. For our own dark times, the plurality of voices recorded here present a dazzling vindication of the practices of history." --Bill Schwarz, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

"Antoinette Burton and Dane Kennedy have hit upon the wonderfully original idea of asking fifteen other historians of the British Empire to contribute (along with them) essays on why and how they came to work on this vast topic, and on how empire has impacted on their own respective lives and careers. Scholars rarely get invited to attempt autobiography, and this explains some of the marked freshness and sense of involvement of the pieces gathered together here. But these are not exercises in self-indulgence. Rather, we are introduced to a sequence of scholars - born over a space of fifty years - who address different parts of the Empire and espouse different methodologies, and we learn about how the accidents of birth, place, friendships, chosen mentors, and influential books can all shape the minds and choices of historians. An absorbing read." --Linda J. Colley, Princeton University, USA

From the Publisher

Antoinette Burton and Dane Kennedy have hit upon the wonderfully original idea of asking fifteen other historians of the British Empire to contribute (along with them) essays on why and how they came to work on this vast topic, and on how empire has impacted on their own respective lives and careers. Scholars rarely get invited to attempt autobiography, and this explains some of the marked freshness and sense of involvement of the pieces gathered together here. But these are not exercises in self-indulgence. Rather, we are introduced to a sequence of scholars - born over a space of fifty years - who address different parts of the Empire and espouse different methodologies, and we learn about how the accidents of birth, place, friendships, chosen mentors, and influential books can all shape the minds and choices of historians. An absorbing read.

Linda J. Colley

A beautiful, insightful collection in which distinguished historians of empire reflect on the private and personal dynamics of their becoming - often against all odds - modern chroniclers of the imperial past. As an experiment in collective life-writing, it's a book that excavates the deep, subjective reservoirs which underwrite the histories we know as decolonization. The connections between the past and the present, and the public and the private, intermingle in these pages, generating wonderfully unexpected vignettes. For our own dark times, the plurality of voices recorded here present a dazzling vindication of the practices of history.

Bill Schwarz

This collection serves as a wonderful introduction to the broad field of British imperial history through the career-narratives of several generations of leading historians working on many different regions of the world. A valuable resource for students and scholars alike, it shows how the writing of imperial history was transformed in the aftermath of decolonization, and highlights the rich diversity of contemporary approaches to rewriting the history of the British empire.

Robert Travers