I should like first to acknowledge the generosity and fair-mindedness of the three reviewers. It is rarely wise to reply to reviews: the excuses and defenses of the bleeding author make dreary reading. On this occasion, quite apart from the merits and demerits of the book in question, a number of points have been raised that deserve some discussion.

I. Violence: The case Duncan Bell makes is a forceful one, and in certain respects incontestable. I should be surprised if many reader of The Empire Project overlooked the role of force in the making and maintaining of the British system. Perhaps some more pointed remarks might have been made in case an unwary reader assumed that the references to “invasion,” “struggle,” “conquest,” “racial exclusion” or the onslaught on Mau Mau described nonviolent actions or friendly persuasion. But exactly how to discuss violence in relation to the British Empire is an interesting question. Plainly there were many brutal episodes in its history. Plainly, its authority depended ultimately (and sometimes immediately) upon the use of violence. But then so has that of almost every state in history, precolonial, colonial and postcolonial (and things are not getting better). To say that violence played a central part in Britain's imperial history is not to add much to the sum of knowledge. The more interesting questions (I turn to moral evaluation later) might concern the scale of that violence, the forms of violence, the setting in which it was used, and by whom and on whom it was inflicted. As regards scale, there is no dispute that the British invasion of Australia was a violent one, and was coupled with localized genocidal killings (and much the same would apply to the English invasion of eastern North America); nor that the (partly non-British) occupation of the Southern African interior was a brutal dispossession, though one more designed to enserf the indigenous population than to destroy it. Where settlers (or planters) were absent, the scale of the violence was drastically lower, if only because the means and the will were usually lacking. The great exception to this was the savage repression of the Great Rebellion of 1857 in which an unknown number of Indians were killed, some in battle, many in indiscriminate revenge, some by what we might be tempted to call a “judicial killing.” For both sides, however, this was a war of desperate survival. Of course, we could add to this the frequency with which forms of coercion were used to conscript labor and suppress all kinds of protest, or political movements that threatened colonial authority, as well as the lethal and sometimes barbarous methods employed in late-colonial “emergencies.” As students of African history know well, casual as well as premeditated violence was constantly visited by whites on blacks and excused with cynical evasions. Britons themselves came from a violent society in which children were routinely thrashed, soldiers and sailors flogged, and criminals hanged. Of course, as Duncan Bell rightly remarks “broken and abused bodies—almost invariably black or brown” abounded in the British Empire, but they did so in colonial and noncolonial societies alike, under white or nonwhite masters alike. The Empire Project advances no claim for the moral superiority of British imperialism. If, however, we are to insist that violence was the distinguishing feature of British imperialism, and made the basis of our (moral) evaluation of it, we would need to engage in a little comparison. Unless, that is, we mean to judge it by the standards of Utopia. Perhaps the effort would be tiresome. It might have to include (as well as those of the colonial powers) the criminal records of non-British settler societies like Argentina and Brazil, as well as of precolonial states like Asante, Abyssinia, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Burmese Empire, the Maratha Confederacy, Qing China—to go no further back than c. 1800 nor advance very far into the twentieth century. Brutal as British practice might have been, its killing rate was sadly deficient set against those of Stalinist Russia, and Mao's Chinese empire. Interestingly, one of the few attempts at metrics in this matter was conducted some years ago in a PhD thesis at University College London. Using the “body count” as a proxy for violence, its conclusion was that in interwar British India, even with the 379 “official” victims at Amritsar, the number of those killed at the hands of the security forces averaged a handful a year in a turbulent subcontinent of three hundred million. In fact, genocidal violence by intent, as opposed to killing by involuntary infection, was rare in the British Empire, even if more “targeted” variations were commonplace. The wider claim sometimes made that empires in general were more violent than other kinds of polity is (to adapt Gibbon's phrase) unsupported by either fact or probability; nor should we be too coy about the scale of precolonial violence, as if colonialism blundered into so many gardens of Eden. As the Stalinist, Chinese, and Nazi cases suggest, high levels of lethal state-sponsored violence are more likely to be a function of modernity than of imperialism.

This raises the further question of what attitude was taken by authority to the use of violence, lethal or otherwise. In the nineteenth century, imperial officialdom was largely resigned to the localized violence of British settlers and planters, mainly on the grounds that they could do little to control it. Perhaps that was a form of passive complicity. Often, perhaps, officialdom preferred not to know, or to know too much, as Nicholas Owen has argued in a recent pathbreaking article.Footnote ¹ The record is a mixed one. But seven white men were hanged for the mass killing of aborigines at Myall Creek in Australia in 1838 against a furious (white) outcry (thereafter settler self-government made such punishment all but impossible); the methods used to punish the Morant Bay “rebels’” in 1865 were savagely condemned by the commission of inquiry; British official opinion was often fiercely, if impotently, critical of the behavior of settlers and soldiers, as over the Bambatha uprising in Natal in 1906 or most famously in the case of Amritsar and General Dyer. So was the British Empire founded on violence? Of course it was. Was lethal violence its preferred mode of operation, or explicitly sanctioned by its nominal rulers in Whitehall? Usually not, if only on grounds of expense. Was its record of promoting or tolerating violent disorder of the kind that brings misery today to millions worldwide better or worse than that of most empires (and states) in history? A glance at some of the suspects mentioned above would supply an answer. In short, we need more than a few striking examples to grasp the scale, operation, and meaning of British imperial violence, and we need a suitably global setting. It is intellectually parochial to write as if the British invented empire, as they did steam locomotion.

II. Morals and empire: was it remiss not to have conveyed to the reader that the British world-system was a morally reprehensible enterprise, and asserted the author's revulsion? Fortunately, denouncing a dead empire, like kicking a dead tiger, is not very dangerous. In fact, there are very good reasons for refraining from the kind of judgments that easily spill over into moral preening. First, it is always better to present the evidence and let the readers make their own moral judgment; of course, it would be remiss not to present relevant evidence. Secondly, it goes to the heart of the historian's task, which is to explain why people in the past (often people we instinctively dislike) did things that we now find (deeply) objectionable. That advances understanding rather than merely confirms our contemporary prejudices; it also reminds us that not many years from now, we too may appear as moral defectives to succeeding generations, who will laugh as loudly at our moral pretensions as we do at the Victorians’.

Thirdly, if we are to make moral judgments, it is helpful to know the moral criteria to be used: a glance at the past shows the radically different moral weightings that held sway in different times and places. And if the world today acknowledged a common moral code, it would no doubt be a happier place. Of course, we might want to claim that there is a pressing need, on strictly contemporary grounds, to warn against the recourse to “imperial” methods in the future. But no one contemplating the history of the British Empire, with or without the author's moral anathema, is likely to proclaim that its political and racial practices offer a model for future imperialisms. Those engaged now or hereafter in empire building (and there are plenty of candidates) will fashion their own methods and rhetoric, and they will ignore or denounce those of the past. It would be provincial to expect anything different, and we need look no further than the Soviet Union in the past, or the China of today, to see this at work.

Lastly, what should we make of the argument that moral evaluation (that is, moral condemnation) is necessary because of the “strong causal connections … to the modern world” deriving from “mainly European imperialisms” and that “moral evaluation is especially pertinent for those of us who live in societies that have been profoundly shaped by the very institutions and belief systems that structured the empire”? That is surely to jump a rather large gun. No one would dispute, for example, that acquiring and possessing an empire exerted an influence upon British society. But precisely what and how decisive it was remains at the moment an unsettled question, hampered by an underdeveloped methodology and sometimes overhasty conclusions. On some issues—for example the claim that contemporary racism is a direct product of empire—rigorous sociological inquiry has rejected findings of the “it must have been so” variety. It is true that much of the modern world has been the handiwork of empires—and of their disorderly collapse. But many if not most of those empires were built on the foundations of previous “indigenous” imperial enterprises, many of which lasted until very recent times. What is now central Ghana was ruled by the Asante Empire for over two hundred years and by the British for fifty-six. There are plenty of other examples. Whose imperial legacy should we blame? And why should we assume, without further inquiry, that all that is wrong with the modern world should be laid at the feet of (anyone's) empire? One reason for reminding the reader that the British Empire is only one, if a rather large one, in an endless succession of empires is to draw attention to the fact that a very large part of what we like to imagine as “progress”—moral, material, aesthetic—has been achieved under the aegis of empires. If all empires are to be deemed ipso facto “evil,” most of world history will need rewriting. And to denounce the persistence of empires in history is to bay at the moon: noisy but useless.

III. The place of social and cultural history: I should begin by endorsing the point made by all three reviewers, that this is a history confined to the geopolitics, politics, and political economy of the British Empire, and it is aimed at a readership extending beyond those primarily interested in British imperial history. The attention it gives to the vast range of topics in social and cultural history is correspondingly narrow. That does not imply disparagement: perhaps half of the three dozen doctoral theses I have supervised have been in these fields. It would be wise to acknowledge that The Empire Project would have been improved by more attention to issues of gender. Nor could anyone doubt that our knowledge of empire, and our awareness of the subjectivities to which older styles of imperial history were either indifferent, or which they were ill equipped to engage, have been hugely advanced by several decades of work in the sociocultural history of empire. We are now infinitely more sensitive to the vast range of experiences, especially those of “subalterns,” than we were an academic generation ago, and that has rightly had an impact on all aspects of imperial history. The challenge has been how to integrate these into the general history of empire. What the particular emphasis of The Empire Project does imply is a conviction that the social and cultural history of empire has to be anchored in a geopolitical, political, and economic context if we are to understand the everyday constraints that influenced social and cultural behaviors (here I agree very strongly with some of Alan Lester's remarks). For example, we are gradually rediscovering the importance of governance, and of legal institutions in particular—subjects once dismissed as tediously old-fashioned “constitutional” history—for the insights they provide not just into politics but also into the arenas of social and cultural contestation that were seen by contemporaries as the most problematic or “dangerous.” There is a further point. It ought to be axiomatic that the study of cultural history (anywhere) should be alert to the importance of “conjuncture”: the mix of circumstances—political, economic, international, ideological, as well as social—that shape public attitudes and render the cultural preferences of one generation obsolete or repellent in the eyes of the next. In reality, of course, the conjuncture can change with extraordinary rapidity and extreme unpredictability, condemning old cultural orthodoxies and vindicating the new. One of the arguments that The Empire Project tries to convey is the instability and uncertainty that afflicted the British Empire from the late nineteenth century, and the space this created for a cultural resistance to its claims.

IV. “Peace in Our Time:” Kirsten McKenzie regrets the mutual hostility she detects between rival camps of imperial historians. My own impression is that this is considerably less than it was a few years ago when, for example, Bernard Porter's Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004) was reviewed in some quarters with an unhappy combination of hysteria and travesty. On one of the main bones of contention, the influence of empire on British society, we are gradually accumulating the painstaking work needed to build up a picture of how a complex and variegated empire reacted upon a complex and variegated social formation at home. Nicholas Draper's meticulous investigation of the scale of slaveholding in Britain; Huw Bowen's exploration of how the nabobs’ loot was recycled into the British economy; and Andrew Thompson's demonstration that the impact of empire was both deep and diffuse, are but three examples.Footnote ² There is much more to be done, not least on the effects of the serial migration that, as we have begun to recognize, accounted for a large fraction of what we once assumed was once-for-all emigration. The reinsertion of both British and British imperial history into global history will also change the terms of debate (it perhaps has done so already) and will inject new questions and concepts into the subject. Altogether, we might conclude that there has never been a better time to study the history of empire—or write about it.