There is much to admire in this masterly account of the rise and decline of the “British world-system,” a conceptually useful term that John Darwin employs in preference to the less precise “empire” (xi). Not least among Darwin's achievements is his exhaustive attention to detail across a vast span of time periods and geographical contexts. Equally impressive is his consistent emphasis on how a diverse set of component parts came to form an interdependent system in response to broader global developments, as well as his explanations of why this system contained within it the seeds of its own destruction.

Darwin rightly insists on the need to understand the “chaotic pluralism” of his object of inquiry (3). In my favorite of many evocative phrases in the book, he likens the component parts to “the booty of an obsessive collector whose passions had come with a rush and then gone with the wind, to be replaced in their turn by still more transient interests. The result was a pile of possessions whose purpose or meaning was long since forgotten, half-opened packets of quickly waning appeal, and new acquisitions made on the spur of the moment” (2).

The book's key achievement is to recognize and chart this seemingly anarchic process and yet make coherent sense of what resulted. Darwin does so by disentangling the distinct (and often mutually antagonistic) elements of what appears to have no internal logic while never losing site of the importance of showing how these elements became bound together in an interdependent system. Providing a welcome corrective to many British imperial histories that remain too parochial (whether focused on metropole or colony), he makes a persuasive case that the system that resulted was always and forever dependent upon broader global developments outside of itself.

All of this presents him with a daunting array of objects that must be kept continually revolving through the air, and Darwin accomplishes this juggling act with truly consummate skill. Early in the discussion, he makes clear that his solution to the endless possibilities presented by embarking on a book of this sort is to focus “upon what might be called ‘imperial politics’” (8). This is broadly conceived and crucially bound up not only in questions of economics but also in ideas of cultural connection.

With all these excellent qualities, The Empire Project nevertheless left me troubled by the way that it underscores a persistent and unhelpful bifurcation in the historiography of scholarship on empire. Given the importance of this issue for the state of the field, it is upon this, of many possible questions raised by Darwin's book, that I focus my remarks.

The preface and introduction to The Empire Project amount almost to a manifesto. Laying out what he wants to achieve, Darwin explicitly asks, “But how to write such a history?” (7). In answer, he nails his colors very firmly to the historiographical mast, outlining four “traditions” upon which he has drawn for his approach (xii). At the center is the work of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher and P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins.Footnote ¹ In addition, Darwin reaches back to an older tradition of diplomatic history and the study of great power relations, and forward to what has become known as “British world history,” a historiography that has reintroduced an emphasis on the place of settler societies in the wider history of empire.Footnote ²

In addition to explaining how his task might be achieved, Darwin makes clear how he considers it should not be (7). I am in agreement with much of what he says concerning the distortions of nationalist historiography and a narrowly focused study of imperial policy. But what of his final example? “Least of all,” writes Darwin, “will it help to fall back upon a crude stereotyping of conflicting ‘imaginaries,’ in which ‘British’ conceptions of mastery are contrasted with the values of their indigenous subjects”(7). I fully endorse Darwin's evident exasperation with claims about hegemonic “power” and “identity” when they are made without due attention to the concrete structures of how empire worked (or indeed did not work). As he insists, a “sampling of texts” without careful attention to economic and political context does not a scholarly argument make (7). Nor should one lose sight of deep internal divisions amongst both colonizers and colonized in making such an analysis.Footnote ³ Nevertheless, does this assessment do proper justice to the many rich, diverse, and (above all) archivally rigorous histories that have emerged in the last two decades out of the approaches Darwin apparently alludes to here?

While ideas of what constitutes the so-called new imperial history vary enormously, it is most commonly associated with the influence of postcolonial theory, along with a turn away from political or economic histories of empire. As Dane Kennedy's recent account of these developments outlines, what the interdisciplinary scholarship of the late twentieth century brought to the study of imperialism was “a theoretical perspective inflected by poststructuralist and postcolonial thought, a cultural preoccupation with issues such as race and gender, and a political determination to demonstrate that modern Britain itself had been shaped in profoundly important ways by its empire.”Footnote ⁴ The flourishing state of imperial history, a field once seemingly marked for “institutional decline and marginalization” in the words of Stephen Howe, has in part been attributed to these innovations. Yet in his introduction to a 2010 collection of notable work in this genre, Howe also flagged a “disconcerting downside” to these developments: “a slow-burning civil war, between those who proclaim themselves or are labeled as exponents of a ‘new imperial history’ and those who, by default, must presumably be termed old imperial historians.”Footnote ⁵

Questions of identity and difference have informed many instances of this “new imperial” scholarship, and gender has loomed particularly large.Footnote ⁶ In The Empire Project, men (mostly, though not exclusively, those active in high politics or commerce) appear throughout the narrative in a wide variety of racial and ethnic guises. At a broader social level, the influence that nonelites and popular opinion exerted upon the rise and fall of the “British world-system” is acknowledged across the book's argument, though nonelites are treated far more often as contributors to trends rather than as individual historical subjects.Footnote ⁷ This being said, the almost complete absence of women, along with the muted appearance of issues relating to gender and sexuality, is stark. While I may well have missed them among a cast of thousands, by my reckoning Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II are the only individual women mentioned by name, and then fleetingly. Given a subsequent study, it is clearly not the case that Darwin believes either individual women or questions of gender more broadly to be irrelevant to the history of the British Empire.Footnote ⁸ His Unfinished Empire, with its greater focus on the practices of everyday life and the mechanics of social interaction, includes attention to these issues, addressing questions such as sexuality and domesticity in cross-cultural relations.Footnote ⁹

Darwin's analysis in The Empire Project prioritizes high politics and economics, and the choice is an effective one for the questions he seeks to answer. But his treatment of such topics as implicitly gender-neutral runs counter to a substantive recent historiography, much of it inspired by the tradition he cautions us against.Footnote ¹⁰ Space precludes me from mentioning more than two examples. In the first instance, changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity cannot be separated from rising evangelicalism and the shift in models of governance that saw the end of Old Corruption and the beginnings of Victorian probity (at least in theory) that Darwin outlines in the origins of his tale (59–60). What was effectively a transition from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century modes of political being has inspired an extensive historiography in interconnected British and imperial spheres.Footnote ¹¹ Secondly, gender is at least as important as race in understanding questions of Australian identity, labor relations, and politics around the period of Federation in 1901. It receives no attention in Darwin's account beyond a brief mention of “demographic anxiety” (167), despite the fact that the gendered, raced, and classed anxieties of this period are absolutely inseparable and, as many historians have argued, cannot be understood except in relation to one another.Footnote ¹² As Angela Woollacott argued persuasively in her 2006 overview, Gender and Empire, it should no longer be possible for historians to ignore “gender as a foundational dynamic that shaped all aspects of the [British] empire.”Footnote ¹³

The wider problem presented by this split within the field has implications in both directions. Many topics beloved by “new imperial historians” would similarly benefit from a far greater attention to varieties of imperial history writing that their authors may disregard as irrelevant. Analyses of “governmentality” cannot be persuasive if they are not sufficiently embedded in a rigorous understanding of their legal, political, administrative, and constitutional contexts. This can mean engaging with the older traditions of imperial history that Darwin cites as one of his key inspirations (xii). A promising recent development has seen “traditional” topics such as administrative and constitutional change, as well as publications on these topics often considered “dated,” regain a much broader readership by virtue of the flourishing interest in studying imperial legal cultures.Footnote ¹⁴

There is of course no hard and fast divide between so-called old and new imperial historians, nor are the two groups any more monolithic (or free of bitter internal wrangling) than were colonizer and colonized. The argument advanced in The Empire Project, for example, acknowledges reliance on the work of several authors included in Howe's collection. In 2006, David Lambert and Alan Lester's excellent survey of approaches to conceptualizing imperial spaces contended that Darwin's earlier work on “bridgeheads” demonstrated a productive “common ground” with a range of interpretations more usually associated with “postcolonial accounts of empire.”Footnote ¹⁵

Such connections, however, are still too seldom made, and Howe's point about the divisions in the field remains all too pertinent. I do not underestimate the difficulty in integrating social and cultural histories into studies pursuing a geopolitical emphasis. But this neglect, and even more importantly, Darwin's explicit and resolute dismissal in The Empire Project of historiography that draws on the insights of postcolonial theory, may contribute to widening a gap that seemed to show signs of closing. The explosion of publications in imperial history, not to mention global and world history, arguably makes staying on top of the entirety of the literature a near-impossibility. As it is, The Empire Project represents extraordinary depth and breadth in this regard. Nevertheless, Darwin's magisterial account reminds us to be wary of the possibility that imperial historians, whatever their variety of “old” or “new,” might confine themselves to digging along separated historiographical trenches. There is much analytical richness to be gained by breaking these barriers down.