One of the companion volumes intended to rectify omissions or amplify underserved areas in the five-volume 1998–99 Oxford History of the British Empire, this volume demonstrates both the rich and complex histories omitted by conventional approaches to imperial history (the “old” imperial history, if you will) and the challenges of integrating neglected questions into a coherent narrative of empire. The volume not only aims to show how the British Empire shaped Black experience, but how Black people in turn participated in shaping the Empire, whether through collaboration, resistance, subversion, or more ambiguous forms of agency.
Although emphasizing the instability, fluidity, and ambiguity of Black identities, the editors somewhat summarily define the population at issue as “people of African descent,” not only omitting Asian British subjects including those who lived in East and South Africa and the Caribbean, but also North Africans, few of whom, admittedly, fell under formal British rule. Having so dispensed with questions of definition, the volume illustrates the porousness of the “new” imperial history, resorting to area studies and Europeanist scholars of five distinct bodies of literature: Atlantic slavery; African history; Caribbean history; the history of Black, that is, African diaspora, people in Britain; and African literature. These thirteen synthetic and interpretive essays not only contextualize but challenge the British specialist's narrative of insular national development.
Recognizing the inextricability of British empire building from slave trading and the plantation complex, the first five essays focus on the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave system. David Northrup relies heavily on John Thornton and others who emphasize West African elites’ participation in slave trading, and the essay contains the only map or other illustration in the volume. David Richardson organizes his inquiry around the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, a text many of us may already teach, usefully comparing and contextualizing Equiano's allegedly autobiographical account within the broader history, demographics, culture, and experiences of nonelite Africans’ centuries of capture, enslavement, and resistance within the Atlantic economy. Philip Morgan describes Africans’ diverse experiences in the British Empire during the long eighteenth century, considering how slaves negotiated the survival of families, social life, and culture. The most exciting section of this chapter describes Africans’ creolization of various European and African languages, their preservation and innovation of African musical forms, their creative blending of Christian with African religious practices, and the pervasiveness of resistance and rebellion. Christopher Brown describes the development of emancipationist discourse prompted both by the demands of incorporating new imperial subjects acquired through territorial expansion, and by the reevaluation prompted by the loss of the thirteen American colonies. Like Brown, and also much indebted to Thomas Holt, Gad Heuman describes the process of Caribbean emancipation and freed slaves’ struggles for survival, personal and economic autonomy, and political power. The brief reference to employers’ use of Indian indentured labor to counter freedpeople's autonomy is one of several points in this volume where the choice to exclude Asians seems particularly unfortunate.
Two additional chapters treat postemancipation Africa: T. C. McCaskie and Vivian Bickford-Smith describe the worsening position of Europeanized African creoles in the course of the nineteenth century, as British colonial expansion and the attendant introduction or embrace of white settlers converged with more virulent forms of racism by the century's end. Diana Jeater, the sole woman contributor to this volume, discusses the changing position and fortunes of African women, as paternalistic state and missionary meddling in African family and marriage arrangements undermined women's autonomy and power, first in the name of progress and uplift, and later in the name of tradition. Intensified exploitation of women's labor, facilitated by the confected customary law accompanying indirect rule, in detaching male labor for European enterprises, only reinforced the long-standing pattern of African women's social and reproductive labor subsidizing the British Empire and European wealth. Timothy H. Parsons describes Africans’ entry into military, administrative, and other positions in the lower levels of the imperial bureaucracy, helping maintain empire with minimal investment of European manpower. But Parsons, like Walter Rodney before him, who, like Eric Williams, remains neither cited nor engaged in this volume, shows that this Western-educated and relatively urbanized petty bourgeoisie of clerks, teachers, clergy, and other professionals paradoxically became the vanguard of anticolonial resistance. He also emphasizes, counter to prevalent assumptions, that African businessmen and growers outproduced and outcompeted European ones, in spite of discrimination they organized to resist.
Frederick Cooper describes colonizers’ discontinuous but consistently contradictory and benighted efforts to discipline and mobilize labor, slave and free, without responsibility for workers’ social reproduction, provoking African labor and nationalist resistance in the middle and late twentieth century. Howard Johnson tells a similar story for the twentieth-century Caribbean, focusing on racialized class formation and political agitation, the economic consequences of the decline of sugar and the rise of multinational extractive industries, the resort to migration and the creation of “remittance economies,” and the mid-1930s explosion of labor militancy and its co-optation by nationalist elites and colonizers alike in the postwar period. Winston James offers an overview of African diaspora experience in Britain, emphasizing the metropole not only as a place of settlement, but as a “crossroads” of colonized people throughout the centuries of British imperialism, particularly the diasporic Black intelligentsia who moved between London and various African and Caribbean colonies. James emphasizes Black political mobilization against state and popular racism, and African diaspora contributions to British culture in the period since 1945, contrasting the “sunlight” of Black achievement with the “shadows” of continuing oppression. Finally, Kwame Anthony Appiah assesses the prospects for genuinely postcolonial African literature, arguing, like Frantz Fanon and Chinua Achebe, that African culture remains indelibly imprinted by the colonial experience and, further, that Africans have “appropriated and reworked” European languages, literatures, and cultures, rendering the quest of “Africanist” writers such as Wole Soyinka for an endogenous African identity and culture futile.
These stimulating essays, with notes and a bibliography of major works concluding each, offer the British or European specialist encouragement to venture further afield, perhaps to design a course for which this book, were it available in paperback, might serve as text, or at least to begin including the experiences of the colonized into our narratives of British national and imperial development.
