Over the last twenty years, historians have sought to transcend the long-established reification of the nation-state as the basic unit of historical analysis. A world increasingly conscious of its own interconnectedness demanded, or seemed to demand, new forms of history. Global history, transnational history, revivified world history, and imperial history all rose to the challenge while national histories were set in transnational contexts.Footnote 1 New units of analysis attracted increasing attention and by a strange linguistic quirk the globe became partitioned into a series of ‘worlds’, described by Bernard Baylyn as ‘vast cultural area[s] distinctive in world history’.Footnote 2 Baylyn wrote about the Atlantic world, and maritime worlds in particular have blossomed as historians have charted exchanges of ideas, goods, and peoples in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans.Footnote 3 For many historians, oceans and seas have provided a consistent (if not uncontested) framework within which to trace transnational processes across the boundaries of states and empires.Footnote 4 Shared cultures and identities have also formed the basis of ‘worlds’ history, such as the trading networks of the Dar-al-Islam.Footnote 5 The Atlantic itself has been subdivided in this way, to produce British, French, Lusophone, Spanish, even Canadian Atlantics, along with a Green, a Red, and a Black Atlantic.Footnote 6 The conceptual differences between the maritime worlds and such culturally defined approaches are significant. The maritime approach defines a cultural ‘world’ exogenously through the operation of communications systems shaped by the interaction of the sea and maritime technology at their core. Where culture and identity themselves provide the building blocks for the world, the field is conceived endogenously through the forms of identity adopted by, and the connections forged between, historical actors.
This article critically assesses this latter approach: the attempt to construct a world as a field of study using cultural connections and identities, rather than a set geographical space. What are the merits and perils of such an approach? We take as our case-study the increasingly voluminous literature about the so-called ‘British world’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in order to critique this broader ‘worlds’ approach to global history.Footnote 7 This literature has multiple points of origin but grew from a coalescence of historians of the British empire seeking to restore the British colonies of settlement to a prominent place in the study of empire, with national historians of those former colonies seeking to restore consideration of the imperial connection. Yet, as with other forms of ‘worlds’ history, many studying the British world have sought to distinguish the approach from these imperial or national histories. This literature then provides a perfect prism to assess the recent global turn in scholarship and particularly of forms of ‘worlds’ history which place identity front and centre.
To this end, we undertake a critical assessment of the achievements and shortcomings of the British world, as a case-study of the opportunities and pitfalls of the more general global turn in scholarship. With respect to the contribution of the British world itself, we argue that much of value has emerged, especially in the way the conferences and writings have brought together disparate scholars from across the globe. This has effected several necessary transformations within the study of the British empire, particularly the re-emphasizing of the importance of migration and the settler empire after several generations of relative neglect. Equally it has contributed to the reintegration of imperial dimensions into the national historiographies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and to a lesser extent South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Nonetheless, the British world has been less successful when offered as a fundamental departure from older imperial and national histories. We argue that, in the final analysis, the British world is best understood as a movement within rather than beyond the history of British imperialism, and that many authors in practice have acknowledged this. However, we suggest that by seemingly rejecting the historiographical framework of empire, the British world omits or only implicitly acknowledges important analytical dimensions, particularly ones bound up with power and politics. Moreover, the conceptual core of the British world, combining an attention to cultural networks with a focus on British identity, is not sufficient to delineate a distinct field of study. Indeed, using something as subjective as ‘British’ as an analytical framework can obscure what it seeks to analyse more than it can enlighten. An expanded conception of empire and imperial history serves better than attempting to conceptualize a separate world. This in turn helps to illuminate for scholars of global history some of the strengths and weaknesses of using ‘worlds’ defined by culture and identity as analytical frameworks.
I
The British world originated from a series of conferences held in London (1998), Cape Town (2002), Calgary (2003), and Bristol (2007). The original organizers combined historians of the British empire and Commonwealth, and of the ‘old dominions’ (a term we shall return to later), establishing a core combination which has subsequently characterized British world scholars and scholarship.Footnote 8 The initial conferences were motivated by dissatisfaction with existing historiographical boundaries. On the one hand, they represented a growing sense that settlement empire and the ‘old dominions’ had become marginalized in the historiographies of empire.Footnote 9 Historians studying the post-1776 British empire in the second half of the twentieth century had tended to focus more on the ‘dependent’ empire in Africa and Asia in dialogue with area studies specialists.Footnote 10 As post-colonial studies flourished following Said's seminal study of orientalism, developing into the new ‘imperial history’, scholarly attention was again drawn to empires of difference in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.Footnote 11 On the other hand, a certain insularity developed in the writing of Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and (with strong caveats) South African national historiographies.Footnote 12 Notwithstanding comparative work exploring dependency theory,Footnote 13 the creation of national (if not explicitly nationalist) literatures tended to focus increasingly on internal developments at the expense of external connections. Hence, a key motivation behind the British world was to restore the ‘lodestone of empire’ to the study of national histories of the dominions.Footnote 14
These historiographical complaints were explicit in the introductions to the edited collections which emerged from the first two conferences. Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, and Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis criticized both the concerns and conceptual tools of post-1950s British imperial history: the concern with informal and formal power, the simplistic spatial division of core and periphery, the relative neglect of the dominions, as well as the supposedly exclusive post-colonial concern with encounters with the ‘other’.Footnote 15 They also criticized the insularity of national historiographies of the old dominions for neglecting comparisons, and the historical significance of the British connection and Britishness. Instead, they argued it was necessary to ‘rediscover’ what they termed the British world.
The precise genesis of the term is nebulous. Both collections emphasized that the ‘British world’ was used throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe Britain and the settler colonies. It should, however, be noted: ‘Greater Britain’, ‘empire’, or (from the First World War) ‘British Commonwealth’ tripped more easily off contemporary tongues, and from the pens of authors such as J. R. Seeley, J. A. Froude, Charles Dilke, or Richard Jebb who are frequently cited in British world publications.Footnote 16 The term more closely derives from J. G. A. Pocock's reflections on the ‘new British history’, which he conceived as stretching beyond the confines of the Atlantic archipelago: ‘There was a British world, both European and oceanic, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it had a history.’Footnote 17 Thus, James Belich cited Pocock when asserting there existed a ‘transnational cultural entity based upon a populist form of pan-Britonism’.Footnote 18 The implications of these early debts to late nineteenth-century imperial federalism and to new British history – especially Pocock – are discussed later.
The British world, then, emerged as a corrective within imperial and national historiographies, but claimed to be distinctive. Bridge and Fedorowich's initial 2003 characterization of the British world established the basic conceptual framework, and is worth extensive summary. It was, they write, ‘a phenomenon of mass migration from the British Isles. Its core was the “neo-Britains” where migrants found they could transfer into societies with familiar cultural values’. Based on improving ‘trans-oceanic and trans-continental travel and communications’, this world became more ‘intricately inter-connected and self-defining’. The identity at the core of the world, Britishness, meant ‘exercising full civil rights within a liberal, pluralistic polity ‘or aspiring to this status. Although ‘“whiteness” was a dominant element…this world was not exclusively white’ as people from differing ethnic backgrounds ‘adopted British identity’ and were ‘accepted to varying degrees as part of the British world, within the white Dominions, elsewhere in the empire and to some extent outside it’. Crucially, the ‘cultural glue which held together this British world consisted not only of sentiment and shared institutional values but also of a plethora of networks’. Thus, and here came the distinction from imperial history, the British world was not a top down political structure but rather a form of ‘globalization from below’, built largely through migration and ideas of British identity.Footnote 19
However, the British world, as introduced by Bridge and Fedorowich, possessed several ambiguities. While that world was judged to be the product of the interaction of diaspora, culture, and identity, the meanings and implications of these concepts were not explored.Footnote 20 The core identity defining the field of study (the ‘world’), Britishness, could be seen as the product of migration from Britain (an ethnic diaspora), or it could be a civic identity, a set of ideas and values not – in principle – tied to migration or ethnicity. Authors have often slipped between both treatments, while the spatial and temporal definitions of the British world remained equally unclear. As Phillip Buckner and R. Francis, two of the founders of the approach, observed, ‘even the founders of the British world project were never uniform in their interpretation of what should be included within the framework of the project’.Footnote 21 At the outset, the British world possessed a conceptual ambiguity with authors slipping between differing conceptions.
This became particularly problematic because the British world was linked with two further bodies of literature, both with their own ambiguous relationships to the historiography of empire (and indeed with national historiographies). First, following J. G. A. Pocock, the British world developed connections to the project of new British history and the study of Britishness. Thus, Linda Colley's work on British identify became a clear inspiration, although British world literature has tended to omit the processes of forging a composite identity through the identification of external others at the core of Colley's work.Footnote 22 Second, by placing social networks at the heart of analysis, the British world became associated with a growing literature on Victorian-era ‘imperial networks’, particularly strengthening the British world's concern to break down the binary opposition between British metropole and colonial ‘peripheries’ to consider cross-colonial connections.Footnote 23 Curiously, fewer parallels were made with the burgeoning literature on the Atlantic world (especially David Armitage's revival of the term ‘Greater Britain’).Footnote 24 In part, this reflects the differing periods that preoccupy the Atlantic world (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and the British world (late nineteenth and twentieth centuries), as well as a more general tendency for ‘worlds’ studies to concentrate on the periods where interconnections appear strongest.
From these different currents, a variegated British world literature has emerged, generally in edited collections based on the conferences. All follow a pattern, juxtaposing studies of Britain, the ‘old dominions’, and, occasionally, other locations within and beyond the British empire (constitutionally defined). The collections give a de facto definition of the British world which places the settlement empire at the core.Footnote 25 These publications have been characterized by a profound slipperiness in terminology. As Phillip Buckner and Carl Bridge noted about one conference, there was ‘a certain imprecision in the meaning of terms such as Britishness, imperialism, empire loyalty, British race patriotism, colonial nationalism and Greater Britain’. They, like most writers of the British world, have argued that this imprecision is a strength and not a weakness of the concept. Networks and identities are, ‘by their very nature…contested and fluid’, as are ‘the parameters of the British world’.Footnote 26 The 2005 book from the Calgary conference has chapters which use ‘British world’, ‘Anglo-world’, ‘imperial networks’, ‘white settler colonies’, ‘Britishness’, ‘English-speaking worlds’, and ‘settler societies’ without really attempting, as the editors note, to define or differentiate.Footnote 27 Most frequently, the term British world is used as a synonym for Britain and the settler colonies, but only implicitly and at times authors also stretch it to include the US or other concentrations of expatriates (Shanghai has become a cause célèbre).Footnote 28 Although perhaps it is unfair to expect coherence to emerge in collections based on conferences, nonetheless the heterogeneous vocabulary often used highlights a problem: many different and distinct phenomena are all collapsed together without precision.
These problems of lexicon reflect a broader problem within existing imperial historiography about settler colonies. ‘Dominions’ is frequently (and confusingly) used by scholars as a synonym for ‘settler colony’ with little acknowledgement that ‘dominion’ was not used to denote a separate constitutional status until 1907.Footnote 29 Historians repeatedly rob the term of its constitutional specificity. The term has also on occasion been stretched to incorporate ‘honorary dominions’ to describe Shanghai, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile.Footnote 30 The fluidity of ‘British’ has also become evident in recent years. Many Australian and New Zealand scholars have instead adopted ‘Anglo-Celtic’, which is problematic for several reasons, mainly because of the prioritization of English (‘Anglo’) and the fact that the original Celts were not a cultural or ethnic grouping at all but a loose trading network, so the term depends on pseudo-history for significance. The point is that much British world writing tends to be desperately unclear about where is included, and how these places are defined as a network. The British world lacks definition.
Perhaps the greatest problem lies in the British world's treatment of the US. Given the British world's emphasis on diasporic networks and identities (on ‘globalisation from below’),Footnote 31 and the overwhelming popularity of the US as a destination for British migrants, the US seems logically to be part of the British world. Indeed, if one conceptualized through networks and identities, it rivals Britain as a core. Yet in practice, the British world literature generally holds the US at arms-length in an ambiguous half-way house without successfully explaining why (the implicit answer is clear enough: it was not a part of the British imperium, but of a ‘white’ or English-speaking network). Very few contributions to the edited collections give the US much attention.
The ambiguities of the British world approach are more fully exposed in the two major monographs to have grown out of the literature.Footnote 32 These attempt to distinguish the British world from the British empire and integrate the analysis of economics, culture, and migratory networks to contribute to the history of nineteenth-century globalization. First, Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson's Empire and globalisation provides much needed theoretical ballast to the British world, and also seeks to connect the literature to the history of globalization in the nineteenth century. Their discussion brings to bear the full force of network theory to elaborate on Bridge and Fedorowich's brief account of the British world. They argue that due to the operation of ‘co-ethnic networks’ and the bonds of trust facilitated by a shared British culture, the British world was a tightly integrated economic unit within the late nineteenth-century global economy as demonstrated by patterns of migration, investment, and trade.Footnote 33 Magee and Thompson's adoption of network theory and emphasis on culture as the defining feature of the British world's ‘cultural economy’ leads them to adopt an ambiguous spatial framework, generally placing Britain and the settler colonies at the core of their analysis, but also including other clusters of expatriates, even at times the United States. Indeed, the occasional inclusion of the US is central to Magee and Thompson's core claim that the ‘first phase’ of ‘modern globalisation’ was ‘nurtured within the confines of the British world’.Footnote 34
Nonetheless, they frequently use the terms British world, empire, and imperial as synonymous, and tend to frame their argument through the inter-relationship of Britain and the settler colonies, while describing the US as having an ‘ambiguous’ relationship with the British world.Footnote 35 It is true that the tryptic of late nineteenth-century writers so frequently cited (Dilke, Froude, and Seeley) were divided as to how to treat Americans: Charles Dilke even altered his position, first including and then excluding the US.Footnote 36 Nonetheless, contemporaries were divided rather than ambiguous on the dimensions of ‘Greater Britain’ (or rather whether those dimensions were contiguous with the English-speaking world or confined to the British empire).Footnote 37 No contemporary imagined the US to be subject to the rhetoric or institutional practices of the British imperium, hence the evolution of an alternate language about the English-speaking world or Anglo-Saxon world.Footnote 38 No approach to economic globalization in the nineteenth century can treat the US (the major emerging component of the Atlantic trading system and the largest single destination for European migrants, European capital, and trade) so ambiguously.Footnote 39 Thus, the British world, in and of itself, does not prove sufficient for the conceptual work required of it by Magee and Thompson's otherwise admirable and ambitious analysis.
James Belich's Replenishing the earth also seeks to offer an account of the central contribution of anglophone settlers to the evolution of the world economy in the long nineteenth century. Belich, unlike Magee and Thomson, gives full and equal treatment to the United States. Yet for our purposes, the conceptual construct he adopts is important. Belich redraws the map of the world to describe what he calls a twofold ‘Anglo-world’ – a term adopted to denote Britain, the old dominions (but only partially including South Africa), and the United States. Geography is reimagined. The east coast of the US is separated from the west and reclassified as an ‘oldland’ (a long settled core), while the dominions of the British empire are grouped together as ‘Greater Britain’ or the ‘British West’ (not the British world), joining the American west as ‘newlands’. Belich then describes how cycles of boom and bust drive the colonization of the new by the old and the social, economic, and cultural relations between them.Footnote 40 Subdividing the Anglo-world into symmetrical, analogous, units avoids the problems incurred by Magee and Thompson: the US is not an ambiguity. The move also helpfully exposes the economic relations at play. Yet Belich's account too contains an occlusion. He explicitly sets out not to write the political history of the Anglo-world, yet the subdivisions on which the analysis is built are political. After all, the 49th parallel has absolutely no geographical or economic significance. Politics, not economics, determines the inclusion of the Canadian west in Greater Britain not the American west. This failure to grapple with many of the political institutions underpinning such a focus remains a problem rife in British world literature.
The British world then has generated a growing and variegated literature, including several monographs. Much of this work has made useful diverse contributions, especially in reconnecting the national historiographies of Britain and the colonies of settlement with that of the British empire.Footnote 41 Yet when applied to major monographs, the British world concept becomes problematic. Magee and Thompson took the emphasis on socio-cultural networks to its logical conclusion – largely including the US – yet in so doing treated the US as an ambiguous exception. Belich conversely overcame similar ambiguities by implicitly reintroducing the political.
In their different ways, both monographs place under close scrutiny the twin concepts around which the British world is built: ‘world’, and ‘Britishness’. In response, several scholars have attempted to address such criticisms by imparting greater coherence to these key concepts. Tamson Pietsch has interrogated the concept of the ‘world’, Saul Dubow the idea of Britishness. Their attempts to rescue the British world framework bear closer scrutiny.
Pietsch subjects the frequent anxieties about the spatial dimensions of the British world to serious critique. She argues that it is not, in fact, helpful to consider the British world as a fixed space. She draws in particular on cultural geographers’ theorization of ‘space not as a fixed entity that we move through but rather as something that gets made by people and their contexts’. Thus, she argues that
historians of Britain and its empire need to think not of a singular British World but rather of multiple, produced British world spaces: we need to think not only about the places in which people lived but also about the networks and exchanges that shaped their lives and the emotions and feelings that created internal landscapes of longing and belonging.Footnote 42
Pietsch draws specifically on David Harvey's distinction between three kinds of space: absolute (‘bounded and immovable’), relative (‘transportation relations and of commodity and monetary circulation’), and relational (‘space that lives inside us – the space produced by our experiences, memories, fears, and dreams’).Footnote 43 As a result, Pietsch argues that the British world concept is best approached with the recognition that all three conceptions of space are at work, although most attention is given to relational space in her article. Hence, she rebrands this as ‘British worlds’ to provide ‘a way of talking about the multiple and intersecting yet necessarily limited worlds that long-distance connections created’ within which a multiplicity of ideas of Britain and Britishness operated.Footnote 44 She illustrates her argument through an analysis of the multiple discourses of space at work in a single event, the 1903 Allied Colonial Universities Conference, where different attendees envisioned all possible meanings of the British world. Thus, she suggests that the imprecision inherent in the term ‘worlds’ is perhaps its attraction. In her imagining of the British worlds, it is impossible, and becomes no longer necessary, to decide finally whether the United States, Anglo-phone expatriates in Buenos Aires or the redoubtable ‘Shanghailanders’ are in or out.
There are, however, limitations to this line of argument. In her article, Pietsch can deconstruct conceptions of space in part precisely because she chooses a case-study which, notwithstanding the multiple discourses in operation, is framed by a relatively unambiguous and explicitly constitutionally imperial conception of empire (‘Allied Colonial Conference’). Inevitably, there are multiple discourses of Britishness extant globally, but her example suggests that such a use of space could easily fit within existing histories of the British empire; it is not clear why a separate analytical framework of British worlds is actually necessary. What would be the value of studying ‘British worlds’, as opposed to different identities or networks within the empire or some other existing framework? Indeed, this highlights the need not only to specify and delineate the different imagined communities, the different discourses, operating within the British world(s) but also to consider the absolute and relative spatial forces which might lend some coherence to these imaginings. As Ben Anderson has emphasized, the meaning and materiality of space cannot be divided into neat separate categories.Footnote 45 Therefore, the pluralization of the term, inviting a consideration of British worlds, in and of itself cannot not salvage the concept.
Britishness, of course, has also provided a de facto reference point to distinguish the history of the British world from the history of the British empire. Such a close examination of the meaning of Britishness lies at the heart of Saul Dubow's widely read rethinking of the British world from the perspective of South Africa, which is treated ambiguously by most British world literature. Dubow argues that the British world concept helps tease out a Britishness which could not simply be defined by ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ considerations. Instead, Britishness was ‘a composite, rather than an exclusive, form of identity’.Footnote 46 Dubow's version of the British world is an imagined community, distinguished from the British empire, with ‘British’ used in an ‘adjectival’ not a ‘possessive’ sense. It was imagined differently by different people at different times for different reasons and only one identity which overlapped with many others in South Africa. Drawing on work by Donal Lowry in particular, he emphasized the role of ‘non-British’ outsiders who could still ‘“feel as profound a sense of loyalty to the Crown and Empire as did their Anglo-Protestant compatriots”’.Footnote 47 The British world in South Africa was not the study of the migration of Britons abroad and their links with Britishness, but a far more inclusive ‘set of affinities’ which people felt towards Britain and Britishness for a variety of reasons.Footnote 48 Dubow's contribution differentiates the British world more sharply from the British empire, and implies an interesting avenue of enquiry to which we shall return: a global history of Britishness. Yet having made the conceptual distinction, he (like so many writers on the British world) called into question the significance of the distinction by using the terms the ‘British empire’ and ‘British world’ almost interchangeably as he developed a case-study of South African usages of Britishness.
A striking comparison is Andrew Thompson's exploration of similar ideas about identity in South Africa using the concept of ‘loyalism’, rather than the British world. He adapted a term coined by British imperial authorities in the late nineteenth century to differentiate white, English-speaking settlers who supported British imperial rule from the rest of the population. In Thompson's article, ‘loyalism’ was defined more broadly as people being loyal to ‘an idea of “Britain”’. He also identified three key factors ‘which shaped South African loyalism – geography, ideology and ethnicity’, similar to the ideas expressed about Britishness within British world literature.Footnote 49 Both Dubow and Thompson rightly made clear that it is important to not constantly divide colonists and colonized into separate groups, that their identities were complex, contested, and often overlapped. Thompson and Dubow discuss similar things, but one uses the concept of the British world and the other loyalism, and it is not clear that either offer a distinct advantage over the other except that loyalism is grounded more directly in contemporary language.
II
In practice, the British world has grown out of British imperial history and has been used to re-emphasize the importance of the settlement empire, self-governing and forged by migration, rather than the dependent empire. The reflective accounts of Pietsch, Dubow, or indeed Magee and Thompson, seek to complicate and challenge crude spatial divisions (core-periphery) and associated assumptions about (always unequal) power which supposedly characterized an older imperial literature. A re-emphasis on British–dominion relations, highlighting the history of migration and the like, has undoubtedly been valuable. However, a distinctive concept of the British world is not really needed to achieve this. Indeed, in practice, it has often added yet another layer of jargon to the already unclear terminology used to describe Britain and the colonies of settlement. Equally, a global and transnational turn has made valuable contributions to the historiographies of individual locations as has the stimulus for comparative studies. But it is not clear that the British world is necessary to ‘go global’. Dubow's and Pietsch's efforts to inject greater nuance and clarity into the term reveal its inextricable limitations. There is no reason not to use a term like the British world to enrich a pre-existing field, but this does not in and of itself create a separate analytical field.
It is true that, in 2003, there was a need for historians of empire to reconsider the colonies of settlement which had hitherto become marginalized. Their distinctive internal dynamics – the colonialism of settler colonies – certainly needed to be analysed beyond individual national contexts. The British world literature may have helped here. Belich's study of the ‘Anglo-world’ might be considered a stimulating argument as to how and why anglophone settler colonialism was distinctive due to unique global connections.Footnote 50 However, the study of ‘settler colonialism’ itself has increasingly developed as an independent field of study since Patrick Wolfe's 1999 book, Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology.Footnote 51 While economic works on development theory continue to use the term loosely,Footnote 52 this has increasingly given way to a specific field of analysis, defined by permanent settlement, land ownership, and ‘native’ annihilation. The theoretical underpinnings, especially relating to its distinctiveness from imperial and colonial history, have been developed in two books, as well as in a journal founded in 2011 by Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini.Footnote 53 Some of this burgeoning literature does the work that the British world has tried to do, by focusing on how settlers have developed their own cultures and identities and how indigenous groups have related to this process (as well as how such definitions such as ‘settler’ and ‘indigenous’ were constructed). Perhaps most importantly, it embeds explicit considerations of power, lacking in most British world scholarship.Footnote 54 Furthermore, much of the literature emphasizes that settler colonialism can only be understood in a global context, by exploring comparisons as well as connections.Footnote 55 Thus, the literature on settler colonialism now widens the lens to examine locations within (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Algeria, Zimbabwe, etc.) and beyond European maritime empires (the US, Israel, Russia, China, and Japan).Footnote 56 There is, then, no longer a need for a British world concept to place the history of British settler colonialism in a broader context.
Nor is it clear that the British world concept is necessary to restore a consideration of the settlement empire to British imperial history. Duncan Bell has successfully revived an interest in the Victorian concept of ‘Greater Britain’ in the sphere of imperial thought, while earlier work by Andrew Thompson, along with publications by Simon Potter and Marc William Palen, have all begun to re-emphasize the importance of the self-governing empire in British imperial thought without the ‘world’ or the attendant difficulties of Britishness.Footnote 57 Of course, ‘Greater Britain’ conceptually can only be used at a specific historical juncture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The language of Greater Britain ultimately became sublimated into a language of Commonwealth against a backdrop of growing (and increasingly explicitly national) autonomy in the dominions (as they became in 1907).Footnote 58 John Darwin's resurrection of Alfred Zimmern's term ‘the third British empire’ is probably as good a solution as any to finding a term which encompasses the full chronological and special trajectories of the colonies of settlement.Footnote 59 Alternatively, one might, with H. Duncan Hall, back-project the periodization of the British Commonwealth of Nations from its conventional 1920s point of departure (an ‘Empire-Commonwealth’?).Footnote 60
The close analogy between the British world and the Empire-Commonwealth or third British empire becomes clear when examining the periodization of the British world offered in much of the literature. Bridge and Fedorowich's suggested chronology illustrates the point: beginning with the loss of the American colonies in 1783, proceeding through the foundation of new (or reorganized) settler colonies down to the 1930s, before continuing to discuss patterns of migration, colonial autonomy and colonial identity, the Great War, the emergence of the British Commonwealth of Nations, the Second World War, the emergence of the new commonwealth, separate nationality, de-dominionization, and the legal repatriation of constitutions.Footnote 61 This is, of course, in fact a history of the Empire-Commonwealth (a term even used in Bridge and Fedorowich's summary). Yet the punctuation of that history by wars and acts of state perhaps beg questions of neglect of the state in the conceptualization of the British world. Often, scholarship evades the problem by focusing on a cultural ‘heyday’ between the 1880s and 1914 (or 1939) in a way that robs the British world of chronological specificity and in particular marginalizes the technological, economic, and geopolitical forces driving its formation, sustaining its existence, and ultimately eroding its coherence.Footnote 62 Writing a history focusing on culture and networks yet implicitly periodized by global economics and geopolitics clearly presents fundamental conceptual problems. If this was globalization from below, why is the periodization so obviously ‘top down’, framed by the chronology of British global politics?
From this perspective, whether conceived as a sub-category of imperial history or as distinct from imperial history, the British world risks neglecting a fundamental concern of imperial history in all its varieties: power. On the one hand, it neglects the power relations between settler societies and metropoles. Bridge and Fedorowich argue that such debates are irrelevant, writing that ‘Collaboration is about “us” and “them”, but the British world was emphatically about “we”.’Footnote 63 Yet a shared British identity (shared by whom and why) by no means eliminates the possibility of unequal power dynamics. Financial, strategic, even cultural asymmetries are neglected within the British world in its eagerness to decentre and reject ‘old’ imperial history.Footnote 64 James Belich's Replenishing the earth restores ideas of economic asymmetry but does so by placing the economic dynamics of settler expansion rather than socio-cultural networks at the core of the analysis.Footnote 65 On the other hand, the British world at times also risks neglecting settler colonialism and the internal and heavily unequal power dynamics between settlers and indigenous peoples (and the fact that such phenomena were not limited to a British sphere). As Adele Perry has warned,
deconstructing colonialism's self-serving success story is not without risks. In highlighting the local, the provisional, and the particular within colonialism, historians can find themselves, however inadvertently, downplaying the very real power of imperialism to reorder the map, the economy, the state(s), and, perhaps above all, to influence myriad social, political and intimate arrangements.Footnote 66
Indigenous peoples often feature in British world collections only to note their exclusion from social networks or to highlight appeals to Britishness and the British monarchy.
Several British world authors are alive to the problem. Tamson Pietsch writes that, ‘in accentuating the shared culture and identity of settler communities and their connections with Britain, the British World approach can be seen to have de-emphasized the uneven nature of power relations’.Footnote 67 Magee and Thompson make the problem clear when they devote several sentences to the issue, writing:
as soon as we begin to re-imagine imperial geographies, we are faced with the tricky question of where power spatially resided. For the logic of a ‘networked’ or ‘decentred’ approach to studying empires is that metropole and settler colony acted and reacted upon each other in complex ways, and that sovereignty in the colonies, far from being static or stable, was subject to constant negotiation and renegotiation by a variety of settler and non-settler groups.Footnote 68
Yet the problem is not simply that the British world approach neglects power. It is that network theory and a focus on identity in and of themselves (at least as currently formulated) struggle to tell us very much about power relations either on a macro-level, or on a micro-level.
Furthermore, given one of the primary aims throughout the British world project has been to move beyond some of the spatial boundaries of imperial and national histories, the actual history written under this label has largely stuck to a metropole–colony analysis. There is almost a complete absence of recognition that colonies had relationships with each other. There is much that could be gleaned about the real experiential power dynamics at play across these different spaces, as the work by Simon Potter and Rachel Bright has suggested.Footnote 69 Instead, the British world has largely simply duplicated the failures of imperial history to move beyond traditional spatial binaries.
All of these issues are exacerbated because the British world concept usually sidesteps the categories of the political and constitutional. In so doing, it fails to scrutinize explicitly the implications of late nineteenth-century imperial federalist ideas.Footnote 70 For example, citing J. R. Seeley as evidence of the existence of a British world (a frequent device) is problematic on a number of levels. Seeley famously wrote:
We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. While we were doing it…we did not allow it to affect our imaginations or in any degree to change our way of thinking; nor have we even now ceased to think of ourselves as simply a race inhabiting an island off the northern coast of the Continent of Europe.Footnote 71
The British world literature is in the habit of using Seeley to suggest a late Victorian consciousness of Greater Britain, not, as the passage makes clear, an absence and moreover an absence to be overcome though specific political projects undertaken by sections of elites across the empire.Footnote 72 Seeley and his successors were not celebrating globalization from below but pursuing integration and association from above.
The British world's acknowledged but underdeveloped debt to J. G. A. Pocock's conception of the new British history again points to the significance of a paradoxical failure to consider the political and the constitutional realms. Pocock conceived of British history as a quasi-organic entity – distinct and separated from European history – constituted through the integration of the varying ethnicities, but particularly polities of Britain and Ireland. Pocock's British history is political and constitutional; so too his extension of new British history overseas. Pocock's project, moreover, evolved as a reaction against the rupture of Britain's entry into Europe: it was one New Zealander's reaction to the political, economic, and constitutional changes in Anglo-dominion relations in the era of decolonization.Footnote 73 Again, the British world concept seems framed by political and constitutional factors (and the monarchy features frequently in British world collections, along with flags, and other symbols of state identity) yet these factors (central to Pocock) are completely omitted from the British world's conceptual architecture.Footnote 74 Greater Britain, the third British empire, Empire-Commonwealth, all these terms better serve to describe the unit of analysis dominating the British world literature. Thus, a more fruitful approach to addressing the concerns of the British world would have been to answer Francine McKenzie's call for a revived and enriched ‘new Commonwealth History’, perhaps (where appropriate) giving that history a transnational and post-colonial turn or engaging with the growing literature on settler colonialism.Footnote 75
Is it possible to conceive of a British world more firmly separated from the British imperial or Commonwealth project? One alternative (not advocated here) might be to use the British world as foil to study global conceptions of race, harmonizing with the central concern of post-colonial studies and the new imperial history. This would, naturally, encompass the study of the US and would constitute a dramatic departure from the concerns of the founders of the British world. Yet other, more appropriate, conceptual foils exist to perform this task. The rich field of whiteness studies seeks to understand precisely the evolution and use of cultural, social, and political power to make settler societies (including the US) ‘white’ spaces, and covers much of the same period. Lake and Reynolds’ admirable overview highlights the global spread of ideas of ‘whiteness’ and legal frameworks set up to protect that ‘whiteness’.Footnote 76 It was a concept clearly globally separate from empire, and Britishness. Bill Schwarz's first volume of his trilogy on ‘whiteness’ within Britain and the settler empire deliberately chose the term ‘white’ over ‘British’, since this more accurately placed the focus on the identification central to his analysis.Footnote 77 Our argument is not that this should not be an either/or British, British imperial, or white world. Rather, it is that these are best held to be distinct but overlapping. Jonathan Hyslop, amongst others, has already examined some of the ways these identities could overlap and conflict;Footnote 78 using the ‘worlds’ framework, in contrast, implies concrete boundaries which rarely existed in practice.
This leaves one final possibility for the ‘British’ world, interesting but more confined: the study of global or trans-national incarnations of British identity (or rather identities). In the exploration of the history of ideas of Britishness, its rise, flux, and fall lies the strongest case for having distinct British worlds analysis, rather than using frameworks like the British empire, whiteness studies, or settler colonialism. This project would not be limited to empire, but would be a chance to study how people constructed ideas of ‘Britishness’ to identify themselves and the worlds around them. The project might be executed by charting reconfigurations of ideas of Britain and Britishness along three vectors: Britishness as an identification; the global relations to Britain as a space; or networks and connections and boundaries and ruptures shaping such worlds. This conception is sufficiently distinct from the notion of a British imperium to ask searching questions about the relationship between incarnations of Britishness and empire's constitutional entity or power relations. Moreover, this approach must also include colonized peoples and opponents of empire, and not just as foils against which metropolitan and settler colonial Britishness was defined. It necessarily encompasses on an equal basis all claims by colonized peoples. The project should also encompass the constructions of Britain and Britishness across the rest of the world, for example in continental Europe, in the United States, or in the colonial empires of other European powers. The impact and interaction of these strands would necessarily require the charting of these multiple constructions of Britishness, and a consideration of their impact on and acceptance or rejection by a plurality of groups. In short, this would be a Linda Colley-esque history of Britain and Britishness, but from a truly global perspective. However, as Tony Ballantyne has warned, if ‘Britishness’ is used as the analytical tool, it can also act as a throw-back to Dilke's celebration of empire, and gloss over the diverse identities of colonial societies.Footnote 79 Only a global history of the multiple, patchy, and at times subversive uses to which vocabularies of Britishness have been put, by all actors within and beyond Britain and the British empire, is worth pursuing.
Such a study of global Britishness should not, however, be subsumed under the term British world, or even British worlds. To do so would obscure the very complex, conflicting, composite, and often disconnected discourses at the heart of such a history. Indeed, the term British world must prove unhelpfully distorting because it implies uniform connection and singularity where in fact the focus of study is plural and often disconnected or connected in fitful and sporadic ways. It assumes the existence of a connected field – a world – where none may exist. To study Britishness globally is necessarily to build from local and unique manifestations of self-declared Britishness, and then perhaps to proceed to establish specific connections or by way of comparisons, along with a consideration of the broader forces, the context, shaping these particular local manifestations of a global phenomenon. Because of this, we do not advocate using the term ‘British world’ to describe this project. Indeed, such a global study of Britishness is definitively not framed within a world, as it would be comparative in scope, not connected as worlds are meant to be. This is not an analysis of a British world but can only be one of Britishness in the world.
III
Our purpose has not been not to deny the important intervention which the British world literature has made in the historiography of the British empire; we have both been helped and inspired by the work in this area to make global connections we would otherwise never have made. Rather, our purpose has been to highlight that, in the end, this is the nature of the British world's achievement. It has brought disparate people together at conferences in a manner which many have found helpful. Historians have now rediscovered that an empire of settler capitalism and colonialism, increasingly self-governing and jealous of its autonomy, was a crucial component of Britain's empire. They have also returned the ‘imperial factor’ to the history of these and other regions. The British world also usefully emphasized the role of migration from the British Isles more broadly in the history of empire.Footnote 80 Relations between Britain and the self-governing dominions cannot simply be understood through the prism of inter-governmental relations or economic dependence. In addition, the British world shed new light on other locations which were part of a broader imperial project, and sought to understand them in new ways, shifting away from older debates on informal empire.
These advances are not, however, best articulated through the distinct concept of the British world. Reintegrating the dominions (as they became in 1907) and ultimately the ‘old Commonwealth’ more fully into the historiography of empire clearly was necessary. It was not, however, necessary to develop a distinctive concept which rested solely on social networks and shared culture to do this. Other terms were and are available: Greater Britain, the ‘third British empire’ or even ‘Empire-Commonwealth’ all better capture a slippery constitutional and political history, the omission of which frequently led the British world approach to neglect political culture and power. Combining this attention to ethnically British settler colonies (joined at times, with obvious reluctance, by the US) with the study of expatriate outposts within and beyond the empire, and the usages of languages of Britishness by other groups does not clarify our understanding of any of these phenomena.
Attempts to understand the British world as distinct from the British empire accentuate ambiguities which undermine the concept's utility. It is far from clear how that differentiation can be maintained or with what analytical gain. Consider for a moment the meaning of ‘world’, which emerged from the Atlantic world literature (which also sought differentiation from empire-driven histories). The Atlantic was an absolute space: an ocean. It was a relative space: connected by a certain conjunction of early modern maritime technologies. It was also a relational space: imagined and reimagined by those within its borders. A clear if fluid field of study emerges as a result. By contrast, a British world divorced from empire can only be defined relationally, by Britishness. That creates conceptual problems, for Britishness itself is a mutable, fragile, and composite identity (like all identities).Footnote 81
This critique of the British world has broader significance for the study of distinctive ‘worlds’ as a means of approaching the ‘lumpy’ nature of global history. It is clearly necessary for historians to appreciate as they take a global and transnational turn that not all areas are equally connected. Transnational connections vary in form and differ in density and intensity and consistency across space and time.Footnote 82 Given this, there is perhaps a place for the usage of the term ‘world’ to denote a dense, intense, and consistent set of connections within the broader sweep of global history. However, the case of the British world indicates how cautiously that term must be used. To construct a world around an identity alone when identity itself is such a slippery, mutable, and contingent concept can only lead to deep ambiguities. For a ‘world’ to have some purchase, it cannot be defined purely endogenously by the mutable identities of its supposed members. To contribute to the burgeoning fields of transnational, and global, history, ‘worlds’ history must look without as well as within.
