This weighty and impressive book is a thoroughly appropriate scholarly festschrift for Tony Hopkins. Thirty-six scholars from African history, from the history of the British Empire, and from the new field of global studies, present essays that are (on the whole) not just good, but excellent in ways that mirror the scholarship of Hopkins himself. Detailed and serious, most are rooted in the kind of close, archival scholarship that Hopkins himself has practiced to such fine effect. Wherever one cares to dip into the volume, one finds finely crafted, densely textured pieces of historical research. In short, this festschrift gives testimony to Hopkins' remarkable impact on the three historical fields that form the title of the book.
Hopkins made his initial mark as an historian in African history at a time when the field scarcely existed. His studies of Lagos, and West Africa more generally, were foundational to the field of African economic history. Long before any of us had heard of subalternity or postcolonialism, Tony Hopkins was reversing the gaze and arguing that Africans made their own histories and were not merely subject to the forces of colonialism. Indeed, his argument that internal tensions within African kingdoms played a major role in the partition of West Africa continues to be a critical point of contention in the historiography of the scramble for that part of the continent. It is, perhaps, not surprising that the first section of the book devoted to Africa is the most consistently impressive. In his early career especially, Hopkins gave historians of West Africa plenty to chew on and argue about. And these essays tend to reflect his influence in that respect very directly. They are mainly concerned with the economic history of region and its interaction with the external forces of French and British colonial and business interests.
Economic history has been fundamental to Hopkins's approach to history. The section of the book on Empire naturally enough focuses around the work he and Peter Cain did on gentlemanly capitalism. Hopkins (with Cain) offered a paradigm for interpreting the relationship between British history and the history of the British Empire that was rooted in a virtuoso performance of historical research. British Imperialism 1699–2000 (2nd edn, London, 2001) was an exhibition of archival research and of intellectual power that set a high standard for others who followed to explore this complicated relationship. It is striking, however, that with one exception (an interesting essay on the Chartist appreciation of the importance of finance capitalism), the essays in this section mostly deal with the empire side of gentlemanly capitalism. Once again, their key characteristic is detailed archival research. They are less concerned to challenge the idea of gentlemanly capitalism than to modify and revise it. Several contributions point to greater inter-penetration between commercial and industrial sectors of the economy than the theory allowed; others challenge the periodization that Cain and Hopkins laid down; and essays on specific sectors of imperial economic penetration – in Asia for example – show how gentlemanly capitalism itself was shot through with tensions and conflicts. Still, on the whole, the thesis holds up pretty well under this scrutiny, as it has in the wider scholarly world. On the other hand, this book does not include a consideration of how well the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis works at the metropolitan end of the story. Only Ian Phimister's careful discussion of the City of London's manipulation of the tin, chrome, and asbestos markets in the interwar years fully treats the British side of the concept of gentlemanly capitalism.
The third section of the book is more mixed in the quality of its essays. There are some that continue the very high standard of research and interest that mark the first two sections. Patrick Karl O'Brien, for example, writes a very strong statement on the importance, viability, and methods of global history. William Roger Louis offers an elegant and neatly researched piece on the partition of Palestine and the United Nations. But most of the essays are trans-national in focus, and deal with the ways in which local histories can be connected to cross-national or international frames of reference. It is worth noting that historians have been latecomers to the study of globalization and there remains considerable debate about how it best can be done. This relative immaturity perhaps is reflected in the uneven range of the essays in this section, some of which read like research reports from NGOs advising aid and government agencies.
But if the globalization section is the weakest from an historian's point of view, this hardly detracts from the overall achievement of the volume. Hopkins has been a true pioneer in each of these three areas. He is currently working on a big global history project, and I would not be surprised if the next few years see enough contributions to that field from Hopkins to generate another festschrift to match the quality of this one.
