One of the most interesting scholarly moves in British studies of the past decade or so has been the reemergence of the empire as a focus of historical and cultural interest. Indeed, I think the empire may be just the tonic needed to revitalize the intellectual arteries of the field—an elixir that many thought would be provided by the poststructuralist “linguistic turn” of the 1980s and 1990s. But even the most cursory acquaintance with the theoretical foundations of the linguistic turn was enough to reveal its conceptual weaknesses as a guide to historical practice. Indeed, its foremost deficit was precisely an inability to accommodate histories of empire. Its extreme idealism, for example, precluded reading empire as an economic or political system, let alone as a series of diverse encounters and associations. Still, poststructuralism did leave one valuable legacy; it encouraged a focus on culture, a focus that is very evident in the renewed interest in empire in British history.

The imperial turn is unlikely to suffer the same fate as the linguistic turn. Empire, after all, has continually returned to Britain, particularly since HMS Windrush tied up at Southampton Dock in 1948. Immigration is, of course, integral to Britain's past, tying its experiences to spheres beyond the nation itself. Of the different domains where Britain's history can be located—the Isles themselves, Europe, the North Atlantic—the imperial dimension has claims to be the most significant. After all, from its beginning in the sixteenth century, the very idea of Britain was an imperial construction. Britain itself was a result of the process of English imperialism and competition against the weaker, but no less evident, imperialism of Scotland. From the later seventeenth century, therefore, it is a thoroughly reasonable proposition to argue that the histories of Britain and its empire are, to use an oft-quoted phrase, “mutually constituted.”

This essay is a meditation on the notion of a mutually constituted history between Britain and its empire. It was inspired by recent scholarship that advertises itself as an “imperial turn” in British history. I am interested in how to write a history that understands Britain's history within the context of its empire. Thus, I shall focus my discussion around some recent books and articles that are either written from this conceptual perspective or make a relevant contribution to the history of empire in this respect. My principal attention is directed, therefore, to what is sometimes called the “new imperial history,” which is built around the idea of the mutual constitution of the histories of Britain and its empire. I also discuss the more conservative version of imperial history represented by Niall Ferguson and the recent text by Bill Nasson because both throw light on themes that currently interest historians of the field.Footnote ¹

I do not aim to achieve an exhaustive coverage of all the possible relevant literature. In this burgeoning field, such a goal would be hard to attain. I do not address, for example, those efforts to contextualize imperial history as another version of world history, nor do I address those scholarly initiatives that have come from historical geographers or from more traditional imperial historians, such as the recent series of “British World” conferences, except insofar as they reflect an emphasis on imperial networks as the way to understand the connection between Britain and its empire.Footnote ²

It is probably best that I declare my position at the beginning. Since I think that it is important and interesting to explore the mutual constitution of Britain and its empire, I also think that it is crucial that attempts to write such histories be convincing and that the structure of their historical argument be robust. But I am struck by how much of the existing scholarship is far better at stating the proposition of a mutually constituted history between Britain and the empire than at executing it. The core of my argument revolves around four absences that I find persistently common to much of the literature. These voids create a gap between the large aspirations and the smaller achievements of the new imperial history.

First, the new imperial history is not much interested in the kinds of categories that remain central to a consideration of empire and without which a meaningful history of empire cannot be written. Is it possible to write a history of empire without considering political economy or without some notion of the “state” as a historical actor in the imperial process? Second, issues of periodization and of historical change over time are conspicuous by their absence in much of the new imperial history. This point is illustrated by a discussion of how the ideas of “modernity” and empire are treated in some recent important works.

Third, many of these works fail to escape the metropolitan gaze. This is an odd claim to make, since it is an oft-stated objective of the new imperial history to decenter the metropole. What this means in actual, historical practice is seldom spelled out, however. What decentering does not seem to mean is moving beyond British sources or perspectives. In that respect, the new imperial history is reminiscent of the Gallagher-Robinson thesis in Africa and the Victorians, which, it will be recalled, posited a “peripheral” view of empire through the “official mind” of the metropole: that is, that empire in Africa grew out of the way that events on the outskirts of empire were processed through the official mind in London. Ronald Robinson himself, we may note in passing, was one of the first scholars to suggest the importance of the subjects of empire in determining the course of imperial history.Footnote ³ The new interest in empire may reflect a more cultural orientation than the imperial history it seeks to displace, but it seems to be similarly committed to writing that history through the sources of the metropole.

This leads to a fourth feature that I wish to highlight. Tied in these ways to the metropole, the new imperial history does not track how empire-British connections worked in practice. This omission leaves it open to the kind of criticism launched in a recent book by Bernard Porter, to be discussed below. Finally, the new imperial history fails to interrogate the relationship between the representation of empire in British society and the experience of empire itself. In other words, to what extent does the “empire” itself needs to be “problematized” within British society? Another way of putting this in more empirical terms is to say that the distance between what was happening in empire and what was represented as such in Britain is not sufficiently distinguished. To what extent was the empire in Britain “real”?

In contrast, two new books in the mold of traditional imperial history treat empire as a system rather than as a cultural construct. If the new imperial history wishes to establish itself as the new orthodoxy in imperial or British history, it would do well to learn from aspects of these texts. Let us begin with Niall Ferguson, whose recent book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, reveals an enthusiasm for the British empire that is somewhat unusual among historians these days.Footnote ⁴ Ferguson's devotion to the claims of the British empire as a civilizing force owes more to issues of public policy than it does to anything else.

Concurrent with his move to the United States, Ferguson emerged from his earlier expertise as a historian of war and finance to position himself as a historical commentator on the imperial mission of the United States itself. Shortly after arriving in New York, he went to Langley, presumably to advise on how to build or run an empire.Footnote ⁵ This followed the publication of Colossus: The Price of America's Empire.Footnote ⁶ Readers of this piece will probably be familiar with Colossus, since it received considerable attention in the popular press. It is a serious and in many ways a learned book packed with the kinds of statistics and graphs on issues like “kill-ratio” statistics that were Ferguson's original forte in Pity of War: Explaining World War I. Colossus makes an extended argument for an American imperium. Yet if Colossus is not directly about the British Empire, the British Empire is the historical precondition, as it were, for its arguments. Ferguson's neoconservative perspective presents the British experience of empire as the norm against which American global strategy may be measured. But its blueprint for a new imperial rationale is undercut by a persistent worry that the Yanks are not really up to it after all. Ferguson fears that America does not have the staying power needed to be a successful imperial power. The commitment to Social Security and other entitlement programs and the political grip of low, or no, taxation create a binding fiscal squeeze. No Ivy League elite is available to match those from Oxford and Cambridge who were willing to commit themselves to a life of selfless sacrifice in godforsaken parts of the world, wearing those ridiculous shorts and topees, all in furtherance of the white man's burden.

If Colossus was a call to action for America, Empire recalled the high noon of Britain's imperial mission, setting the stage for the notion that the United States could at last take up the evangelizing heritage of that earlier imperial enterprise. Indeed, Ferguson prepared for Empire by making a sort of archaeological tour of some of the more celebrated sites of the empire. It may be this that explains the rather odd geographical emphases that shape its narrative. Perhaps, too, the lingering imperial residues that Ferguson undoubtedly encountered on that tour impressed upon him the benefits that Britain had deposited in the world during its long imperial episode. In any case, although Ferguson judiciously details the case against empire, he comes down decisively on the side of the benefits of British imperial rule. This posture is developed most fully in Colossus, where he makes the audacious argument that the problem with places like Egypt in the postimperial era derived from the fact that there had not been enough empire to properly drag them out of their oriental stupor into the modern age! Here is an argument that will surely set neoconservative pulses racing. Edward Said must be turning in his grave.

Still, Empire is in many ways a good book. It is a beautifully produced volume, full of appropriate illustrations, maps, and other well-placed aids for those students or general readers who do not have much idea of where Sierra Leone is or who David Livingstone was. Unlike many books that aim at the nonspecialist or educational market, Empire has an engaging and lively style that presents its arguments without condescension or superiority. Ferguson has a good eye for the personal anecdote used to introduce an important theme. Nor is the book incorrigibly old-fashioned. Although it is rooted in a narrative of empire that proceeds from the British moving into the world and prevailing, it treats empire as a social formation as much as a military and diplomatic formation. In addition, it recognizes that indigenous peoples were part of the process of empire, too. For these reasons and others, it is a wonderful book to assign to undergraduates, and especially because it provides a nice target to teach against.

Empire is a reminder that there are alternatives to the cultural bias of the new imperial history. And this is important, because in the enthusiasm for empire as culture, one often gets the impression that there were no economic, political, or diplomatic dimensions of empire. But Empire is equally notable for its restrictions and its biases. In spite of a nod toward the Irish, Africans, or native Americans, and a couple of bows toward Indians, Ferguson's vision of empire remains very much the story of Britain coming, looking, and imposing its own brands of rationality. The extinction of the Tasmanian Indians, for example, warrants a line or two. But this ethnocide is swamped under the several pages devoted to Lachlan Macquarie's imposition of order on New South Wales in the early 1800s. In this respect, Empire is a version of the narrative of British imperial history that brushes up and polishes the historiography of the colonizer, with a hurried glance toward the colonized. India, of course, as always, is a partial exception to that bias. And India gets more than its fair treatment, as a site of commercial pillage by the East India Company, missionary zeal in the early nineteenth century, the Mutiny—as it is called—and then the Raj.

Other places get less extended attention. Canada and Australia soon drop out of the story, as do the West Indies once the sugar and slavery story has been told. Obviously, choices have to be made in attempting to tell a story spread over several centuries and spanning the world. Ferguson's strategy to meet this exigency has been to reduce each phase of the history of empire to one theme or place. Thus, he treats nineteenth-century Africa largely through the stories of David Livingstone and Cecil Rhodes. This is, of course, a viable strategy. But its result is to reinforce the conventional history of the empire as one of politics, diplomacy, and military endeavor, and, most of all, as British. An equally viable strategy would have been to take personages and incidents that show how empire was a process of contact, encounter, and interaction.

This aspect of empire is more prominent in Bill Nasson's recent Britannia's Empire: Making a British World.Footnote ⁷ Like Ferguson, Nasson has written a sweeping narrative of the empire story. Unlike Ferguson, however, Nasson brings a wry distance and breezy irreverence to the task. From his ex-colonial location of Cape Town, where he is an eminent historian of South Africa, Nasson is more aware than most of the sharp end of colonial rule. Like Ferguson, he has a good eye for the ripe story, but he is drawn more toward the darker, ambiguous side of the narrative. By emphasizing empire as a series of encounters and associations, Nasson is better than Ferguson at illustrating how empire studies are changing. I got particular amusement out of the story Nasson excavated to illustrate how the end of empire was foretold during the Second World War. Among the “few of the few” who defended the Weald of Kent against the barbarian invader during the Battle of Britain were a West Indian fighter pilot who had a pet mascot named Lugard and his Sikh compatriot who named his Hurricane fighter “Amritsar.”

In this one vignette, of course, lie associations of empire that are seldom centered in accounts by British historians. Nasson lights on such a story because he knows how British culture in the colonies engaged in a constant interaction with other cultures. Sometimes these interactions involved violence and destruction; sometimes they involved negotiation and bargaining. But always they implicated British culture in a more fragile and contingent relationship with colonized subjects than most imperial historians have cared to realize, let alone to assess. Ferguson argues that the underbelly of empire, with its costs in human lives and dignity, was ultimately outweighed by the benefits it bestowed. Nasson, however, would probably dismiss the idea of a balance as meaningless without asking “whose losses and whose gains?”

Nasson's survey proceeds by century. His narrative is driven by the traditional engines of commerce, international competition, geography, and the maritime tradition that goes back to the original conception of a British empire in the sixteenth century. Nasson's economy of expression and lightness of touch enable him to cover a lot of ground efficiently and expeditiously. He is skilled at condensing a lot of learning into a compact package; an impressive erudition underpins his easy style. Thus, he provides a deep and inclusive narrative. In contrast to Ferguson's habit of latching onto an emblematic event or person, Nasson ensures that all parts of the empire get their moment in the sun. He provides a fuller and more complete narrative line than Ferguson, switching easily between China and the Ottomans, Africa, India, Ireland, and North America to tell the story of each phase of empire.

It remains true, of course, that surveys such as these reflect conceptual assumptions about empire that are different from much of the current monographic literature. There is little in either work, for example, about gender and empire. However, both Nasson and Ferguson contextualize empire within an international political and economic framework. There is much to be said for this contextualization, since, as Ferguson points out, empires have been a persistent fact of world history. By contrast, the new imperial history does not seem much interested in empire as a system that possessed political economies, legal systems, and other kinds of power relations beyond those that are gendered and cultural. This is a curious absence. One result is to exclude from consideration the principal ways that empire was experienced by its victims—that is, as systems of direct power through labor and legal systems. New work, such as a study of master and servant law in the empire, however, may soon remedy this blind spot.Footnote ⁸

In the new imperial history, power is treated largely as a cultural artifact. But it is seldom theorized much beyond that; nor is it typically treated as a particularly complicated category of analysis. It is ironic that we get a better sense of the fragilities that underlay imperial power from the more traditional analysis of Nasson. Empire was anything but unproblematic for those charged with the business of building or running it. Just to dip into the colonial archives, those in the colonies, reveals the constant work required to maintain the sinews of imperial power. Yet empire is seldom treated as an inherently brittle construct.Footnote ⁹ And it is one of the strengths of Nasson's book that he has a better sense of the complications of imperial power than most writers on empire that I have encountered. Indeed, as against the assumption of the new imperial history that empire was somehow easy for the British, it is worth making the point that empire was something of a perpetual chimera. To appreciate this, one has only to ask the question: who actually did the ruling of empire? It was hardly the imperial officer. From any period one wishes to pick, the slender imperial veneer could be amply illustrated. As Nasson points out, in Uganda in the 1890s about twenty residents governed—if that is the right word—3 million people. Even in the 1940s, there were fewer than one thousand administrative officers in sub-Saharan Africa.

The answer to the question of who ran the empire, of course, is that it was the colonized themselves. So whose empire was the British Empire? From London, where most historians of empire go for their ideas about empire, it was obviously “ours.” At the local level it was a different story altogether. Empire required constant work, negotiation, and maintenance to remain a going concern. As Lynn Lees has put it in an unpublished paper, empire was a series of “middle grounds.” These were the places where power relations were negotiated. They were also places where various kinds of hybridities could flourish. And hybridity, whether it be of a cultural, social, or sexual kind, obviously dilutes the power of the colonizer. It is for this reason that evidence of boundary crossings of any sort in the colonial encounter occasioned such intense unease.Footnote ¹⁰ Still, empire had no choice but to depend on the local elites who peopled these middle grounds. Thus, at its very heart, imperial culture fostered the expansion of power networks that were not entirely dependent on imperial largesse. When independence came, it involved the transfer of sovereign power to groups who had been already exercising much of the actual power from the very beginning.

To what extent was this fragility of empire reflected within British culture? Here again, Nasson offers some interesting reflections on an important question that deserves to be more centrally placed in the historiography. Only in the late 1950s was it widely recognized in British society that the imperial sun was about to set. But Nasson argues that the self-confidence of the imperial project was shaken by the First World War. We need only think of George Orwell lying on the ground in his Burmese village, scared out his wits waiting to shoot the elephant, to capture the truth of this argument.Footnote ¹¹ Nasson quotes Alec Cook, father of the comedian Peter Cook, to the same effect. Cook was a colonial officer in interwar Nigeria. On the surface, he possessed all the attributes of the colonial civil servant. He was skilled at projecting the official line on the British civilizing mission to the Ibo, and he was committed to the moral work of British colonialism in showing the Nigerians how good government was supposed to run. Yet beneath his self-assured manner, Cook fretted that it was all in vain, that the civilizing mission was largely rhetoric, and that he would end his days lazing on the seafront at Eastbourne, conscious that the whole paraphernalia of the empire had been for naught. Indeed, we might extend this theme even beyond the twentieth century to argue that empire was always regarded as an impermanent construction. After all, the predominant assumption about empire until the mid-nineteenth century was precisely that it would not last.Footnote ¹² It was only in the turbo-charged imperialism of the later nineteenth century that this idea fell prey to silly slogans that suggested a map splashed with red on which the sun would never set. Thus, although the end of empire seemed to arrive with an unexpected rush at the end of the 1950s, in a deeper way the British had been expecting it since 1776.

It is this kind of consciousness that makes Nasson skeptical, therefore, of the idea that British national consciousness was inherently imperial. This is, of course, an underlying assumption of the new imperial history. But Nasson would want to draw a distinction between the mythologized official national ideology of the past and the actual consciousness of the general public. This, of course, is a class distinction and points to the importance of entering class into the analysis of empire in some form. Once the policy-making class decided that the empire was finished—signaled by Harold Macmillan's “Winds of Change” speech in 1960—popular memory of empire faded with a startling rapidity. Even in the 1940s, after fifty years or so of empire being unrelentingly fed into the public consciousness, few people could name a single colony. Some even thought that the United States remained a colony. And the great influx of immigrants from the empire in the 1950s hardly changed this persistent ignorance. A 1997 Gallup Poll revealed the following facts: 65 percent did not know which country Robert Clive or James Wolfe was associated with, 77 percent did not know who Cecil Rhodes was, 79 percent could not identify a famous poem Rudyard Kipling had written, and 47 percent thought Australia was still a colony. Over 50 percent did not know that the United States of America had once been part of the British Empire.Footnote ¹³

How could this have happened if the empire and Britain were one big thing? These are difficult facts for those who wish to argue that Britain's culture has been defined by its imperial role. How well does the new imperial history provide answers to those questions? How convincing is its conceptual apparatus and its forms of historical argumentation in presenting the case for a mutual constitution of British history and the history of empire? Let us start at the beginning of the modern empire, in the eighteenth century.

Recent publications by Kathleen Wilson provide a useful entrance to discuss the conceptual apparatus of the new imperial history.Footnote ¹⁴ Wilson has positioned herself as one of the most impressive advocates for a cultural interpretation of empire as against an economic or political interpretation. Indeed, her enthusiasm for the potential of the “new imperial history” is such that she reaches beyond the parochial boundaries of British history to claim that “new imperial histories may thus have the effect of reinventing History itself.”Footnote ¹⁵ So this may be a truly imperial history. If this is, indeed, an implication of the cultural turn in imperial studies, it is fair to ask whether the conceptual scaffolding revealed here and elsewhere is capable of bearing such a load.

In these works, as in others, empire does indeed seem to be everywhere one looks in British culture and society. Tea parties, botanical gardens, slavery, technology, and even sitting-room gossip were pervaded by the empire. The Hanoverian state itself was one of its inventions. Indeed, for Wilson eighteenth-century history rested upon the empire. Most of all, the empire is identified as the source of eighteenth-century “modernities.”Footnote ¹⁶

It is, of course, quite conventional to position the eighteenth century as the pivot on which Britain's imperial history turned. This was a well-established theme of the older historiography upon which the new imperial history now rests. Still, careful chronological distinctions need to be drawn for that claim to be intelligible. Indeed, unlike in the old imperial history, chronology does not seem to figure very large in the new imperial history. Thus, we are left wondering if the empire played quite the same role in early eighteenth-century modernities as it did in late eighteenth-century modernities. And where does the fiscal military state of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries fit into this schema? More fundamentally, what exactly may be said to constitute eighteenth-century modernity, and how may the identities that flowed from it be defined? Several answers seem to be offered to that question. At various points, eighteenth-century modernity is taken to include a “precarious sense of self” and the “unfolding set of relationships … which produces the conviction of historical difference.” Elsewhere, the key component of eighteenth-century identity is taken to be the growth of “relational” categories. This may very well be the case. But we can only assess the strength of this claim in a relational sense of a different kind. Any claim for the distinctiveness of eighteenth-century modernities has to be made in relation to past and future modernities, or else their epistemological distinctiveness cannot be described. What is the relationship between the empire-induced modernities of the eighteenth century and those of the nineteenth century, for example? What is peculiar about eighteenth-century “difference”? What particular constellations of culture and power distinguished the eighteenth-century empire from the configurations of an earlier period, say, or from those of the nineteenth century?Footnote ¹⁷

The great gain of the new imperial history has been to draw attention to empire as a cultural process and formation. But often this seems to mean how empire was represented rather than how empire was constructed in British culture. The most impressive essays in Wilson's edited book, A New Imperial History, are those that approach the problem of empire in British society with a recognition of how its intrusion into British society was historically constructed. The case of General James Wolfe described by Nicholas Rogers, for example, addresses one of the earliest cases of the invention of an imperial hero and his insertion into popular and political culture.Footnote ¹⁸ Imperial heroes were to be a constant fixture in British imperial culture well into the twentieth century, and none of them can be treated purely as cultural representations. They were all the product of deliberate acts of invention in some way or another.

Similarly, the question of national identity is the subject of a very learned essay by Colin Kidd, who dissects the multiple and overlapping identities of the North Atlantic empire. And, likewise, Margaret Hunt demonstrates that early eighteenth-century women connected with sailors were well practiced at mobilizing to press their pension and wage demands upon the state.Footnote ¹⁹ Here are concrete instances of how the state provided a link between empire and the internalities of British society. All these examples are models of how to address the general question of the interconnections between empire and domestic culture. It is notable, however, that such essays are highly “traditional” in their method and style. They use evidence in a credible way, and they contextualize their topics within a historical perspective or larger perspectives that go beyond a model of cultural representation. If the new imperial history is, in fact, to supplement usefully other ways of looking at empire, it needs to be willing to fill out its ideas—like “mutually constitutive”—with the cogent deployment of concept and fact.

However, there is a danger that the concentration on empire in the constitution of “Britain” runs the risk of falling into a self-confirming teleology and reductionism all of its own. Some of the essays in Wilson's book seem in clear danger of doing this. But, more broadly, it is revealing that no one seems to be asking how to weigh the importance of empire in the making of British culture and identities against and alongside other formations that may have similar claims to be foundational. What other elements, aside from empire, constituted British modernities, whether in the eighteenth century or elsewhere? What is the significance of empire compared to class, for example? Where do we fit in issues like “customs in common,” the law, the tradition of civic republicanism, ideas of “liberty” and the constitution, the political economy, or the hostility toward other “others,” like the French, or toward Italian opera? How would we demonstrate that empire overwhelmed these other identities, subjectivities, and historical formations in defining British culture? If eighteenth-century Britain revolved around empire, where do we put the enclosure riots, the identities of the keelboatmen of the Tyne, the women spinners of Lancashire? Where do we place the quotidian life of these people? If everything about eighteenth-century Britain was determined by empire, how long must it be before we once again rescue the poor stockinger from the enormous condescension of posterity? How much empire, how much “mutual constitutiveness” was there in eighteenth-century British culture? It may just be that Britain itself was too complicated a social formation to be viewed simply through the prism of empire.Footnote ²⁰

I have already suggested that the fragilities of empire need to occupy a much larger place in our historical consciousness than they currently do. It is true that passing references are often made in the new imperial history to the fractures and negotiations that composed power relationships in empire. But this is required by the mandates of postcolonial theory upon which the new imperial history rests. The actual ways in which imperial hegemony was constantly compromised plays little part in this analysis. Imperial culture is treated as a hegemon, a Gulliver striding across the nation and the world. Naturally, therefore, indigenes are almost entirely absent from these accounts. The many models of how to examine colonized-colonizer relations that have been offered by historical anthropology are not much in evidence in Wilson's edited collection. Where indigenes are introduced, for example, they are usually presented as representations in British culture, not as living beings in the empire. Thus, Harriet Guest's essay on Omai (the Tahitian noble brought to London by Cook in 1774) treats his reception by London society as being framed through the discourse of Adam Smith, although what other discourses he was also enmeshed in are not identified, so what is gained by this suggestion is by no means obvious.Footnote ²¹

To treat imperial representation as the main object for historical investigation of the connection between empire and Britain allows only very narrow and limited arguments to be made. Wilson's own absorbing essay on the cultural misreadings of Polynesian sexual practices by the British is a partial exception to this pattern. But even here the Polynesians are treated as mirrors of the (largely gendered) assumptions that the British brought with them to the Pacific, prepackaged, courtesy of the Enlightenment. Not until the very end of the essay is the psychology that accompanied the encounter introduced. But in many ways this is the place to start, not to finish. The dynamic element of two groups reacting to and trying to understand each other is missing. But it was precisely this process that lay at the heart of the building of empire and the formation of its culture. And it was this engagement, too, that injected the perpetual instability into empire. Empire was a process of continual disruption and instability, and Cook's encounter with the Polynesians was a classic case of how imperial encounters disturbed the serenity of the colonizer. But serenity was to be a most elusive quality for colonial and imperial culture.Footnote ²²

The relational question is one that reveals the conceptual limits of the field as it is currently conceived by the new imperial history. What, for example, is the relationship of this new imperial history to other histories? The answer is not clear, since there seems to be little interest in linking the cultural history of empire to past efforts to explain the connections between Britain and its empire. There is a large body of eighteenth-century scholarship that addressed this connection, yet there seems to be little interest in integrating this work.

In this respect, the absence of an engagement with other conceptual paradigms for understanding empire is even more puzzling than the refusal of earlier scholarly biases. For instance, the new imperial history has not engaged with the opus produced by Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins. By any standards, this was a breathtaking work of research and conception. Cain and Hopkins offered an interpretive schema for understanding the connection between Britain and its empire, arguing that the empire was shaped by the domestic structures of social relations that settled into place at the end of the seventeenth century—their celebrated notion of “gentlemanly capitalism.” (Similarly, we may note in this respect the work of Chris Bayly, which is a prime example of the gains that may be secured when revisionist work does attend to other interpretive frameworks.)Footnote ²³ Debate and engagement with other theories and interpretive frameworks of imperial history were built into Cain and Hopkins's presentation of argument and evidence. This stands in sharp contrast to the new imperial history, at least as it is presented.Footnote ²⁴ The point, of course, is not that the new imperial history should be governed by the scholarship of the past. The point, rather, is that the questions that it is asking are in some ways the traditional questions. And since this is so, it will ultimately be judged on the comparative strength of its interpretive and analytical practices.

The absence of the state and state formation in the cultural bias of the new imperial history is somewhat ironic because the first person to suggest that British history was constituted by its empire did so through the agency of the state: in the 1880s, the great-grandfather of the new imperial historians, Sir John Seeley, proposed the notion that British history happened more in India than it did in the home counties (at least for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).Footnote ²⁵ Seeley put the growth of the imperial state at the center of the way British history was constituted by the empire. Of course, linking Britain and its empire via the history of the state is not about to find much scholarly favor today. Postcolonial theory has critiqued the idea of the nation-state as specifically European in its meaning and scope. Writing the history of India or Africa through categories like the nation-state, it is argued, imposes a Eurocentric narrative and thus continues the intellectual colonization of such places. This is, indeed, a genuine problem for the histories of those nations that were colonized. But it is a problem to which no real alternative has been presented even by those who have examined it most thoroughly. It would surely be a major gain for the new imperial history if it were to develop a notion of the state as integral to its presumptions.Footnote ²⁶

It is hard to see how the idea of the nation-state can be denied as a site where imperial culture as well as imperial policy was made. Who was it who sent that little fleet of convict ships to Botany Bay in 1788? Who devised the scheme—one of many in the history of empire—to send several hundred Irish workhouse girls to the eastern Cape to serve as wives for the German military settlers planted on the frontier as armed farmers in the later 1850s?Footnote ²⁷ It is certainly true that Seeley possessed an unproblematic notion of the “state.” The British state was neither a fixed nor an essential category. It assumed different shapes and forms from different historical moments or geographical vantage points. But the state can be seen as a historical problem rather than as an impediment to historical understanding. Indeed, the state provides perhaps the best example of the mutually constitutive relationship of empire and British history. Historically speaking, the idea of the British state was inseparable from the idea of empire. Is it possible to say the same about British culture?

The centrality of the state to empire history is illustrated by scholars who have followed John Pocock and David Armitage in locating British history in the context of empire.Footnote ²⁸ Pocock—who probably does not figure large enough in contemplation of the historiography of empire—has long been part of a discussion about how to contextualize British history in a way that looks back to Seeley, even if it does not, for the main part, see itself as picking up Seeley's agenda. Pocock's method of close textual analysis and tracing the genealogies of key intellectual concepts has allowed David Armitage and others to convincingly demonstrate the centrality of empire in early modern British political theory. Their focus has been largely on the more rarefied realms of political culture. But it is this work that has made the most convincing case that the British state and British political culture were imperial in their context in the eighteenth century. State formation lies at the heart of this set of arguments, and most attention has been directed toward the North Atlantic. But its lessons could obviously be applied to other outliers of state formation such as the East India Company. It was in such places that histories of eighteenth-century Britain and its empire were locked in the most fervid mutually constitutive embrace.Footnote ²⁹

The difficulties that run through much of the new imperial history derive from inadequate historical reasoning. And the same is even more true when we turn to some representative treatments of the relationship between empire and nineteenth-century British culture. Thus books by Ian Baucom, Peter van der Veer, and Steve Attridge all reveal curious notions of what constitutes historical reasoning, and all possess conceptual approaches that are unable to sustain the arguments that are presented.Footnote ³⁰ At one point Baucom argues as if it were an accepted fact that the export of Ruskin's Gothic architecture was to discipline the natives just as its purpose at home was to discipline the working class! Similarly, in a breathtaking example of disregard for elementary rules of logic and chronology, let alone knowledge of history, he dates the enclosure movement to the 1870s and suggests a causal link between the changes in the patterns of rural land use and the development of the disciplining rules of cricket!Footnote ³¹ Van der Veer proposes to explore the interchange between Indian and British religions, but he fails to show how either were particularly changed by their encounter and ends up merely arguing that the British saw themselves as secular and regarded the Indians as religious.

Attridge's book deserves a fuller consideration because it presents an example of a slightly different problem: how to match theoretical conceptualization with historical periodization. The book's thesis is that the South African War (1899–1902) was the pivot of modernity for ideas of patriotism and nationalism. To make that case, it offers a montage of studies of varying interest that include the music hall, treatment of the image of the common soldier, the phenomenon of the hooligan and mafficking, and considerations of writers such as Kipling and W. E. Henley. There are, indeed, good reasons to regard the South African War as more significant than simply Britain's “Vietnam.” In recent years, scholars like Paula Krebs and Laura Nym Mayhall have made a pretty good case that the war marked a more important moment for political mobilization than had previously been thought.Footnote ³² There may be some merit in Attridge's argument, therefore. But it never quite receives the supporting evidence that it deserves.

The difficulty lies in Attridge's failure to contextualize and define his terms. What is meant by the “modernity” that the South African War introduced? If one historical moment is going to be privileged as marking the move to modernity, then we need to have some sense of what criteria are being used to substantiate this claim and how those criteria distinguish it from other periods, such as those on either side of it. How were the cultural configurations that the war opened in the national and imperial culture historically significant and distinctive? In the chapter on Kipling, Attridge's discussion focuses on where he may be placed in the contemporary and present literary canon. But the more profound historical question is what his representation of the working-class soldier can tell us about changing notions of imperial identity. Thus, Kipling's Tommy Atkins is claimed to have become the signifier of the soldier in the national character at this moment. But how does one assess that claim against the celebration of soldier-heroes in other periods or wars? Similarly, although the book aims to explain how national identity was located in various forms of representation around the period of the South African War, it fails to define what is meant by the various illustrations of “national identity.” It is as if nationalism and patriotism do not need to be embedded in any political, ideological, or material contexts. Without such contextualization, however, it is not clear what one can do with these ideas.

The irony is that the late nineteenth century did indeed form a distinct and different period in terms of the way imperial culture was configured in the national culture. This is the context that helps make sense of literary figures like Kipling, poet and essayist Henley, and G. A. Henty, the author of boys’ literature around imperial themes. The distinct stage that the late nineteenth century represents in the history of Britain's relationship with its empire may be demonstrated in many ways. New methods of product advertising, for example, emerged at this moment to foster an imperial patriotism. Perhaps this provides a nice example of the way empire was constitutive of British culture?

If we turn to politics, the late nineteenth century sees the powerful conjuncture of a challenged imperial status in the world with the breakthrough to mass politics. The political culture had to respond to a mutating world political economy that was placing Britain under military, fiscal, and cultural stress. The growing democratic forms of national politics threatened to drive sectionalist and class wedges into the political culture. Thus, the political subjectivity of the ordinary Briton was transitioning at this time from the deferential subject to the assertive citizen with the prospect of gaining actual power within the political system. Empire was potentially a way of bridging those divisions in electoral politics. This was one reason why empire was injected into British culture in a more profound way than ever before during this period. How this was achieved and the extent to which it was achieved in the culture is precisely the historical question at issue and obviously one far too large to be even sketched here. But the end result was that, from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, to be a British citizen meant also to be an imperial citizen. Before the late nineteenth century, such categories had very different meanings and values in the culture.Footnote ³³

The value of Attridge's book, therefore, is that it may be read as explicating the way imperial culture of the period came to stand for British culture. But questions of how this happened, of what it involved, and of how a distinctive configuration of imperial culture and British culture was forged remain unrecognized and unanswered. Attridge's book serves as a lesson in the dangers of failing to recognize that the relationship between imperial culture and British culture is a historical relationship and needs to be located within historical periods and historical formations.

There is another question of more general import that is raised by Attridge's book. When the empire is spoken of as constituting Britain, or as contributing to British culture, what is meant by “empire”? Attridge's empire, and the empire of many of the new imperial historians, is an empire that is an amorphous, ill-defined construct, existing out there. It is seldom given concrete description or explanation. In this sense, the empire is caught once again playing a familiar role in British culture. It is a role we recognize from nineteenth-century suffragettes, for example, who staked their claims to political rights within Britain on the role they could play as imperial women. The empire as such did not figure much in their actual lives or work. They did not actually know much about empire, nor, it seems, did many of them go to India. Empire was instead a useful site for them to authorize their own political subjectivity. Thus regarded, empire was just like the needy working class for middle-class feminists. It allowed them to marry their recognized domestic values with their aspirations towards social and political public action.Footnote ³⁴

In this respect, as in others, a common thread of much of the new imperial history scholarship is precisely the failure to demonstrate convincingly the large connections between empire and Britain that is its raison d'être. This failure proceeds from the way these scholars use theory. As we have already indicated, theoretical claims, often of a grandiose nature, are a common currency in the new imperial scholarship, whether it proceeds along historical or literary lines of inquiry. Yet the new imperial history is equally often quite naive in its own treatment of theory. By this, I mean there is a tendency to use theory as the magic lantern of truth rather than as a beam to light up and reveal things about the “facts” that are revealed by sources. For the historian, theory and sources need to be regarded as mutually constitutive, as being held in mutual tension, as being reciprocally enlightening. They are to some degree separate things until they are brought together in an argument. The problem with much new imperial history in this respect lies in its internal logic. It proceeds from the “theory”—orientalism or the mutual constitution of Britain and empire, and the like—and thus finds traces of the theory everywhere. Thus, we get the kind of reasoning we have noted above as characteristic of Attridge and others.

Now, all this is important only because theoretical claims are commonly deployed in the new imperial history. Indeed, the structure of argument to be found in some statements of the new imperial history is an untidy mix of broad conceptual claims jumbled with worthy political statements, intermixed with dismissive derision of those who practice “old” or “reactionary” imperial history.Footnote ³⁵ How theory is used by historians to present and argue their notions of historical process is not a small matter. To use orientalism, for example, as a received truth, rather than as the problematique, is not very helpful. Said did not establish orientalism as a new law of historical gravity; it remains a useful tool for understanding how the West looked at the East. But the more one understands the local histories of “orientalism,” the more one understands that it is a very partial tool for that purpose. The same is true of the premise of a “mutual constitution” of Britain and its empire. It is a proposition that needs to be demonstrated, not the truth against which all other discussion of this matter should be judged.

This brings me to how we may interrogate the idea that Britain's history and its culture were imbued with the presence of empire. Bernard Porter's recent book, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, is a sustained interrogation of the idea that Britain and its empire were conjoint and that British culture was constituted by the imperial factor.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, Porter's book is a complete contrast to the theoretical pretensions of the new imperial history. Its procedure is to subject those big ideas about British culture being “mutually constituted” by empire or about Britain and empire being an “imperial social formation” to the rude glare of empirical evidence. Most of the objects of his attention fail to meet his test, which is to seek empire's traces in the everyday practices and institutions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British society. He has plowed through an enormous variety of printed sources, periodicals, memoirs, and government documents, so his bibliography runs to thirty pages. At each point he asks where “empire” was to be found and in what quantities, even to the extent of measuring the column inches devoted to empire in Hansard. He thoroughly covers the main institutional features of the culture and society: politics, the schools, theater, literature, music; he looks at the way empire was perceived by the different classes; he distinguishes between the different phases of imperial propaganda, how official talk about empire began to be directed at the working classes when the ruling class sensed the imperial mission to be under threat; and he appreciates the importance of applying the grid of periodization to any discussion of empire's importance to Britain.

Porter complicates the idea that empire defined and constituted British culture. On the one hand, he finds empire was not ubiquitous in any of the cultural institutions he examined. By contrast, he points to the ideology of free trade, which was ubiquitous and an article of faith in parts of the Victorian middle classes. Empire did not occupy much attention from the political classes. Even the House of Commons in the mid-nineteenth century spent only 10–15 percent of its time on colonial issues. Indeed, although he does not make the point, Porter's arguments can be supported by evidence from those who do argue for the pervasiveness of empire. Between 1868 and 1910 there were only thirty articles on Indian women in the Englishwoman's Review, for example, which has been used as a main source to argue the centrality of empire in feminist consciousness in the late nineteenth century. That, of course, is well under one a year.Footnote ³⁷

On the other hand, Porter does not deny that empire was represented in British culture. But, like Nasson, he doubts that it was an essential presence. To the contrary, Porter suggests that the profile of empire in national culture varied over time and in response to changing political culture. He tends to see empire's presence in the culture as a constructed presence. Thus, Porter argues, it was only in the late nineteenth century that empire began to pop up everywhere in the national culture—from political sloganeering through literature to popular songs. This did not reflect a sudden epiphany by the British people to the calling of an imperial race. It did express, however, the altered place of empire in the politics of the later nineteenth century.

Porter's critique of the culturalist view of empire in British history, therefore, is first and foremost that it fails to meet the test of empirical evidence. It fails to ask how the connection between empire and British culture was actually made or by what methods and means it was realized. Indeed, in this respect Porter puts his finger on a weakness to be found in many attempts to put empire into British politics. Catherine Hall's argument about the role of the empire in the events of 1867 in Britain, for example, rests on inferential and contextual connections between notions of empire and citizenship rather than on direct and immediate ones. It is not, therefore, obvious that this argument about the origins of the second reform bill is superior to the older argument that focused upon the domestic representations of class.Footnote ³⁸

Porter's second main charge against the cultural analysis of empire identifies a persistent habit of the new imperial scholarship: that it fails to contextualize over space and time. Porter draws particular attention in this regard to class. He points, for example, to the way the reception of empire varied between the classes. In the nineteenth century, he argues the upper classes were most cognizant of empire, as part of their ruling-class duties; that the middle classes were much more focused on free trade and evangelical Christianity; and that the working classes, generally speaking, were not much interested in it.

There is much that is telling about Porter's critique, and it deserves to be met seriously. But his own view of empire is not without difficulties. While he is right to insist on the interrogation of the conceptual framework of a culturalist view of empire, and while he is also right to point to the importance of periodizing and contextualizing, I suspect that the evidence for empire's presence in culture is more mixed than he allows. His discussion of the representation of empire themes in art, for example, does not take account of the enormous print and lithograph market in the early nineteenth century. Recording the feats of British troops in the frontier campaigns to hang on living room walls was a big business, although one that we are unlikely to be able to recover now. Similarly, empire themes seem to have been a staple of the music halls or the clubs in the late nineteenth century. But they were not present in the mainstream theaters of the West End that Porter examined.Footnote ³⁹ Even in the eighteenth century, empire left its traces in food and other deposits that remain to be picked over by historians. Porter's emphasis on the nineteenth century may bias his case somewhat. It does seem likely that politicians and others spent less time discussing empire from the early nineteenth century onward (at least until the 1880s) than their counterparts had in the eighteenth century. There are times in the eighteenth century when a great deal of attention is given to the North American Indians, for example, and debate about the slave trade from the 1780s surely involved an imperial presence. Still, Porter would claim that this does not mean that empire was internalized in the thought patterns or beliefs of the culture. Ultimately, however, one feels that Porter's empiricism is not quite enough. Porter is willing to admit that empire cannot be ruled out as a component of British culture. But one gets the sense that his hammering of the new imperial history left him with no energy to explain how he might envisage the linkages.

The same cannot be said of David Cannadine. Here is a historian who has been bold enough to lay out what the new imperial historians, in fact, are calling for—a conceptual link between British culture and empire. Cannadine chose to name this link “ornamentalism.” And in doing so he has brought upon himself considerable scholarly wrath.Footnote ⁴⁰ By “ornamentalism,” Cannadine intended to launch a play on “orientalism” as a means of highlighting the complete absence of class and status in the Saidian conceptual framework. Said offered a way of understanding the world that was comfortingly cultural; it allowed the materiality of the social world to be ignored. Cannadine cannot be accused of this mistake. His recognition of the importance of class has always been the strongest aspect of his historical method, and he has spent a large part of his academic career exploring the dimensions of class in Britain. By “ornamentalism,” then, Cannadine means that the British saw their empire through the prism of their class and status system, rather than seeing it as structured by racial difference. The strength of this argument is that, as with Porter, it reminds us that class and status are relevant to any consideration of how the empire was constituted in British culture. Unfortunately, the notion of ornamentalism is not the best demonstration of the historical agency of class in empire.

In the first place, the idea that the culture of empire can be reduced to one essential quality—ornamentalism—grossly oversimplifies a very complicated process. Aside from the easy dismissal of racial difference by Cannadine, there is the question of gender, which a vast body of scholarship has placed at the center of how imperial culture actually worked. Then there is the question of religion. Early nineteenth-century missionaries, for example, were strongly influenced by the evangelical notion of the equality of the human spirit. They tended to divide people according to their reception of the Christian spirit. Indeed, they had to “learn” to see them in other ways, such as through race and class, as their initial categorizations were undermined by experience.Footnote ⁴¹

In the second place, ornamentalism works well to explain the mediation of colonizer and colonized only in certain parts of princely India. Even there the idea that Prince Ranjitsinhji, the celebrated test-match cricketer, was the rough equivalent to the Duke of Westminster was an idea that itself had to grow as part of an historical process of accommodation and rule. Tipu Sultan had a completely different kind of reputation and suffered a different fate. Ornamentalism was a useful element to the ideology of imperial rule, but it was an element that was itself a historical construction, a partial answer to the problem of dealing with indigenous hierarchies and aristocracies in places like India and Malaya. Once one moved below the level of princes and nizams, how the British saw their empire surely became a much more muddied, complicated, and very racial business.

Ornamentalism as a concept is not very helpful once one moves out of the rarefied environment of a few princely states. The British did not see the slave-trading King Guzo of Lagos in the 1850s through an ornamentalist frame. Nor did they see the Xhosa chiefs of South Africa in that light. These chiefs were either murdered or politically neutered. Cetswhayo of the Zulu, of course, achieved a momentary celebrity in Britain in the 1880s as a noble savage, but only after he himself had been defeated in revenge for the humiliation of Isandlwana. And, like many of the other South African chiefs, he was later hunted down and murdered by British-funded auxiliaries. This does not show much respect for hierarchy or status. Some indigenous hierarchies were viewed with greater respect and tolerance than others. But the British view of them depended on a more complicated calculus than a simple respect for status and hierarchy.

The most interesting thing about Ornamentalism is the response it has occasioned from fellow historians. While the positive comments that greeted its appearance were from predictable academic quarters, equally predictable was the excoriating response from other sections of the scholarly world. Indeed, a whole issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History was devoted to refuting Cannadine's argument. In the case of several of the contributors this was done with so much contempt that one has to wonder why so much effort was expended on a work that was generally found to be so ineffective as a guide to analyzing imperial culture.Footnote ⁴²

After the heat that Cannadine's Ornamentalism generated, it is with some relief that one turns to the question of gender and empire. A growing collection of works demonstrate the reciprocities between Britain and its empire in ways more convincing than through the category of class. Philippa Levine's recent study of sexual politics and policies in the empire is a model example of this body of work. Her recent edited collection Gender and Empire is a convenient introduction to the current historiography of this aspect of the new imperial history.Footnote ⁴³Gender and Empire is one of several supplements that are being produced to remedy the failure of the five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire to reflect virtually any of the recent scholarship on empire. Of course there is a way in which the addition of a “companion” series only compounds the original error. We now have additional volumes on important subjects like “blacks” and “women” in the empire. But these volumes displace such groups into ghettoized byways that are thinner and smaller than the mainstream volumes. The belated recognition that the original volumes were but a pale imitation of the state of empire scholarship led to what seems like a knee-jerk reaction to now accommodate obvious voids. It was quite predictable that we would get volumes on gender and empire or on missionaries and empire. The real problem of course is that such linkages were missing from the original volumes. But in this process an opportunity was lost to use the companion volumes as a way to present categories of empire that were altogether different. Has anyone thought, for example, of volumes on “imperial violence,” or “imperial law”?Footnote ⁴⁴

Nevertheless, aside from all this, Levine's volume would have been welcomed anyway. It is an appropriate moment to put together a sort of state of the field collection for gender and empire. And Levine is the right person to do it. The essays in Gender and Empire provide a good survey of the scope and dimensions of the presence of gender in all aspects of empire. The collection comprises a useful guide to the scholarship on gender and the British empire, surveying topics such as gender and medicine, missionary women and migration.

In her compact introduction, Levine lays out the reasons why gender is important to the study of empire. How to actually integrate gender into the study of social relations remains a problem that Levine recognizes but does not directly address. This is particularly evident in the exclusion of masculinities in the conceptualization of gender presented here. This is an issue that Levine raises in her introduction, but it receives only passing reference from the contributors. In this volume, gender means largely the feminine experience of empire, with only side glances at the question of how empire shaped British masculinities. It is, of course, true that empire is typically gendered as male, but the extent to which it was never just a place for males is only now becoming truly evident.Footnote ⁴⁵ And the problem of what empire meant for British masculinity in the metropole remains unexplored.

This absence reflects the tendency in this book both to insist on the centrality of gender in understanding empire and to treat it as a subdiscipline that continues to need justification. It is true, of course, that imperial gender studies are quite patchy for many parts of the empire. Australia has long been an exception to this, and the relative weighting toward the subcontinent (especially in terms of contributors) is notable. Not all parts of the empire are given equal treatment. Africa is very underrepresented; more strangely, so is India.

Still, this is a valuable collection of essays. In her introduction Levine presents the central arguments for the importance of gender in empire, which has been well established by her own work and by that of others. Gender also played a central role as a marker of civilization. It was a British—but not only a British—conceit that their practice of domesticity was the lodestar against which other family structures could be judged.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this respect, too, gender was an important part of understanding changing perceptions of the empire over time. After 1945, for example, the empire became feminized in official ideology, as the nineteenth-century feminists’ dream of women contributing in an integrated way to the imperial mission began to be finally realized. Gender was also an important instrument of ideological subordination. It was used, especially in the nineteenth century, to categorize colonial peoples as “masculine” or “feminine,” depending, it would seem, on British appreciation of their martial abilities. Thus, Sikhs and Zulu were masculine and Bengalis were feminine.

But this is where we reach the boundaries of current gender analysis. And the question is where we go from here. What determined the construction of gender knowledge systems and categories? What were the historical processes that were involved, and how did they change over time and place? Bengalis were not always feminine, for instance, although Macaulay thought them so and by the end of the nineteenth century, as we know, it had become one of the dominant tropes by which they were described. But this was not the only way they were understood in British knowledge. What was the relationship of gender to other categorizations, such as sex, for example? Similarly, not all colonial races were classified by gender. It is my impression that the Xhosa in South Africa, among others, were not. The Xhosa were a source of continual puzzlement to the British. They were much more complicated than the Zulu, who were tagged as a martial race in the early nineteenth century when stories of the fearsome Shaka began to filter back to Cape and London.Footnote ⁴⁷ This was long before the Zulu actually defeated the British at Isandlwana. The Xhosa destabilized British belief systems in ways that the Zulu never did. The Xhosa were viewed alternately as childlike, cunning, deceitful, and darkly unknowable but never as feminine or, explicitly, as masculine, either.

While gender is a necessary category of analyzing the links between Britain and its empire, it cannot alone do the work of the new imperial history in reconceptualizing the relationship between Britain and its empire. As a category, however, it is less problematic than some of the practices of the culturalist approach, since it is hard for gender historians to lose touch with an idea of social and historical context. As I have suggested, the same is not true of some of the studies that take empire entirely as a cultural construct. In that respect, it is necessary to return to the questions that I posed at the beginning of this essay. What may we learn from the current attempts to understand the relationship of Britain to its empire? What other possibilities remain for understanding how empire entered into the culture of Britain?

My first observation is that imperial culture was a very complicated and fractured entity. Empire cannot be treated as a hegemon, either at home or in the empire itself. It is always true that the perspective from the center is going to be very different from the perspective at the periphery of empire. Thus, from the frontier of empire, the process of installing and building an imperial culture was a very untidy process. This untidiness is insufficiently reflected in much of the new history on empire, which too often treats empire as inexorably hegemonic. And when it is treated this way, the only distinctions that seem worth making are between the various effects of its hegemonic oppressions. Yet at the site of empire itself, the project was always experienced as uncertain and unstable. Take, as an example, the case of the moments of initial contact between empire and indigenous peoples.

The more one looks at these moments, the more one is struck by the chaos that accompanied the first meetings of colonial and indigenous cultures. It is the indeterminacy of the initial phase of the encounter that is the key element for historians to understand. It is not helpful to see this moment as predetermined by the imperial culture itself. The process of empire building had to be learned, even by the British, who certainly had plenty of experience in this matter. The recent book by Inga Clendinnen on the first few years of the Botany Bay settlement is wonderfully evocative of this. And in the area of my own current work—the colonial encounters on the frontier of the Cape colony in the early nineteenth century—I would argue that it took twenty years for the British to figure out a unified “imperial” culture and policy that they could employ to subjugate the Xhosa. It took them even longer to settle on an established view on what it meant to be Xhosa.Footnote ⁴⁸

It follows from this that the representation of empire needs to be treated as something that was constructed. There is a conceptual void in much current work that proceeds from the idea of a mutual constitutiveness of empire and British histories. That is, the representation of empire is taken as unproblematic in itself, when in reality it was the product of complex processes. Some of these processes operated in full public view; others were more obscure, hidden behind the secrecy of policy making and veils of deception and denial. In another aspect, this failure to attend to the temporalities of the construction of empire provides critics of postcolonial scholarship like Bernard Porter with their strongest suits. In exploring the notion that Britain and its empire constitute a mutual historical experience, it is important to pay special attention to the specificities of period and place. Not to do so leads to the weak arguments that I have noted in the course of this essay. The questions that now, perhaps, need to move to the front of historical analysis include the following: How did imperial culture change over time? What was its relationship to those other, forgotten spheres of historical inquiry: politics and economics? And what are the most useful ways of understanding the linkages between the empire and domestic society in Britain?

There are models of how these questions may be usefully approached. But, interesting enough, they have typically been pioneered by historians working from the colony back to the metropole. Thus, one example of how linkages between metropole and empire could be conceived is that of “imperial circuits.” This idea has been deployed by Alan Lester and Elizabeth Elbourne and others who are looking at links between the individual colonies as well as at those between the colonies and Britain. Indeed, from one perspective empire was composed of a dense matrix of networks. There were the East India or West India lobbies, both of which would be worth renewed historical attention. There were also the scientific networks. Phrenology, for example, was dependent upon the provision of “knowledge” about racial types from the empire, not least from the supply of skulls that frontier wars provided. And there were the administrative and political networks across the empire and between its colonies. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the empire was run through the network of army veterans sponsored and patronized by the Duke of Wellington as administrators and governors.Footnote ⁴⁹

Imperial culture was given political definition through such circuits. Thus, the growth of white settler politics was not simply a matter of establishing a dominion over the local politics of the colony, of simply displacing the autocratic rule by the governor. Settlers needed to secure a voice in the metropole and thereby shape metropolitan views of the colonial mission. This had long been the purpose of the West India lobby, for example, but South African white Britishers had to start all over again in this respect from the 1830s in order to displace the missionary claims to speak for southern Africa in British politics. How this was done and how it fed into and shaped imperial culture and political practice in Britain itself are questions that go to the heart of the problem of “mutual constitution” of Britain by empire.

My second observation follows on from this. One major reason why sites of “mutual constitution” remain so hard to pin down in the culturalist versions of the new imperial history is a consequence of its continued privileging of the metropolitan gaze. With some notable exceptions—Philippa Levine being one—the new imperial history is a metropolitan history, both in terms of the sources that are employed and the perspectives adopted. This is not surprising, since most practitioners of the new imperial history were originally British historians. It is the culture of empire as it is found in British society that comprises the central theme of the work produced. Perhaps it is time to go to empire, both metaphorically and in practice, and look back at Britain.

The metropolitan gaze is insufficient to properly scan the links of Britain's history to its empire. To approach empire from the metropolitan perch is to miss a great deal of the process of constructing empire. One big thing that is missed is the agency of the subjects of empire in the making of British history. This is a big topic of debate in other quarters of the scholarly attention to empire, but it is only faintly reflected in imperial history as a whole.Footnote ⁵⁰ There is no single alternative model to the view from London. I have already pointed to historians such as Elbourne and Lester who are painstakingly reconstructing the actual pathways along which empire issues and British issues interacted and were jointly constituted. And in the area of policy making, the imperial perspective of Philippa Levine stands as a quite exceptional example. These are the kinds of approaches that I personally find most convincing. But if the empire in a real sense is often absent from the new imperial history, this also suggests a third issue that needs to be confronted.

To what extent was the empire that presented itself in British culture an invention of British culture and quite distinct from the empire as it was experienced at the frontier? This is a question that is posed by a contemplation of how empire was lived at the frontier and how it was talked about at home. If one looks at British history through the prism of the colonial archive, for example, one is immediately struck by the gulf between imperial culture as it composed itself at the frontier and how it was refracted back home. Indeed, from this vantage point, imperial culture is revealed as a culture of inversion and reversal. Histories that proceed from the cultural and metropolitan perspectives thus exclude from their sights huge areas of the imperial encounter. They fail to capture, for example, the pervasive violence that was part of the imperial experience. Violence was endemic to the quotidian life of empire. I am speaking of casual violence, not organized resistance, or deliberate military campaigns, or the kind of violence that marked unclosed frontiers. Neither was it something that was practiced solely by “nonofficial” classes. Indeed, a kind of domestic violence—striking, humiliating, other gestures of force that stop short of serious bodily injury—was integral to imperial policy making, even though one would be hard put to find a memo on it in the Colonial Office archives. Such practices occupied a far lower valence in the domestic representations of empire. They emerged occasionally in some large scandal, as in the celebrated Governor Eyre controversy. But such intermittent attention allowed the question of violence to be treated as exceptional and the product of personal failings. So the question arises: by what means and constructs was the presence of violence in empire silenced or denied in British culture?Footnote ⁵¹

The idea of a law-giving imperialism was obviously one enormous filter that facilitated this elision. The law was central to the British image of themselves in empire. Bringing the law to those without it—to paraphrase Kipling—was the prime task of the imperial order. The law was among the first artifacts of British culture colonizers introduced to indigenes. It was through the law that British authority was exercised; British culture knew no other way. Naturally, therefore, the establishment of a system of British common law is at the very top of the list of benefits that empire is thought to have bestowed upon its subjects. Yet the creation of a British legal system was always a forced creation, sometimes involving uneasy combinations with well-established indigenous legal systems, as in India, and sometimes involving the coercive dissolution of prior systems. Constructing the law therefore involved a large element of social engineering and displacements of indigenous systems of civil society. Once it had been done, the law that was erected can hardly be said to have served the interests of colonial subjects.Footnote ⁵² Yet this inverted role of the law in colonial societies is easily glided over in histories like those of Ferguson. Neither was it part of the image of empire at home.

Another example of the disjuncture between the realities of empire and how those realities were represented at home was to be found in the bifurcated missionary subjectivities in the early nineteenth century. At the frontier, missionaries were subject to bouts of desperate pessimism as they confronted the Herculean tasks of conversion. But far more optimistic messages were relayed back home, so that the missionary public could remain comfortable in its convictions.

So, if we are to see Britain and its empire as mutually constituted, we need to ask: whose empire was it that British culture contained? And, more important, how did it get there? Thus, if it was the case that the empire in British society was an imaginary of British culture, then the question of the links between Britain and its empire becomes more complicated than simple relationships of transmission and representation. If what passed for empire in Britain contained at least some degree of invention, then it is even more crucial to attend to the process of how those representations were constructed. They cannot just be theorized—as they tend to be in the current scholarship—as cultural representations. They also have to be seen as products of material constructions. Nor does this imply that the actual, physical, geographical empire may be ignored in detailing what the empire meant to Britain. Indeed, understanding the actual experiences of empire becomes even more important in this enterprise. Understanding how the idea of empire was placed into British culture will involve understanding both the circuits of empire and what was transmitted along those circuits, what was filtered, and what was transmuted.