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Subject: H-ASIA: REVIEW H-Net Review Publication: 'The Idea of Empire'
> H-ASIA
> January 27, 2011
>
> Book Review (orig pub. H-Albion) by Daniel Gorman on Duncan Kelly, ed.
> Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought
>
> (x-post H-Review)
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> From: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
>
> Duncan Kelly, ed. Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of
> British Imperial Thought. Oxford Oxford University Press, 2009. xv
> + 247 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-726439-3.
>
> Reviewed by Daniel Gorman (University of Waterloo)
> Published on H-Albion (January, 2011)
> Commissioned by Thomas Hajkowski
>
> The Idea of Empire
>
> Despite work by scholars such as David Armitage, Uday Singh Mehta,
> Jennifer Pitts, and Duncan Bell, to cite just four examples of a
> recent upsurge of interest in empire and political theory, we still
> have only a partial understanding of the historical discourses
> surrounding the intellectual roots of empire.[1] To be sure,
> imperial historians have devoted much ink to "discourse" as a dynamic
> feature of the history of empire.[2] Whether invoking Orientalism,
> Michel Foucault, or the Subaltern School, much of the history very
> loosely grouped under the aegis of "postcoloniality" has argued that
> the very essence of imperialism was ideational. Relationships of
> inequality and power were inscribed in the various iterations of
> imperial rule and culture created by European powers. Recovering the
> history of these relationships requires historians to be attentive to
> how ideas and language were constructed and contested. This work has
> without question widened our understanding of how and why empires
> functioned, and how they shaped the lives of those in both the
> metropole and the colonized world. Yet like the politico-economic
> imperial history which is sometimes presented as its foil, the "new
> imperial history," whether postcolonial or more empirically based
> cultural history, largely ignores the ideational beginnings and
> subsequent intellectual rationales of empire. The "idea of empire"
> is assumed from its later nature.
>
> Refuting such _ex post facto_ reasoning is one goal of intellectual
> histories of imperialism, as on display in the book under review,
> _Lineages of Empire_, edited by Duncan Kelly. The book is derived
> from a 2006 symposium on the roots of British imperial thought, and
> published as a proceeding of the British Academy. While the opening
> essay by James Tully attempts to draw some impressionistic
> contemporary conclusions from a series of historical imperial
> antecedents, the strength of the book is the reconstruction of
> aspects of historical political imperial thought rather than any
> (necessarily politicized) present salience such thought might have.
>
> Much of the historiography on the political theory of empire,
> particularly as it relates to Britain, concentrates on two subjects.
> The first, a subset of histories of the Atlantic world, is what used
> to be called "The First British Empire" which took form in the
> eighteenth century in the Americas. Understanding the relationship
> between British settlers, the Imperial Parliament, and the Crown,
> especially relating to the key question of sovereignty, is an
> important theme in this literature. A second is the dialectic of
> imperialism and Enlightenment rationalism, with a focus on the
> roughly contemporaneous developments of Britain's imperial ascendency
> in India in the latter eighteenth century and the advent of
> principles of political economy.
>
> These temporal and thematic interests are replicated in _Lineages of
> Empire_, where only the final two essays, by Douglas Lorimer and
> Jeanne Morefield, focus specifically on post-Georgian subjects.
> Following a short part 1, which includes Tully's essay and a chapter
> by Mehta on the ways by which postcolonial states have been
> constituted through a self-conscious refashioning of their imperial
> political pasts, the book's part 2 presents a series of chapters on
> "historical debates."
>
> In the only chapter in part 2 which extends its coverage beyond
> Britain, Richard Whatmore reflects on the implications for small
> states of the eighteenth-century growth of European empires, spurred
> by the national rivalries emanating from the application of
> statecraft to economic affairs. Whatmore demonstrates that such
> growth posed both an existential threat and an opportunity to
> cultivate protection and/or commercial gain. Phiroze Vasunia
> examines the various providential uses of Virgil made by British
> imperial writers in the long eighteenth century, concentrating
> especially on Edward Gibbon at the era's opening and Alfred, Lord
> Tennyson at its close. Iain Hampsher-Monk and Robert Travers are
> concerned with the relationship between empire and the development of
> political economy in the late eighteenth century. Hampsher-Monk's
> fine chapter examines Edmund Burke's attempts to come to terms with
> "the dynamic between the economic and moral properties of empire, and
> its prospects for survival" (p. 118) in an age when Adam Smith's
> concept of a commercial empire was eclipsing the more customary
> established practices of imperialism favored by Burke. Travers also
> writes on Smith, comparing the latter's root and branch attack on the
> East India Company's monopoly status with the Scottish political
> economist James Steuart's preference for more stringent "economies of
> control" (p. 158). Both cases, Travers argues, demonstrate the need
> to reconcile histories of imperialism and political economy, rather
> than treat them as mutually exclusive developments.
>
> Karen O'Brien also challenges conventional wisdom in her chapter on
> the role of Tory Romanticism in the Georgian discourse on
> state-assisted emigration to the colonies. While she does not
> dispute the prevailing contemporary perception of emigrants as
> "wastrels"--assisted emigration, after all, represented but a small
> percentage of total emigration flows which were dominated by penal
> convicts and "casualt[ies] of industrialisation, war and poverty" (p.
> 161)--O'Brien suggests that voluntary emigrants represented a promise
> of "social uplift" embodied in romantic ideals of "constructive
> imperialism" (p. 162). After O'Brien's chapter, the book is silent
> on mid-Victorian imperial thought. This is an odd lacuna, for
> Victorian concepts of world order were fundamental in constructing
> the ideational infrastructure upon which rested the New Imperialism
> of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[3] Lorimer
> picks up the thread at this point, providing a fine examination of
> the language of race relations in the decades before the First World
> War. He convincingly shows the separate, though not mutually
> exclusive, historical trajectories of biological and cultural
> discourses of race, and argues that it was the latter which more
> directly influenced the imperial racial discourse of Empire's last
> decades. Morefield concludes the volume with a careful exegesis of
> the imperial connotations of the political theorist Harold Laski's
> theory of sovereignty.
>
> Despite the inevitable challenges of coverage and continuity endemic
> to an edited volume, _Lineages of Empire_ is an important
> contribution to the history of imperial political thought. It
> illustrates the connection of imperial thought with other prominent
> intellectual discourses in modern British history, including the
> merits of emigration, political economy and demography, the role of
> the state and sovereignty in British political life, the language of
> race relations, and the invocation of classical models in
> understanding Britain's empire. The essays in this book remind us
> that at every point in its history, Britons thought about the "idea
> of empire." They variously challenged, defended, or questioned the
> assumptions of what Morefield terms, in a narrower application to
> Laski that holds for all imperial thinkers, their "habits of
> imperialism" (pp. 226-235). There is still much to learn about the
> history of these practices of thinking, equally relevant for "new"
> and "old" imperial histories alike.
>
> Notes
>
> [1]. David Armitage, _The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
> _(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Uday Singh Mehta,
> _Liberalism and Empire_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
> Jennifer Pitts, _A Turn to Empire_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
> University Press, 2005), Duncan Bell, _The Idea of Greater Britain_
> (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
>
> [2]. For a useful survey of some of this material, including
> "postcoloniality," see Stephen Howe, "Empire and Ideology," in _The
> British Empire: Themes and Perspectives_,_ _ed. Sarah Stockwell
> (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 157-176.
>
> [3].See Duncan Bell, ed., _Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire
> and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
> _(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
>
> Citation: Daniel Gorman. Review of Kelly, Duncan, ed., _Lineages of
> Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought_. H-Albion,
> H-Net Reviews. January, 2011.
> URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29382
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
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