The Absent Minded Imperialists

A controversial new study from a leading Empire historian, this work argues that the Empire made very little impact on daily life in Victorian Britain.

`The Empire Strikes Back' will inject the empire back into the domestic history of modern Britain. In the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century, Britain's empire was so large that it was truly the global superpower. Much of Africa, Asia and America had been subsumed. Britannia's tentacles had stretched both wide and deep. Culture, Religion, Health, Sexuality, Law and Order were all impacted in the dominated countries. `The Empire Strikes Back' shows how the dependent states were subsumed and then hit back, affecting in turn England itself.

This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on the Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.

As well as presenting a lively narrative of events, Bernard Porter explores a number of broad analytical themes, challenging more conventional and popular interpretations. He sees imperialism as a symptom not of Britain's strength in the world, but of her decline; and he argues that the empire itself both aggravated and obscured deep-seated malaise in the British economy.

The British Empire was an astonishingly complex and varied phenomenon, not to be reduced to any of the simple generalisations or theories that are often taken to characterise it. One way of illustrating this, and so conveying some of the subtle flavour of the thing itself, is to descend from the over-arching to the particular, and describe and discuss aspects of it in detail. This book, by the well-known imperial historian Bernard Porter, ranges among a wide range of the events and personalities that shaped or were shaped by British imperialism, or by its decline in the post-war years. These include chapters on science, drugs, battles, proconsuls, an odd assortment of imperialists including Kipling, Lady Hester Stanhope and TE Lawrence, architecture, music, the role of MI6 and the reputation of the Empire since its demise. Together the chapters inform, explain, provoke, and occasionally amuse; but above all they demonstrate the kaleidoscopic variety and ambivalence of Britain s imperial history."

Globalizing Confederation brings together original research from 17 scholars to provide an international perspective on Canada’s Confederation in 1867. In seeking to ascertain how others understood, constructed or considered the changes taking place in British North America, Globalizing Confederation unpacks a range of viewpoints, including those from foreign governments, British colonies, and Indigenous peoples. Exploring perspectives from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, Latin America, New Zealand, and the Vatican, among others, as well as considering the impact of Confederation on the rights of Indigenous peoples during this period, the contributors to this collection present how Canada’s Confederation captured the imaginations of people around the world in the 1860s. Globalizing Confederation reveals how some viewed the 1867 changes to Canada as part of a reorganization of the British Empire, while others contextualized it in the literature on colonization more broadly, while still others framed the event as part of a re-alignment or power shift among the Spanish, French and British empires. While many people showed interest in the Confederation debates, others, such as South Africa and the West Indies, expressed little interest in the establishment of Canada until it had profound effects on their corners of the global political landscape.

Imperial Boredom offers a radical reconsideration of the British Empire during its heyday in the nineteenth century. Challenging the long-established view that that the Empire was about adventure and excitement, with heroic men and intrepid women settling new lands and spreading commerce and civilization around the globe, this thoroughly researched, engagingly written, and lavishly illustrated analysis instead argues that boredom was central to the experience of Empire. This volume looks at what it was actually like to sail to Australia, to serve as a soldier in South Africa, or to accompany a colonial official to the hill stations of India, and agrues that for numerous men and women, from governors to convicts, explorers to tourists, the Victorian Empire was dull and disappointing. Drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs, and travelogues, it demonstrates that all across the empire, men and women found the landscapes monotonous, the physical and psychological distance from home debilitating, the routines of everyday life wearisome, and their work unfulfilling. Ocean voyages were tedious; colonial rule was bureaucratic; warfare was infrequent; economic opportunity was limited; and indigenous people were largely invisible. The seventeenth-century Empire may have been about wonder and marvel, but the Victorian Empire was a far less exciting project.