The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives

Abstract

This rewarding collection is a sophisticated and idiosyncratic companion to recent research on the British Empire, rather than an introduction to imperial history or its historiography. Several essays are worthy of applause; others are provocative, if not conclusive. Although some critical debates are excluded (notably, a sustained discussion of gender and empire; the omission justified by the subject's ubiquity) and other ‘themes’ are still in the process of definition, the collection presents an engaging and successful attempt to bring together scholarship from across the spectrum of British imperial history. Some contributors had an easier task than others. In the first chapter, John Darwin makes a valiant attempt to provide an overview of the British Empire in just eighteen pages, while Sarah Stockwell concludes the collection by confronting the ‘Ends of Empire’ in a mere twenty. Both essays are valuable, if brief, conveying the diversity of British imperial forms and circumstances right through to the late twentieth century. Several other chapters adopt a low-risk approach, essentially providing an assessment of the major trends in imperial scholarship. Andrew Thompson's survey of ‘Empire and the British State’ addresses several disparate themes, most interestingly critiquing the conceptualisation of the state as deployed by Robinson and Gallagher in the 1950s and Cain and Hopkins in the 1990s. Andrew Dilley also provides an overview in his chapter on ‘The Economics of Empire’. Clearly organised and elegantly written, Dilley's essay provides an excellent introduction to economic analyses of the British Empire from Adam Smith to the present. Kent Fedorowich again adopts the style of review in his discussion of ‘The British Empire on the Move, 1760–1914’. Rather misleadingly titled, this chapter deals only with flows from Britain to the empire. The experiences of migrants leaving the United Kingdom are covered in convincing and illuminating detail, but the collection would have benefited from a directly comparable chapter discussing the equally important patterns of migration between Britain's colonial territories.