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The book shows how people have come to approach the writing of imperial histories in the early twenty-first century. It explores the social and political contexts that informed the genesis and development of the Studies in Imperialism series, and the conceptual links it has sought to forge between empire and metropolitan culture. The book provides an insightful account of John MacKenzie's 'Orientalism': the problems of 'power' and 'agency'. The 'MacKenziean moment' needs to be read historically, as a product of the 'delayed arrival of decolonising sensibilities', where contemporary popular phenomena and new types of scholarship integrated Britain and its empire. Sexuality made early appearances in the Series through the publication of 'Empire and Sexuality'. MacKenzie's 'Empire of Nature', 'Imperialism and the Natural World', and 'Museums and Empire' convey the impact of his scholarship in the themes of exploration, environment and empire. The historical geographies of British colonialism have enjoyed a prominent place in the Series, and the book explores the ways in which different 'spatial imaginations' have been made possible. Discussions on colonial policing during the depression years, and on immigrant welfare during and after decolonisation, take their cue from MacKenzie's European Empires and the People. The later nineteenth century witnessed the interaction of many diasporas, which in turn produced new modes of communication. By dealing with the idea of the 'Third British Empire' and the role of the Indian press during and after the British Raj, the book repositions British imperial histories within a broader set of global transformations.
Chocolate remains a mythic product, a symbol both of luxury and of a fantasy world of exoticism, yet also (for many) a workaday requirement providing energy and nutrition. This book concentrates on three key stages of chocolate production in the British empire: growing cocoa beans, manufacturing chocolate from these beans, and the marketing of chocolate products. It begins with the romantic construction of chocolate, redresses the gender imbalance of many existing Rowntree histories and values women's own interpretations of their working lives. The analysis of advertising establishes connections and tensions between the worlds of production and consumption, with an attention to gender and class, and to cultural characteristics. The book tackles imperial histories of chocolate and how British firms, including Rowntree, constructed their own romantic narratives of the 'discovery' and development of chocolate production. It focuses on Nigerian women farmers who have always been active agents in cocoa production, despite having to struggle against the often intersecting structures and ideologies of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy. The book explores the ways in which Rowntree created and reflected particular understandings of the historic city of York and of empire, through media such as their in-house journal, 'Cocoa Works Magazine'. It provides the oral histories of women factory workers, including that of a Chinese girl, and their experiences of gendered and raced labour in chocolate manufacture.
postcolonial scholars since the 1970s to what were once considered to be some of the verities of European imperial history in general: its narratives of modernity and economic expansion; the metropolitan locus of ideas of governance and civil society; and the encounter with indigenous peoples, who were perceived as possessing none of these things. These debates inform our present concern with place
Introduction 1 In recent decades new geographies of imperial history writing have emerged. The boundaries that used to delimit separate domains of British history, imperial history, area studies and the histories of former colonies have been traversed promiscuously. Accompanying and propelling this reconfiguration of spatial categories has been more explicit attention to the
separate origins and differing preoccupations of women’s/gender history and traditional British Imperial History, and then proceeds to discuss the challenges to traditional Imperial History posed by new ‘post-colonial’ histories of imperialism. This section provides a background for the survey which follows of existing scholarship on gender and imperialism, which leads in turn to an outline of the
Historians who have reflected on the historiography relating to the British empire have often noted that this particular sub-discipline is not just prone to ‘heart-searching’, but is also ‘quarrelsome’, and it is common to find references to the tendency to engage in ‘posturing’ and ‘ill-tempered disputes’. In commenting on what he tellingly described as the ‘imperial history wars’, Dane Kennedy referred to the risk that some strands within the profession might adopt a ‘smugly self-righteous attitude’. 1 It is certainly true that imperial history has witnessed
moves in this direction (albeit one framed as global, rather than imperial, history), but there have been wider developments too. For example, recent work on empire and metropolitan culture – as embodied in the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series of which Empire and Mobility is part – includes recent books such as Markku Hokkanen’s Medicine, Mobility and the Empire . 9 Likewise, themes of flow and circulation have been apparent in research on empire informed by postcolonial approaches. In Moving Subjects , for example, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton make an
MacKenzie school’ or ‘MacKenzieites’ rather provocatively, his critique was nevertheless indicative of the stature and respect that John MacKenzie has earned through both the Series and his own impressive, varied and often pioneering scholarship. 2 Yet there is something of an irony in the ascription of such a central position in a ‘school’ of imperial history to a scholar who has often promoted and
The Studies in Imperialism series has pioneered a comparative and connected approach to imperial history. The Series has been at the forefront of the study of imperial networks: from personal and professional networks, to networks of steamships and aircraft and lines of communication. Migration has always been a central concern. To begin with, the volumes focused on primarily the history of
have concluded that the empire grew rather in spite than because of the course of English politics. Three broadly agreed views support this conclusion. The first is that imperial history turned on the tension between what Jack Greene calls ‘the centrifugal forces inherent in the conditions of settlement’ and England’s desire to control the colonies and benefit from their growth. 3 Within this consensus