The 'Studies in Imperialism' Series

By John M. MacKenzie

All of these thoughts have occurred to me since I founded the 'Studies in Imperialism' series ten years ago in 1985. At that time I thought that such a series might be good for a decade or so, might be able to bring together about twenty books before the energies were dissipated and the baton was passed to a new sequence of publications. In 1995 the series seems to have a great deal of vigour left in it. There are sufficient works in production or under contract to take it up to the thirty mark and, much more importantly, the debates to which it is connected and has hopefully contributed show no signs of dying down.

The imperial juggernaut
In the early 1980s imperial history was still very largely taken up with the administrative, military and economic dimensions of empire. It was written almost entirely in terms of centrifugal influences, the radiating out of imperial lines of force from the metropolis to the periphery. The global theory of the Wallerstein school and 'underdevelopment' and 'counter-development' ideas were highly influential, but actually contributed to just such a sense of centrifugal power, the overwhelming and unstoppable force of the imperial juggernaut. It is true that from the 1960s an important school of 'nationalist' historians had emerged, both among Europeans and a distinguished group of scholars working within the universities of the newly independent states. They were concerned to refigure the character and significance of resistance to imperial rule, form connections with modern nationalism, and provide a new voicing for the unvoiced. The highly influential 'subaltern studies' group of Indian historians was only just beginning to find its feet and colonial discourse studies, heavily influenced by the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism of 1978 were beginning to achieve take-off.
But in all of this activity, there were a number of notable absences. Few had written about the influence of imperialism upon metropolitan cultures and societies, not only in terms of popular and 'high' culture, but also in respect of the development of scholarly disciplines, the growth of institutions like museums, societies and pressure groups, the churches and their attendant missionary societies, and the role of empire in forming aspects of national character and public self-image in the period. Although race studies were well-advanced, these had not been followed through to popular text, artefact and performance. Marxists historians, like Eric Hobsbawm had occasionally written of the manipulation of empire by politicians faced with dangerously fractured class settings at home, of the co-opting of the 'aristocracy of labour' in the imperial programme, helping to form a patriotic, right-wing electorate to sustain the new-found grandeur and presumptions of the imperial states. It was clear that these kinds of analysis had implications for the histories of many European nationalisms in the period, though in most cases they were in a relatively rudimentary state.

Little Englander approach
But in the British case Hobsbawm and his few followers sang within the extraordinary wilderness of the influential 'little Englander' approach, symbolised by the work of A.J.P. Taylor and Henry Pelling among others. For them imperialism had a minimal effect upon home society, particularly where it mattered, at the ballot box. It was an irrelevance, an extraneous set of circumstances that lay largely beyond the ken of an indigenous population in pursuit of much more hard-headed domestic concerns. This group was formed in the inter- war years, in the period of intellectual revulsion against empire, and sought to translate its own ideological convictions into a 'soft-left' approach to domestic social history. Others sought to accuse and acquit specific social classes of 'collaboration' in the imperial enterprise, generally viewing it as a plaything of the aristocracy and the middle classes, whose hollowness was recognised by the workers and their leadership. Interestingly, those sentimental left assumptions were taken over by the right. In a post-totalitarian and decolonising age, right-wing historians like Max Beloff were concerned to exculpate the British from grandiose imperial designs, nationalist theories or popular involvement. To them, such a constellation smacked of the dangerous regimes of Europe, the excessive excitements from which the British had been mercifully freed by their coldly sceptical national character and ancient notions of liberalism and liberty.

Propaganda and empire
It was into this kind of historiographical pattern that I sought to inject a new approach. In the early 1980s it became more and more apparent that empire and Britain's imperial status had been extraordinarily visible in all aspects of British culture in the Nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Studies of propaganda, although better developed in dissecting the totalitarian manipulation of public opinion, had scarcely begun in the British case, where it was thought that propaganda in that sense was a deeply alien concept. Philip Taylor had examined, to great effect, the development of British ideas about international propaganda in the 1930s, but the projection of nationalist and imperial ideas through institutions like the monarchy and all the highly visible aspects of a burgeoning popular culture had never been fully explored.
As I thought through these ideas, the Falklands War broke out in 1982. This was an extraordinary conjunction, for it seemed like a nineteenth-century colonial war up-dated to the late twentieth. It involved the re-capture of a distant and apparently insignificant piece of territory deeply embedded in imperial history. It became a matter of national honour, an objective behind which all the instruments of the state and of popular culture could be swung, a source of self-regard and a means of reviving the fortunes of an ailing government. Such mild criticism as emerged, from whatever source, was slapped down as little short of contumacious treason. Thatcher became a new Boadicea, wrapping herself in the Union flag and riding her chariot against the aggressive and ideologically unacceptable 'Argies'. It seemed like an object lesson, the recreation in a modern laboratory of just the conditions of imperial warfare in the nineteenth century.
Moreover, it seemed to confirm a view I had arrived at, that the slanting in the work of most historians arose from the fact that they were obsessed with the official source. The ;official mind' of imperialism had, as a result, been subjected to much more analysis than the popular psychology in all its social and cultural dimensions. If one turned away from documents and examined popular texts, ephemera, visual materials, the press, the theatre and other expressions of public entertainment, exhibitions, institutions, even the architecture, art and street furniture of the imperial state, lines of enquiry and modes of interpretation could be greatly extended. All of this fed into my book Propaganda and Empire, published in 1984 and in many ways the foundation work of the 'Studies in Imperialism' series. It utilised a wide variety of sources and offered an extensive survey, although its great failing was a lack of an adequate theoretical framework and an undeveloped awareness of the multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural approaches that were beginning to be possible. However, perhaps its most influential insight was the suggestion that as the nineteenth century progressed, popular culture turned away from domestic discontents toward empire, reconstituting class tensions into those of race.

Cross-disciplinary forum
As so often happens, the book was scarcely published when it became apparent that large numbers of people were working in similar areas, often utilising and developing those theoretical insights which I had avoided partly through ignorance, partly through a desire for accessibility. The series therefore set out to create a cross-disciplinary forum for those who wished to illuminate the impact of imperialism on home societies, to examine the mutual inter-actions of imperialism not only between metropolis and periphery (rather patronising terms which are perhaps in need of up-dating), but also around different areas of subordinate responses.
Since then, twenty-three works have appeared, both single-authored monographs and collections of essays. They have considered aspects of literary, theatrical, educational, military, policing, emigration, medical, sexual, environmental and art history, as well as considering exhibitions, the publication and reception of works of trave, the developments of scholarly disciplines and the language in which the project of empire was couched. The important thing about all this activity was that it sought to put imperial history back together again. Whereas some had predicted that it would break down totally into its national components, it was obvious that a cultural, social and intellectual approach was capable of bringing imperial studies together in the search for comparative insights from a variety of experiences across the globe, as well as unveiling new theoretical possibilities.
The works of particular interest to members of this newsletter would have included David Arnold's collection Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies of 1988 which unveiled some striking new work on India and the Philippines and reflected fresh approaches to medical history which set it much more clearly within its social and cultural context as a significant reflector of imperial power. Robin Winks' and James Rush's collection, Asia in Western Fiction (1990) was remarkable for its comparative range, while Ronald Hyam's Empire and Sexuality (1990) stimulated a lively controversy as a result of its approach to the sexual dimensions of race relations. David Anderson's and David Killingray's two volumes on policing, arising out of a London conference (1991 and 1992), became the touchstone for studies of policing, imperial power, and decolonisation: they contained articles on India, Palestine and Malaya, but offered theoretical insights that could be applied to other parts of Asia. David Omissi's Air Power and Colonial Control: the Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (1990) was notable in demonstrating the importance of empire to the reputation and survival of a key
British service. Its case studies spanned Africa, the Middle East and India and it was particularly striking for its application of the work of Fernand Braudal and its remarkable assessment of indigenous responses to air power. It was noticeable that conventional military historians had problems understanding it. My own The Empire of Nature (1988) analyzed approaches to hunting, the exploitation of animal resources, and imperial administrative and legal controls upon the environment in both Africa and India and the symposium Imperialism and the Natural World (1990) also attempted discussions of natural science which spanned different regions of imperial power.

Orientalism
While historians were thus putting culture into studies of imperialism, literary critic were putting imperialism into cultural studies. The work of Said has been both highly influential in the development of work by literary critics and the practitioners of many other disciplines in the field of colonial discourse and has also stimulated a major inter-disciplinary debate. To a certain extent historians have played a smaller part in this than they should have done, partly because of their empiricist predilections, partly because of the inaccessibility of some of the language of Said's admirers (though Said himself writes well). Said's more recent work, Culture and Imperialism, did little to help. A much more disappointing and sprawling book than Orientalism, it created almost violent controversy. My next work from manchester University Press, Orientalism, History, Theory and the Arts, (1995) constitutes a survey of the debates stemming from Said's work and re-examines his ideas in the context of the responses of some of the western arts (notably art, architecture, music and the theatre) to the East. I join other critics in suggesting that the work of Said and the discourse theorists (some of whom he has repudiated) places too much emphasis on the allegedly overwhelming power of imperialism, on an excessive manichaeanism in arguing that response to the Other always implies hostility, and too great a concentration on the texts of high culture. When one moves out into the other arts, and extends the scope in the direction of popular cultural elements, different conclusions present themselves. These are far from unique insights: many other scholars have been working towards these positions, once again adopting much more worked- through theoretical positions. Moreover, we have to recognise the complexity of 'alterity'. It has European and domestic dimensions and 'others' are to be found within the nation state -- for example, the Irish and the Scots. The latest development is indeed the study of the influence of empire on the composition of the parent state and the stresses and strains which developed within it after decolonisation. Future works in the series will include Ireland and the Empire and Scotland and the Empire. But the whole field has now become so rich and productive that the 'Studies in Imperialism' series should have no difficulty in moving on into the twenty-first century. Whether it does so, of course, depends on scholars continuing to send works for publication in it. I hope that readers will keep them flowing and that the collective strength of these books will maintain its energy and momentum.

John M. MacKenzie is the series editor for the 'Studies in Imperialism' series by Manchester University press.