Can Humpty‐Dumpty be put together again? Imperial history in the 1980s

Fieldhouse, D. K.

doi:10.1080/03086538408582657

Cited by 46 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Fieldhouse described a decade ago as the Humpty-Dumpty syndrome in British imperial history. 68 Since decolonization, the study of the British empire has shattered into a multitude of separate fragments, with the most significant break occurring between the imperial experience as it has been portrayed from the metropole and from the periphery. By presenting a case for understanding the construction of cultural difference as a binary process -we define ourselves in the context of how we define others -post-colonial theory has insisted that the metropole has no meaning apart from the periphery, the West apart from the Orient, the colonizer apart from the colonized.…”

Section: Illmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imperial history and post‐colonial theory

Kennedy

1996

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

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Section: Illmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imperial history and post‐colonial theory

Kennedy

1996

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

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“…This was the starting point for regional studies as a substitute for imperial history.' 9 Effectively, the fragmentation of the empire itself resulted in the fragmentation of imperial history writing. Fieldhouse noted the effects: 'European historians .…”

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“…Fieldhouse's question was,'Can the fragments of the old imperial history be put together again into new patterns which are intellectually respectable?' 16 Fieldhouse's own answer was 'yes', as long as the imperial British 'core' could continue to be linked reciprocally with its colonial 'peripheries'.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Her [sic] past had obviously been tending in that direction, her present and future would be moulded by the imperial factor.' 19 When Fieldhouse came to consider how imperial historians in the 1980s could use what was best in Seeley's account to move on from its teleological assumptions, he proposed that the imperial historian adopt a specific spatial vantage point. He advocated an imperial history specialism in the 'interactions' between the British 'core' and its 'peripheries'.…”

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Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire1

Lester

2005

History Compass

143

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How to write about the many, diverse places that constituted the British Empire in the same text; how to conceive of both the differences and the connections between Britain and its various colonies? These have been perennial problems for imperial historians. This article begins by examining the concept of 'core' and 'periphery', and the various ways that it has been employed within the tradition of British imperial history. It then turns to concepts such as networks, webs and circuits, which are characteristic of the 'new' imperial history. It suggests that these newer concepts are useful in allowing the social and cultural, as well as the economic, histories of Britain and its colonies to be conceived as more fluidly and reciprocally interrelated. The article concludes by suggesting that these spatial concepts could usefully be taken further, through an explicit recognition of the multiple trajectories that define any space and place.From the beginnings of British imperial history writing at the end of the nineteenth century, the differences between spaces and places, particularly 'metropolitan' or 'core' ones, and 'colonial' or 'peripheral' ones, have been absolutely fundamental to our imagination of the British Empire. And yet these spatial concepts have rarely been examined explicitly. Rather, the spatial imagination of imperial historians has generally been an implicit, taken-for-granted one. This article begins by reviewing a genre of 'traditional' imperial history that is often criticized by postcolonial scholars for being top-down, focused solely on economic and political issues, and not only masculinist but also ignorant of the significance of gender in its approaches. Seldom, however, has that tradition been interrogated specifically for its spatial imagination. At the risk of re-centring a tradition that many postcolonial scholars of empire have been seeking to displace, this article begins by performing such an interrogation. It does so, however, as a stepping stone to newer ways of conceptualizing the British Empire's spatialitiesways that postcolonial scholars themselves have developed.For over thirty years, between the 1950s and 1980s, the most influential model for understanding Britain's nineteenth-century imperial expansion was that of Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher. Robinson and Gallagher argued that the kind of overseas influence favoured by the mid-Victorian

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“…J. R. Seelers The Expansion of England (1883) not only gave imperial history its institutional life ... [and] respectability, it helped to guarantee that the boundaries between the history of Great Britain and that of Greater Britain were clearly drawn. [3] For in spite of the fact that empire was believed to be a determining fact in the life of both the metropolis and its dependencies, for almost a century the history of empire was treated as if it occurred on another planet, far away from Englands green and pleasant lands, disconnected in time and space from the Mother Country that saccharine, stolid and basically static imperial referent. It was not routinely the purview of conventional British historians, but remained the territory of self-styled imperial historians, the burra sahibs of the British historical establishment.…”

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confidence: 99%

Rules of thumb: british history and ‘imperial culture’ in nineteenth and twentieth-century britain 1

Burton

1994

Women's History Review

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This paper examines the traditions of both British imperial and British domestic historiography and calls for a re-mapping of both so that the so-called separate spheres of home and away may be brought back into the same fields of debate. Its central claim is that imperial ideology and its effects were not phenomena out there. Empire was not a singular place; nor did home exist in isolation from it. In spite of the polarization, which has been characteristic of their historiographies, their relationship was dialectic rather than dichotomous. These insights, while derived in part from new trends inside British history itself, owe both their theoretical rigor and their self-avowedly political concerns to post-colonial and feminist historiographical work, which together insist on the desacralization of Britain proper. I cannot help thinking that in discussions of this kind, a great deal of misapprehension arises from the popular use of maps on a small scale. As with such maps you are able to put a thumb on India and a finger on Russia, some persons at once think that the political situation is alarming and that India must be looked to. If the noble Lord would use a larger map say one on the scale of the Ordinance Map of England he would find that the distance between Russia and British India is not to be measured by the finger and thumb, but by a rule.

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Can Humpty‐Dumpty be put together again? Imperial history in the 1980s

Cited by 46 publications

References 2 publications

Imperial history and post‐colonial theory

Imperial history and post‐colonial theory

Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire1

Rules of thumb: british history and ‘imperial culture’ in nineteenth and twentieth-century britain 1

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