Imperial history and post‐colonial theory

Germs, genes and postcolonial geographies: reading the return of tuberculosis to Leicester, UK, 2001

“…For many postcolonial critics the optical lens of imperialism visualized hidden threats to the integrity of imperial identities. 113 As Europeans expanded their borders, the cultures, peoples and diseases they embraced began diffusing through permeable membranes back towards their imperial cell bodies. 114 In the words of Donna Haraway, the colonized (the invaded) were perceived as the invader.…”

Decolonising Imperial Heroes: Britain and France

“…Whether displayed in village squares to the indifference of the locality or situated at the heart of specific systems of meanings, the relics of colonial heroes remain an object of post-colonial contest and study. 146 The Privatisation of Heroes: Sexuality and Scandal…”

British Historiography of Education in International Context at the Turn of the Century, 1996–2006

“…On the other, it is intimately linked with world affairs, and, most especially: the failure by the end of the twentieth century of almost all Marx's predictions concerning social and political development; 84 the implications for academic history of the working methods of feminism 85 and, later, postmodernism; 86 and the location of Western historians in what, by the 1980s, were starting to become self-consciously 'postcolonial' societies. 87 Within this broad context, and for several more specific reasons, it has remained the norm in Britain over the past decade for historians of education to uphold a public commitment to a wide definition of their field. In this way, Roy Lowe could remain true to the verity of the 1960s that only by this means could historians of education position themselves in the mainstream of social history (a battle fought and lost in England in the mid-1970s 88 ) while, for a new generation, Gary McCulloch, Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin could value breadth of study for the interdisciplinary engagements that it promised across the humanities and social sciences, and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.…”