Clashes and Collaborations

Linda Colley

• Empire: The British Imperial Experience, from 1765 to the Present by Denis Judd
  HarperCollins, 517 pp, £25.00, March 1996, ISBN 0 00 255237 X
• Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire edited by P.J. Marshall
  Cambridge, 400 pp, £24.95, March 1996, ISBN 0 521 43211 1
• Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800 by Anthony Pagden
  Yale, 244 pp, £19.95, August 1995, ISBN 0 300 06415 2

How should historians write about empire? Or, if you prefer, the imperial enterprise? The task is made difficult in part because many people still find it easy to confuse academic concentration on this phenomenon with approval of it. To some on the Left for instance – especially in the United States – imaginatively reconstructing the ideas and actions of the imperial powers in the past can seem dangerously close to condoning racism, brutality and Eurocentricity in the present. The only valid questions about empire, in this view, are why so many Europeans were so complicit in such an obvious evil for so long, and how non-Europeans came successfully to resist it. By contrast, sections of the Right in this country insist on a version of history that will trumpet Empire’s positive achievements, not least out of a present-minded concern to stress that Britain’s role is global not European. The forthcoming Oxford History of the British Empire, a massive and important work, has already been attacked by sections of the Tory press on the grounds that its American editor, international contributors of both sexes and striving for balance are bound to make it a subversive piece of multiculturalism. Yet rumour has it that this same project was initially denied American funding, because Foundations there assumed that its subject-matter made it ipso facto reactionary.