imperial history and post colonial theory

Lyautey and the French Conquest ofMorocco

by William A. Hoisington

Swettenhamby H.S. Barlow

Malcolm MacDonald: Bringing an End toEmpire

by Clyde Sanger

Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura1922-1992

by Shahid Amin

Second to None: The Story of the Hong KongVolunteers

by Phillip Bruce

C.R. Pennell 490

Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory

A.J. Stockwell 492

David Arnold 495

The First Sea Lords: From Fisher toMountbatten

edited by Malcolm H. Murfett

The U-Boat Hunters: The Royal CanadianNavy and the Offensive againstGermany's Submarines

by Marc Milner

Diplomacy and World Power: Studiesin British Foreign Policy, 1890-1950

edited by Michael Dockrill andBrian McKercher

The Decolonization of Africaby David Birmingham

Sources for Colonial Studies in the PublicRecord Office, Volume 1: Records ofthe Colonial Office, Dominions Office,Commonwealth Relations Officeand Commonwealth Office

compiled by Anne Thurston

C. Mary Turnbull 4%

Andrew D. Lambert 497

Andrew D. Lambert 498

C.J. Bartlett 499

John D. Hargreaves 501

David M. Anderson 501

DANE KENNEDY

The historiography of British imperialism has long been coloured by thepolitical and methodological conservatism of its practitioners. Arising as itdid from the imperial metropole in the late nineteenth century, it originallyserved as an ideological adjunct to empire.1 Its purpose was to contributehistorical insights into past exercises in overseas power that could be usedto inform and inspire contemporaries to shoulder their obligations as rulersof a world-wide imperial system. Decolonization robbed imperial history ofmost of its practical incentives. Yet it continued to cling to the methodologyand mentalite of 'the official mind', as Ronald Robinson and John Gallag-her termed it in their enormously influential work.2 The persistence of thisparadigm is evident even in the most recent scholarship. Peruse any issue ofThe Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, for example, and youwill find a succession of articles that still tread the path pioneered by JohnSeeley more than a century ago. They remain wedded to the same officialdocumentation, persist in addressing the same political, economic, andmilitary manifestations of power, and continue to employ the same narrativeconventions. They seldom stray from an adamant empiricism. On the rareoccasions they do flirt with theory, it generally derives from well-wornmodels. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins' acclaimed new two-volume study ofBritish Imperialism, which is widely regarded as the most important andinnovative contribution to the field since Robinson and Gallagher,resembles nothing so much in its theoretical stance than that old war-horseof imperial theory, J.A. Hobson, with a pinch of Schumpeter thrown in forflavour.3 This return to the concerns of Edwardian radicalism is taken withinthe field for theoretical daring. It is hardly surprising, therefore, thatimperial history has acquired a reputation for insularity and inattention tothe methodological advances made both by historians in other fields and byscholars in related disciplines.

Perhaps because so many historians of British imperialism have beencontent to plough the same narrow plot over and over again, theirprofessional domain has been invaded in recent years by a wide array ofacademic interlopers. Interest in imperialism and colonialism has intensifiedamong specialists in anthropology, area studies, feminist studies, and, aboveall, literary studies. The latter have proven especially energetic and adept at

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol.24, No.3, September 1996, pp.345-363PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

346 THE JOURNAL OF IMPERIAL AND COMMONWEALTH HISTORY

claiming squatters' rights over imperial history's unclaimed provincesArmed with the latest post-structuralist theories, the literary invaders haveopened up and exploited some surprisingly rich and provocative intellectualterrain. It is their colonization of imperial studies and its implication for thefield that this essay proposes to address.

There can be no mistaking the success that literary scholars have had inmaking the topic of imperialism their own. Teaching positions in colonialand post-colonial literatures appear to be one of the booming fields inEnglish departments these days. New works with titles like The Rhetoric ofEmpire seem to come off the presses every week. Thick anthologies ofinfluential and representative essays have begun to appear for use astextbooks in college courses.4 Leading theorists such as Edward W. SaidHomi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have become superstarsof the academic firmament. In America, The Chronicle of Higher Educationhas highlighted the phenomenon with a feature story, the popular academicjournal Linguafranca has attacked it in a cover story, and Time magazinehas devoted several pages to a flattering profile of Said, its principalfounder.5 In Britain, interest among the intellectual community has beenequally intense.6 Clearly this is a scholarly industry to be reckoned with.

The problem is that historians of British imperialism have for the mostpart failed to reckon with it.7 This is a pity both for the historians, whosemethodological horizons could be broadened by serious engagement withthis literature, and for the literary scholars, whose theoretical excesses couldbe checked by the sober scrutiny of the historians. In proposing that histori-ans enter into a dialogue with their literary trespassers, I do not mean tosuggest that the two parties can be entirely reconciled with one another.Some of the differences that divide them are unbridgeable. Even so, a gooddeal can be gained, I believe, from historians conducting a criticalreconnaissance of the territory that literary theory has claimed as its own.So let us explore.

The new and growing body of scholarship that concerns us here is generallyknown either as colonial discourse analysis or post-colonial theory. Colonialdiscourse analysis refers to the examination and interpretation of particularcolonial texts. Post-colonial theory refers to the political and ideologicalposition of the critic who undertakes this analysis. In practice, the two termshave become virtually interchangeable, so much so that several recentlypublished 'readers' have put them in harness in their rather ponderous,mirror-imaged titles - Post-Colonial Theory and Colonial Discourse andColonial Discourse, Post-Colonial Theory. Although objections have been

IMPERIAL HISTORY AND POST-COLONIAL THEORY 347

raised to the teleological implications of the hyphenated tag 'post-colonial',8its evocation of an anti-imperialist political stance and a post-structuralisttheoretical one has ensured its usage. Indeed, the label 'post-colonialtheorist' seems to carry rather more cachet among the practitioners of thetrade than 'colonial discourse analyst', even though the latter designation isoften the more accurate one. Perhaps the term 'analyst' has unwelcomeassociations with financial and/or military functionaries; certainly the term'theorist' has an inflated prestige in lit-crit circles these days. For the sakeof convenience and consistency, I will refer to this literature as post-colonialtheory, but I caution that much of it is less engaged in developing a body oftheory than in making gestures of obeisance to it.

It is generally acknowledged that Edward Said's seminal study, Orien-talism (1978), is the foundational text for post-colonial theory.9 Itstransfiguration of the term 'orientalism' from an arcane field of academicstudy to a synonym for Western imperialism and racism has been acceptedand applied across a wide spectrum of scholarship, as has its central thesisand theoretical concerns. Said starts from the post-structuralist premise thatknowledge is a discursive field derived from language and he draws fromFoucault the insight that its significance lies embedded within systems ofpower. His study of Orientalism, by which he means Westernrepresentations of those parts of the world the West identifies as the Orient,seeks to show that this body of knowledge tells us little about the so-calledOrient, which may or may not exist outside the Western imagination, butmuch about the West's efforts to impose itself on the peoples and cultureswho came under its hegemonic sway. Orientalism, then, pushes past theconventional conception of imperial power as a material phenomenon,presenting it instead as an epistemological system. Moreover, because theWest's power is linked to the cultural representations it constructs andimposes on the minds of colonizer and colonized alike, it is able to survivethe political decolonization that occurred after the Second World War.Indeed, it exists even within the purportedly objective scholarship ofWestern academia. The full implication of this analysis is that the disman-tlement of Western modes of domination requires the deconstruction ofWestern structures of knowledge. Hence the claim that this is a post-colo-nial theory.10

These central propositions have been endorsed, elaborated upon, andmodified in varying respects by subsequent practitioners of post-colonialtheory. Although Said has his critics within the fraternity, his influence haspersisted to a remarkable degree over the years since Orientalism firstappeared. Many of the weaknesses as well as some of the strengths of hisenterprise have become magnified in the works that have followed its lead.

Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of post-colonial scholarship is


its theoretical promiscuity. Said draws mainly on Foucault for inspirationbut other influences on his work include Antonio Gramsci and ErichAuerbach. This odd menage create certain tensions and contradictions in hisargument. Aijaz Ahmad has observed that Said vacillates between aFoucaultian position that places the origin of Orientalism in theEnlightenment project of the eighteenth century and a Auerbachian stancethat traces it all the way back to classical Greece.11 Dennis Porter haspointed out that Said's use of Foucault is at odds with his use of Gramsci -the former presents a totalizing conception of power that absorbs knowl-edge itself while the latter conceives of hegemony as historically contingentand subject to subversion.12 Various critics have drawn attention to theambivalence, if not outright obfuscation, in Said's position regarding thefundamental question raised by his study: is it possible to attain a trueknowledge of the Other? For Said to charge that the West's representationsof the Orient are distorted seems to suggest that he regards an undistortedrepresentation as attainable, but this conflicts with his post-structuralistinsistence that the Orient is nothing more than a discursive phantasm.'Orientalist inauthenticity is not answered by any authenticity', notes JamesClifford.13 Such are the conundrums that arise from the effort to appropriateincompatible theoretical perspectives.

Said's progeny have taken the turn to theory in ever more tortuousdirections. As Stefan Collini has remarked with regard to cultural studies ingeneral, it suffers from 'a disabling deference to the idea of "theory"'.14 Inaddition to the obligatory bows to Foucault and Gramsci, post-colonialtheorists have drawn upon Althusser, Bakhtin, Barthes, Benjamin,Bourdieu, Derrida, de Man, Fanon, Heidegger, Lacan, Lyotard, and othermainly post-modernist theorists. Conspicuously absent from the post-colo-nial canon is Marx, whose work is considered irredeemably Eurocentric.15

This seems rather ironic in light of the fact that, except for Fanon, none ofthe names cited above ever exhibited the slightest intellectual curiosity inthe issue of European colonialism or the concerns of non-European peo-ples.16 Yet the fascination with such theorists, especially if they are French,continues to run high among the post-colonial coterie. The latest initiatesinto the canon appear to be Foucault's contemporaries, Gilles Deleuze andFelix Guattari, whose Wilhelm Reich-inspired work Anti-Oedipus isadvanced by Robert Young as an important new source of post-Saidianinspiration."

The infiltration of these varied theoretical influences into post-colonialstudies makes for a literature that is often dense and sometimesimpenetrable. Arguably the most fashionable figure in the field at thepresent time is Homi Bhabha, whose ruminations on the cultural effects ofcolonialism draw inspiration from post-structuralist psychoanalysis and


semiotics.18 Traces of Lacan, Derrida, and the like are all too visible in thestyle and substance of his essays, which pose a formidable challenge forthose who seek to decipher them. One of Bhabha's most sympatheticcommentators has suggested that his baffling prose is a deliberate strategyto disorient the reader so as to prevent 'closure' and thereby subvert the 'au-thoritative mode' of Western discourse, a claim also offered in defence ofGayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose work is often equally difficult topenetrate.19 One has to admire the over-the-top audacity of this assertion, butthe fact remains that the principal reason readers have trouble with Bhabha,Spivak, and certain other post-colonial theorists is because they make suchindiscriminate use of words, expressions, concepts, and doctrines from somany different, sometimes incompatible sources. The literary scholarElaine Showalter rightly complains that the 'difficult languages of hightheory... have become a new orthodoxy as muffling as scholastic Latin,expressive straitjackets which confine all thought to a prescribed vocabu-lary'.20 Post-colonial theorists' vocabulary has become clotted with highlyspecialized, often obscure terms like heteroglossy, alterity, aporia, synecdo-che, aleatory, elide, and metonymy. Even familiar words such as gaze, ges-ture, site, space, efface, erase, and interrogate have taken on highly special-ized, almost metaphysical meanings in their writings. Metaphor hasmetastasized into metaphoricity, narrative into narrativity, origin intooriginary, fact into facticity. One critic of this plethora of arcana has puttongue-in-cheek in recommending a Devil's Dictionary of Cultural Studiesto make its terminology accessible to the uninitiated.21

It is easy, of course, to mock almost any academic genre for its jargon,but what makes post-colonial theorists especially vulnerable to criticism arethe claims they make for the relationship between language and liberation.Language, as they see it, is the key to emancipation from colonial modes ofthought. This is the objective the Kenyan novelist and essayist Ngugi waThiong'o has referred to as 'decolonizing the mind'.22 His strategy for doingso has been to reassert the use of his native tongue (although this does notextend to the programmatic tracts in which he presents his rationale fordoing so). The strategy adopted by the post-colonial theorists is to subjectthe language of the colonizers to critical scrutiny, deconstructing represen-tative texts and exposing the discursive designs that underlie their surfacenarratives. This is seen as an act of transgression, a politicized initiative thatundermines the hegemonic influence of Western knowledge and bringsabout the 'cultural decentering of the [European] centered world system'."Bhabha, for example, presents his work as an effort to turn 'the pathos ofcultural confusion into a strategy of political subversion'.24 Its intent is toescape from the totalizing claims of the West.

For the sake of argument, let us accept the post-colonial theorists'


assertion. Let us agree that the non-Western world remains in thrall to thediscursive system of the West, to the system that Said identifies asOrientalism. How do the post-colonial theorists propose to liberate thesehostages? By writing in a manner that is utterly inaccessible to most ofthem? By writing as the acolytes of Western theorists? By writing to mainlyWestern audiences from mainly Western academies about mainly Westernliterature? By writing?25 These questions may seem unnecessarily harsh, butthey force to the fore the premise that stands at the heart of post-colonialtheory's sense of itself- the notion that the sort of recondite textual analysisit practises offers a weapon to break free from the cultural and indeedpolitical oppression of the West. One need not be a Marxian materialist -though this stance has supported a healthy scepticism regarding post-colonial theory - to consider this proposition as dubious, if not delusional.26

The issue that concerns us here, however, is not what this literature canor cannot do to decolonize the minds of contemporary non-Western peoples,but what it can or cannot do to deepen our understanding of the history ofcolonialism. What complicates this issue is that post-colonial theorists holdcontending views about the value of historical analysis. For post-modernistpurists like Homi Bhabha, history is nothing more than a text, a 'grandnarrative' that operates according to the same rules of rhetoric and logic asother genres of Western writing. As such, its significance is limited to thepart it plays in the discursive field that the post-colonial critic seeks todismantle, rather than the contribution it makes to our knowledge about thenature of colonialism. Bhabha keeps out the stuff of history by pluckingrandom works of literature and other texts from their contextual soil andsealing them in the hermetic chambers of a psychoanalytic essentialism.Suspicion of history as an accomplice to the West's discursive drive todominate the Other is a disturbing motif within a significant element ofpost-colonial theory. Edward Said's position is an ambiguous one,professing on the one hand the importance of a historicized understandingof Orientalism, while suggesting on the other hand that the discipline ofhistory is itself implicated in the Orientalist enterprise. John MacKenziecomplains that Said's efforts to achieve a historicism untainted byOrientalist assumptions are essentially ahistorical, a charge that I thinkoverstates the case, obviating the opportunity for interdisciplinarydialogue.27 The same accusation can be made, however, against some ofSaid's confederates. Gayatri Spivak praises the members of the SubalternStudies group for engaging in what she regards as the deconstruction of a'hegemonic historiography' and urges them to break from the premises ofhistorical analysis altogether.28 The influential cultural critic Ashis Nandydenounces historical consciousness as a 'cultural and political liability' fornon-Western peoples.29 In The Intimate Enemy, his best-known work, he


proclaims that his aim is to present 'an alternative mythography whichdenies and defies the values of history'.30 This view of history as amythography concocted by the West to further its hegemonic ambitions isone that Robert Young argues to be at the core of the post-colonial critique.He traces the intellectual genealogy of this effort to expose, decentre, anddeconstruct what are seen as the totalizing claims of 'white mythologies', orhistory as it has been practised in the West.31 For historians who have comeunder the influence of post-colonial purists, this attack on history hasoccasioned considerable hand-wringing. Some of the younger members ofthe Subaltern Studies school of Indian historiography in particular havebegun to agonize about whether it is possible to write history when 'Europeworks as a silent referent to historical knowledge itself'.32 This is a real andserious epistemological problem, and I do not wish to demean the struggleto reconstruct history from a non-Eurocentric perspective. But this is not theagenda of the post-colonial purists, whose efforts instead are directedagainst an historical mode of understanding altogether.

What happens when history is set aside? Some recent examples of post-colonial scholarship suggest that it leads to a wilful neglect of causation,context, and chronology. The authors of The Empire Writes Back: Theoryand Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures blithely pour the literatures ofAfrica, Australia, the Caribbean, the United States, and other regions of theworld into the same post-colonial pot, ignoring their profoundly differenthistorical experiences except insofar as their 'complexities and variedcultural provenance' are taken as signs of the decentring pluralism thatidentify them as post-colonial literatures.33 Laura E. Donaldsonacknowledges the need to address 'concrete historical circumstances' in theintroduction to her Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building, but this appreciation is quickly forgotten as she flits from JaneEyre to Uncle Tom's Cabin to The King and I (the novel, the play, and thefilm) as well as a bewildering array of other texts in an analysis thatconflates colonialism with racism, sexism, and oppression in general.34 Oneof the most egregious examples of this aversion to history is David Spurr'sThe Rhetoric of Empire?* Subtitled 'colonial discourse in journalism, travelwriting, and imperial administration', this astonishing book insists that thesame discursive forms recurred over more than a century in the diversegenres of writing that Western travellers, officials, and others producedabout the profoundly varied peoples across the globe with whom they camein contact. In this 'global system of representation',36 it seems to make nodifference whether the rhetoric is British, French, or American, whether theauthor is Lord Lugard, Andre Gide, or Joan Didion, whether the text is acolonial report, a scholarly treatise, or an article in National Geographic, orwhether the place is nineteenth-century South Africa, early twentieth


century Mexico, or the contemporary Middle East. All are indiscriminatelyadvanced as evidence of the depth of the West's discursive drive for powerand domination. It might be supposed that reductionism could not be carriedmuch further, but Spurr shows otherwise. Following in the footsteps ofDerrida, he tracks his quarry all the way back to writing itself: "The writeris the original and ultimate colonizer, conquering the space of consciousnesswith the exclusionary and divisive structures of representations'." Rarelydoes a theory chase its own tail with such single-minded intensity.38 We willnot trouble Spurr with such obvious questions as whether he too is compli-cit as a writer in this colonization of consciousness or whether the imperialimplications of writing are also applicable to the literatures of non-Westernsocieties. We will merely observe that his analysis is entangled in what post-colonial theorists might call a 'double bind': it seeks to convict historicallyspecific parties of historically specific crimes while exonerating itself of anyaccountability to historical specificity.

II

Fortunately, other literary scholars have shown far more sensitivity to thehistorical record in their work. While operating under the general rubric ofpost-colonial theory, these scholars have rejected the anti-historicalorientation of the theoretical purists. They recognize the distinction thatexists between history as a text and history as a tool, between its presenceas a discursive product and its use as an analytical practice. By placing theirarguments in an historical context and testing them against the historicalevidence, they have enriched our understanding of the imperial experiencein ways that historians have been slow to appreciate.

Mary Louise Pratt, like David Spurr, concerns herself with the rhetoricof European travel writing in her book Imperial Eyes, and like Spurr, sheranges freely across centuries and continents.39 Unlike Spurr, however, shedoes not conflate one century or continent with another. She takes some careto place the texts she has selected within the contexts of their particular timeand space and she readily acknowledges the appearance of discordant dis-courses along the way. While her main aim is to trace the taxonomicimpulses of an emergent European hegemony from the eighteenth centuryto the present, the story she tells is far from the univocal, unilinear onepresented by Spurr. For many historians her enterprise still may seemunduly speculative and her arguments insufficiently grounded in the empiri-cal record, but her efforts to establish the historical textures of her textsmake her study of European travel literature much more nuanced andsophisticated than certain of its counterparts.

Various other works of post-colonial scholarship have engaged in a


profitable if often provisional association with history. Gauri Viswanathan'sflawed but intriguing study of the British effort to introduce the study ofEnglish literature into the curriculum of Indian schools draws much of itsforce from the author's immersion in the early nineteenth-century debatebetween Orientalists and Anglicists about how to make Indians moreamenable to British rule.40 The self-proclaimed 'historicist' reading ofBritish explorers' accounts of East and Central Africa that Tim Youngsproffers is successful in showing that these representations of Africa wereshaped in significant ways by class-specific preoccupations with identitythat had their impetus in Britain itself.41 Jenny Sharpe overcomes the sim-plistic assumptions that often accompany discussions of gender and race inthe colonial realm by placing her study of rape as a trope in Western fictionabout the Raj within the context of the shifting patterns of power from thepre-Mutiny to the post-independence eras.42 Patrick Brantlinger's sweepingsurvey of British literature and imperialism in the nineteenth centurysucceeds as well as it does partly because it understands that the Britishempire was a widely varied phenomenon that inspired different responses indifferent places and at different times.43 Each of these works evidences asignificant degree of sensitivity to the historical record, and althoughhistorians in the relevant fields can doubtless demonstrate that distortionsand simplifications persist, the fact remains that these examples ofengagement with imperial history by post-colonial theory demand our atten-tion.

This increased fraternization with history has inspired its practitioners toquestion some of the cruder premises that post-colonial theory brought tothe study of imperialism. One of the most dismaying of these is the tenden-cy to essentialize the West, a discursive practice no less distorting than theWest's tendency to essentialize the Orient.44 In Said's Orientalism and muchof the scholarship it has inspired, the West is seen as an undifferentiated,omnipotent entity, imposing its totalizing designs on the rest of the worldwithout check or interruption. Ironically, this stress on the power of theWest countenances the neglect of that power as it was actually exercised inthe colonial context, ignoring 'its plural and particularized expressions'.45

Further, it fails to appreciate the uncertainties, inconsistencies, modifica-tions, and contradictions that afflicted Western efforts to impose its will onother peoples. Marxist-inspired critics in particular have taken post-colonialtheory to task for ignoring what Sumit Sarkar calls 'the microphysics ofcolonial power' ."*

With the appearance of more historically attuned studies like those citedabove, we have evidence that post-colonial scholarship is capable of moresubtle and persuasive treatments of the West and its widely varied imperialagents, interests, and aims. Javed Majeed's Ungoverned Imaginings, for


example, shows that Sir William Jones, Thomas Moore, James Mill, andother major British interpreters of India in the late eighteenth and early nine-teenth centuries constructed profoundly different versions of the Orient toserve profoundly different purposes, purposes that were often directed asmuch towards Britain as they were towards India.47 Monolithic conceptionsof the West and its intentions have also proved increasingly unsatisfactoryfor many feminist scholars, whose analyses of the role of white women incolonial societies have exposed an obvious fissure in the facade of ahomogeneous ruling elite. While some feminists have sought simply toacquit Western women of complicity in Western imperialism, others haveunderstood that the construction of colonial power was a far more complexand contradictory process than the theoretical purists suppose.48 As JennySharpe observes: The notion of a discourse that is traversed by anomnifunctional, free-floating power breaks down any distinction betweenrelations of domination and subordination'49 - by which she has in mind inparticular the distinction that confronted white women as members both ofa dominant race and the subordinate gender. These sorts of distinctions areessential for making sense of the ambiguous, ambivalent positions ofmemsahibs, poor whites, and various other subordinate or marginalizedgroups within white colonial society.

If post-colonial theory is to move toward a more nuanced, historicizedunderstanding of the colonial experience, it also has to overcome itstendency to abstract the colonized Other as an undifferentiated, unknowablecategory. Given their ideological loyalties, this may seem a rather surpris-ing position for the proponents of post-colonial theory to take, but it derivesdirectly from their answer to a crucial question: can the deconstruction ofthe West's misrepresentations of the Other open the door to a truerepresentation? Most theoretical purists say 'no', arguing that any effort toretrieve the experiences and attitudes of the colonized is doomed to failurebecause it is inescapably enmeshed in the positivist premises of Westernknowledge. Homi Bhabha argues that the best that can be done is to monitorthe traces of the colonized inscribed in the margins of the colonizer's dis-course, an enterprise enigmatic enough in its interpretation of silences,ambivalences, and contradictions to escape almost any kind of externalassessment.50 Gayatri Spivak insists that the voice of the colonized subject,and especially the colonized female subject, can never be recovered - it hasbeen drowned out by the oppressive collusion of colonial and patriarchaldiscourses." The implication of this stance is made clear by Gyan Prakash,who declares that the 'shift to the analysis of discourses' means theabandonment of a 'positivist retrieval' of the experience of the colonizedand the search instead for the random discursive threads from thatexperience that have become 'woven into the fabric of dominant structures'.


While Prakash is seduced by the prospect that the 'relocation of subalternityin the operation of dominant discourses leads... to the critique of the modernWest',52 others are appalled by this abandonment of the effort to recover the'subaltern' or colonial subject's experiences. Critics complain that theDerridean turn in post-colonial theory denies agency and autonomy to thecolonized, whose struggles against colonial rule and strategies to turn it intheir favour are too abundant and abundantly recorded to be dismissed asmere echoes in the chambers of Western discourse.53 Apart from Prakash,few historians are likely to adopt the stifling stance of the theoretical purists,and there are signs that an increasing number of practitioners of post-colo-nial studies have begun to back away from it as well. Robert Youngconcedes in his latest book that the discipline has 'reached something of animpasse' growing in part out of a realization that 'the homogenization ofcolonialism does also need to be set against its historical and geographicalparticularities'.54 And Sara Suleri complains in The Rhetoric of EnglishIndia that post-colonial theory 'names the other in order that it need not befurther known', and that its practitioners 'wrest the rhetoric of othernessinto a postmodern substitute for the very Orientalism that they seek todismantle'.55 Even Edward Said has recently warned against viewing theWest and the rest as essentialized dichotomies. He has retreated from hisearlier position regarding the pervasiveness of Western power by examiningthe work of Yeats, Fanon, and other voices of cultural resistance to thatpower.56

Whether figures such as Yeats and Fanon are entirely representative ofcolonized peoples' reactions to colonial rule, however, is open to question.What Said's use of them signifies is post-colonial theory's residual obei-sance to its literary studies roots, with its privileging of canonical authors.Hence the almost ritualistic re-examination of Charlotte Bronte, Kipling,Conrad, Forster, and the like in volume after volume of post-colonialscholarship. While recent efforts to extend the post-colonial inquiry to non-Western writers should be regarded as an important step forward, it remainsthe case that attention tends to focus on those Westernized authors who haveobtained at least provisional admission into the Western canon, such asAchebe, Naipaul, and Rushdie (though Naipaul's status, in particular, isquestioned by some post-colonial theorists because of his contrarianpolitical views). It would be useful if post-colonial scholarship made moreeffort to situate these writers within the class structure of their home soci-eties and the cultural context of a transnational intelligentsia so as to avoidsimplistic generalizations that their work embodies some nationalist or'Third World' essence.57 It would be even more useful if it freed itself fromthe constraints of a canon altogether. The recent upsurge of studies of travelliterature can be seen as one of the ways it has sought to do precisely that,


but the abiding limitation of this genre is its Eurocentric character.58 Whilesome practitioners of post-colonial theory have managed to take up topicsand texts that are entirely outside the bounds of any Western-derived canonthe most interesting instances generally have come from scholars trained indisciplines other than literature.59 Thus, one of the challenges that continuesto confront post-colonial theory is to open its inquiries to a wider range ofvoices, especially those from colonial and ex-colonial territories.

Ill

What, then, does post-colonial theory offer to British imperial history? Withits mind-numbing jargon, its often crude essentializations of the West andthe Other as binary opposites, and, above all, its deeply ingrained suspicionof historical thinking, one might well wonder if it has anything to offer. InJohn MacKenzie's view, it does not.60

Such a conclusion, I suggest, profoundly misjudges the potential of post-colonial theory to enrich the inquiries of imperial historians. For all itsfaults, this body of scholarship has inspired some valuable insights into thecolonial experience, and historians would do well to take notice. It hasreoriented and reinvigorated imperial studies, taking it in directions that theconventional historiography of the British empire has hardly begun toconsider. It has raised provocative, often fundamental questions about theepistemological structures of power and the cultural foundations of resis-tance, about the porous relationship between metropolitan and colonialsocieties, about the construction of group identities in the context of stateformation, even about the nature and uses of historical evidence itself.These preoccupations are in no way limited to the literary proponents ofpost-colonial theory: similar inquiries have arisen among anthropologists,area studies specialists, feminist scholars, and others whose methods mayseem somewhat less inimical to imperial historians, but whose concerns areoften no less challenging to their practices. This essay, however, has focusedon the literary scholarship inspired in large measure by Said because it hasbeen the most audacious in its application of post-structuralist theories andthe most uncompromising in its relationship to historiographical traditions.

The principal aim of this scholarship has been to reframe and reassessEurope's impact on the rest of the world - and the reciprocal effects onEurope itself - by shifting the focus from the material to the cultural realm.The contribution of post-colonial theory to this effort lies first and foremostin its appreciation of the relationship between knowledge and power. Said'scentral premise, derived from Foucault and embraced by other post-colonialtheorists, holds that the imperial power of the West was bound to andsustained by the epistemological order the West imposed on its subject


domains. While imperial historians have attended to the issue of powersince the inception of their field of study, and while their inquiries havegiven rise to a sophisticated body of work that traces the exercise of powerfrom coercion to collaboration, the fact remains that the circumstances thatallowed relatively small contingents of Europeans to acquire and maintainauthority over vastly larger numbers of Asians, Africans, and othersrepresent one of the most persistent conundrums to arise from the study ofWestern imperialism. The post-colonial theorists have opened up a new andintriguing avenue of inquiry into this problem by probing the assumptionsand intentions that underlay the efforts to give meaning to the colonialencounter. They have argued that these discursive practices were every bitas expressive of power relations as the more conventional manifestations ofthose relations in politics and other material realms. Heretofore their workhas been more successful in suggesting an intent on the part of colonialrulers than in establishing an effect on colonized subjects: this has been arecurrent point of criticism of Said and his student Gauri Viswanathan, forexample.61 However, they have been helped in their endeavours by others,notably historical anthropologists like Bernard Cohn, whose path-breakingwork on British India has demonstrated a direct relationship between theacquisition of knowledge about subject peoples and the imposition ofauthority over them.62 The marriage of this research to the insights frompost-colonial theory has shown that a fuller understanding of the West'ssuccess in imposing itself on the rest of the world requires a deeperappreciation of its cultural and ideological dimensions.

Post-colonial theory's insight into the pervasive nature of Westernconstructions of the Other has made it clear that much of what we thoughtwe knew about societies that had been subjected to colonial rule wasdistorted by the discursive designs of the colonizers. This realization hascompelled scholars to re-examine the circumstances under which particularpeoples became identified as members of particular tribes, castes, races,faiths, nations, and other culturally-defined collectivities. Once again, thetheoretical positions advanced by the post-colonial contingent haveconverged with the empirical researches of others, particularly specialists inthe anthropology and history of ex-colonial societies. An exceptionallylively and important body of scholarship has arisen that examines thecolonial construction of collective identities. What had long been thought tobe the primordial affiliations of tribe and caste, for example, are now seento have assumed much of their modern shape as a result of contestatoryprocesses arising from the efforts of colonial authorities to impose orderover subject peoples who sought to resist those demands. Similarly,religious communalism and other markers of group identity such as race andethnicity appear to have taken new and more virulent forms under colonial-inial-

•


ism as a result of its determination to classify and categorize.63 Theinfluence of post-colonial theory has been felt in studies of peasantconsciousness,64 of gender and sexuality,65 of the body and disease,66 and ofimperial ideology.67 Our understanding of the nature and impact of colonial-ism has been profoundly reconfigured as a result of these and other works,and at the heart of this reconfiguration lies the post-colonial premise that thecategories of identity that gave meaning to colonizers and colonized alikecannot be taken for granted: they must be problematized and presented inthe context of power.

The final point is that this problematizing of identity has provided anopportunity to overcome what D.K. Fieldhouse described a decade ago asthe Humpty-Dumpty syndrome in British imperial history.68 Since decolo-nization, the study of the British empire has shattered into a multitude ofseparate fragments, with the most significant break occurring between theimperial experience as it has been portrayed from the metropole and fromthe periphery. By presenting a case for understanding the construction ofcultural difference as a binary process - we define ourselves in the contextof how we define others - post-colonial theory has insisted that the metro-pole has no meaning apart from the periphery, the West apart from theOrient, the colonizer apart from the colonized. The dominant party in theseparings has its own character shaped as a consequence of the shape it givesthe character of the other. This is almost certainly the most significantcontribution that post-colonial theory has made to the study of colonialpractice. Sometimes, as in Edward Said's effort to read plantationexploitation in Antigua as the silent referent in Jane Austen's MansfieldPark, the case for a connection between imperial periphery and centreseems strained.69 But just as often it has worked, supplying fresh insightsinto the imperial experience and its impact on Britain. Javed Majeed hasmade a persuasive case for viewing the development of PhilosophicRadicalism in the context of colonial India in the early nineteenth century.70

Moira Ferguson has shown that the abolitionist-inspired debate about colo-nial slavery helped to shape Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of genderrelations in British society.71 Robert Young has exposed the importance ofmid-nineteenth century racial theory on the development of MatthewArnold's famous notion of culture.72 More generally, post-colonial theoristshave shown that the 'languages of class, gender, and race [were] often usedinterchangeably',73 connecting imperial metropole and colonial periphery insurprising and significant ways. Evidence that historians have begun to takeheed of the insights advanced by post-colonial scholarship can be found inworks such as Antoinette Burton's provocative analysis of the efforts byBritish feminists to appropriate the ideology of humanitarian imperialism totheir cause and Lynn Zastoupil's careful study of the influence of John


Stuart Mill's career in the India Office on the development of his ideas.74

Post-colonial theory, then, has contributed to the task of restoring therelationship between centre and periphery, of recovering the connectionbetween the history of Britain and the history of its imperial dependencies_ in effect, of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.73 It has done soby demonstrating that imperialism was a process of mutual interaction, ofpoint and counterpoint that inscribed itself on the dominant partner as wellas the dominated one. And it has made it clear that any assessment of thisinteraction which ignores the cultural dimension - that is, the realm ofmutual representations of the self and the other - is one that misses whatmay well be the most persistent and profound legacy of the imperial experi-ence.

IV

I began this essay with a rather polemical metaphor that portrayed post-colonial theory as a colonizing discipline, subjecting a province of historicalstudies to its alien rule. Insofar as this metaphor resonated with readers, itdid so because it pandered to the widespread perception that disciplinaryboundaries are akin to ethnic or national ones, abstract entities that must bepatrolled and protected at all costs against outsiders. I intend now todenounce this metaphor as misleading and even destructive. It connotes adefensive mentality that hinders rather than advances scholarship andknowledge. While I have argued that there is a great deal wrong with post-colonial theory, I have also suggested that it offers interesting and usefulavenues of inquiry that imperial historians would do well to examine. Whatwe need at this stage is a full-fledged critical dialogue between the twoparties, a dialogue that exposes areas of difference and delineates points ofconvergence. There are, in fact, some signs that this has begun to occur.76

John MacKenzie has made a vigorous, albeit defensive, intervention thathas already stimulated debate.77 My intent has been to push this dialogue ina direction that will encourage imperial historians to rethink their practicesin response to post-colonial theory. Whatever the outcome of such arethinking, it promises to take the historiography of imperialism in fruitful,if unfamiliar, directions.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

NOTES

A preliminary version of this essay was presented in October 1994 to the North AmericanConference on British Studies in Vancouver, British Columbia. I wish to thank Antoinette Burton,


John Cell, Sandy Freitag, Dorothy Helly, Tom Metcalf, and the members of the nineteenth-century studies group for their comments on subsequent drafts. None of them is responsible forthe opinions expressed here.

1. See Frederick Madden and O.K. Fieldhouse (eds.), Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth(London, 1986), esp. the contribution by Ronald Robinson; and Richard Symonds, Oxfordand Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (London, 1986), esp. ch.3.

2. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: TheOfficial Mind of Imperialism, 2nd ed. (London, 1981).

3. P. J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Vol. 1, Innovation and Expansion; Vol. 2Crisis and Deconstruction (London, 1993).

4. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory:A Reader (New York, 1994); Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (eds.),Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory (Manchester, 1994); Bill Ashcroft, GarethGriffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London, 1995).

5. Liz McMillen et al., 'Post-Colonial Studies Plumb the Experience of Living Under, andAfter, Imperialism', The Chronicle of Higher Education (19 May 1993), A6-A9; RussellJacoby, 'Marginal Returns: The Trouble with Post-Colonial Theory', Linguafranca, 5, no.6(SeptVOct. 1995), 30-7; Robert Hughes, 'Envoy to Two Cultures', Time, 141, no.25 (21 June21 1993), 60-3.

6. John M. MacKenzie, 'Edward Said and the Historians', Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 18,no.l (1994), 9, refers to some of the attention surrounding Said: the Reith lectures he gaveon BBC radio, the 'Arena' television documentary about his career, and the controversysparked by Ernest Gellner's review of his book Culture and Imperialism in The TimesLiterary Supplement (19 Feb. 1993), 3-4.

7. The most notable exception is John M. MacKenzie, who has made an important interventionin the debate with Said and his followers. See his Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts(Manchester, 1995), and 'Edward Said and the Historians'.

8. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest(New York, 1995), intro.

9. For an appreciation of Said, see Michael Sprinker (ed.), Edward Said: A Critical Reader(Oxford, 1992). Especially relevant are the essays by Benita Parry, Richard Fox, and ParthaChatterjee.

10. The implications of this position are developed in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van derVeer (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia, 1993).

11. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London, 1992), ch.5.12. Dennis Porter, 'Orientalism and Its Problems', in Francis Barker et al. (eds.), The Politics of

Theory (Colchester, 1983), 179-93, reprinted in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourseand Post-Colonial Theory, 150-61.

13. James Clifford, 'Orientalism', History and Theory, 19, no.2 (1980), 209.14. Stefan Collini, 'Badly Connected: The Passionate Intensity of Cultural Studies', Victorian

Studies, 36, no.4 (Summer 1993), 458.15. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London, 1990), esp. chs. 1

and 2.16. It is striking how little attention has been paid by post-colonial theorists to this troubling fact.

In a provocative new book, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's 'History ofSexuality' and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995), the anthropologist Ann LauraStoler has had the forthrightness to frame her Foucaultian analysis of European colonialismaround the issue of Foucault's neglect of colonialism and racism.

17. Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London, 1995).This endorsement comes even though Young acknowledges that Deleuze and Guattari'sarguments are obscure and their analysis of culture 'too simplistic' (173).

18. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994).19. Young, White Mythologies, 156, 158.20. Elaine Showalter in 'The Rise of Theory - a Symposium', Times Literary Supplement, 4763

(15 July 1994), 12.


21 Daniel Cotton, 'Discipline and Punish', Victorian Studies, 36, no.4 (Summer 1993), 463.22 Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

(Heinemann, 1986).23 Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore, 1994), 221.24 Bhabha, 'Interrogating Identity', Location of Culture, 62.25 Significantly, I think, questions similar to these are posed in an interview with Gayatri

Spivak conducted by three Delhi-based Indians. See Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic (ed.)Sarah Harasym (New York, 1990), 69.

26 See the pointed remarks by Ahmad, In Theory, passim; Sumit Sarkar, 'Orientalism Revisited:Saidian Frameworks in the Writing of Modern History', The Oxford Literary Review, 16,nos.1-2 (1994), 205-24; Benita Parry, 'Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse',The Oxford Literary Review, 9, nos. 1-2 (1987), 27-58; and Elazar Barkan, 'Post-Anti-Colo-nial Histories: Representing the Other in Imperial Britain', Journal of British Studies, 33,no.2 (April 1994), 180-203.

27 MacKenzie, Orientalism, xvii, passim.28 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography', in Ranajit

Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi, 1985), 332, passim.29 Ashis Nandy, 'History's Forgotten Doubles', History and Theory: Theme Issue 34. World

Historians and Their Critics (1995), 65.30 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi,

1983), xv.31. Young, White Mythologies. For a more subtle reading of these anti-historical tendencies in

post-colonial theory, see Buell, National Culture, ch.9.32 Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian"

Pasts?', Representations, 37 (Winter 1992), 2. Also see Cyan Prakash, 'Subaltern Studies asPostcolonial Criticism', American Historical Review, 99, no.5 (Dec. 1994), 1475-90, andidem, 'Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from IndianHistoriography', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32, no.2 (April 1990),

33. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory andPractice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London, 1989), 11.

34. Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building (ChapelHill, 1992), 9, passim.

35. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, andImperial Administration (Durham, 1993).

36. Spurr, Rhetoric, 10.37. Spurr, Rhetoric, 93.38. Perhaps a post-colonial theorist can draw some submerged significance from the concidental

appearance of the imagery I use here in MacKenzie 's critique of Orientalism, 15. Or perhapsour independent efforts are simply evidence of the aptness of the image.

39. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992).40. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York,

1989).41. Tim Youngs, Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900 (Manchester, 1994).42. Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis,

1993). For a much more simplistic approach to this subject, see Nancy L. Paxton, 'Mobi-lizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels about the Indian Uprising of 1857', VictorianStudies, 36, no.l (Fall 1992), 5-30.

43. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914(Ithaca, 1988).

44. This is one of the principal criticisms made by MacKenzie, Orientalism, ch. 1 .45. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton,

1994), x. Thomas's book is a critique of post-colonial theory's representations of colonialismas 'a unitary totality' (ix).

46. Sarkar, 'Orientalism Revisited', 217. Also see Ahmad, In Theory, 172, passim; FrederickCooper, 'Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History', American


Historical Review, 99, no.5 (Dec. 1994), 1531.47. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's 'The History of British India' and

Orientalism (Oxford, 1992).

48. See the excellent review essay by James Buzard, 'Victorian Women and the Implications ofEmpire', Victorian Studies, 36, no.4 (Summer 1993), 443-53.

49. Sharpe, Allegories, 9.50. Bhabha, Location of Culture, passim.

51. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Gary Nelson and LawrenceGrossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana and Chicago, 1988)271-313. For an influential application of Spivak's argument to a specific colonial context'see Lata Mani's 'Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India', in KumkuniSangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (NewBrunswick, N.J., 1990), 88-126, which sees the widows who committed sati in earlynineteenth century India as silent parties in a struggle between British colonial officials andIndian high-caste males.

52. Cyan Prakash, 'Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism', 1482, 1483.53. See Ahmad, In Theory; Sarkar, 'Orientalism Revisited'; Florencia E. Mallon, 'The Promise

and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History', AmericanHistorical Review, 99, no.5 (Dec. 1994), 1491-1515; Cooper, 'Conflict and Connection'.

54. Young, Colonial Desire, 164, 165.55. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, 1992), 12-13.56. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), ch.3.57. This is one of the main themes of Ahmad, In Theory.58. In addition to Pratt, Imperial Eyes, Spurr, Rhetoric of Empire, and Youngs, Travellers in

Africa, see Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European TravelWriting (Princeton, 1991); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women'sTravel Writing and Colonialism (London, 1991); and Ali Behdad, Belated Travellers:Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, 1994).

59. See, for example, Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley, 1988), and ParthaChatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton,1993).

60. MacKenzie, Orientalism, and 'Edward Said and the Historians'. My reservations withMacKenzie's position are expressed in a review of his book in The International HistoryReview (forthcoming).

61. See MacKenzie, Orientalism, chs. 1 and 2; Sarkar, 'Orientalism Revisited', passim.62. Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1990).

Also see Nicholas B. Dirks, 'Castes of Mind', Representations, 37 (Winter 1992), 56-78;idem, 'From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule', in Dirks (ed.),Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor, 1992), 175-208; and the essays by Arjun Appadurai,David Lelyveld, and David Ludden in Breckenridge and van der Veer (eds.), Orientalism andthe Postcolonial Predicament.

63. Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi,1990); Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and theEmergence of Communalism in North India (Delhi, 1990); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation andIts Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993); Leroy Vail (ed.), TheCreation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, 1989); Bruce Berman and JohnLonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, v. 2 (London, 1992); DavidWilliam Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of anAfrican Landscape (London, 1989); Jean and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution:Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, v. 1 (Chicago, 1991); CliftonCrais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in f 're-Industrial South Africa (Cambridge,1992).

64. Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, 1983);and more generally the work of the Guha-led Subaltern Studies collective.

65. See the work of Ann Laura Stoler, especially 'Making Empire Respectable: The Politics ofRace and Sexual Morality in 20th-century Colonial Cultures', American Ethnologist, 16,


no 4 (Nov. 1989), 634-59, and Race and the Education of Desire. An important new casestudy is Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'EffeminateBengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995).

66 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1993); Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power andAfrican Illness (London, 1991); Luise White, '"They Could Make Their Victims Dull":Genders and Genres, Fantasies and Cures in Colonial Southern Uganda', AmericanHistorical Review, 100, no.5 (Dec. 1995), 1379-1402.

67 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj: The New Cambridge History of India, III, 4' (Cambridge, 1994).

68 David Fieldhouse, 'Can Humpty-Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the1980s', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12, no.2 (Jan. 1984), 9-23.

69. Said, Culture and Imperialism, ch.2.70. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings; Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest.71. Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica

Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York, 1993), ch.2.72. Young, Colonial Desire, chs. 2 & 3.73. Youngs, Travellers in Africa, 6. Also see McClintock, Imperial Leather.74. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial

Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994); Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stan-ford, 1994).

75. It should be said that P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins have sought the same ends through moretraditional means in their two-volume magnum opus, British Imperialism, but their effortshave simply swung the pendulum back from the peripheral perspective encouraged byRobinson and Gallagher to the anglocentric one that had previously dominated imperialhistoriography. What distinguishes post-colonial theory in its more successful manifestationsis its determination to trace the points of the mutual exchange between metropole andperiphery.

76. See, for example, Antoinette Burton, 'Rules of Thumb: British History and "ImperialCulture" in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain', Women's History Review, 3, no.4(1994), 483-500.

77. MacKenzie, 'Edward Said and the Historians' and Orientalism; Martha L. Hildreth,'Lamentations on Reality: A Response to John M. MacKenzie's 'Edward Said and theHistorians', Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 19, no.l (1995), 65-73.

imperial history and post colonial theory

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