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Roundtable: Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin's The Empire Project. Comment: Desolation Goes before Us
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2015
Abstract
In an age when both the traditional book form and the world that the British Empire made are arguably in crisis, it is remarkable that big books on British imperialism abound. Contributors to this roundtable assess scale and genre as well as content in their discussion of the claims and impact of John Darwin's tome, The Empire Project. John Darwin's response is also included.
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- Roundtable: Imperial History by the Book: A Roundtable on John Darwin's The Empire Project
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- Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015
References
1 James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (Oxford, 2009); Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson, Empire and Globalization: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010).
2 On the settler empire in late Victorian political thought, see Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 2007); idem, Remaking the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, forthcoming).
3 See Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008).
4 For further discussion of this historiographical refusal, see the other papers in this roundtable and Schwarz, Bill, “An Unsentimental Education: Darwin's Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, no. 1 (January 2015): 125–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 C. P. Lucas, “Introduction,” in An Essay on the Government of Dependencies, ed. George Cornewall Lewis (Oxford, 1891), vii–lxvii, xxxiii.
6 Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, 1997).
7 Drayton, Richard, “Where Does the World Historian Write From? Moral Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 3 (July 2011): 671–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 675–76.
8 Elsewhere, Darwin expresses skepticism about the idea of “epistemic violence” without offering a convincing argument against it. See John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London, 2013), 266–68, 302. While most commonly used in a Foucauldian sense, it can be derived from other theoretical idioms. See Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (Oxford, 2007).
9 On how antislavery arguments were employed to legitimate imperialism, see Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, 2012).
10 Wolfe, Patrick, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 393.
11 On humanitarian governmentality, see Lester and Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance. On some intriguing utopian dimensions of Anglo-Saxonism, see Bell, Duncan, “Before the Democratic Peace: Racial Utopianism, Empire, and the Abolition of War,” European Journal of International Relations 2, no. 3 (September 2014): 647–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Madley, Benjamin, “From Terror to Genocide: Britain's Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia's History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 1 (January 2008): 77–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 77; Ann Curthoys, “Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (Oxford, 2008), 229–53; A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (Oxford, 2004).
13 In Unfinished Empire, Darwin briefly mentions Tasmania, describing the final fate of its people in “deadly exile offshore” (259).
14 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 397. On “losing your concepts,” see Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, 2008).
15 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 388. For a useful comparative perspective, see Benjamin Madley, “Tactics of Nineteenth Century Colonial Massacre: Tasmania, California and Beyond,” in Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History, ed. Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (New York, 2012), 110–25.
16 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, 117–18, 263.
17 For contrasting accounts of this issue, see Bayly, C. A., “Moral Judgement: Empire, Nation, and History,” European Review 14, no. 3 (July 2006): 385–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Drayton, “Where Does the World Historian Write From”; Kennedy, Dane, “The Imperial History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 1 (January 2015): 5–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, 7.
19 On “moralism” as a distorted form of morality, see C. A. J. Coady, Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (Oxford, 2009), and in a different idiom, Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton, 2011).
20 Bernard Porter, review of The Empire Project, by John Darwin, “Book of the Month,” The British Scholar Society, January 2010, http://britishscholar.org/publications/2010/01/01/the-empire-project/, accessed January 2015.
21 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourses on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, 2003).
22 H. G. Wells, prologue to The War of the Worlds (London, 1898).
23 Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonies and Colonisation (London, 1842), 2:152.
24 Alfred Caldecott, English Colonization and Empire (London, 1891), 234.
25 Merivale, Lectures, 2:152.