The Cambridge History of the British Empire

Wrong, George M.; Rose, J. Holland; Harmsworth, Vere; Newton, A. P.; Benians, E. A.

doi:10.2307/1838489

The American Historical Review

1929

DOI: 10.2307/1838489

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The Cambridge History of the British Empire

George M. Wrong¹,

J. Holland Rose²,

Vere Harmsworth³

et al.

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1989

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Cited by 4 publications

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“…18 The plural view of empire in interwar historiography reached its most expansive expression in the multi-volume Cambridge History of the British Empire which privileged empirical elaboration, and was divided between territory-specific volumes which prevented an overarching account. 19 The momentum of interwar scholarship carried into the post-Second World War decades. In 1959, the young American historian of empire Philip D. Curtin surveyed 'The British Empire and Commonwealth in Recent Historiography' for the American Historical Review.…”

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The Incoherence of Empire. Or, the Pitfalls of Ignoring Sovereignty in the History of the British Empire

Wilson

Dilley

2023

Trans. R. Hist. Soc.

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This article argues for an essentially political definition of empire with sovereignty at its core, which recognises that British assertions of sovereignty were multiple, mutually contradictory and thus, taken together, incoherent. Tracing the history of conflict between different archetypes of sovereign authority, we argue that imperial crises occurred when empire's different ideas were forced to speak to one another, during world war, for example. The emphasis here on sovereignty and incoherence contrasts with conceptions of the history of the British empire which assert to the contrary that empire was a coherent entity. Such coherence can, we argue, only be maintained by treating empire as a metaphor for broader conceptions of power and thus collapsing the history of empire into other totalising meta-concepts such as global capitalism or Western cultural dominance. Recognition of the incoherence of imperial sovereignty offers new, more nuanced, readings of central concerns in the literature such as imperial violence and the economics of empire.

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confidence: 99%

The Incoherence of Empire. Or, the Pitfalls of Ignoring Sovereignty in the History of the British Empire

Wilson

Dilley

2023

Trans. R. Hist. Soc.

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Amongst Empires: A Short History of Ireland and Empire Studies in International Context

Cleary¹

2007

eir

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This essay begins with a summary overview of emergent intellectual trends that are redefining the study of empire today. It then charts a history of modern Irish scholarship on empire, discussing the achievements and limitations of Atlantic History, Commonwealth History, and postcolonial studies. 1 The piece closes with a discussion of how Empire Studies in Ireland might be reoriented in the future so as to deal not only with Irish responses to the now-vanished British Empire but also to the wider European imperial system and to the American neo-imperialism that emerged in its wake. Empire Studies and the Crises of American Imperialism Not so long ago the historiography of empire was a sedate enterprise with the air of a somewhat inconsequential intellectual tidy-up operation in which mostly Western historians deliberated the character of European empires gone the way of Nineveh and Tyre. For a time, the very word "imperialism" seemed even to be becoming obsolete due to the collapse of Marxist theory's intellectual stock 11 . These fields obviously do not cover the entire gamut of Irish scholarship on empire. Several other fields might be discussed, including the economic history of empire, scholarship on Northern Ireland, studies of empire in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century contexts, and so on. However, they do represent major concentrations of work and thus represent significant contributions to the development of Empire Studies in Ireland. Amongst Empires: A Short History of Ireland and Empire Studies in International Context after  and to its displacement by newer lexicons like "globalization." Now, as Giovanni Arrighi has remarked, the "E" and "I" words are very much back in fashion and, what is more, the study of empire and imperialism has lost much its aura of retrospection, its romance of requiem. 2 And as this has occurred, the center of gravity of Empire Studies has also moved westward from Britain and France to the United States. When contemporary intellectuals debate the economics of imperial expansion, the nature of interimperial competition, or the dangers of over-stretch, they do so less as archivists of a disappearing age and more in the manner of auguries hoping to discern the outline of a new world in the entrails of the old. The current reinvigoration of Empire Studies owes much to scholars who have worked to rehabilitate the idea of empire, not least by arguing that the United States should assume the imperial functions relinquished by Britain and France after World War II. Refurbishing arguments about imperialism as midwife to modernization and enlightenment, this scholarship is also advanced on the "realist" premise that in an inherently war-prone international state system it will always be necessary for some master-state to regulate the world. Hence, unless a twenty-first century pax Americana can replicate its nineteenth-century British predecessor, the world is doomed in the century ahead either to long-term chaos or to the prospect that some non-Western power will assume the Augu...

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Empire versus Truck: The Official Interpretation of Debt and Labour in the Eighteenth‐Century Newfoundland Fishery

Crowley¹

1989

Canadian Historical Review

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The Cambridge History of the British Empire

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The Incoherence of Empire. Or, the Pitfalls of Ignoring Sovereignty in the History of the British Empire

The Incoherence of Empire. Or, the Pitfalls of Ignoring Sovereignty in the History of the British Empire

Amongst Empires: A Short History of Ireland and Empire Studies in International Context

Empire versus Truck: The Official Interpretation of Debt and Labour in the Eighteenth‐Century Newfoundland Fishery

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