Book Review

Methods/Theory

Once the purview of established university chair holders for whom empire radiated outward from center to periphery, British imperial history has undergone some important transformations in the last two decades. Not only have all manner of practitioners—literary theorists, cultural critics, and feminists—rushed in, but former colonials of all varieties have also explored terrains that others feared to tread, especially where the impact of empire on the metropole is concerned. The new generation of scholars has brought with it new tools for research as well, from Foucauldian analysis to poststructuralism to critical race theory, all in an effort to understand the role of British imperialism on both a local and a global scale and to recast the fixity of those structural identities in the process. Surveying these proceedings, David Cannadine has lighted upon the paradigms offered by Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) as the most influential of all recent developments. He does so because of its insistence on the role of "otherness"; because of the emphasis he believes it places on race as a category of analysis; and because of the attention he suggests it pays to the experiences of colonial natives. Cannadine's new book is his rebuttal to the biases he perceives in recent scholarship on imperialism. In this eye-catching, synthetic brief for imperial history from the perspective of imperial Britons, Cannadine attempts to reclaim empire from contemporary Saidian influences and to make a case for it as a "class act": the province of social history rather than the unwitting hostage of racial (and, to a lesser degree, gendered) interests, whether historical or contemporary.

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