Abstract:The British Scholar Journal attempts to understand the field of British history as a whole and overcome fragmentation—to find not a compromise but a new direction. If this issue is evidence, there is ...The British Scholar Journal attempts to understand the field of British history as a whole and overcome fragmentation—to find not a compromise but a new direction. If this issue is evidence, there is some reason to believe that a new approach is emerging. Historians have slowly started to move beyond the polarized fields of both traditional imperial history and post-colonialism by exploring new knowledge produced by an imperial synthesis of shared experience that has now become the heritage of a globalized world. Exploring such an imperial synthesis moves us beyond the divide between metropole and periphery, active agent and passive victim, and traditional history and post-colonialism. It enables historians to see the British Empire as a theatre where new knowledge arose from the crucible of interaction. Part of the goal of defining and discovering this synthesis of imperial knowledge requires a critical assessment of the European agency, and morality, of imperialism. To do this, we must understand the practice of history itself. The first article of this journal analyses two journals, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, as well as two museums, the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. In this article, Angela Woollacott differentiates traditional imperial history and its emphasis on the exercise of power through economic and political levers (with its longing for lost imperial glory), from that of the postcolonial, that leads us into the broader meadows of cultural history, sexual history, and the history of race relations, to name just a few. In her article “Making Empire Visible or Making Colonialism Visible? The Struggle for the British Imperial Past,” Woollacott lays bare four central examples of these two approaches. Rather than taking us down the familiar list of scholars on each side of this divide, she displays a material analysis of this bifurcated field by excavating the ideological British Scholar Vol. I, Issue 2, 151-4, March 2009Read More
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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