Empire Multiplied. A Review Essay

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 46, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 247-272

  Cooper, Frederick ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33750309119     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417504000131     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. Simply including the plural would have extended the list still further: see Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D'Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, eds., Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);
2. Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). I am grateful to Jane Burbank, Antonio Feros, and Molly Nolan for comments on a previous draft of this article
3. For a fuller argument along these lines, see Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian's Perspective.” African Affairs 100 (2001): 189–213
4. Some years ago, David Fieldhouse-no radical he-argued that if imperial history were to regain favor among students it had to integrate itself better with histories of the societies of Africa and Asia, fields toward which scholars had gravitated. To at least some extent this advice has been followed, but not by Ferguson. David Fieldhouse, “Can Humpty Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the 1980s,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 12 (1984): 9–23;
5. and Stephen Howe, “The Slow Death and Strange Rebirth of Imperial History,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29 (2001): 131–141
6. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), bubbling with enthusiasm for the new without enough curiosity about the past to know whether it was new or not
7. For better informed and more thoughtfully argued work on transnational networks, see Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997);
8. Sanjeev Khagram, James Riker, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002);
9. and Thomas Callaghy, Ronald Kassimir, and Robert Latham, eds., Intervention and Transnationalism in Africa: Global-Local Networks of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
10. On the other side of the political spectrum is Samuel Huntington, who adduces little persuasive evidence for a clash of civilizations, but does his best to bring one about. Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)
11. Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Decolonization,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22 (1994): 462–511;
12. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
13. For earlier treatments of this point, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992);
14. C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989)
15. He mentions that Britain's sweet tooth provided the incentives to build sugar plantations, but he does not take up the more profound point of Sidney Mintz that sugar was tied into the growth of an industrial working class that could be supplied with cheap calories at no opportunity costs in domestic land or labor force. S. Mintz, Sweetness And Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985)
16. For a more detailed and nuanced treatment of the limits of domination over Indians-one of many important books that do not rate Ferguson's bibliography-see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
17. See especially Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
18. and Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
19. For a concise discussion of how political conflict played out in one corner of the British empire among missionaries intent on conversion and civilization, settlers eager to seize land and exploit labor, and officials trying to forge a docile political order, see John Comaroff, “Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 661–685
20. Arevealing and geographically relevant illustration of the deescalating ambition of the British Empire comes from David Edwards work on Afghanistan, where an effort to rule and remake a territory important to the security of India turned into periodic expeditions in search of “mad mullahs” who could be blamed for the difficulties of occupation. “Mad Mullahs and Englishmen: Discourse in the Colonial Encounter,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989): 649–670
21. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin wrote, “If only we pushed on & developed Africa we could have U.S. dependent on us, & eating out of our hand in four or five years.” Quoted in Hugh Dal-ton diaries, 15 Oct. 1948,cited in R. D. Pearce, The Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy 1938–1948 (London: Cass, 1982), 95. The sale of tropical commodities in demand in the United States was one of few ways, many officials thought, that the dollar debt could be paid off. Similar arguments were made by other leading figures in the post-war government. On these visions of post-war government and the costs and conflicts to which its new activism gave rise
22. see Cooper, Decolonization and African Society
23. Some economic historians have even argued for an anti-capitalist bias in British colonial policy, although it would be more precise to stress the selectivity of the bias. Cyril Ehrlich, “Building and Caretaking: Economic Policy in British Tropical Africa, 1890–1960,” Economic History Review 26 (1973): 649–667.
24. The racial restrictions on African economic activity in settler colonies is documented many times over in the literature on Kenya and the Rhodesias. On sterling balances and other capital-constricting policies, see David Fieldhouse, Black Africa, 1945–1980: Economic Decolonization and Arrested Development (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986)
25. Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
26. Lauren Benton brings out a general trend among colonial states to move from “legal pluralism” to systems that were separate and unequal, but subordinated to the state. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
27. On the limitations of British initiatives in building international order, see Patrick Karl O'Brien and Armand Clesse, eds., Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846–1914 and the United States 1941–2001 (London: Ashgate, 2002), especially the chapters of O'Brien and John M. Hobson
28. The most geographically relevant comparison-Britain's short rule over Iraq as a mandated territory taken from the Ottoman Empire after World War I (which Ferguson does not discuss)‘is not encouraging. The British government, faced with a large, thinly populated and often rebellious territory, decided to make use of the air force, because the minister in charge, Winston Churchill, decided that planes could “police the mandated territory of Mesopotamia for less cost than the traditional method of military occupation.” David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 16
29. Ferguson seems quite worried that this is precisely what will happen with the Bush Administration, despite his exhortations to get serious about being a good imperialist. Niall Ferguson, “The Empire Slinks Back: Why Americans Don't Really Have What It Takes to Rule the World,” The New York Times Magazine, 27 Apr. 2003, 52–57
30. Anthony Pagden, “Great Expectations of Themselves,” London Review of Books, 17 Apr. 2003, 32
31. The non-national character of the empire was not unique to Spain, but Spain's good fortune in finding gold and silver in one of its conquered areas gave it a precious asset in developing a crucial aspect of any such system-patronage. See J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past and Present 137 (1992), esp. 56–59
32. Others make more of the debate, giving greater weight to the importance the elite gave to their legitimacy and sense of purpose, the influence of juridical scholars on systems of rule, and the cen-trality of the idea of a Catholic monarchy. Kamen may underestimate as well the strength and sophistication of the Crown's administrative system in the Americas, as well as the importance of its law codes and judicial apparatus. See for example Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 1530–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990);
33. and J. H. Elliott, “Empire and State in British and Spanish America,” in Serge Gruzinski and Nathan Wachtel, eds., Le nouveau monde, mondes nouveaux: L'expérience américaine (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations and Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1996), 368–72
34. John H. Elliott, “The Spanish Conquest and Settlement in the Americas,” and Spain and America in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” both in Leslie Bethell, ed., Cambridge History of Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Vol. 1: Colonial Latin America, 161, 204–5, 289, 297;
35. David Brading, “The Catholic Monarchy,” in Gruzinski and Wachtel, 38–405;
36. Colin M. MacLachlan, Spain's Empire in the New World: The Role of Ideas in Institutional and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988);
37. Antonio Feros, Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
38. Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988)
39. As in Doyle, Empires, 30
40. Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest from Greece to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2001);
41. and David Aber-nethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1415–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) most recently.
42. Going back a few years, see Doyle, Empires, and Maurice Duverger, ed., Le Concept d'Empire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980)
43. Charles A. Kupchan, The Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994);
44. Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991)
45. Lieven is one of a growing number of historians of Russia who are rethinking history from the vantage point of empire. For two collections indicative of this trend, see Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1998);
46. and Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini, eds., Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
47. The idea of empire as the creation of sharp alterity has produced sharp counterarguments, such as David Cannadine's Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), which attempts to reverse Said's Orientalism by putting the weight of interpretation on the hierarchical nature of British society and the incorporation of Indian Rajas and African chiefs into such a system. As Mrilani Sinla acutely observes, “Since Ornamentalism collapses the inequality between metropole and periphery as simply analogous to “domestic’ British hierarchies-see here as themselves having less to do with collective antagonisms of race, class, or gender than with an infinitesimally graded spectrum of social ranks-the problem of reconciling empires and nation simply does not arise.” The problem of thinking through the relationship of different forms of antagonism and connection indeed remains.
48. “Signs Taken for Wonders': The Stakes for Imperial Studies,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, 1 (2002): par. 15 (web version).
49. Such issues are taken up in Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming)
50. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society
51. For a vivid discussion of what it means to be written off-looking at people who thought they were part of the modernizing moment of late British colonialism and early post-independence- see James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)