This wide-ranging and accessible book examines the effects of British imperial involvements on history writing in Britain since 1750. It provides a chronological account of the development of history writing in its social, political, and cultural contexts, and an analysis of the structural links between those involvements and the dominant concerns of that writing. The author looks at the impact of imperial and global expansion on the treatment of government, of social structures and changes and of national and ethnic identity in scholarly and popular works, in school histories, and in ‘famous’ history books. In a clear and student-friendly way, the book argues that involvement in empire played a transformative and central role within history writing as whole, reframing its basic assumptions and language, and sustaining a significant ‘imperial’ influence across generations of writers and diverse types of historical text.

This study follows a particular thread of investigation and interpretation through the story of history writing in 'Britain' since the mid 18th century. The work covers the impact of involvement in empire on historical practice over this period. The purpose of this is to offer a different perspective on existing narratives of history and writing in Britain in its varied scholarly and popular forms by raising questions of imperial influence within those narratives.

The history of the British Empire, a subject that had slipped into obscurity when the empire came to an end, has since made a stunning comeback, generating a series of heated debates about the causes, character, and consequences of empire. In this volume Dane Kennedy offers a wide-ranging assessment of the main schools of thought that have transformed the way we view the British Empire and the world it helped to create. Navigating a clear course through these intellectual waters requires an awareness of their shifting currents and a commitment to tracking their changing character over time. Dane Kennedy has contributed to the imperial history wars for more than thirty years, and in this volume he brings his most important writings, along with brand new material, together for the first time to provide a sweeping overview of the subject and the debates that have shaped it. The Imperial History Wars is essential reading for any student or scholar of the British Empire.

Presents a dramatic account of how readers across the English-speaking world used history to understand the Age of Enlightenment and Revolutions.

What was the course and consequence of the British Empire? The rights and wrongs, strengths and weaknesses of empire are a major topic in global history, and deservedly so. Focusing on the most prominent and wide-ranging empire in world history, the British empire, Jeremy Black provides not only a history of that empire, but also a perspective from which to consider the issues of its strengths and weaknesses, and rights and wrongs. In short, this is history both of the past, and of the present-day discussion of the past, that recognises that discussion over historical empires is in part a reflection of the consideration of contemporary states. In this book Professor Black weaves together an overview of the British Empire across the centuries, with a considered commentary on both the public historiography of empire and the politically-charged character of much discussion of it. There is a coverage here of social as well as political and economic dimensions of empire, and both the British perspective and that of the colonies is considered. The chronological dimension is set by the need to consider not only imperial expansion by the British state, but also the history of Britain within an imperial context. As such, this is a story of empires within the British Isles, Europe, and, later, world-wide. The book addresses global decline, decolonisation, and the complex nature of post-colonialism and different imperial activity in modern and contemporary history. Taking a revisionist approach, there is no automatic assumption that imperialism, empire and colonialism were ’bad’ things. Instead, there is a dispassionate and evidence-based evaluation of the British empire as a form of government, an economic system, and a method of engagement with the world, one with both faults and benefits for the metropole and the colony.

In 1914 almost one quarter of the earth's surface was British. When the empire and its allies went to war in 1914 against the Central Powers, history's first global conflict was inevitable. It is the social and cultural reactions to that war and within those distant, often overlooked, societies which is the focus of this volume. From Singapore to Australia, Cyprus to Ireland, India to Iraq and around the rest of the British imperial world, further complexities and interlocking themes are addressed, offering new perspectives on imperial and colonial history and theory, as well as art, music, photography, propaganda, education, pacifism, gender, class, race and diplomacy at the end of the pax Britannica.

Examining the rise of the field of imperial history in Britain and wider webs of advocacy, this book demonstrates how intellectuals and politicians promoted settler colonialism, excluded the subject empire, and laid a precarious framework for decolonization. History was politics in late-nineteenth-century Britain. But the means by which influential thinkers sought to steer democracy and state development also consigned vast populations to the margins of imperial debate and policy. From the 1880s onward, politicians, intellectuals, and journalists erected a school of thought based on exclusion and deferral that segregated past and future, backwardness and civilization, validating racial discrimination in empire all while disavowing racism. These efforts, however, engendered powerful anticolonial backlash and cast a long shadow over the closing decades of imperial rule. Bringing to life the forgotten struggles which have, in effect, defined our times, Imperial History and the Global Politics of Exclusion is an important reinterpretation of the intellectual history of the British Empire.