Abstract
John MacKenzie changed how British imperial history is conceived, researched, and written about. The evolution from the understanding of the British Empire as something that the dominant metropolis imposed upon the colonial periphery to something that had, via culture rather than political or military power, a massive impact upon that selfsame metropolis, has been enormous. MacKenzie’s work, however, has not gone unchallenged, and this volume will both explore critiques and introduce some notes of nuance into his approach.
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Notes
- 1.
See in particular Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
- 2.
The term ‘MacKenzian moment’ was coined by Stuart Ward, in his essay ‘The MacKenzian Moment in Retrospect (or How One Hundred Volumes Bloomed)’, in Andrew Thompson, ed., Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 29–48; John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); and John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). For a summary of MacKenzie’s views, see his ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’, in Stuart Ward, ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 21–56.
- 3.
David Cannadine, ‘Review Article: The Empire Strikes Back’, Past and Present 147 (1995), 184.
- 4.
See Stephen Howe, The New Imperial Histories Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 1–21.
- 5.
J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 604–5.
- 6.
The use of this term is contentious, and though I acknowledge that it is severely problematic regarding Ireland in particular, I am using it because the alternatives are even less satisfactory. ‘Atlantic archipelago’ is both insufficiently specific and a clunky avoidance that only further highlights the problem, while ‘British archipelago’ seems a less desirable substitute that changes the non-offending word but leaves the offending one.
- 7.
Gordon Donaldson, for example, insisted that ‘despite some assimilation into England, Scotland preserved and developed its own institutions’. A. J. P. Taylor, Gordon Donaldson, and Michael Hechter, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject: Comments’, Journal of Modern History 47 (1975), 622–26.
- 8.
Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.
- 9.
See Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds., The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, eds., British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1522–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lawrence Brockliss and David Eastwood, eds., A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750–c. 1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); R. R. Davies, ed., The British Isles, 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections (Edinburgh: Donald, 1988); Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber, eds., Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State 1485–1735 (London: Longman, 1995); Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995); Ronald Hutton, The British Republic 1649–1660 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990); Alexander Murdoch, British History, 1660–1832: National Identity and Local Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); and David L. Smith, A History of the Modern British Isles 1603–1707: The Double Crown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). As this list suggests, the new British history was most successful in recasting the early modern period, less so the modern.
- 10.
John Brewer, ‘The Eighteenth-Century British State: Contexts and Issues’, in Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London: Routledge, 1993), 66. See also Tony Claydon, ‘Problems with the British Problem’, Parliamentary History 16 (1997), 221–27.
- 11.
Nicholas Canny, ‘Irish, Scottish and Welsh Responses to Centralization, c. 1530–c. 1640’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995), 147–48. See also T. C. Barnard, ‘British History and Irish History’, in Glenn Burgess, ed., The New British History: Founding a Modern State 1603–1715 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 201–37; Keith M. Brown, ‘Seducing the Scottish Clio: Has Scottish History Anything to Fear from the New British History?’, in Glenn Burgess, ed., The New British History: Founding a Modern State 1603–1715 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 238–65; and Nicholas Canny, ‘The Attempted Anglicization of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century: An Exemplar of “British History”’, in R. G. Asch, ed., Three Nations—A Common History? (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1993), 49–82.
- 12.
Glenn Burgess, ‘Introduction: The New British History’, in Glenn Burgess, ed., The New British History: Founding a Modern State 1603–1715 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 13.
- 13.
See Michael Fry, The Union: England, Scotland and the Treaty of 1707 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006); and Christopher Whatley, The Scots and the Union: Then and Now (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
- 14.
See, as an introduction to what has become a large historiography, T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire 1600–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2003); Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press and Birlinn, 2001); John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine, eds., Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 15.
Pocock, ‘British History’, 617.
- 16.
James Thompson, ‘Modern Britain and the New Imperial History’, History Compass 5 (2007), 455.
- 17.
Antoinette Burton has been at the forefront of calls to rethink the category of ‘nation’ by dissolving the conceptual division between the metropole and the colonial periphery. See Antoinette Burton, ‘Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating “British” History’, Journal of Historical Sociology 10 (1997), 227–48.
- 18.
Bernard Porter, ‘Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36 (2008), 101–17; John M. MacKenzie, ‘“Comfort” and Conviction: A Response to Bernard Porter’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36 (2008), 659–68; and Bernard Porter, British Imperial: What the British Empire Wasn’t (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016).
- 19.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).
- 20.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).
- 21.
John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Somewhat ironically, Said’s later book Culture and Imperialism (1993) out-MacKenzied MacKenzie in making an argument for the pervasive presence of empire in British culture in the nineteenth century.
- 22.
John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- 23.
Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London and New York: Verso, 2011); and Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 24.
MacKenzie’s successor as the editor of the Studies in Imperialism series, Andrew Thompson, has taken a much more sceptical view of the impact of empire both abroad and at home. See Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005).
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Barczewski, S. (2019). Introduction: The ‘MacKenzian Moment’ Past and Present. In: Barczewski, S., Farr, M. (eds) The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_1
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