Abstract
Eric Wolf’s insistence that historical writing should unravel the ‘bundles of relationships’ that constituted the past underpins this study of the complex networks that constituted the British empire. Wolf’s quotation continues to resonate today as, despite increasing calls for transnational and global histories, most historical writing continues to treat nations, cultures and societies as abstract and bounded entities. Despite the work of historians on long distance trade, the integration of Eurasia (or in Marshall Hodgson’s formulation Afro-Eurasia), and capitalism over the longue durée, most history continues to be organized on the basis of a fixed geographical referent generally congruent with a modern nation-state.2 This study moves away from a narrow focus on one nation or civilization, instead conceiving of the British empire as a ‘bundle of relationships’ that brought disparate regions, communities and individuals into contact through systems of mobility and exchange. It does not dispense with the nation-state altogether, for India, New Zealand and the United Kingdom remain prominent throughout, but rather re-imagines these nations as dynamic and diverse communities constantly being remade by the migration, trade and international conflict born out of British imperialism.
Concepts like ‘nation,’ ‘society,’ and ‘culture’ name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the fields from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding.1
Eric Wolf
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, CA, 1982), 3.
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on European, Islam and World History, Edmund Burke III ed. (Cambridge, 1993);
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected histories: notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), 735–62;
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, CA, 1998).
David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995);
P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London, 1993). Hopkins has articulated a rather different vision in his recent ‘Back to the future: from national history to imperial history’, Past and Present, 164 (1999), 198–243.
Most notably Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (Berkeley, CA, 1998); Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930 (London, 2000);
John M. Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, 1986).
Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The imaginary institution of India’, Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1993), 1–39. Also see Antoinette Burton, ‘Who needs the nation? Interrogating British history’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 10 (1997), 227–48.
J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British history: a plea for a new subject’, New Zealand Journal of History, 8 (1974), 3–21 and ‘The limits and divisions of British history: in search of the unknown subject’, American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 311–36.
C. W. Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867, 3 vols (London, 1868).
W. W. Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal (Calcutta, 1868);
James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (London, 1876).
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992);
I. C. Campbell, ‘Culture contact and Polynesian identity in the European age’, Journal of World History, 8 (1997), 29–55.
Reginald Horsman, ‘Origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), 387–410;
Edward A. Hagan, ‘The Aryan myth: a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish will to power’, in Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, Tadhg Foley and Sean Ryder eds (Dublin, 1998), 197–206.
Raymond Schwab, Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the Orient, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York, 1984).
Jane Rendall, ‘Scottish Orientalism: from Robertson to James Mill’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), 43–69.
J. D. Lang, A View of the Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation; demonstrating their ancient discovery and progressive settlement of the Continent of America (London, 1834).
Joan Leopold, ‘The Aryan theory of race’, Indian Social and Economic History Review, 7 (1970) and ‘British applications of the Aryan theory of race to India, 1850–1870’, English Historical Review, CCCLLII (1974), 578–603;
Romila Thapar, ‘The theory of Aryan race and India: history and politics’, Social Scientist 24 (1996), 3–29.
Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 217–21;
Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered. Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi, 1988).
Paul Rabinow, ‘Representations are social facts: modernism and post-modernism in anthropology’, in James Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA, 1986).
Andrew E. Barnes, ‘Aryanizing projects: African collaborators and colonial transcripts’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 17 (1997), 46–68;
Hagan, ‘The Aryan myth: a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish will to power’, 197–206; Mónica Quijada Mauriño, ‘Los “Incas Arios”: Historia, lengua y raza en la construcción nacional Hispanoamericana del siglo XIX’, Histórica, 20 (1996), 243–69.
J. S. Mill, ‘The East India Company’s Charter’, Writings on India by John Stuart Mill. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, volume 30, J. M. Robson, M. Moir and Z. Moir eds (Toronto, 1990), 33.
Radhika Mongia, ‘Race, nationality, mobility: a history of the passport’, Public Culture 11 (1999), 527–56;
Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernities (London, 1999).
Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, CT, 2000), xviii, 221–68.
Most notably W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a Vocabularly of the Peculiar Language used by the Thugs (Calcutta, 1836).
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information. Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), 171–4, 331–2.
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford, 1983).
Katherine Prior, ‘Making history: the state’s intervention in urban religious disputes in the North-West Provinces in the early-nineteenth century’, Modem Asian Studies, 27 (1993), 179–203.
On archives as ‘state memory’ see Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modem (New York, 1996).
See M. P. J. Reilly, ‘John White. Part II: Seeking the exclusive Mohio: White and his Maori informants’, New Zealand Journal of History, 24 (1990), 45–55; Bayly, Empire and Information, 56–141.
Warren Hastings, ‘Letter to Nathaniel Smith’, from The Bhagvat-Geeta, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, P. J. Marshall ed. (Cambridge, 1970), 189–91; Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology, and ancient traditional history of the New Zealand race, as furnished by their priests and chiefs (London, 1855), iii–vii.
Th. Hahn, An Index of the Grey Collection in the South African Public Library (Cape Town, 1884);
Anon, General Catalogue of Grey Collection, Free Public Library (Auckland, 1888).
Benita Parry, ‘Problems in current theories of colonial discourse’, Oxford Literary Review, 9 (1987), 39.
For example, Hone Mohi Tawhai in Parliamentary Debates in 1880. See John Caselberg (ed.), Maori is My Name: Historical Maori Writings in Translation (Dunedin, 1975), 121–2.
C. A. Bayly, ‘Informing empire and nation: publicity, propaganda and the press, 1880–1920’, Information, Media and Power through the Ages, Hiram Morgan ed. (Dublin, 2001); Lachy Paterson, ‘Te Hokioi and Haiti’. Conference paper in author’s possession.
Harold Innis, Staples, Markets and Cultural Change: Selected Essays, Daniel Drache ed. (Montreal, 1995);
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London, 1991).
Susan O’Brien, ‘A transatlantic community of Saints: the Great Awakening and the first Evangelical network, 1735–1755’, American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 811–32.
John Stenhouse, ‘“A disappearing race before we came here”: Doctor Alfred Kingcombe Newman, the dying Maori and Victorian scientific racism’, New Zealand Journal of History, 30 (1996), 124–40;
Shaun Broadley, ‘Science, race and politics: an intellectual biography of A. K. Newman’ (University of Otago, Honours thesis, 1994).
Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995)
and Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940 (Cambridge, 1997); S. B. Cook, Imperial Affinities. Nineteenth Centuty Analogies and Exchanges between India and Ireland (New Delhi, 1993); Andrew Porter, ‘North American experience and British missionary encounters in Africa and the Pacific, c. 1800–50’, Empire and Others. British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples 1600–1850, Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern eds (London, 1999).
Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London, 1989).
Panjab Notes and Queries, 1: 1 (October 1883), 6; S. E. Peal, ‘The ancestors of the Maori’, JPS, 6:24 (December 1897), 174–6; Elsdon Best, ‘Maori beliefs concerning the human organs of generation’, Man, 14 (1914), 132–4.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2002 Tony Ballantyne
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ballantyne, T. (2002). Introduction: Aryanism and the Webs of Empire. In: Orientalism and Race. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508071_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508071_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-50703-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50807-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)