Introduction: Imperialisms: Early Modern to Premodernist

Abstract

In researching imperialisms, postcolonial critics and historians have concentrated on retrieving subjected cultures from the stereotypes in which they were embedded. Scholarship on empire has been much less engaged with characterizing cultures of dominance, in part because the sheer weight of dominance has precluded consideration of its varieties. Moreover, postcolonialists tend to nourish the proposition that the nuances of exploitation matter little to the exploited. In the words of V. K. Krishna Menon, defence minister for India in the early 1960s, asking a subject people what imperialism it prefers is like asking a fish whether it would rather be fried in margarine or butter. There is enough in this quip to make distinctions between imperialisms seem a matter of scholarly rather than real importance. Yet, notwithstanding their similarities, imperialisms do differ, often substantially, and have their individual ways of articulating these differences. Each imperial nation devises its own characteristic propaganda and separates itself emphatically from other nations and empires if only to advertise its special entitlement to power. Even today the propaganda for benevolent liberal imperialisms (by scholars such as Niall Ferguson)¹ demonstrates that imperialist fictions of self-justification are still alive and still being invented.