ABSTRACT
Many have speculated about what Ronald Robinson was doing academically during the ten years after 1961, that pivotal date in the literature of modern imperialism when he and Jack Gallagher published Africa and the Victorians. Before then there were his articles in the Journal of African Administration, the famous article on ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ in 1953, written with Jack, and his own chapter in the Cambridge History of the British Empire, Vol. III, which came out eventually in 1959. But after 1961 there was only the previously written chapter (again with Jack) on ‘The Partition of Africa’ in the New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. XI, published in 1962, and a short introduction to the English edition of Henri Brunschwig’s French Colonialism. Thereafter the next generally known (and extremely influential) publication was his ‘NonEuropean Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, originally given at a seminar in Oxford in 1969 but published in R.Owen and B.Sutcliffe’s Studies in the Theory of Imperialism in 1972. So why were there no more seminal publications in this decade?
