ABSTRACT

In the work of Antoinette Burton, and perhaps especially in several successive programmatic essays she has produced, one finds almost all the dominant themes of the ‘new imperial history’ brought together. Indeed one might aptly think of those essays as ‘manifestoes’ for that intellectual current. Here, in one of the earliest and most influential of them, she especially argues for the dissolving of barriers between British ‘imperial’ and ‘domestic’ history. Historians have always been concerned with maps and mapping and British historians are certainly no exception. Because history-writing in the West has been instrumental to the building of nation-states, historiography itself has become an institutionalized expression, not just of national identity but of the geographical reach of national power as well. In reality, there was so much movement ‘back’ and ‘forth’ between Britain and its imperial possessions, the imperial culture cannot be located exclusively either in the metropole or in the colonies.