ABSTRACT
By the 1970s, the historical study of colonial empires had become one of the deadest of dead fields within the discipline of history. Students interested in pushing the frontiers of historical research looked to Africa, Asia, or Latin America, or they sought to look at Europe and North America ‘from the bottom up.’ The revival of interest in the colonial world a generation later reflects the influence of literature and anthropology and, more important, wider intellectual currents that threw into question the most basic narratives and the most fundamental ways in which knowledge is configured. History, as a discipline, has itself become the object of critique. Such a critique has had its value, above all, in forcing historians – such as anthropologists or other social scientists – to question their own epistemological positions and to think long and hard about how historical sources, as much as interpretations, are produced.
