Introduction: on the critical importance of colonial formations

In 1921 the National Geographic Magazine published a special issue on ‘The Islands of the Pacific’. Richly illustrated with photographs, as was the hallmark of the magazine, the issue also featured a map produced as a special colour supplement. The map supplement also emphasised empire, but from a quite different perspective. It, too, included all of the ‘Islands of the Pacific’, but these were overlaid with ‘Sovereignty and Mandate Lines in 1921’. Indeed, these lines dominated the map. After decades of deliberate separation, encouraged by the seeming commitment of the new imperial history paradigm to expansive inclusion and reciprocity, scholars of the former British colonies thus began to re-engage with metropolitan imperial scholarship. Antoinette Burton goes further in this vein of critique: ‘even a “reformed” imperial history is still imperial history because it does not imagine non-Western subjects except as colonial subjects’.