Notes

There is also (to my eyes) surprisingly little stylistic diversity among the chapters here. Everyone writes in more or less the same way: an Anglophone-demotic ‘plain style’ which features little specialist vocabulary (or jargon), but also little idiosyncrasy, literary flourish, in short little that is personal to the writer. Writing in and about the first person involves a shift in matter but not in manner. If ‘the style is the man or woman’, as the Comte de Buffon (or maybe Oscar Wilde) is supposed to have established, then few of the imperial historians sampled here are really very individual (sic). If a further personal anecdote may be forgiven: I recall another of the field’s great figures, Ranajit Guha, once passionately lamenting how no historian ever tries to write in the manner of Heidegger or Nietzsche.2 I’m not sure, myself, that I’d want them to do so, especially in light of that particular pair’s political views-but maybe a bit more experimentation would be welcome…

This has been an ungenerous appraisal of a stimulating and welcome book, in its emphasis on what isn’t here rather than what is, which is a lot. There are almost inescapably numerous minor matters at which one might also quibble. Philippa Levine, who is perhaps closest among the contributors in background and upbringing to this writer’s, claims (111) that in her adolescence ruins left by IRA bombings were ‘a common sight’. Since she is explicitly referring to mainland Britain, not Northern Ireland, this is a very considerable exaggeration. In their ‘Introduction’, Burton and Kennedy surprisingly manage even to mis-cite (in almost Freudian fashion) one of their own previous works. The essay of Kennedy’s which they mention appeared not in a (non-existent) Journal of Imperial Studies but in the Journal of British Studies. OK, they might well think that the JBS should be renamed thus, and indeed its contents have over the years sometimes edged somewhat in that very direction: but, says the irredeemable positivist, it has not yet been so.