Imperial history in Britain, 1880--1940: Pasts, politics and the making of a field

This dissertation explains why, in the late nineteenth century, public intellectuals in Britain began to practice imperial history as a separate academic field and theoretical pursuit, and with what consequences for Britain and empire. While most historians dismiss imperial history's development as uneventful or as a straightforward symptom of a vast ruling impulse, private papers and university records throughout the UK and North America reveal a much more compelling reality. Scholars, politicians and journalists were a driving force in conceptualizing what the British empire was and what it ought to become. Their struggles to mold the study of imperial history in response to contemporary currents and crises fatefully informed the organized knowledge, institutions and very worldviews through which Britons ultimately would negotiate world war and decolonization in the twentieth century.;This dissertation argues that the impetus for the rise of imperial history from the 1880s was to promote the colonies of white settlement and banish from concern vast portions of the empire in Asia and Africa. By relegating non-white subject populations to a different and closed temporal realm, historians, public sages and politicians in Britain lent scientific gravity to the project of building an Anglo-Saxon world union linked by a common and exclusive conception of settler citizenship. The currency and contentiousness of this vision only swelled in subsequent decades, in response to the Boer War and Edwardian political economic controversies. But from 1912 onward, new forms of colonial crisis—namely, nationalist movements in India and Africa and violent resistance to discriminatory labor and migration systems in the wider British world—brought the politics of alien rule to the forefront for a new generation of imperial and historical theorists. The First World War accelerated this confrontation, throwing supposedly distinct Anglo-Saxon and dependent populations together in one moral and historical frame. From a new position of authority conferred by wartime information politics, leading interwar thinkers responded by promising a formula that would bring non-white peoples into the calculus of international reconstruction. They did so, however, by invoking ideals of localism and settler citizenship that largely doomed the so-called transfer of power, when it came, to manifest as a matter of presentation and conformity rather than as an honest dialogue about the limits of political transformation and the realities of social, economic and cultural strife.;This shift in historical thought, in turn, exposed an enduring tension between a language of rights on one hand, and a racism based on historical difference, on the other, which had developed over the course of a century and would persist in British politics and attitudes past the end of formal rule. All told, these events played out in the networking, correspondence, patronage, policymaking and history-writing of three generations of Britons who sought to intervene decisively in the most pressing social and moral debates of their day, and who plotted their destiny based on beliefs about the past. The emergence and practice of imperial history thus informed, and in many ways determined, the fractured trajectory of the modern British empire.