Historians and Empire

Age of Empire: Imperialism and British Society, 1868-1918

Historians and Empire

Historians have long been fascinated by empire. Perhaps the most notable example of a historian whose work on empire found widespread public as well as academic acclaim was Edward Gibbon (1737-94). His six-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire set a standard that has arguably never been surpassed in terms of scope and influence. According to one biographer, ‘the Decline and Fall occupies the summit of European Enlightenment historiography’.[1] And a contemporary (twenty-first century) historian of British imperialism has written: ‘Readers expect to know whether Gibbon helps us to understand not only the end but [also] the end of the British Empire. He wrote in the era of the American Revolution. But he... did not necessarily think that the loss of the American colonies [in 1783] was the beginning of the end for the British Empire in the Roman sense. Nevertheless, there is a key question... was there an undeviating line of decline that characterized the British Empire?... Did Britain, as the first industrialized nation, with the greatest navy and a worldwide Empire, decline because of moral weakness at the centre and a failure of the will to resist the onslaught at the periphery?’[2]

Historians of empire since Gibbon have often focussed on the relationship between imperial and national progress – and decline. British historians of the late Victorian and Edwardian age ‘were all influenced by a growing awareness of the challenges posed to British hegemony by the rise of the continental powers, the United States and Japan. Several writers also dimly recognized the stirrings of Dominions’ nationalism and anti-colonial sentiment in the dependent Empire’.[3] Sir John Seeley published The Expansion of England in 1883. The strains to which the Empire was being subjected might be overcome, as Seeley saw it, by greater awareness of Britain’s imperial past and also by commitment to...