DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
MODULE HANDBOOK
TENSIONS OF EMPIRE: BRITISH IDENTITIES IN A
COLONIAL WORLD, 1780-1914
Convenor: Dr Bronwen Everill
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Table of Contents
Module Aims
3
Intended Learning Outcomes
3
Reading and Assessment
4
Syllabus:
Seminar 1:
Imperial History Overview
5
Seminar 2:
Alterity: Empire and Identity
6
Seminar 3:
Class and Caste
7
Seminar 4:
Gender and Sexuality
8
Seminar 5:
Humanitarian Identities
9
Seminar 6:
Empire Writing
10
Seminar 7:
Picturing Empire
11
Seminar 8:
Coming Home: Colonial Travellers to Britain
12
Seminar 9:
Exhibiting Empire
13
Illustrative Bibliography
14
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Module Aims
This module is designed to introduce students to the key theoretical and
methodological issues that inform historical analysis of British identity formation
during the heyday of imperialism. It re-situates the essential analytical categories of
modern British social and cultural history - class, gender, race and nationality - within
the colonial contexts of Africa, Australia and India while introducing students to the
use of fictional and visual sources in imperial historiography. The module expands
the scope of British history encompassed by the Modern British History MA beyond the
geographical boundaries of the United Kingdom.
Intended Learning Outcomes

Appreciate the tensions and conflicts created within British national identities
by the processes of colonisation

Appreciate the contribution to British identities (of class, gender, race and
nationality) made by the processes of colonisation

Analyse and assess key historiographical approaches to the history of
imperialism

Analyse, assess and compare the utility of fictional, 'factual' and visual primary
sources for the writing of imperial histories

Communicate interpretations of the contribution of non-British peoples to the
formation of British national identities
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Reading and Assignments
Each week, there is one text assigned as core reading. Everyone is responsible for
preparing that core reading for seminar. Preparing the core reading means taking
notes on the arguments, the historiography the author is engaging with, types of
primary sources used, what each chapter covers, and reading a few reviews of the
book.
Students will each be assigned a week to begin the discussion with a 10 minute
presentation on the week’s reading and its historiographical context.
For written assignments, students will be expected to complete the following:
Seminar 3: Identify a question
Seminar 4: Prepare a bibliography
Seminar 5: Prepare an abstract
Seminar 7: Prepare a rough draft
The final 5,000 word papers are due after term ends (see current deadline list)
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Seminar 1: Course Overview
Please read through Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share, OR Ronald Hyam, Britain’s
Imperial Century for this first session.
Everyone should also read Anne Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between
Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda”, In Anne Laura Stoler and
Frederick Cooper, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World
(1997), 1-56.
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Seminar 2: Alterity: Empire and Identity
Core Readings:

Robert Bickers (ed) Settlers and Expatriates (Oxford, 2010).
Further Readings:

Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for
“Indian” Pasts?’, Representations, 37 (192), 1-26.

Dane Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Postcolonial Theory’, Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History, 24 (1996), 345-63.

Uday Mehta, ‘Liberal Strategies of Exclusion’, in Stoler & Cooper, eds., Tensions
of Empire, 59-86.

Vivian Bickford-Smith, ‘The Betrayal of Creole Elites, 1880-1920’ in Sean
Hawkins and Phillip D. Morgan (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire,
(Oxford, 2004), 194-227.
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Seminar 3 : Class and Caste
Core Readings:

David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001)
Further Readings:

Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions:
Employers, Government and the Jute Workers of Calcutta, 1890-1940’, in Ranajit
Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies II (1983), 259-310.

Clare Anderson, ‘Fashioning Identities: Convict Dress in Colonial South and
Southeast Asia’, History Workshop Journal, 52 (Autumn 2001), 152-174.

Luise White, ‘Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and
Central Africa’, in Stoler and Cooper, eds., Tensions of Empire, 436-60.

Ravi Ahuja, ‘Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras c. 1750-1800’,
Modern Asian Studies, 36 (2002), 793-826.

Frederick Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the
Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombassa (1987).

Arjun De Haan, ‘Unsettled Settlers: Migrant Workers and Industrial Capitalism in
Calcutta’, Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), 919-47.

Stephen Nicholas, Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (1988).

E.L. Wheelwright and K. Buckley, eds., No Paradise for Workers: Capitalism and
the Common People in Australia, 1788-1914 (1988).

Luise White, ‘Vampire Priests of Central Africa: African Debates bout Labour and
Religion in Colonial Northern Zambia’, Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 35 (1993), 746-72.
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Seminar 4 : Gender and Sexuality
Core Readings:

Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the
British Empire (2003).
OR

Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining
of Masculinities (1994).
Further Readings:

Antoinette Burton, ‘From Child Bride to “Hindoo Lady”: Rukhmalsi and the Debate
on Sexual Responsibility in Imperial Britain’, American Historical Review, 103
(1998), 1119-46.

Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: British Experience (1991)

Graham Dawson, ‘The Blond Bedouin: Lawrence of Arabia, Imperial Adventure and
the Imagining of English-British Masculinity’, in Michael Roper and John Tosh,
eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (1991), 113-44.

Marilyn Lake, ‘Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation:
Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts’, Gender & History, 4 (1992), 30522.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity: Public
Debate on Domesticity in British Bengal’, in Stoler and Cooper, eds., Tensions
of Empire, 373-405.

Deborah Cherry, ‘Shuttling and Soul Making: Tracing Links between Algeria and
Egalitarian Feminism in the 1850s’, in Shearer West, ed., The Victorians and
Race (1996), 156-70.

Billie Melman, ‘Under the Western Historian’s Eyes: Eileen Power and the Early
Feminist Encounter with Colonialism’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996),
147-68.

Wendy Webster, ‘Elspeth Huxley: Gender, Empire, and Narratives of Nation, 193564’, Women’s History Review, 8 (1999), 527-45.
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Seminar 5 : Humanitarian Identities
Core Readings:

Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital (2007)

Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English
Or
Imagination 1830-1867 (2003).
Further Readings:

Thomas Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,’
American Historical Review, 90, 2 (1985), 339-361.

Deirdre Coleman, “Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English
Women’s Protest Writing in the 1790s,” English Literary History 61, 2 (1994).

Jean Comaroff, ‘Missionaries and Mechanical Clocks: An Essay on Religion and
History in South Africa’, Journal of Religion, 71 (1991), 1-17.

Saurabh Dube, ‘Paternalism and Freedom: The Evangelical Encounter in Colonial
Chattisgarth, Central India’, Modern Asian Studies, 29 (1995), 171-201.

John Comaroff, ‘Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial
Domination in South Africa’, in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire, 16397.

Catherine Hall, ‘William Knibb and the Constitution of the New Black Subject’, in
Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds., Empire and Others: British Encounters
with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850 (1000(, pp. 303-324.

Andrew Porter, ‘“Cultural Imperialism” and Protestant Missionary Enterprise, 17801914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 25 (1997), 367-91.

N.B. Musisi, ‘Morality or Identity: The Missionary Moral Agenda in Buganda, 18771945’, Journal of Religious History, 23 (1999), 51-74.
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Seminar 6 : Empire Writing
Core Readings:

Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 18301914 (1998).
OR

Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992).
Further Readings:

Deidre Coleman, Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies (1999), 1-42.

Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and
Colonialism (1991).

Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the
Dark Continent’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 166-203.

Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (2004),
Introduction and chap. 1 (reading specifically for the use of imaginative literature
as an historical source).

Nancy Paxton, ‘Complicity and Resistance in the Writings of Flora Annie Steel and
Annie Besant’, in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and
Imperialism (1992), 158-76.

Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (1992).

Javed Majeed, ‘Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug: The Anglo-Indian Novel
as a Genre in the Making’, in Bart Moore-Gilbert, ed., Writing India 1757-1990
(1996), 86-100.

Nancy Paxton, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British
Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947 (1999).

Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa (1975).

Philip Curtin, The Image of Africa in Britain (1964)
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Seminar 7 : Picturing Empire
Core Readings:

James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British
Empire (1997).
Further Readings:

Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History
(1987).

Terence Ranger, ‘Colonialism, Consciousness and the Camera’, Past & Present,
171 (2001), 203-15.

Wendy Webster, ‘ “There’ll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial
Wars and Immigration, 1948-1968’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001), 55784.

John Falcolner, ‘Photography in Nineteenth-Century India’, in C.A. Bayly, ed.,
The Raj (1990), 264-77.

John McKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995).

Gwyn Prins, ‘The Battle for Control of the Camera in Late Nineteenth-Century
Western Zambia’, African Affairs, 89 (1990), 95-105.

Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in EighteenthCentury British Painting (1999).
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Seminar 8 : Coming Home: Colonial Travellers to Britain
Core Readings:

Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial
Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (1998).
Further Readings:

Antoinette Burton, ‘Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in fin-desiecle London, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), 126-46.

Antoinette Burton, ‘Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury’s “Black Man” and the
Boundaries of Imperial Democracy’, Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 42 (2000), 632-66.

Angela Woollaott, ‘The Colonial Flaneuse: Australian Women Negotiating Turnof-the-Century London’, Signs, 25 (2000), 761-87.

Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortunes in London: Australian Women,
Colonialism and Modernity (2001).
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Seminar 9 : Exhibiting Empire: Colonial Displays
Core Readings:

Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination (1994).
Further Readings:

Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, British Imperialism and the
‘Improvement’ of the World (2000).

Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and
Identity (1999).

Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian
Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (2000).
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Illustrative Bibliography
Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois
World (1997)
Catherine Hall, Cultures of Empire: A Reader (2000)
Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (2002)
Nancy Paxton, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial
Imagination, 1830-1947 (1999)
Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and
Modernity (2001)
James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire
(1997)
Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India (2002)
Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular
Imagination (1994)
Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914
(1998)
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001)
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