Comments on: Empire Week IV: Absent-Minded Imperialists and the Doughnut Effect

By: Kumuda

Kumuda — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 16:33:58 +0000

Oops… here’s the link

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek.shtml

By: Kumuda

Kumuda — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 16:20:57 +0000

Hi,

I don’t know if you’ve already come across this, but thought you might be interested….. Niall Ferguson, Eric Hobsbawm, Priya Gopal on BBC’s Start the Week.

By: rob

rob — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

A review that’s more interesting than the snark, as they should be. It’s always very grown-up when people admit that a book is “important” even when they don’t like it 100%; at least rabid souls like me think so. I may have to go and buy myself as copy. It sounds about 5 times better than Cannadine, at least.

By: sharon

sharon — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Out of curiosity (because I doubt that I’ll have time to read the book…), what sort of primary sources does Porter use in order to make his pronouncements on the attitudes of the working class? There are, after all, plenty of 19th-century working-class autobiographies (enough to make an early modernist jealous as hell anyway), and there’s been plenty of study of them in recent years too. Did he use these? (Or did he only read newspapers?) And did he look at expressions of popular culture like music hall or pulp fiction (penny dreadfuls and the like), and then movies? I’m not really up on research in late 19th-century popular culture, but I’m not sure that it’s good enough any more simply to say that it’s “difficult to say” what working-class readers made of newspapers and the like…

And what about the middle classes in all this? Even if we agree that the working poor were not very interested in empire, there still remains that vast and vital middle strata between them and “elite” intellectuals or aristocratic politicians. These were overall perhaps the main beneficiaries of imperial expansion, and, as missionaries, traders, administrators and the rest of it, surely the key figures on the ground between the ruling politicians, and the colonised populations; and equally key figures in representing the Empire to the audience at home.

By: rob

rob — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I for one second your comments on the middle classes; this is the major thrust of Catherine Hall’s recent work, which is hardly flimsy.

Still, maybe the focus on the working classes is simply one of Porter’s own “rather old-fashioned left-wing proclivities”? Whatever the merits of his evidential approach, there’s certainly still a place for this; recent C19th women’s history has to my mind taken a similar fetish of elite and middle-class experience at the expense, perhaps, of making good use of the legacy of Thompson et al. Not to say that we should return to the days of the CP Historians’ Group, just that perhaps those “silenced”/”marginilised” groups “at home” have remained that way in a lot of empire studies. That said, my relatively limited breadth of reading is probably a poor indicator of what the academic fashions are right now!

By: sepoy

sepoy — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Sharon: His archive is pretty standard: india office, parliamentary records, newspapers, novels, music, penny chap-books etc. He does deal with the middle class extensively - almost 2 chapters.
The basic thing is that since his definition of Imperialism is so restrictive and he is not doing any “code-breaking”, he can reach the opposite conclusion to Hall [whose book I think he liked but whose conclusions he does not take].
As to the population, here is the interesting bit: He contends that those in the middle class who were really into imperialism, LEFT for the colonies. Leaving the disinterested majority behind.
About saturation of ideas from books/novels/dailies: Before 1880, he says, no one really read anything. After 1900, it was all propaganda from imperialists and if it was so pronounced that must mean that they people were not buying it. I would say: why do Coca-Cola and Pepsi spend almost 4 billion dollars in global advertising when the concept of carbonated, sugar water is pretty accessible to everyone? It is brand-competition, yes. But the basic product is established.

rob: Who you calling a “grown up”? sheesh. Next, you will be asking if I like the music these kids listen to nowadays, really loud.