Abstract
The well-worn truism – that the presentness of the past is all around us – has been publicly resuscitated in light of a recent YouGov survey conducted in mid-January 2016 (which found that 43% of respondents thought that ‘generally speaking’ the British Empire was a good thing) and the ongoing debates around the Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford campaign. Echoes of Empire is a particularly timely contribution in capturing how the present is continuously informed by an often-inconvenient yet ubiquitous past, and subsequently why its contestations are relevant. The range of this edited collection – spanning history, literature, political science and international relations – is testament to the vitality of the ever-expanding historiography of territorial and transoceanic imperial legacies and the fruitfulness of inter-disciplinary approaches.
The introductory essay by its three editors functions as a suitably thought-provoking segue into the motivations behind the book’s inception and rationale. The book’s two overriding objectives – to develop new inter-disciplinary avenues of investigation and to engage with scholars from across the globe – are well executed. With over 28 contributors spanning four continents, the organisation of its chapters coalesces around the book’s four main themes: colonial echoes across time and space; ideology, discourse and practice; the European Union in a post-colonial world; and universalism versus particularism.
Echoes of Empire is a bold, and ultimately successful, attempt to provide a coherent collection of essays that tackle what is an ambitiously large subject matter – the reverberations and continuously shifting representations of European and non-European empires. The work is also generous enough to include contributions from independent and emergent scholars such as Gabrielle Mass and Vinícius Rodrigues Vieira, in addition to prominent experts in the fields of international relations and politics such as Elena Korosteleva and Emily Jones and the well-established doyens of imperial history such as John Darwin, John M MacKenzie and Bernard Porter. Indeed, Darwin’s afterword serves to remind us just how far the discipline of imperial history has travelled (in the right direction) over the last 40 years, to which Echoes of Empire is testament.
Given the extensiveness of empire’s imprint, much more remains to be discovered, a point recently reinforced by the ‘Hanslope disclosure’. For students and scholars alike, this book is an impressive addition to a field of enquiry with much momentum, much dynamism and much to reveal about the imperial continuities behind globalisation and the contemporary global order for many years to come.