How Empire Shaped Us

Few historical subjects have generated such intense and sustained interest in recent decades as the history of empires. While historians have approached this subject in very different ways, their shared preoccupation with the British imperial experience-its institutions, ideas and impact on peoples around the world-has endured and given rise to a rich, varied, and influential body of historical scholarship. What accounts for this preoccupation? Why has it gained such purchase on the historical imagination? How has it endured as an active area of inquiry even as the empire it studies slips further into the past?

In seeking to answer these questions, the proposed volume brings together some of the leading figures in the field, historians of different generations, different nationalities, different methodological and theoretical perspectives and different ideological persuasions. Each addresses the relationship between their personal development as historians of empire and the larger forces and events that helped to shape how the subject and how it is studied.

The result is a book that investigates the connections between the past and the present, the private and the public, the professional practices of historians and the political environments within which they take shape. This intellectual genealogy of the recent historiography of empire will be of great value to anyone studying or researching in the field of imperial history.

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, USA. She has written widely on modern Britain and empire. Her most recent publications includeA Primer for Teaching World History (2012) and Brown Over Black: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (2012).

Dane Kennedy is Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at The George Washington University, USA. His most recent publications includeThe Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (2013) and The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (2005).