Islands of Whiteness.(Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism)(Critical essay)

Astonishingly, empire is still in question. For a few decades now, Antoinette Burton has been making subtle and compelling arguments about our need to make Victorian British history not only inclusive of empire, but to make the empire constitutive of Victorian Britain. somehow, the nation is a construct we cannot and will not do without, but empire must be peripheral, partial, and deeply and always optional. about five years ago, I heard a respected scholar in my field say that she was "tired" of empire. Of course we all are: it generally produces some very ugly power relations, some ruinous extractions of natural resources, often very little in the way of useful infrastructure, and the invention of castes, ethnic groups, nations, and tribes that often produces disaster in the postcolonial phase. The British Empire is the name of an enterprise of domination that followed from principles of what is often referred to as the Enlightenment, and it is thus variously embarrassing and disappointing that the likes of John Locke and John Stuart Mill not only produced the philosophy of the liberal individual and then denied it theoretically to populations of people in well over half of the world, but that they also participated actively in empire and thus denied it practically as well: Locke as a shareholder in the Royal Africa Company and Mill as an administrator at India House. This is a sad and troubling legacy, and one that imperial and postcolonial studies makes impossible to separate from liberalism, the Enlightenment, and Anglo-American history and culture more broadly. The fact of empire complicates the narration of the nation and its fondest ideas about itself. The empire also generates the nation--that is, it generates the idea of a people whose geography lends them certain defining characteristics. If we don't want to know this, I will discuss below the extent to which Victorian theorists of nation and race not only knew it, but embraced this connection between empire and nation--making the most of the histories of other empires and invaders to forge a racial identity for themselves that could go the distance.

Antoinette Burton names the expectation of her students, which is also I think the hope of many scholars as well, that the study of Victorian Britain will provide reassuring "islands of whiteness," a respite from the demanding ethnic diversity of American Studies (2). The fantasy of a homogenous culture allows us (and I'm as guilty of this as …