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This chapter considers how China has maintained the sustainability of a unified empire, and more importantly, its regeneration after periods of division. It proposes that the answer should be sought primarily in the realm of ideology. The idea that “All-under-Heaven” (tianxia) should be unified under the aegis of the single monarch predated the imperial unification of 221 BCE and directly contributed to it. As this chapter demonstrates, it became the true cornerstone of traditional Chinese political culture, and decisively shaped political dynamics during ages of unity and fragmentation alike. Although in the course of imperial history the quest for unity had to be qualified to accommodate domestic and foreign political realities, it was never essentially compromised. Indeed, it may be argued that this belief remains the single most important legacy of the traditional political culture well into present day.

This chapter explores the reasons for the recurrence of large-scale popular uprisings throughout imperial history. It considers how the idea of rebellion correlates with fundamental principles of Chinese political culture, such as monarchism and intellectual elitism. Moreover, the chapter looks at why the rebellions serve to support rather than disrupt the empire's longevity. These issues are then related to the broader issue of the political role of the “people,” here referring primarily, although not exclusively, to the lower strata, in the Chinese imperial enterprise. In answering these questions, this chapter focuses on ideological and social factors that both legitimated rebellions and also enabled their accommodation within the imperial enterprise.

The historiography of the second British Empire of the period 1783–1860 was already in vigorous debate at the very time when that the Empire was being established. From the American Revolution onwards, writers of histories began to take up a number of broad positions on this phase of British territorial expansion that set the terms of debate for the next century. The overlapping traditions in writing on the British Empire persisted into the later 19th century, but a distinct set of themes began to emerge from about 1880 and held sway until the First World War. The historical interpretations during 1950–80, specifically the motive force of British expansion, are discussed. Moreover, the historical interpretations in the 1980s and 1990s are explored. Some Imperial historians, especially in Britain, have deplored what they see as the politicization of Imperial history by issues of gender, race, and ‘post-coloniality’. While the naiveté of some of this work deserves their disparagement, this chapter has argued that Imperial history has always been intensely political.

The study of the British Empire is embedded in an ever-changing culture, largely but not exclusively academic, and trends and expectations in the field naturally reflect the larger environment. There is no point in the historiography of the British Empire at which development differed in any sustained and significant way from general trends in the development of historical studies broadly, though of course specific lines of inquiry also reflected the more nation-, class- or time-specific cultures from which they came. Nationalism played the most important role in the selection of subjects for study. It can scarcely be surprising to find that the history of the British Empire reflects the changes in the years since the Second World War. In the 1960s, there was a notable trend towards embedding the history of the British Empire, and of the Commonwealth, into the comparative history of imperialism. In the future, writing about the history of the British Empire is likely to require more collaborative ventures. One would like to think that in time the concept of ‘Other’ will have only a historiographical utility.

The corpus of writing on the subject of the interrelationship between naval and Imperial history previously has been confined to two branches. However, Arthur J. Marder and Gerald S. Graham revolutionized, in their respective fields, the correlation of naval power and colonial empires in the 19th century. The study of the navy and its influence on the Empire and vice versa remained a largely untouched field of study. In line with this, a discussion on Marder, Graham, J. C. Beaglehole and the Pacific, and unfinished business is presented. The general linkage of navy to Empire continues to escape historians, perhaps because the task is such a daunting one. Case studies are needed: a survey of the role of British naval power and its relation to the Pax Britannica; a survey of overseas stations and bases; and a study of how the Royal Navy influenced the course of the early history of colonial and Commonwealth navies.

This book explores the historical experience of British imperialism in South Africa, as mediated through the works of three novelists: the imperialist Henry Rider Haggard, the liberal anti-imperialist Olive Schreiner, and the African nationalist Sol Plaatje. South Africa currently occupies a marginalized place in cultural studies of British imperialism. With the single exception of the Anglo-Boer War, South Africa's literary impact on the British metropolis during the ‘Age of Empire’ receives scant critical attention when compared to India, which continues to be seen as ‘the jewel in the crown’, the land that colonized British imaginations at every point in its colonial and imperial history. This book counteracts this emphasis on India as the definitive site of British imperial culture.

Imperial historians make no claim to ‘a sense of the whole society’. But where imperialism is routinely stripped, and operated on under halogen lamps, the history of collaboration is still in shadow. Historiography, advises the historian Henri Brunschwig, ‘is not the fact of writing history, but the mode of writing’. The global omnipresence of imperialism naturally promoted it to top-billing on banners of protest. English historians, wary of power, readily distinguish between English expansion and European rapacity overseas. Good government was on the face of it so much better than self-government that the matter was scarcely discussed. Emigrants took ship to better their prospects. A migrant minority took ship in order to take charge at the far end. Transients only, their baggage and outlook stayed intact. The 20th-century empires all ended with long casualty-lists; but it is only the British who are constructing memorials both nostalgic and concrete.

Historiography is retrospective by definition and classificatory by common practice. Its value lies in identifying contours and boundaries, and in enabling observers to view the landscape as a whole. Historiography has pitfalls as well as advantages. The evolution of historical studies is the result of a combination of two related forces: the momentum built up within the scholarly body to find solutions to specific intellectual problems, and the response of scholars to the external influences that have a bearing on their lives. The year 1960 is an appropriate starting-point for this survey because it marks, as well as any single year can, the end of British Empire and the beginning of the era of independence. It became clear that the concept of a ‘traditional society’ was simply the antonym of an assumed modernity. The effect of post-modernist influences on Imperial history is well known, but it should nevertheless be recorded in case it slips from future minds, as many earlier influences have been lost to those of the present. Looking now at the 21st century, it seems reasonable to predict that Imperial history has a future and not just a past.

This chapter explores the recent historical and geographical literature on empire and colonialism. It argues that the historical literature has remained largely immune to the idea that different social and cultural constructions of space and place might play an instrumental role in colonial identity formation. In particular, it examines the encounter between postcolonial theory and British imperial history per se. The complex intimacies between race, gender and representation have long been common currency in the new imperial history of the non-white empire. Various studies have pointed to the power and tenacity of the subjective colonial geographies created and sustained by different imperial claims to truth. The new imperial history remains remarkably immune to the seductive charms of geography's irredentist claims concerning the inherent spatiality of the human condition. Ethnic performances were integral to some at least of the settler place-narratives created by the Irish and Scots.

Science and medicine played a part in British expansion from the age of Ralegh to that of Curzon and Nehru. But the critical history of this involvement is just about thirty years old. The terms of the alliance of science and the British Empire had historiographical consequences which endured well into the 20th century. The suggestion that modern science helped to construct the racial ‘Other’ was rapidly absorbed in the 1970s into the mainstream of Imperial history. Work on colonial medicine began by the early 1980s. The inclusion of Britain (and Europe generally) into the space of Imperial history will have important consequences. In particular, by addressing how the ‘indigenous’ negotiated with the exotic, whether in Bombay or Bristol, we are going beyond thinking of empire or science as crimes inflicted by Britain on its colonies.

The participation of Scots in the commercial and territorial empire of the English East India Company over the course of the long eighteenth century remains one of the most understudied aspects of the wider Scottish role in the British Empire. This chapter surveys the latest research on the numbers, social origins and identities of Scots in Asia, while reflecting on the benefits and limitations of adopting a particular Scottish perspective on British expansion in Asia. It emphasises the central role of London-based patronage and local networks in securing places for a regionally and socially diverse range of Scots, who in turn maintained discernibly Scottish identities while in Asia. It concludes that a closer engagement between Scottish evidence and more general debates on the nature of pre-1815 British imperialism can be mutually beneficial for both Scottish History and British Imperial Studies.

By 1929, the tradition that British Imperial history could be divided into phases, with an ‘old’ or ‘first’ Empire separate from what was to follow, was long established. It was a tradition that went back into the first half of the 19th century. Throughout its long usage, there has been a rough consensus as to what is meant by the term ‘first British Empire’, even if some points have been contested. The first Empire was often said to have come into existence during the Interregnum, since the act passed in 1651 is usually taken as the prototype for the later Laws of Trade, and to have lasted until the Navigation Acts began to be modified and dismantled in the early 19th century. For those who saw the first Empire as dominated by the enforcement of commercial regulations, its constitutional or political history was a secondary issue. The concept of a first British Empire has proved to be a useful and even an indispensable one for some 150 years.

This chapter explores Ireland, which was already playing its role in later Imperial history, as part colony and part partner in Empire. Ireland’s developing position within the British Empire during the 18th century is described. It is also shown that Ireland benefited from the Imperial connection in this century. Throughout the 18th century, restrictions on Irish colonial commerce were regularly denounced as evidence both of England’s resolve to keep ‘poor Ireland poor’ and of her determination to do down a prospective rival. The worsening relations between Britain and her colonies in America had not gone unnoticed in Ireland. After 1800, the Irish of all descriptions entered enthusiastically into the business of Empire. The Empire was greatly admired and highly prized in 19th-century Ireland.

This chapter offers a discussion on the American colonies in war and revolution during thirty-five crucial years of Imperial history. From about 1740, the scale of North American warfare began to grow, and more Americans, more often than not, found themselves drawn into the military realm. Two events of the 1740s marked the new level of direct American involvement in Britain’s wars. Revolution in the American colonies did not originate solely in the prior experience of war, as the account in this chapter makes clear, but behaviour in both Great Britain and North America in 1763–75, leading to the revolutionary crisis, was profoundly shaped by the immediately preceding two decades of Imperial warfare. At the war’s end in 1783, the United States confronted the wreckage of war. The war gave the United States a charismatic national leader whose post-war performance would be crucial in bringing stability to the Revolutionary Republic.

The view from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra looks up the broad expanse of avenue that leads toward the Admiralty Spire at the center of imperial St Petersburg, the capital that the first All-Russian Emperor, Peter the Great, erected on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. Following Nevsky Prospect from there back to the monastery, whose baroque architecture tied Peter's new European culture to Russia's Orthodox and medieval past, the visitor finds its cemetery, where St Petersburg's city elite honored itself. There, tucked in a small, enclosed courtyard expanse, is to be found a large, granite grey tombstone, which marks the site where Witte was laid to rest on 2 March 1915, seven months after the outbreak of what was becoming the Great War. This chapter considers what can be said about Witte's life story from the perspective of its own end time, only some two years removed from the destruction of the empire that had shaped it.

The naturalists Peter Simon Pallas and Thomas Pennant both composed compendia describing North Pacific nature in the last decades of the eighteenth century. In the spirit of an increasingly imperial culture marking European natural history, Pallas took the Russian Empire as the space to organize the animals he described. As a result, Pallas’s Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica did not account for the extinction of the sea cow and the near-extinction of the sea otter. Pennant, though beginning his book with similar ideas, was forced by the American Revolution to imagine a space not defined by political boundaries. His Arctic Zoology provided the key conceptual linkage–namely, biogeography–necessary for North Pacific observers to challenge the concept of nature’s economy and to understand the extinctions then taking place. Both works are testaments to the power and unpredictable consequences of empire on understandings of the natural world.