SUMMARY:

In the “Imperial Languages: Postscript” Andrew Thompson reconstructs intellectual history of his article and reflects on the future of imperial “identity politics” studies. Among the biggest influences on his understanding of imperial languages A. Thompson cites David Eastwood’s pioneering essay “Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism” (1992), Koebner’s and Schmidt’s “Imperialism. The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840-1960” (); Hugh Cunningham’s “The Language of Patriotism, 1750-1914” (1981); studies on the semantic of “nationalism” and “imperialism” written in terms of “dominion” historiography. More generally, he describes the context in which several scholars – most notably, John Darwin, Phil Buckner, Carl Bridge, Kent Fedorowich – were formulating the idea of a “British (imperial) world”, thereby re-positioning the empire’s settler societies (neo-Britains) at the center of Commonwealth-Imperial historiography. These trends inspired Thompson to embark on the task of charting the history of the “British world” as a political concept in later-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Among the main ideas his article was meant to convey Thompson singles out the role of political imaginings of empire that resolved around the self-governing or settler regions of empire, and struggled to accommodate the tropical dependencies – India included. Second, he wanted to show how closely entwined were definitions of “nation” and “empire” in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing this, he intended to go beyond “official” or high political discourses to look at representations of empire from the “subaltern groups” of British politics. All these themes are developed further in his new book, The Empire Strikes Back? The impact of imperialism on Britain from the mid-nineteenth century (2005). Thompson welcomes the fact that historians of other empires are now grappling with similar questions, but suggest to think about the bigger question of “where we go next?”, namely about the future of “identity politics” in twenty-first century imperial historiography. Set in this context, he founds Ab-Imperio’s exploration of the relationship between European empires and the rise of the nation-state very timely.