SUMMARY:

In this article, Stephen Howe examines the series of approaches, topics of investigation, and methodologies that are loosely connected under the rubric of “new imperial history.” He stresses that to some, it means primarily cultural, as opposed to political or economic, histories of empire. Others use the term mainly to refer to ecological history. Still others mean primarily histories informed by feminism and gender studies, or by literary theories of colonial discourse and postcoloniality. Howe composes a “map” of the “new imperial history” by critically examining these approaches and the contradictions between them, along with what is not included as “new imperial history” by those who use the label. He shows that what intends, or proclaims itself, to be an integrative, barrier-dissolving body of work has instead sometimes seemed to produce new schisms and antagonisms. As Howe’s analysis shows, the idea of the new imperial history has already occasioned a remarkable number of negative polemics – often extremely heated ones, with strong political and/or ethical overtones. In the main part of the article Howe sketches the basic lines of these debates. They include methodological and epistemological disputes, inter- and intradisciplinary ones (especially those between “traditional” historians and social scientists on the one hand, colonial and postcolonial cultural theorists on the other), and directly political ones.