Reconnecting the global British empire: response to critics

Abstract

It is extremely gratifying when any piece of historical writing stimulates the thoughtful reflections and criticisms of internationally renowned scholars. We could not be more pleased with the responses developed by Alison Bashford, Trevor Burnard and Lisa Ford. Collectively they have both captured what we felt to be most important in our contribution and outlined areas that we need to develop further. Together these scholars raise four principal objections. First, Alison Bashford raises the question of whether the British empire was in fact a state, or whether it needs to be seen as part of an ‘age of cooperation between the crown, the government, and private venture’, suggesting that the ‘empire-state was more a nineteenthand twentiethcentury phenomenon’. Second, Lisa Ford worries that we overestimate the strength of the British imperial state. The state was not able to achieve all of its lofty goals, and by paying attention to legal history, she suggests, it becomes clear that the state was ‘relatively weak’. Third, Trevor Burnard is concerned that we exaggerate the importance of partisanship. After all, he notes, ‘all Britons seem to have supported slavery and the slave trade before the 1750s’. Finally, Ford, in particular, believes that there is nothing particularly new about our highlighting the importance of political economic debate. As one would expect from scholars of this stature, all of these points have a good deal of merit. Nevertheless, we remain convinced of our overall narrative. We should say at the outset that we do not mean to overclaim the novelty of our approach. While we are disappointed that much of the scholarship on the British empire remains binary in conceptualisation, and nation-centred in its assumed telos, there are many distinguished exceptions. Calls have been made for several decades, for example, to globalise early American history. There is now a pervasive call for a ‘vast early America’. However, in our view, much of the response to this call has been ‘continental’ rather than global in approach. Similarly, the late C.A. Bayly bravely called for a more global approach to thinking about the British empire in South Asia, but the new proliferation of local studies seems to have done the reverse. So, we cannot claim to be the first scholars arguing for a more global approach to the empire. Indeed, in many ways this has long been the approach of the school of imperial history associated with John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson and developed by others like Paul Kennedy, John Darwin and James Belich. Yet we do think that in the period up to 1788 there is more work to be done.