Presidential Address: Whatever happened to the British Empire?

Abstract

Since the 1960s historians of the second British Empire have been seeking to redefine their field in ways that would give it continuing relevance. Unfortunately, in the process, they have lost sight of one of the most important components of the nineteenth-century empire. Even the most promising of the new approaches — the effort to reintegrate imperial history with domestic British history — is flawed by the failure to recognize, as J.C.A. Pocock has insisted, that Greater Britain included not only the British Isles but also the British colonies of settlement. Because historians of the second British Empire no longer have much interest in colonization, they have glossed over the differences between the colonies formed in the first wave of European expansion prior to 1783 and those formed during the much larger second wave that commenced in 1815 and they have underestimated the long-term significance of those colonies in helping to shape the sense of identity held by the British at home. But historians of the colonies of settlement must also take some of the responsibility for this myopia because they have lost sight of the significance of the empire to those Britons who established themselves abroad in the nineteenth century. In fact, Canadian historians have locked themselves into a teleological framework which is obsessed with the evolution of Canadian autonomy and the construction of a Canadian national identity and thus downplayed the significance of the imperial experience in shaping the identity of nineteenth-century British Canadians. It is time now not only to place the nineteenth-century colonies of settlement back on the agenda of imperial historians but also to put the imperial experience back where it belongs, at the centre of nineteenth-century Canadian history.