Discussing the essence of reparative history, the author articulates the need to go beyond an examination of the impact of colonialism (for good or ill) or a simplistic inclusion of cultural minorities into the national story. Instead she urges an examination of the agency and influence of peripheries’ struggles – rebellions and resistance in the colonies – such as the Haitian revolution, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Morant Bay Uprising, the Urabi Revolt on the metropole itself. How did they shape British domestic criticism of empire and ultimately ideas about liberty and independence? Where, she asks, is the acknowledgement of the agency of those who struggled against empire and slavery in present day debates about what constitutes British values.
KiernanVictor G., The Lords of Human Kind: European attitudes towards the outside world in the imperial age (London, Serif, 1995), p. 2.
4.
EvansRichard J., ‘The wonderfulness of us (the Tory interpretation of history)’, The London Review of Books (Vol. 33, no. 6, 17March2011).
5.
SamuelRaphael, ‘Empire stories: the imperial and the domestic’, in Island Stories: unravelling Britain, theatres of memory, Volume II (London, Verso, 1998), p. 84.
6.
The term is that of pro-empire historian, Niall Ferguson. See FergusonNiall, ‘British imperialism revisited: the cost and benefits of “anglobalization”’, Historically Speaking (Vol. 4, no. 4, April2003).
7.
LittlerJoNaidooRoshi, ‘White past, multicultural present: heritage and national stories’, in PhillipsRobertBrocklehurstHelen, eds, History, Identity and the Question of Britain (Palgrave, 2004), pp. 330–41.
8.
KincaidJamaica, A Small Place (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), pp. 56–57.
9.
See BaylyC. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian thought in the age of liberalism and empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011).
10.
Cited in OldfieldJ. R., ‘Chords of Freedom’: commemoration, ritual and British transatlantic slavery (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 102.
11.
WalvinJames, Britain’s Slave Empire (London, Tempus, 2000), p. 77.
12.
MacaulayThomas Babington, speech in Second Report of the Committee of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions: read at the general meeting of the society held on the 30th day of April, 1825, p. 76.
13.
TrouillotMichel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: power and the production of history (Boston, Beacon Press, 1995).
14.
See ApthekerHerbert, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, International Publishers, 1983); GottRichard, The British Empire: resistance, repression and revolt (London, Verso, 2011).
15.
WardStuart ed., British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 4.
16.
BhabhaHomi K., ‘Signs taken for wonders: questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry (Vol. 12, no. 1, 1985), p. 144.
17.
See LazarusNeil, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 133.
18.
YoungRobert J. C., Postcolonialism: an historical introduction (Oxford, Blackwell, 2001), p. 100.
19.
LinebaughPeterRedikerMarcus, The Many-Headed Hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, Beacon Press, 2000).
20.
Buck-MorssSusan, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh University Press, 2009), p. 80.
21.
DouglassFrederick, ‘West India Emancipation’, speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, 3August1857, University of Rochester, Frederick Douglass Project, available at: https://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4398.
22.
For an elaboration of ‘indifference’ as a factor in decolonisation, see DarwinJohn, Britain and Decolonisation: the retreat from empire in the post-war world (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 2001).
23.
SaidEdward W., Culture and Imperialism (New York, Vintage, 1994).
24.
HeyrickElizabeth, Immediate not Gradual Abolition; or an inquiry into the shortest, safest, and most effectual means of getting rid of West Indian slavery (London, J. Hatchard and Son, 1824), p. 33.
25.
‘Hanging of a Methodist Preacher, at Demerara’, The Black Dwarf, 4February1824.
26.
Heyrick, op. cit., p. 26.
27.
Ibid, p. 45.
28.
WoolerThomas J., ‘Review of parliamentary proceedings’, The Black Dwarf (24March1824),p. 358.
29.
WedderburnRobert, ‘The axe laid to the root or a fatal blow to oppressors, being an address to the planters and negroes of the island of Jamaica’, in McCalmanIain ed., The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 83.
30.
Cited in ‘PRO HO 42/191, [Rev. Chetwode Eusatace], [10 Aug.1819]’, in Wedderburn op. cit., p. 116.
31.
Cited in BodelsenC. A., Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism (London, Heinemann, 1960), p. 14.
32.
It should be noted though that ‘colonies’ initially meant the white settler colonies, primarily Canada. Prominent advocates of ‘Separatism’ included Henry Brougham, Joseph Hume, Jeremy Bentham (who wrote Emancipate Your Colonies), Henry Parnell and Grote, Roebuck, Warburton, according to Bodelsen op. cit., p. 15.
33.
See ClaeysGregory, Imperial Sceptics: British critics of empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010).
34.
ThompsonGeorge, Affghan War: a lecture delivered by George Thompson, Esq., at the Assembly Rooms, Cheltenham, on Friday, May 13, 1842 (London, George Rowe, 1842), p. 9.
35.
The People’s Paper (10October1857).
36.
KostalR. W., A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian empire and the rule of law (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 25.
37.
Ibid, p. 461.
38.
See, for instance, HallCatherine, Civilising Subjects: colony and metropole in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2002).
39.
HarrisonFrederic, ‘Egypt’, in National and social problems (London, Macmillan & Co, 1908).
40.
NevinsonHenry W., The New Spirit in India (London, Harper & Brothers, 1908), p. 262.
41.
Ibid., p. 328.
42.
Buck-Morss, op. cit, p. 22.
43.
Ibid., pp. 74–75.
44.
HarveyDavid, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 206.
