Abstract
Determining whether the British Empire and decolonisation had a major impact on the metropolis seems less pertinent today than the interpretative possibilities presented by the multiple forms of imperial culture that transcended the empire-metropolitan divide. We can no longer reduce public perceptions of empire to a balance sheet of indifference versus wholesale endorsement, or indeed arrive at any generalised verdict on popular imperialism that can be applied confidently to any given time frame. But to look back on the transformations of the historiographical terrain over the last forty years is to recognise the initiative, energy and enduring influence of John MacKenzie.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter Calvocoressi, The British Experience, 1945–75 (London: Bodley Head, 1978), 224–25.
- 2.
Calvocoressi’s view had been foreshadowed in earlier studies such as Richard Price, An Imperial War and the English Working Class (London: Kegan Paul, 1972); and Max Beloff’s, Imperial Sunset, Vol. 1: Britain’s Liberal Empire, 1897–1921 (London: Methuen, 1969). Jan Morris reached a broadly similar conclusion in ‘The Popularisation of Imperial History’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 1 (1973), 113–18.
- 3.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Patheon, 1978).
- 4.
See Ezekiel Mercau, The Falklands War: An Imperial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
- 5.
John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 2.
- 6.
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 258.
- 7.
John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 11 and 38.
- 8.
Stuart Ward, British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
- 9.
MacKenzie, Orientalism, 208.
- 10.
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: What the British Really Thought About Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12–13. Porter’s intervention was presaged to some extent by P. J. Marshall, ‘No Fatal Impact? The Elusive History of Imperial Britain’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 March 1993, 8–10. Ronald Hyam, Ian Phimlister, and Richard Price have voiced sympathy for Porter’s approach in varying degrees; see Richard Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain and Its Empire’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006), 602–27; and Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2.
- 11.
For a representative sample, see Porter’s ‘Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36 (2008), 101–17; and MacKenzie’s, ‘“Comfort” and Conviction: A Response to Bernard Porter’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36 (2008), 659–68.
- 12.
See, for example, Simon Potter’s astute survey: ‘Empire, Cultures and Identities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain’, History Compass 5 (2007), 51–71; and Andrew Thompson, Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
- 13.
Among many examples from the Studies in Imperialism series, see Zoe Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
- 14.
Martin Thomas and Richard Toye, Arguing About Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882–1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
- 15.
Luke Blaxill, ‘Quantifying the Language of British Politics, 1880–1910’, Historical Research 86 (2013), 313.
- 16.
Elizabeth Buettner, Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
- 17.
John M. MacKenzie, ed., European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).
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Ward, S. (2019). Foreword: The Moving Frontier of MacKenzie’s Empire. In: Barczewski, S., Farr, M. (eds) The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_2
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