Epilogue: The Historical Stakes of New Imperial History

Abstract

The unpacking of gender, violence, and empire has arguably taken on a new relevance since 2001 and the advent of the Anglo-American partnership in the “Global War on Terrorism”. This new age, as Arun Khadnani noted, announced an “end of tolerance” and a resurgence of the dangerous post-colonial “Other” in British popular imagination.¹ More broadly, the 9/11 and subsequent 7/7 attacks in London allowed the idea of empire as a beneficial and stabilizing force to regain some of the purchase that it had lost in the post-Thatcher era.² At the other end of the spectrum, Muslim fundamentalists use a language redolent of earlier anti-colonialist movements, urging young men to redress their masculine “humiliation” through pointless murder. Their ostensible goal, the creation of a millenarian pan-Islamic empire, has little basis in historical reality; the caliphate they hope to restore was decidedly more tolerant than the one they envision. To be sure, the rhetoric of violence and masculinity is no artifact of bygone empires, but a revivified and catalytic agent in what Samuel P. Huntington called a “clash of civilizations.” The stakes in doing “New Imperial History” are higher than ever; we are not practicing history so much as reliving the imperial past.