Past the pax. . - Review Essay - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World; Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire - book review

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2003 by Clifton Crais

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), x and 464 Pp.

David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xxiv and 264 Pp.

We are, we are told, living in an age of empire. (1) A steadily increasing number of learned scholars, columnists and essayists have drawn parallels between the contemporary moment and the late nineteenth century pax Britannica. The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, for example, wrote recently that "People are coming out of the closet on the word 'empire'." According to an editorialist for the Wall Street Journal, the September 11 attacks were "a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation." He continued: "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodphurs and pith helmets." Scholars such as Paul Kennedy and Charles Fairbanks have pointed to the great disparities in the distribution of world power and that America is an empire in formation." (2)

The evidence is compelling. Like the nineteenth century, peripheral crises (the Middle East, Central Asia, Central and Southern Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Argentina, to name just a few) characterize the world in which we live (and many others die) today. Osama bin Laden is the twenty-first century's equivalent of the nineteenth-century Mahdi, the "mad mullah" who threatened British imperial ambitions in Egypt and North Africa. Large numbers of British troops and their native proxies ended up fighting the Mahdists and their jihad against Egypt and the infidels. In the Sudan as in Afghanistan today, international military action took place in the context of an ecological catastrophe. Drought and starvation seem to be on quite comfortable terms with mortars and missiles.

Moreover, the past two decades mark, however crudely, the second great wave of globalization. The raw primary products of yesteryear, the cotton and rubber that headed from faraway places to metropolitan households, are today's toys and transistors built by cheap (and sometimes slave) labor. Inequality, globally and within individual countries, has grown steadily. And today's triumphalist talk of Americanization, on the one hand, and intolerance of people who might see the world differently, on the other hand, frighteningly parallel older imperial discourses of either wanting to turn Africans and Indians into Europeans or, instead, dismissing them as so many inferior races. (3)

The past quarter century has seen an outpouring of scholarly writing on imperialism, particularly on the British Empire. Much of this writing was against the grain of earlier imperial and colonial studies, first the emphasis on politics and institutional histories and then, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s as the giddiness of decolonization turned into the postcolonial blues, a concentration on economic change and stagnation. In the 1980s and the 1990s attention turned to the study of culture. Any number of books and articles came out that explored the relationship between culture and colonialism. The cultural history of the nineteenth-century British empire today is one of the most exciting and burgeoning fields within the humanities and social sciences. Comparative literature specialists have produced a torrent of studies on the imperial imagination, particularly European representations of non-European peoples. Inspired by the work of Edward Said and his monumental Orientalism, they have historicized se emingly static categories such as race and have provided important historical depth to issues ranging from sexuality to the social sciences. Studies of Mughals and missionaries, of explorers and proconsuls, have reshaped metropolitan studies, including the character of imperial expansion itself. (4)

There is now an important and rich collection of studies on India and Africa that share a common focus on culture. The historical anthropologist Ann Stoler has argued for the importance of studying the constitution of colonial categories, for bringing anthropology's classic concern with culture to the study of the colonial past. In this and in other similar work scholars have centered their research on identity, power and knowledge, discourse, sexuality, race, ideology, religion, even clothing. Topics that once seemed at best intriguing and, at worst, antiquarian and irrelevant, now occupy the center stage of colonial studies. As one prominent scholar put it, "culture was what colonialism was all about." (5) At times this gush of work seemed more like a plunge of lemmings as scholars in search of projects explored everything from colonial couture to Sinhalese screwing. Gone are the studies of institutions or analyses of the causes of empire exemplified some three decades ago by Robinson and Gallagher's monume ntal Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism. Today the clothes the colonizer and colonized wear and the signification of colonial couture is just as important, perhaps even more important, as the taxes or labor demanded of them by their European overlords.