Duncan Kelly, ed. Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xv + 247 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-726439-3.

Reviewed by Daniel Gorman (University of Waterloo)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2011)
Commissioned by Thomas Hajkowski

excerpt:

Despite work by scholars such as David Armitage, Uday Singh Mehta, Jennifer Pitts, and Duncan Bell, to cite just four examples of a recent upsurge of interest in empire and political theory, we still have only a partial understanding of the historical discourses surrounding the intellectual roots of empire.  To be sure, imperial historians have devoted much ink to “discourse” as a dynamic feature of the history of empire.  Whether invoking Orientalism, Michel Foucault, or the Subaltern School, much of the history very loosely grouped under the aegis of “postcoloniality” has argued that the very essence of imperialism was ideational.  Relationships of inequality and power were inscribed in the various iterations of imperial rule and culture created by European powers.  Recovering the history of these relationships requires historians to be attentive to how ideas and language were constructed and contested.  This work has without question widened our understanding of how and why empires functioned, and how they shaped the lives of those in both the metropole and the colonized world.  Yet like the politico-economic imperial history which is sometimes presented as its foil, the “new imperial history,” whether postcolonial or more empirically based cultural history, largely ignores the ideational beginnings and subsequent intellectual rationales of empire.  The “idea of empire” is assumed from its later nature.