How empire shaped us

Few historical subjects have generated such intense and sustained interest in recent decades as Britain's imperial past. What accounts for this preoccupation? Why has it gained such purchase on the historical imagination? How has it endured even as its subject slips further into the past? In seeking to answer these questions, the proposed volume brings together some of the leading figures in the field, historians of different generations, different nationalities, different methodological and theoretical perspectives and different ideological persuasions. Each addresses the relationship between their personal development as historians of empire and the larger forces and events that helped to shape their careers. The result is a book that investigates the connections between the past and the present, the private and the public, the professional practices of historians and the political environments within which they take shape. This intellectual genealogy of the recent historiography of empire will be of great value to anyone studying or researching in the field of imperial history. -- Provided by publisher.

Introduction: the autobiographical pulse in British imperial history / Antoinette Burton and Dane Kennedy -- From empire to India and back: a career in history / Thomas R. Metcalf (b. 1934) -- Seven pivots toward empire / William Roger Louis (b. 1936) -- Empire from above and from below / John MacKenzie (b. 1943) -- Empire and class: the making of a history boy / Richard N. Price (b. 1944) -- Inside/outside: a non-native Caribbeanist's journey / Bridget Brereton (b. 1946) -- With and against the grain / Catherine Hall (b. 1946) -- In and out of empire: old labels and new histories / Marilyn Lake (b. 1949) -- An education in empire / Dane Kennedy (b. 1951) -- A child of decolonisation / Philippa Levine (b. 1957) -- From South Asian studies to global history: searching for Asian perspectives / Shigeru Akita (b. 1958) -- Crooked lines and zigzags: from the neocolonial to the colonial / Mrinalini Sinha (b. 1960) -- Some intimacies of Anglo-American empire / Antoinette Burton (b. 1961) -- Homes and native lands: settler colonialism, national frames, and the remaking of history / Adele Perry (b. 1968) -- Empire made me / Clare Anderson (b. 1969) -- Paths to the past / Tony Ballantyne (b…