Nine years ago, we published the 100th book in the Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism Series. Andrew Thompson edited a volume, Writing Imperial Histories, to mark the occasion, acknowledging the enormous debt owed to the founding editor, Professor John MacKenzie.
As Andrew then noted, the series has lasted through a period of significant change. When Johnâs books Propaganda and Empire and Imperialism and Popular Culture were published in the mid-1980s, ââBritishâ history had yet to be repositioned in a wider imperial and global framework, and empire was still something widely judged to have happened overseas and to have been mostly marginal to the lives of the British peopleâ.[i]
Since its foundation, the Studies in Imperialism Series has striven to challenge those beliefs about the history of empire. It has played a critical role in establishing beyond any doubt the fundamental role that empire played in shaping Britain and other colonising nations. Books published in the Series have demonstrated how the relationships between imperial powers and their colonies shaped elements of culture and society including sexuality, gender, religion, environment, exploration, the military, policing, the media and humanitarianism, among many others. While much of the work has been on Britain and its empire (including a pioneering four-nation approach to British imperial history), the series has equally championed European imperial histories, covering the French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Belgian, Italian and Spanish empires.
We could say a great deal more about the scholarly innovations of the books published in the Series, but instead, we want to ask a question. How best can we sustain that innovation at a time when the legacies of our imperial history are so pervasive, prominent and pressing?
Events of recent years have brought into sharp focus the longevity of colonial legacies in Europe and North America. Never have these legacies been more visible or widely debated than since the murder of George Floyd in 2020. On the other hand, these uncomfortable conversations have led to a backlash: deliberate attempts to avoid exposing the racially discriminatory aspects of imperial history that the Series has done so much to highlight. Attacks on the efforts of heritage organisations to explore the legacies of colonialism are a testament to the ongoing power of what we might call distancing, denial and disavowal in our politics. There has never been a time when the study of imperial history has been more necessary, or more contested.
The Studies in Imperialism Series has always been open to publishing works from different perspectives and approaches, from scholars at all career levels and in any location. But if we, as the editorial executive of the longest established series on imperialism, are to engage not only in cutting-edge scholarship but also in the current struggle over imperial history, we ourselves will need to diversify.
We must think not just in terms of the representation of groups traditionally consigned to the margins of imperial history â though that is very important â but also in terms of perspectives on the imperial past that we may inadvertently exclude. As Divya Tolia Kelly et al have written recently, âwe need to be conscious of potential prejudicial practice, and the effects of the values and inheritances of imperial and colonial paradigms of thought that are skewed towards a particular geopolitical hierarchy of what, who and where, counts as sites of production for valuable historical ⌠scholarshipâ.[ii] A genuine diversity of perspectives, in addition to a diversity of authors, is whatâs required, though of course there is a strong connection between the two.
A wider range of scholars hailing from a greater diversity of locations, we feel, will help us sustain our commitment to excellence in the analysis of imperialism. To that end, we have drawn together a new Editorial Board with a breadth of representation and perspective, and a much greater reach of expertise in terms of place and period. We invite this new board to help us identify, address and move beyond our own exclusionary habits.
Andrew Thompson, Alan Lester and Emma Brennan
New members of the board include…
Christopher L. Brown
Professor of History at Columbia University is a historian of the British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Comparative History of Slavery and Abolition. His published work includes Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006), and with Philip Morgan, Arming Slaves: Classical Times to the Modern Age (2006). His current work centers on European enterprise on the West African coast in the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Pratik Chakrabarti
The NEH-Cullen endowment chair in History and Medicine at the University of Houston. He has contributed widely to the history of imperialism, science and medicine. His recent monograph is Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (2020).
Elizabeth Elbourne
Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. Her work has focused on South Africa and settler colonialism, and included themes of religion and missions, transnational humanitarianism, violence, sexuality, family networks, slavery and comparative Indigenous histories. Her most recent book is Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842 (2022).
Bronwen Everill (FRHistS)
Director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Gonville & Caius College where she teaches African, US, and Atlantic history. She is the author of Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition (2020) and Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (2013).
Kate Fullagar
Professor in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University. Kate specializes in the history of the eighteenth-century world, particularly the British Empire and the many Indigenous societies it encountered. Her latest book is The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (New Haven, 2020)
Chandrika Kaul
Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews. She explores both centripetal and centrifugal impacts of imperialism with reference to the British Empire in South Asia. Her primary focus is on media and communications, especially British and Indian media, the BBC and the monarchy.
Dane Kennedy
Professor Emeritus of History at George Washington University. He has also served as director of the National History Center and president of the North American Conference of British Studies. He is the author and editor of various books on imperial history.
Shino Konishi
Associate professor in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University. She descends from the Yawuru people of Broome, Western Australia, and specialises in Indigenous history. Her latest book is The Lives and Legacies of a Carceral Island: A Biographical History of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island (Routledge, 2022) with Ann Curthoys and Alexandra Ludewig.
Alan Lester
Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, UK, and co-editor of the series. His research has been focused on the networks that created the British Empire, the settler colonies, Indigenous experiences and counter-networks, colonial humanitarianism, imperial governance âeverywhere and all at onceâ, and, latterly, imperial history in the culture wars.
Philippa Levine
Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin, and has written on feminism, prostitution and eugenics as well as the British Empire.
John M. MacKenzie
Emeritus Professor of Imperial History at Lancaster University. His role in founding and developing the series, as well as refocusing the history of British and European empires, was recently acknowledged by an honorary doctorate of the University of Aix-Marseille. His latest book A Cultural History of the British Empire will be published by Yale University Press later in 2022.
Kirsten McKenzie
Professor of History at the Department of History, University of Sydney, Australia. She employs the perspectives of cultural history to ask questions about the relationship between identity, social status and political liberties in the British empire, 1780-1850. Her most recent monograph is Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the transformation of the British Colonial Order (Cambridge, 2016).
Tinashe Nyamunda
Associate Professor in the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies at the University of Pretoria. His main research focus is the twentieth and twenty-first century Economic History of Southern Africa, particularly the monetary history of colonial and post-colonial southern Africa. He also has interests in the history of economics and its influence in policy making and state and economy making on the African continent. Nyamunda is also passionate about assisting in any way he can, young and emerging historians in the region.
Dexnell Peters
Lecturer in Caribbean and Atlantic History at University of the West Indies, Mona Campus (Jamaica). He was formerly Teaching Fellow in History at the University of Warwick and the Bennett Boskey Fellow in Atlantic History and Supernumerary Fellow at Exeter College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on trans-imperial relations in the Greater Caribbean and the Atlantic World.
Sujit Sivasundaram
Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His latest book, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire won the British Academy Book Prize and jointly won the Bentley Book Prize for World History.
Andy Thompson
Chair of Global and Imperial History at Oxford where he also co-directs the universityâs Global History centre. He is a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College and a former Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is co-editor of the series.
Angela Wanhalla
Professor of history at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is of NgÄi Tahu descent and is proud to be affiliated to NgÄti Moki marae at Taumutu. Angela researches and writes about Indigenous womenâs histories. Her most recent book is He Reo WÄhine: MÄori Women’s Voices from the Nineteenth Century (2017), co-authored with Lachy Paterson.
Stuart Ward
Professor of Imperial and Global History at the University of Copenhagen. His work explores the multiple repercussions of the demise of Europeâs maritime empires in the twentieth century, particularly the identity politics of decolonization and the interface between the imperial and metropolitan dimensions of empireâs end.
[i] Andrew Thompson, âIntroductionâ, in Andrew Thompson (ed) Writing Imperial Histories, Manchester University Press, 2013, 1.
[ii] Divya Tolia-Kelly, Diogo de Carvalho Cabral, Stephen Legg, Maria Lane, Nicola Thomas,
Historical geographies of the 21st century: Challenging our praxis, Journal of Historical Geography,
Volume 69, 2020, Pages 1-4.