Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination

"Catherine Hall is one of the most important historians working in Britain today. She’s very well thought of both within the profession and outside but I think she should be even more so. This book came out in 2002 and it was really important in in pushing this shift in the scholarship, to thinking about how Empire affected the British at home. It explores an earlier time period than the rest of my list: 1830 to 1867. This is a point of imperial expansion, and Hall argues that this process was intrinsically bound up with the definition of modern Englishness. English people learned how to be English, what it meant to be English, through the experience of colonialism. This is partly to do with the construction of the English nation as one of white citizenship. This period – 1830 to 1867 – is also when you have the beginning of the expansion of the vote to middle-class people, and when slavery ends in the British colonies. Elsewhere, Hall has worked more broadly on tracing the impact of slavery in Britain. But this book is actually set just after that moment, at a time of imperial consolidation. She argues that what’s important is that English people learn to define themselves as English against people of colour in the Empire. She talks about the Aboriginal people or what tend to be defined at this point as ‘Negro races,’ and this sense that whiteness is really important to the understanding of ‘civilisation’ for the British. She describes how by the 1860s, Britain has developed a sense of racial hierarchy and race science. The book is about the experience of imperial expansion and increasing awareness of Empire, how it hardens and solidifies ideas about how to be English in the metropole, and then how that really shapes the rest of the 19th century. Beforehand there had been a lot of work on Empire which was very much about the nuts and bolts of power. There was lots of work by people like Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, or John Darwin about how colonies were captured, incorporating military and political history. Whiteness is very much just accepted in those accounts of colonial power; it isn’t seen as something contested or constructed. The overriding impression is that imperialists are white, and they’re going around the world and conquering places that aren’t. Whereas Hall is arguing that actually, in the 1830s and 1840s, there’s more complexity to the way that people are beginning to understand what their identity means and that it’s co-constitutive. Her argument is that there wasn’t a fully fixed and formed sense of English civilisation which was taken around the globe. In fact, this idea of English civilisation is formed through the experience of colonialism. “I tend to think of imperialism as a top-down history, and colonialism as more of a bottom-up history; a history which thinks about the experiences of the colonised and the colonisers” In all of her work, Hall incorporates women’s history. One thing that she does very well in this book that people hadn’t really done before is think about women as agents of Empire. She talks about a group of missionaries, for example, and the role of women within that, as well as the role of women in the black communities that missionaries are going to. She thinks about women as historical actors. If you’re writing a history of Empire which is about conquest and politics, in the 19th century, women don’t really come into it. That’s another way in which she really shifted the norms."