BRITAIN'S IMPERIAL ECONOMY

The Oxford History of the British Empire. Editor-in-Chief, Wm. Roger Louis. Volume I: The Origins of Empire. British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Nicholas Canny. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxx, 553. Volume II: The Eighteenth Century. Edited by P. J. Marshall. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxi, 639. Volume III: The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Andrew Porter. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxii, 774. Volume IV: The Twentieth Century. Edited by Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxvi, 773. Volume V: Historiography. Edited by Robin W. Winks. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xxiv, 731. The historiography of the British empire has long exuded a somewhat musty air, like a relict of glory preserved in faded regimental standards, hanging forlornly in English cathedrals or expressed in the overblown Edwardian baroque of the imperial capital. Even the names of the leading academic posts—such as the Rhodes professorship of Imperial History—now seem retrograde. The initiative has clearly moved elsewhere: as the empire's former subjects would scarcely wish to see their history written through the eyes and institutions of the colonizer, the history of India or Australia, Jamaica or Canada have forsaken the view from Whitehall and the governor's mansion, to become national history.