| The Absent-Minded Imperialists: What the British really thought about empire Bernard Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 475 pages Reviewed by: Brett Bennett, University of Texas at Austin Few nineteenth or twentieth century Britons cared or thought much about the British Empire. Bernard Porter offers this controversial thesis in The Absent Minded Imperialists, a rebuttal to scholars such as John Mackenzie and Edward Said who argued that imperialism pervaded popular British culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The book offers a semi-empirical analysis of schoolbooks, plays, music, and popular culture to determine that the empire performed a minor role in people’s lives. Paring down the definition of “imperialism” to describe situations where people truly advocated political or cultural domination over other groups, Porter argues that few Britons supported political or cultural imperialism; instead of seeing the forest for the trees, he sees the trees for the forest. For most Britons, the empire stood on the periphery of their lives. In upper-class public school history classes, students studied Herodotus, not the famous British imperialist, Richard Hayklut; the middle class believed that Victorian liberalism would eventually end all empires; and the working class worked and thought little about anything else. With simple logic and solid prose, Porter contextualizes and thus deflates what some scholars consider “mass” imperial projects. He writes, “What attracted working-class children to Empire Day was the half-holiday; to scouting, the outdoor activities; to the empire exhibitions, the funfairs…” Most interestingly, he suggests that many of the iconic supporters of empire came from “outside” of British culture. Somerset Maugham grew up in France, Rudyard Kipling identified with Anglo- Indian life, and Joseph Chamberlain made his money through business. Finally, Porter shows how imperial politics found little receptive audience among newspaper readers or parliamentary debaters. The difficulty of his book comes in its particular form of argument: he tries to prove that something did not happen, a negative argument. But within his narrow definitions he succeeds. Still, many historians will likely question the motives or implications of Porter’s book: if most British people did not want an empire, how did it grow or who can we blame? The book raises questions about the connection between implicit and explicit ideologies embedded in culture for future historians to study. Still, Porter sets the bar higher for cultural historians who argue that imperialism dominated the minds and lives of Britons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. |
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