Encountering Empire

Now that the dust has settled some fifty years after the end of empire in Africa, historians can examine the record of what happened. Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, and Alice Deny set out the issues in 1961 in their influential book, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism. Liberal doctrines and the evangelical movement, attuned to movements of national awakening, influenced Britain's role in the colonization of Africa. They argued that the colonial empire was not the cause but the consequence of events in Africa, with nationalist discourse playing a large role in framing the official mind of imperialism. Britain's imperial rule was defined by events outside its control. The contours of colonial suzerainty were entirely by design. The fruit of her dissertation, Elisabeth Engel's Encountering Empire is in part an essay on African Americans’ complex encounter with colonialism without their sharing the colonized fate of Africans who formed “a social stratum of colonial society,” and in part a critique of the “black Atlantic” argument concerning what Engel calls “the silencing of Africans.” As citizens of the United States, black Americans could maintain their blackness with neither the racial stereotypes of colonialism nor the stigma of empire. On this level the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) missionaries came as travelers and explorers, especially “of the human interior.” This is one of the three themes of the book

Ancient history · British Empire · Colonialism · Empire · Framing (construction · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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