How Memory of Empire Drove the Postwar Resurrection of Empire
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5736166 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Priya Satia (0000-0003-3584-5700, Stanford University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 127 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 451-454 |
| Publication date | 2022-04-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ahr/rhac122 |
| OpenAlex | W4214667565 |
| Language | EN |
Robert Gildea offers a masterful narrative of the British and French Empires and of how their memory—“empires of the mind”—continues to shape the world. This is a story of empire stretching from the eighteenth century to 2017 as an unbroken narrative, bridging the illusory rupture of “decolonization” after World War II—a courageous and necessary intervention. Gildea’s approach is fittingly “both comparative and entangled” (13) as he illuminates, via Freud, the way traumatic imperial defeats haunt each fresh challenge to empire, the way historical memory makes history—albeit leaving some questions unanswered and some myths undisturbed. Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present began as the 2013 Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University Belfast, a series inaugurated in 1954 by Herbert Butterfield. In his lectures, published as Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (1955), Butterfield invoked historians’ power to “mislead a...
Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Decolonization · Empire · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Narrative history · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Queen (butterfly) · Scholarship · Australian History and Society · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |