Settlers and Expatriates

This newest addition to the Oxford History of the British Empire’s companion series, edited by Robert Bickers, rescues some ‘orphans of empire’ from historiographical neglect. The ‘great self governing dominions’ like Australia, Canada and New Zealand are increasingly being written back into imperial history as part of a transnational ‘British world’. However, the small communities of Britons overseas found scattered through empire’s miscellany of protectorates, concessions, condominiums and colonies, in Asia, Africa, and India, have, in general, languished outside that history. Consequently, their role in the construction of British identity has languished too, with these outposts of empire being reduced to a set of easy stereotypes, as scenes of white mischief or, more often, of white men’s graves. This authoritative collection deftly puts those colonial caricatures in their proper place, revealing instead a much more complex and contested range of British identities. By emphasising the diverse experience of Britons overseas, it not only expands the current limits of ‘British world’ scholarship but offers a conceptual substitute—‘a world of Britains’(p. 6)

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