Labour History and the Case against Colonialism

Bibliographic Data

ID9969643
AuthorsPeter Brandon (0000-0002-6268-217X, International Institute of Social History, corresponding author), Pepijn Brandon, Aditya Sarkar (0000-0002-8754-083X, University of Warwick, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume64
Issue1
Pages73-109
Publication date2019-03-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Review of Social History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-8590 • E-ISSN: 1469-512X
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020859019000063
OpenAlexW2931058350
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited29

The controversy around Bruce Gilley's article “The Case for Colonialism” has drawn global attention to a stream of revisionist claims and visions on the history of colonialism that has emerged in academia and in the media in recent years. Authors such as Nigel Biggar in the UK, Niall Ferguson in the USA, and Pieter Emmer in the Netherlands, have all published similarly revisionist claims about colonialism, arguing that postcolonial guilt and political correctness blind the majority of their colleagues to the positive side of the colonial project. Their argument chimes with wider societal trends, transforming the revisionist defenders of empire into heroes of a reinvigorated nationalist right within and beyond academia. The public influence attained by these approaches to colonialism requires historians to expose the deep methodological flaws, misreading of historical facts, and misrepresentations of prior scholarship that characterize the writings of this emerging revisionist trend. It is for this reason that the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History ( IRSH ) has decided to devote its first ever Virtual Special Issue to labour history's case against colonialism. This article, also an introduction to the Virtual Special Issue, sifts through the logical implications of the claims made by Gilley and like-minded scholars, providing both a contextualization and a rebuttal of their arguments. After assessing the long absence of colonial labour relations from the field of interest of labour historians and the pages of the IRSH itself, this article shows the centrality of a critique of colonialism to labour history's global turn in the 1990s. Using a selection of articles on colonial labour history from the IRSH 's own archive, the article not only reconstructs “labour history's case against colonialism”, but also shows why labour history's critical insights into the nature of colonialism should be deepened and extended, not discarded

Argument (complex analysis · Colonialism · Empire · Historiography · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Rebuttal · Scholarship · Social history (medicine · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law