Western publics are constantly being told that they ought to rethink the history of empire. The vague sense of guilt which it is presumed those publics feel with regard to their countries’ imperial pasts can, experts assure us, be assuaged. If people were only able to deploy a ‘balanced scorecard’, they would then recognise that imperialists brought roads as well as death, schools as well as national borders, and hospitals as well as racialized forms of ethnic conflict.
This special issue forms a small part of the scholarly repudiation of the ‘experts’ of empire and a call to centre our understanding of colonial praxis upon the lives of the colonised peoples of the past and the present. At its heart is an essay by the Algerian writer Hosni Kitouni, here translated into English for the first time. In ‘Naming the Suffering of Victims in the French Conquest of Algeria’, Kitouni shows how the genre and forms of colonial history mirror the actions of colonists and the documents they left behind, erasing the suffering of indigenous people and the after effects of empire, which last into our present and will continue into our futures.
This contention that to rewrite the history of empire is to be engaged in a conversation in and about our present and futures also animates the work of Yara Hawari. Her essay ‘Palestine sine tempore’ builds on the pioneering scholars of settler colonialism – Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini – to show how the colonial conquest of Palestine has, for Palestinians, always been grounded in the moment of the Nakba (or Catastrophe) of 1948. In spite of the Israeli state’s attempts to quash discussion of the Nakba, as opposed to its own account of the emergence of a Jewish, democratic state, Hawari shows how Palestinians (in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza, in refugee camps and in exile) understand the totemic and life-affirming possibilities which come from a politics of remembering and truth-telling across generations.
Three other articles locate contemporary discussion of empire in settings as varied as thirteenth-century C.E. Pisa, fin-de-siècle Brussels, and the Mediterranean across the nineteenth century. In asking ‘Where does colonialism come from?’ Lorenzo Veracini presents a radically new account of the genealogy of European empire, centred on the medieval city state of Pisa. Such is the surprising character of his claims that we might indeed question whether the Gilleys and the Fergusons who say so much so assuredly about empire, really know so much about the topic at all. Perhaps even scholars in the field need to accept that we are at a moment of recalibration – akin to the shock induced by Edward Said’s Orientalism – and proceed open-mindedly from this point onwards.
This sense of beginning and new trains of thought is also apparent in the final two essays in the collection: Berber Bevernage’s examination of truth-telling and the making of colonial meaning in turn-of-the-century Congo and Belgium, and my essay on the lexical character of empire. Bevernage builds here on his pathbreaking work on the politics of memory in History, Memory and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice to show how a new colonial science and a mass acceptance of the necessity of empire was inculcated in Belgian society. Connectedly, my piece asks how the language of imperialists can be said to be directly connected to the violence of colonial atrocities; a question in large part generated by the earlier pathbreaking work of Bevernage.
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter
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