Small stories of Little Britons: scale and the ethics of imperial histories

Abstract

Categories are useful but deceptive tools, enabling the historian to build totalising models of historical change that at the same time may take us further away from understanding individual and everyday experience. This article seeks to balance big and small histories, and in so doing to fracture monolithic and predetermined conceptions and mechanisms of ‘British’ imperial history through a reflection on the methods and messages of microhistory in a study of colonialism in north-east India. The article further draws out some of the affective implications of doing British and imperial history from an Australian perspective and with an Antipodean sensibility.

This article has been peer reviewed.

Keywords:

• Australian history
• British imperial history
• ethics of history
• microhistory
• northeast India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

Andrew J. May is Professor of History in the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. As a social historian he has engaged locally with cultural and spatial aspects of the historical condition of Australian cities, and internationally as a historian of British engagement with tribal north-east India.

Notes

1 See, for example, ‘Jokes about Australians and Australian jokes,’ accessed 6 May 2015, http://www.convictcreations.com/culture/jokes.html. See also Guy Rundle, ‘What British Jokes about Australians Really Mean,’ Guardian, 8 July 2013.

2 Examples include H. Britain War Dan, Highlander Kharmalki, Hilarious Dhkar, Laborious Manik S. Syiem, Moonlight Pariat, or sisters named Million, Billion and Trillion. See Rajiv Roy, ‘Of Funny Names, Surnames and More,’ Assam Times, 25 April 2014, accessed 22 July 2015, http://www.assamtimes.org/node/10673. See also http://khasi.namegenerator.ga.

3 Andrew J. May, Welsh Missionaries and British Imperialism: The Empire of Clouds in North-east India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 285.

4 Guardian, 1 February 2013; Blog posts by Losdiablo, 2 February 2013, 22:51; beaskies, 2 February 2013, 23:49; jayjaycee, 3 February 2013, 21:37; ArunShourie, 4 February 2013, 19:53. For the article and subsequent blog posts, accessed 30 April 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/feb/01/meghalaya-north-east-india-state.

5 Jerry H. Bentley, ‘The Task of World History,’ in Oxford Handbook of World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2.

6 Ibid., 12–13.

7 Manan Ahmed, ‘Adam’s Mirror: The Frontier in the Imperial Imagination,’ Economic & Political Weekly 46, no. 13 (2011): 60.

8 Luke Clossey, ‘Asia-centred Approaches to the History of the Early Modern World: A Methodological Romp,’ in Comparative Early Modernities: 1100–1800, ed. David Porter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 73–98, cited in K. Jackson, ‘Hearing Images, Tasting Pictures: Making sense of Christian Mission Photography in the Lushai Hills District, Northeast India (1870–1920),’ in From Dust to Digital, ed. M. Kominko (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 449.

9 Giorgio Riello, ‘Cotton: The Fabric that Made the World,’ presentation in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne, September 19, 2013.

10 Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014, first published in German, 2009), 6.

11 Vinay Lal, ‘Provincialising the West: World History from the Perspective of Indian History,’ in Writing World History 1800–2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 288.

12 Richard Drayton, ‘Where Does the World Historian Write From? Objectivity, Moral Conscience and the Past and Present of Imperialism,’ Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 3 (2011): 672.

13 Ibid., 684, 685.

14 Edward Muir, ‘Introduction: Observing Trifles,’ in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), xxi.

15 István Szijártó, ‘Four Arguments for Microhistory,’ Rethinking History 6, no. 2 (2002): 209.

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23 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World,’ History and Theory 50 (2011): 190. The history of railway men, observes Vernon, might be usefully explored through the endeavours of women who nursed the victims of the nineteenth century’s railway accidents: James Vernon, workshop commentary, ‘Writing Modern British History Today: An Antipodean Workshop,’ State Library of New South Wales, 8 May 2015.

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41 Jones, ‘Welsh Missionary Journalism in India, 1880–1947,’ 266.

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47 Kate Fullagar, The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710–1795 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

48 Friend of India, 14 January 1836, 11.

49 Miss Eden to Mrs Lister, 25 January 1837, in Violet Dickinson, ed., Miss Eden’s Letters (London, 1919), 281–2.

50 Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, xx.

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