Women and Empire: The Gap between British Rhetoric and Colonial Realities

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By the 21st century there were more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England. Christianity had a powerful effect far beyond the small circle of converts--it provided a model of modernity. The introduction of European medicine was especially important, as well as the introduction of European political practices and ideals ideals such as religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, colonial reforms, and especially liberal democracy.

They tried to upgrade education, medical care, and sponsored the long-term modernization of the native personality to inculcate European middle-class values. Alongside their churches they established schools and medical clinics, and sometimes demonstrated improved farming techniques. Many were trained as physicians, or took special courses in public health and tropical medicine at Livingstone College, London. Furthermore, Christian missionary activities were studied and copied by local activists and had an influence upon religious politics, on prophetic movements such as those in Xhosa societies, on emerging nationalism in South African and India, the emergence of African independent churches, and sometimes upgrading the status of native women.

Historians have begun to analyze the agency of women in overseas missions. At first, missionary societies officially enrolled only men, but women increasingly insisted on playing a variety of roles. Single women typically worked as educators. Wives assisted their missionary husbands in most of his roles. Advocates stopped short of calling for the end of specified gender roles, but they stressed the interconnectedness of the public and private spheres and spoke out against perceptions of women as weak and house-bound.

In the colonies that became dominions, education was left primarily in the hands of local officials. The Imperial government took a strong hand in India, and most of the later colonies. The goal was To speed up modernization and social development through a widespread system of elementary education for all natives, plus high school and eventually university education for selected elites. The students were encouraged to attend university in Britain.

Much of the older historiography, as represented by The Cambridge History of the British Empire , covers the detailed month-to-month operations of the Imperial bureaucracy. More recent scholarship has examined who Were the bureaucrats, and the governors, and the role of the colonial experience in their own lives, as well as their families. The cultural approach asks how bureaucrats represented themselves And enticed the natives to accept their rule. Wives of senior bureaucrats played an increasingly important role in dealing with the local people, and in sponsoring and promoting charities and civic good will.

When they returned to Britain they had an influential voice in shaping upper-class opinion toward colonization. Historian Robert Pearce points out that many colonial wives had a negative reputation, but he depicts Violet Bourdillon — as "the perfect Governor's wife. Some British colonies were ruled directly by the Colonial Office in London, while others were ruled indirectly through local rulers who are supervised behind the scenes by British advisors, with different economic results as shown by Lakshmi Iyer In much of the Empire, large local populations were ruled in close cooperation with the local hierarchy.

Historians have developed categories of control, such as "subsidiary alliances", "paramountcy", "protectorates", "indirect rule", "clientelism", or "collaboration". Local elites were co-opted into leadership positions, and often had the role of minimizing opposition from local independence movements. Fisher has explored the origins and development of the system of indirect rule. The British East India Company starting in the midth century stationed its staff as agents in Indian states which it did not control, especially the Princely States.

By the s The system became an efficient way to govern indirectly, by providing local rulers with highly detailed advice that had been approved by central authorities. After , military more and more often took the role; they were recruited and promoted officers on the basis of experience and expertise.

The indirect rule system was extended to Many of the colonial holdings in Asia and Africa. Economic historians have explored the economic consequences of indirect rule, as in India [] and West Africa.

In Zanzibar became a protectorate not a colony of Britain. Prime minister Salisbury explained his position:. The condition of a protected dependency is more acceptable to the half civilised races, and more suitable for them than direct dominion. It is cheaper, simpler, less wounding to their self-esteem, gives them more career as public officials, and spares of unnecessary contact with white men.

Historiography of the British Empire

Colonel Sir Robert Groves Sandeman — introduced an innovative system of tribal pacification in Balochistan that was in effect from to He gave financial allowances to tribal chiefs who enforced control, and used British military force only when necessary. However the Government of India generally opposed his methods and refused to allow it to operate in India's North West Frontier.

Historians have long debated its scope and effectiveness in the peaceful spread of Imperial influence. Although environmental history was growing rapidly after , it only reached empire studies in the s. He argues that imperial forestry movement in India around included government reservations, new methods of fire protection, and attention to revenue-producing forest management. The result eased the fight between romantic preservationists and laissez-faire businessmen, thus giving the compromise from which modern environmentalism emerged. In recent years numerous scholars cited by James Beattie have examined the environmental impact of the Empire.

The efficient use of rivers through dams and irrigation projects was an expensive but important method of raising agricultural productivity. Searching for more efficient ways of using natural resources, the British moved flora, fauna and commodities around the world, sometimes resulting in ecological disruption and radical environmental change. Imperialism also stimulated more modern attitudes toward nature and subsidized botany and agricultural research. Since the s, historians have tended to concentrated on specific countries or regions. The American Lawrence H. Gipson — won the Pulitzer Prize for his monumental coverage in 15 volumes of "The British Empire Before the American Revolution", published — In recent decades numerous scholars have tried their hand at one volume surveys including T.

Mercantilism, Diplomacy and the Colonies Obviously from their titles a number of writers have been inspired by the famous The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 6 vols — by Edward Gibbon. They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of Rome. David McIntyre, The commonwealth of nations: Origins and impact, — University of Minnesota Press, provides comprehensive coverage giving London's perspective on political and constitutional relations with each possession.

Ireland, in some ways the first acquisition the British Empire, has generated a very large popular and scholarly literature. Until the late 20th century, historians of Australia used an Imperial framework, arguing that Australia emerged from a transfer of people, institutions, and culture from Britain. It portrayed the first governors as "Lilliputian sovereigns". The historians been traced the arrival of limited self-government, with regional parliaments and responsible ministers, followed by Federation in and eventually full national autonomy.

This was a Whiggish story of successful growth into a modern nation. That interpretation has been largely abandoned by recent scholars. The process of settlement is now regarded as a violent invasion of a rich and subtle indigenous culture, the colonists' material practices as destructive of a fragile environment, their aesthetic response to it blinkered and prejudiced, the cultivation of some British forms timid and unresponsive. Many other historians followed his path, with the six volume History of Australia by Manning Clark published —87 telling the story of "epic tragedy":.

Since the s a " history war " has been fought in Australia by scholars and politicians. Interest in the study of Australian history has plunged, and some schools and universities have sharply cut it back. Historians have used the founding of Australia to mark the beginning of the Second British Empire. Michael Roe argues that the founding of Australia supports the theory of Vincent T.

New Continents and Changing Values that a goal of the second British empire was to open up new commerce in the Far East and Pacific. However, London emphasized Australia's purpose as a penal colony, and the East India Company was hostile to potential commercial rivals. Nevertheless, says Roe, the founders of Australia showed a keen interest in whaling, sealing, sheep raising, mining and other opportunities for trade.

In the long run, he says, commerce was the main stimulus for colonization. Canadian historian Carl Berger argues that an influential section of English Canadians embraced an ideology of imperialism as a way to enhance Canada's own power position in the international system, as well as for more traditional reasons of Anglophillia.

Berger identified Canadian imperialism as a distinct ideology, rival to anti-imperial Canadian nationalism or pro-American continentalism , the other nationalisms in Canada. For the French Canadians, the chief debate among historians involves the conquest and the incorporation into the British Empire in For example, it enabled Quebec to avoid the French Revolution that tore France apart in the s.

Another example is that it integrated the economy into the larger and faster growing British economy, as opposed to the sluggish French economy. The optimistic school attributes the backwardness of the Quebec economy to deeply ingrained conservatism and aversion to entrepreneurship. In recent decades there have been four main schools of historiography in how historians study India: Cambridge, Nationalist, Marxist, and subaltern.

The once common "Orientalist" approach, with its image of a sensuous, inscrutable, and wholly spiritual India, has died out in serious scholarship. Washbrook, [] downplays ideology. The Nationalist school has focused on Congress, Gandhi, Nehru and high level politics. It highlighted the Mutiny of as a war of liberation, and Gandhi's 'Quit India' begun in , as defining historical events. This school of historiography has received criticism for Elitism.

The Marxists have focused on studies of economic development, landownership, and class conflict in precolonial India and of deindustrialisation during the colonial period. The Marxists portrayed Gandhi's movement as a device of the bourgeois elite to harness popular, potentially revolutionary forces for its own ends. Again, the Marxists are accused of being "too much" ideologically influenced. The "subaltern school", was begun in the s by Ranajit Guha and Gyan Prakash.

It focuses on the colonial era before and typically emphasises caste and downplays class, to the annoyance of the Marxist school. More recently, Hindu nationalists have created a version of history to support their demands for "Hindutva" "Hinduness" in Indian society. This school of thought is still in the process of development. Eck in her India: A Sacred Geography argues that the idea of India dates to a much earlier time than the British or the Mughals and it wasn't just a cluster of regional identities and it wasn't ethnic or racial. Debate continues about the economic impact of British imperialism on India.

The issue was actually raised by conservative British politician Edmund Burke who in the s vehemently attacked the East India Company, claiming that Warren Hastings and other top officials had ruined the Indian economy and society. Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray continues this line of attack, saying the new economy brought by the British in the 18th century was a form of "plunder" and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of Mughal India.

Ray accuses the British of depleting the food and money stocks and imposing high taxes that helped cause the terrible famine of , which killed a third of the people of Bengal. Rejecting the Indian nationalist account of the British as alien aggressors, seizing power by brute force and impoverishing all of India, British historian P.

Marshall argues that the British were not in full control but instead were players in what was primarily an Indian play and in which their rise to power depended upon excellent cooperation with Indian elites. Marshall admits that much of his interpretation is still rejected by many historians. Marshall argues the British takeover did not make any sharp break with the past. The British largely delegated control to regional Mughal rulers and sustained a generally prosperous economy for the rest of the 18th century.

Marshall notes the British went into partnership with Indian bankers and raised revenue through local tax administrators and kept the old Mughal rates of taxation. Professor Ray agrees that the East India Company inherited an onerous taxation system that took one-third of the produce of Indian cultivators. The first historical studies appeared in the s, and followed one of four approaches. The territorial narrative was typically written by a veteran soldier or civil servant who gave heavy emphasis to what he had seen.

The "apologia" were essays designed to justify British policies. Thirdly, popularizers tried to reach a large audience, and finally compendia appeared designed to combine academic and official credentials. Professional scholarship appeared around , and began with the study of business operations, typically using government documents and unpublished archives.

The economic approach was widely practiced in the s, primarily to provide descriptions of the changes underway in the previous half-century. The Slave Trade and the Scramble The American historian William L. Langer wrote The Diplomacy of Imperialism: The Second World War diverted most scholars to wartime projects and accounted for a pause in scholarship during the s.

By the s, many African students were studying in British universities, and they produced a demand for new scholarship, and started themselves to supply it as well. Oxford University became the main center for African studies, with activity as well at Cambridge, and the London School of Economics. The perspective from British government policy-makers or from international business operations, slowly gave way to a new interest in the activities of the natives, especially in a nationalistic movements and the growing demand for independence.

The major breakthrough came from Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher , especially with their studies of the impact of free trade on Africa. The historiography of South Africa has been one of the most contentious areas of the British Empire, involving a three-way division of sharply differing interpretations among the British, the Boers, and the black African historians.

After many years of conflict and warfare, the British took control of South Africa and historians began conciliatory effort to bring the two sides together in a shared history. An influential large-scale effort was made by George McCall Theal , who wrote many books as school teacher and as the official historian, such as History and Ethnography of Africa South of the Zambesi 11 vol, — In the s, historians using missionary sources started presenting the Coloured and African viewpoints, as in W.

Macmillan, Bantu, Boer and Briton: Modern research standards were introduced by Eric A. Walker — , who moved from a professorship at the University of Cape Town to become the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, where he trained a generation of graduate students. The dominant approach in recent decades is to emphasize the roots of the liberation movement. By the s, historians were exploring comparative race relations in South Africa and the United States from the late 19th century to the late 20th century.

Opposition to imperialism and demands for self-rule emerged across the empire; in all but one case the British authorities suppressed revolts. However, in the s, under the leadership of Benjamin Franklin , George Washington and Thomas Jefferson , it came to an armed revolt in the 13 American colonies, the American Revolutionary War.

With military and financial help from France and others, the 13 became the first British colonies to secure their independence in the name of American nationalism. There is a large literature on the Indian Rebellion of , which saw a very large scale revolt in India, involving the mutiny of many native troops.

It was suppressed by the British Army after much bloodshed. The Indians organised under Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and finally achieved independence in They wanted one India but the Muslims were organized by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and created their own nation, Pakistan , in a process that still is heatedly debated by scholars.

Author's Response

Millions died and millions more were displaced as the conflicting memories and grievances still shape subcontinent tensions, as Jisha Menon argues. Historians of the empire have recently paid close attention to 20th-century native voices in many colonies who demanded independence. Kenya saw severe violence on both sides. For example, the radical nationalist Kwame Nkrumah in led Ghana to become Britain's first African colony to gain independence, and others quickly followed. At an intellectual level, anti-imperialism appealed strongly to Marxists and liberals across the world.

Both groups were strongly influenced by British writer John A. Hobson in his Imperialism: Historians Peter Duignan and Lewis H. Gann argue that Hobson had an enormous influence in the early 20th century that caused widespread distrust of imperialism:. British historians of the Second World War have not emphasized the critical role played by the Empire in terms of money, manpower and imports of food and raw materials. As Ashley Jackson has argued," The story of the British Empire's war, therefore, is one of Imperial success in contributing toward Allied victory on the one hand, and egregious Imperial failure on the other, as Britain struggled to protect people and defeat them, and failed to win the loyalty of colonial subjects.

In addition, the colonies mobilized over , uniformed personnel who serve primarily inside Africa. Historians continue to debate when the Empire reached its peak. At one end, the insecurities of the s and s are mentioned, especially the industrial rise of the United States and Germany. The Second Boer War in South Africa, angered an influential element of Liberal thought in England, and deprived imperialism of much moral support.

Most historians agree that by , at the end of the First World War, permanent long-term decline was inevitable. The dominions largely had freed themselves and began their own foreign and military policies.

Worldwide investments had been cashed in to pay for the war, and the British economy was in the doldrums after A new spirit of nationalism appeared in many of the colonies, most dramatically in India. All historians agree that by the Second World War , Britain was no longer a superpower, and it was financially near bankruptcy. With the Suez fiasco of , the profound weaknesses were apparent to all and rapid decolonization was inevitable.

The chronology and main features of decolonization of the British Empire have been studied at length. By far the greatest attention has been given to the situation in India in , with far less attention to other colonies in Asia and Africa. Of course most of the scholarly attention focuses on newly independent nations no longer ruled by Britain. Historians also disagree regarding a degree of involvement in the domestic British society and economy. Did Britons much care about decolonization, and did it make much difference to them?

Bailkin points out that one view is that the domestic dimension was of minor importance, and most Britons paid little attention. On the other hand, most social historians argue the contrary. They say the values and beliefs inside Britain about the overseas empire helped shape policy; the decolonization process proved psychologically wrenching to many people living in Britain, particularly migrants, and those with family experience with overseas civil service, business, or missionary activity. Bailkin says that decolonization was often taken personally, and had a major policy impact in terms of the policies of the British welfare state.

She shows how some West Indian migrants were repatriated; idealists volunteered to help the new nations; a wave of overseas students came to British universities; and polygamous relationships were invalidated. Meanwhile, she says, the new welfare state was in part shaped by British colonial practices, especially regarding mental health and child care.

The focus of attention of historians has shifted over time. Phillip Buckner reports that on a bygone era of graduate education in Britain when the Empire was. By the s the Empire was no no longer seen as an unmitigated blessing for its subjects overseas and the emphasis of the newer studies was an attempt to reassess British policy-making from a more critical perspective. Nonetheless, mainstream imperial history still focused on policy-making at the imperial centre with considerable emphasis on relations between Britain and its colonies of settlement overseas and the emergence of modern Commonwealth.

Ronald Hyam argues that the historiography of the British Empire reached a state of severe crisis:. The early s marked the end of an era The old conceptual unities as they had been worked out in the previous half-century now collapsed, particularly under the pressure of the inexorable advance of area studies. Hyam goes on to state that by the 21st century new themes had emerged including "post—colonial theory, globalisation, sex and gender issues, the cultural imperative, and the linguistic turn. The studies of policy-making in London and the settlement colonies like Canada and Australia are now rare.

Newer concerns deal with the natives, [4] and give much more attention to native leaders such as Gandhi. Stockwell, The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives Firstly, they have suggested that the British empire was a cultural project as well as a set of political and economic relationships. As a result, these historians have stressed the ways in which empire building shaped the cultures of both colonized peoples and Britons themselves. In particular they have shown the ways in which British imperialism rested upon ideas about cultural difference and in turn how British colonialism reshaped understandings of race and gender in both the colonies and at home in Britain.

Mrinalini Sinha's Colonial Masculinity showed how supposed British manliness and ideas about the effeminacy of some Indians influenced colonial policy and Indian nationalist thought. The second feature that defines the new imperial history is its examination of the links and flows that connected different parts of the empire together. At first scholars looked at the empire's impact on domestic Britain, particularly in terms of everyday experiences.

More recently, attention has been paid to the material, emotional, and financial links among the different regions. Sinha suggested that these linkages were part of an "imperial social formation", an uneven but integrative set of arguments, ideas and institutions that connected Britain to its colonies.

Lester's Imperial Networks reconstructed some of the debates and policies that linked Britain and South Africa during the 19th century. These webs were made up of the flows of ideas, books, arguments, money, and people that not only moved between London and Britain's colonies, but also moved directly from colony to colony, from places like India to New Zealand. The major multi-volume multi-author coverage of the history of the British Empire is the Oxford History of the British Empire — , five-volume set, plus a companion series.

Max Beloff , reviewing the first two volumes in History Today , praised them for their readability and was pleased that his worry that they would be too anti-imperialist had not been realised. Dubow also felt that some of the authors had tended "to 'play safe', awed perhaps by the monumental nature of the enterprise".

Madhavi Kale of Bryn Mawr College , writing in Social History , also felt that the history took a traditional approach to the historiography of the empire and placed the English, and to a lesser extent the Scottish, Irish and Welsh at the centre of the account, rather than the subject peoples of the empire. Kale summed up her review of volumes III-V of the history by saying it represented "a disturbingly revisionist project that seeks to neutralize A major unexpected development came after with a flood of fresh and innovative books and articles from scholars trained in non-British perspectives.

Many had studied Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and the dominions. The new perspective strengthen the field rather than destroying it. Further imaginative approaches, which occasioned sharp debates, came from literary scholars especially Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha , as well as anthropologists, feminists, [] and other newcomers. Longtime experts suddenly confronted the strange new scholarship with theoretical perspectives such as post-structuralism and post-modernism.

The colonial empire was becoming "postcolonial. Turning away from most political, economic, and diplomatic themes historians recently have looked at the intellectual and cultural impact of the Empire on prison itself. Ideologically, Britons promoted the Empire with appeals to the ideals of political and legal liberty. Historians have always commented on the paradox of the dichotomy of freedom and coercion inside the Empire, of modernity and tradition. Sir John Seeley, for example, pondered in Historian Douglas Peers emphasizes that an idealized knowledge of the Empire permeated popular and elite thought in Britain during the 19th century:.

Politicians at the time and historians ever since have explored whether the Empire was too expensive for the British budget. Joseph Chamberlain thought so but he had little success at the Imperial Conference of asking overseas partners to increase their contribution. Canada and Australia spoke of funding a warship—the Canadian Senate voted it down in In the Porter—MacKenzie debate the historiographical issue was the impact of the Imperial experience on British society and thinking. Imperialism was handled by elites.

In the highly heterogeneous British society, "imperialism did not have to have impact greatly on British society and culture. MacKenzie countered that there is a great deal of scattered evidence to show an important impact. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article has multiple issues.

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Please help by spinning off or relocating any relevant information, and removing excessive detail that may be against Wikipedia's inclusion policy. Thirteen Colonies and American Revolution. The Imperialism of Free Trade. Economic history of India. The Oxford History of the British Empire. Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj. Whatever Happened to the British Empire? The Founding of the Second British Empire, — Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History. The Global Expansion of Britain pp.

The Expansion of Britain, — The Global Expansion of Britain p. The Global Expansion of Britain, p.

Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism: Scandinavian Economic History Review. Damsgaard Hansen, European Economic History: Journal of Early American History 2 1 Nester, The Great Frontier War: Stout, The Royal Navy in America, — The Genesis of the American Mind pp. Perspectives on Global Power and Wealth. Free Trade and Its Reception — The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. The Old Colonial System, — Shade, "Lawrence Henry Gipson's Empire: Trends, Interpretations and Resources pp. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, vol 2.

American Historians in the Context of Empire". Journal of American History.

Greater Britain and the imperial legacy of the American Revolution". Charls Lee, This Sceptred Isle: The First British Empire — v. The Second British Empire: In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century. A Very Short Introduction. Balfour and the British Empire: The British Imperial Experience from to the Present p. Vertical and Horizontal Dimensions of British Imperialism". Hale, The Great Illusion, — pp. The Semantics of 'Imperialism ' ". Journal of the Historical Society. Cain, "Capitalism, Aristocracy and Empire: Hobson and Alfred Zimmern Reconsidered". Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The official mind of imperialism Roger Louis, Imperialism p. Hale, The Great Illusion: The continuing imperialism of free trade". Canadian manufacturing and the national policy, — The development of Economic and Social Policies , p. Cain, and Anthony G.

Thematische Klassifikation

Innovation and Expansion — Lynn, "Review of Cain, P. Settler identity and biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand". Imperial Benevolence and Its Legacies Engerman, eds, British capitalism and Caribbean slavery: British Capitalism and British Slavery". History and Theory British Slavery in the Era of Abolition The Eighteenth Century pp — The Eighteenth Century , pp.

A Comment on the Williams Thesis". Business History Review 46 04 Public Health in the British Empire: Empire, Panic and the Business of Disease". Leprosy and empire, — Institutionalizing Medical Research in the Periphery". For an empire-wide view see Norman Etherington, ed. Stanford University Press, ch 1. British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, — Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, — Woodberry, "The missionary roots of liberal democracy" , American Political Science Review 2 Palmer and Stanley M.

Livingstone College, London, —". Social History of Medicine. Envisioning female agency in the early nineteenth-century British Empire". Journal of British Studies 45 2 History of Education 34 3 Africa and the rest of the colonial empire". History of Education 34 4 Journal of World History ; 11 2: Fisher, "Indirect rule in the British Empire: The foundations of the residency system in India — ". Modern Asian Studies 18 3 The Review of Economics and Statistics 92 4 pp.

Victorian Titan p. Journal of Military History 73 3 MacKenzie, The empire of nature: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums , and the essays collected in Visual Sense: The Cultural Reader , Sensible Objects: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity One of the central obsessions that animated Afterimage was this: That is, how might we think past poststructuralist insights so that we do not merely reproduce them? A shift away from colonial discourse analysis, for example, makes it worthwhile, perhaps even necessary, to revisit archives that might have seemed familiar.

In Afterimage the strand of phenomenology that runs through Maurice Merleau-Ponty rather than Martin Heidegger became the testing ground for making sense of the political formation of aesthetic experiences. I turned to Merleau-Ponty because perception, sensation, and embodiment rather than ontology, being, and unconcealment were the primary issues that arose from my research in an archive that contained a preponderance of images of the racialized body, strange hybrid genres that seemed specific to the political force field of colonialism, and textual accounts of the body inundated with sensory stimuli upon visiting the colony such that making sense of the world without the naturalizing benefits of habit became the underlying concern for these narratives.

Afterimage necessarily sticks to the Indian case, but it was my hope that its analyses might prove themselves to be starting points for further questions to be asked in other historical and geographical contexts, and ideally for those questions that Afterimage itself does not pose. To that extent, writing Afterimage felt like a thought experiment whose elisions and speculations were also invitations. I am pleased to see that Manfredi reads Afterimage as precisely such an invitation.

Skip to main content. Photography in Nineteenth-Century India. Ms Carla Manfredi Queen's University. Ms Carla Manfredi, review of Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India , review no. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2, 1, , 87— Back to 2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Back to 3 January Author's Response Zahid Chaudhary. However, I also get the impression that I am likely to find it a difficult book to read, packed with unfamiliar words or with words used in unfamiliar ways.

There's no excuse for such vocabulary, which I suspect often disguises imprecise thought and at best is needlessly pretentious. Unfamiliar, or technical, words are only necessary when applied to the technology and techniques of photography, not its criticism. Criticism can be addressed to all kinds of audiences, and if all criticism aimed to eschew technical terms then it would be a sorry affair indeed.

After all, where does one draw the line? Some vocabulary may be unfamiliar to you, Anthony, but it may not be unfamiliar to others.

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