As with any area of scholarship, there is much slippage in the terminology of transnational histories. Scholars inflect the terms ‘global history’, ‘world history’ and ‘postcolonial history’ differently. Yet even if these terms inevitably lack precision and completely consensual meaning, there are differences to be descried in their general usage – at least, to my mind, between the terms ‘world history’ and ‘postcolonial history’, particularly the kind of world history most associated with the Journal of World History and the World History Association. My task here is to posit some of the characteristics and contributions of postcolonial histories as a transnational approach, and to this end to focus on Catherine Hall’s monograph Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 published by Polity Press and the University of Chicago Press in 2002.

Let me begin with some thoughts about what characterises postcolonial histories.

I would suggest that postcolonial approaches to transnational history are distinguished by:

It is readily apparent that no one work in postcolonial history totally fulfills any such list of characteristics – whether it’s my list or a list that another scholar might compile. Yet there is value, I think, in considering how a significant, substantial and influential work such as Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects corresponds to such a set of characteristics. Arguably, Civilising Subjects bears evidence of all six of the characteristics of postcolonialism I have listed, but it demonstrates some much more than others. The ways in which it exemplifies some fully, and others only minimally, become telling about both the book and the field of postcolonialism.

The great strengths, in postcolonial terms, of Hall’s magnum opus include her concern with the specificities and contingencies of historical change; her compelling insistence on the interconstitutive connections between colony and metropole; her interest in the historical construction of race and its connections to gender and class; and perhaps above all, her political engagement with the operation of imperialism and colonialism and their legacies. The fact that, despite its heft and the time it took to produce, this is far from a universalist history is signaled immediately by Hall’s disarming introduction, the first sentence: ‘The origins of this book lie in my own history’^[1] – and this contrast with a universalist approach is despite her discussion of the influence of humanist universalism on her intellectual development. By making clear the ways in which her own life shaped the project, and the questions she asks, Hall shows both her belief in the subjective nature of history writing, and the political commitments that underscore the book. The history of her family, and her own life, as well as nineteenth-century British politics and culture have been shaped by the interconstitution of the British midlands and Jamaica, in specific ways which she fully delineates.

In his review of the book, published six months before his death, Edward Said makes plain its contemporary political importance. Referring to the Baptist missionaries at the heart of Hall’s study, Said closes his review with the sobering observation: ‘George Bush’s main constituency, as he sets out first to punish and then to remake the world with American power, are seventy million evangelical and fundamentalist American Christians, many of whom are Southern Baptists’.^[2] Said argues that since the 1960s and 1970s, there has been a disturbing swing in academic and intellectual views of empire, away from the days and views of the anti-Vietnam war movement and support for the anti-colonial nationalists of Asia and Africa. He charts a groundswell of intellectual reaction in the 1980s and 1990s up to the time of his writing, condemning writers from V. S. Naipaul to Niall Ferguson for a revisionist approach that has found redeeming features in the histories of the European empires and, for some at least, has come to consider current American imperialism as an enlightened global force. Passionately advocating a postcolonial approach that interrogates the ‘intertwined histories’ of the two sides of the imperial divide, Said called for continuing recognition of the enormous and ongoing legacies of imperialism – the as-yet continuing consequences of slavery and the other depredations of imperial regimes both economic and moral. ‘[T]he legacy of empire’, Said says, ‘sits like a menacing and metastasising cancer just beneath the skin of our contemporary lives’.^[3]

Not surprisingly, then, Said finds much value in Hall’s Civilising Subjects, lauding her personal investment in her topic, and her finely detailed account of the changing nature of British imperialism as seen through the actions and words of her protagonists, particularly the shift from the paternalist idealism of the Baptist missionaries in the post-emancipation era of the 1830s and 1840s, to the articulated racism of the 1850s and 1860s. Said admired above all Hall’s preparedness, while demonstrating the contingent and evolving nature of imperialism, to show that the empire was fundamentally about the subordination of the colonised to the interests of their English rulers.

One of the historians whom Said contrasts with Hall is David Cannadine. I do not wish to discuss Ornamentalism at great length because it has been widely reviewed and discussed in recent years, but for the very same reason I do not want to pass it over. Cannadine sees postcolonialism and the critique of Orientalism as wrongheaded in their emphasis on the imperial construction of racial difference and otherness.^[4] Despite his avowed support for the project of putting ‘the history of Britain back into the history of empire, and the history of the empire back into the history of Britain’,^[5] he advances the former more than the latter process. He sees the empire as having been cast in the mould of British class hierarchy – and thus as a social extension of the British metropole, built more on affinities than on difference. Further, he argues that the empire was ‘based more on class than on colour’^[6] and was run on collaboration between local elites and British imperial rulers. While he is correct to remind us of such collaboration, several commentators have suggested that the book carries a whiff of nostalgia for empire, implying that its success is a signal of the political shift to which Said pointed. Indeed, it would seem that the book’s success reflects the resistance to postcolonialism that is widespread in contemporary British and British Empire historiography. It must also be said that the book’s success is in good part a product of its considerable merits: its gracious prose, compelling descriptions of the elaborate structures and ceremonies that upheld imperial rule, and its geographical breadth.

In a context of resistance to postcolonial work on race, and of a lack of interest in the perspectives of the colonised, Hall’s book stands out for its political commitment to drawing attention to the continuing negative consequences of imperialism and colonialism, and thus, I think, exemplifies the politics inherent to postcolonialism. Antoinette Burton has laid out the political and intellectual stakes in British historiography’s resistance to postcolonialism, specifically to the argument that Britain itself was shaped by the Empire:

Not surprisingly, in her review of Hall’s book in a forum in Victorian Studies, Burton has pointed to its importance in undermining the hegemonic fiction of Britain’s separation from empire; she calls it ‘a model of British history in a genuinely transnational frame’.^[8]

Equally unsurprisingly, not least because Hall chose to reprint Burton’s essay that lays out the political stakes of British historians’ investment in the nation in her Cultures of Empire reader, Hall agrees in her response to Burton that challenging the national frame was a central goal of the book. ‘One of my imperatives in Civilising Subjects’, Hall notes, ‘was to demonstrate the ways in which the well-established narrative of British history, the national history, the one taught in schools and universities, needs to be rethought through the frame of empire’.^[9] Hall goes on to agree with Burton that ‘the debate in Britain over the impact of empire is extremely contentious and the stakes are high’. Interestingly, she continues ‘Indeed, I have come to think of these debates as Britain’s version of “the history wars” – the controversies over interpretations of colonial history that have mobilized historians in hostile camps in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and elsewhere’.^[10] It is hardly worth adding that the work of those who consider themselves global or world historians is far less likely to provoke such political debate in Britain or elsewhere, for the reason that most of it does not engage with contemporary political issues – certainly not issues of race relations and the moral and political questions of the legacies of colonialism.

Despite her central concern with demonstrating the interconnections between Jamaica and Birmingham, Hall does not address broader imperial connections or connections between Jamaica and other colonies beyond Edward John Eyre’s career in Australia and New Zealand. Edward Said notes this with the comment that Hall ‘mystifyingly doesn’t draw’ on the work of the Subaltern Studies group^[11] – and by implication suggests that Hall’s work would have been enriched both by the theoretical insights of Subaltern Studies and a comparative consideration of the interconstitution of India and the metropole in the same period.

It might be suggested that, because of the near absence of a broader imperial view in Hall’s book, it does not fully reflect what some scholars of postcolonialism have come to consider an important revision of the image of empire as centre and periphery, the old image of a spoked wheel. Tony Ballantyne has suggested the far better metaphor of a spider web, a metaphor that forces us to keep in mind the constant traffic between and interconstitution of multiple imperial sites, especially between colonies.^[12] (I should add that Hall refers to Ballantyne’s web metaphor in the Victorian Studies forum on her book.)^[13] Of course, a reasonable response is that Hall’s interest lies in the relationship between Britain and Jamaica, and therefore she had no empirical reason, beyond Eyre’s career, to look at other colonial sites.

While this absence of a broader imperial context might be considered a shortcoming of the book, it also signals, I think, one of the characteristics of postcolonial history – which is that while postcolonialism necessarily means a transnational or transimperial view of history, it does not mean a global or universal view. Traditional world history practitioners claim a global framework, and a less traditional world historian like C. A. Bayly in his The Birth of the Modern World also takes the planet as his canvas. Importantly, postcolonial history is not big history or macro history, despite the global significance of its concern with imperialism and colonialism. Postcolonial histories use specific transnational or imperial or transcolonial frameworks, to demonstrate interconstitutive histories with particular substance and detail.

For the purposes of this anthology, it is worth briefly considering other examples of such a specifically postcolonial approach – that is, an approach framed both chronologically and geographically, and based solidly on archival sources – to transnational history. One study that has revealed important constitutive dynamics of gender and race stretching between the imperial metropole and the white-settler dominion of Australia is Fiona Paisley’s book on privileged Australian feminists’ activism on the status of Aboriginal people, especially Aboriginal women, in the 1920s and 1930s.^[14] Paisley’s study presents a detailed analysis of what literary critic Simon Gikandi has termed ‘the mutual imbrication of both the colonizer and the colonized in the making of modern social and cultural formations’.^[15] Using postcolonial perspectives in her analysis of race relations within Australia as colonialism, Paisley underscores the importance of white Australian feminists’ international activism. She examines their strategic use of London as an imperial staging ground for feminist critiques of Australian policy on Aborigines, and their deployment of internationalism and the specific humanitarian principles laid out by the League of Nations to focus on Australian governments’ failure to deal adequately with the plight of Aboriginal people.

Paisley argues that white Australian feminists’ concern with their own citizenship status and their maternalism merged with humanitarian and internationalist impulses in the interwar decades in a historically significant episode of activism on behalf of Aboriginal people. As she shows, interwar feminists’ critiques of prevailing assimilationist policies, especially the policy of separating Aboriginal children from their mothers in order to raise them in white society, prefigured the recent controversy in Australia over the legacies of forced child removal, and the debates over how to make amends to Aboriginal people – debates that provoked Australia’s current Prime Minister John Howard to decry what he labelled derisively ‘black armband history’. Like Hall, Paisley is very conscious of the current political significance of her historical work. She points out that the feminists who mounted this critique of racial policy in the 1920s and 1930s were a small but vociferous group, who used the platforms of mainstream Australian feminist organisations with sizeable memberships to speak at local, national and international levels. They became witnesses for Aboriginal reform at three major inquiries: a Royal Commission on the Constitution, a federal government conference on Aboriginal welfare, and a Royal Commission on the status of Aborigines in Western Australia. Their other important victory was the success they had drawing Australian and metropolitan media attention to the deplorable status of Aboriginal people.

Paisley most directly invokes postcolonial theory in her conclusion, where she points out the limitations to these white feminists’ racial analysis, and the ways in which they were the products of their own times, contemporary racial assumptions, and their positioning within Australian structures of colonialism. There she acknowledges that rather than enabling Aboriginal people to speak for themselves, white feminists assumed the right to speak for them and thus effectively contributed to their silencing. Paisley’s book exemplifies what I see as several of the key aspects of postcolonial history. It has a transnational focus central to its story: white Australian feminists needed London, the international stage and their own status as modern ‘citizens of the world’ to conduct their political work. At the same time, Paisley’s focus is very much on developments within Australia’s shores, the impact of the feminists’ activism, and multiple aspects of the political and cultural context. Her study is chronologically focused, based solidly in archival records and contemporary print materials, and fully cognizant of the current political significance of its findings. Constructions of race and gender, shaped by Australian colonialism, are integral to her subject matter.

While Paisley’s work illuminates white-settler colonialism through an analysis of political activism and travel between Australia and the metropole, other postcolonial histories examine transnational dynamics that are rather less tangible. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s study of the social practice of adda in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Calcutta focuses on that particular colonial and post-independence city, but his analysis foregrounds the transnational dynamics of modernisation and urbanisation, and the transnational quest to find both home and subjectivity within the turbulence of modernity. Chakrabarty defines adda as a cultural practice of idle and wide-ranging conversation among groups that met regularly, often tied to specific urban sites and settings, and usually consisting exclusively of men. He shows adda’s roots in earlier Bengali village life and traditions, yet demonstrates in clear and specific ways its emergence as a cultural practice of modernity. The earliest recorded instances of what became this idiosyncratically Bengali practice (despite its similarity to social practices in other places, such as Cairo) are set in the 1820s, suggesting the rise of the practice, along with that of the Bengali capital itself, under British colonialism. Different versions of the practice occurred through the nineteenth century, some – better known as majlish – being associated with wealth and the patronage of a particular elite man. Addas, by contrast, at first carried innuendos of marginal groups who indulged in drugs, but increasingly came to signify democratic gatherings where each member paid for his own refreshments and class distinctions were supposedly irrelevant to the exchange of ideas.

The social practice of addas grew along with the expansion of the middle class and education, becoming associated with high school and university groups of young men. They reached their full flowering, Chakrabarty suggests, in the early twentieth century, the period of late colonialism when nationalist politics meshed with a high period of Bengali literary production and publishing. These conversational groups were products of urban modernity in that they were held not only in private homes, but in public spaces such as teashops, coffee houses and public parks. The open access to such spaces combined with the philosophy of egalitarianism within addas to nurture democratisation, along with radical and nationalist politics and the growth of literary culture. Despite their Bengali particularity, addas forged an intellectual culture linked to cosmopolitanism, and thus helped to create a modern sense of global citizenship – a linking of global culture to local practice.

Chakrabarty acknowledges, and to some extent analyses, the exclusion of women from addas. A few women were admitted to some groups by the middle decades of the twentieth century, but their late admission and their sparsity only highlight the fact of this being a homosocial practice that privileged men in their relations to one another as well as in their access to urban spaces and the worlds of literature and politics. In this sexual exclusion addas were representative of much else in global modernity, even as they were at times the site of debate in Bengal about gender divisions and definitions. Chakrabarty’s history and analysis of this ethnically and locally specific practice thus demonstrates the interconnections among urbanisation, capitalism, education, print culture, masculine homosocial culture, and global consciousness under the aegis of colonial modernity. His narrative of a particular social practice based especially in one city is thus a transnational history, illustrating the focus of a postcolonial approach on combined economic and cultural analysis, on the operations of discourse and cultural practice, and, again, on hierarchies of gender and class.^[16] Both Paisley and Chakrabarty give evidence of being aware of wider imperial contexts and significance of their work, yet the projects are both bounded in specific geographic and temporal ways, as well as being tied to archival and contemporary print sources. Postcolonial histories then can be seen as not global, even as they address issues of global import – not least, of course, the larger project of provincialising Europe, to use Chakrabarty’s phrase.

Hall’s interests lie far more in historical contingency and in the developments and legacies of nineteenth-century politics and culture than they do in theory, postcolonial or otherwise. It is not the case that she is theoretically unaware, yet the theory is worn lightly and its elaboration or revision is not a particular goal of the book. This allows reviewers to make comments such as Anthony Pagden’s quip that ‘Despite some initial obeisance to the household deities of Post-Colonial and Subaltern Studies, Civilising Subjects is a work of traditional social history’.^[17] The density of detail in Hall’s book, as well as the cast of characters that emerges, and the mix of religious, political and economic history, are reasons why more than one reviewer has likened Civilising Subjects to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, including no less a commentator than Roy Porter. Porter gave Hall’s book the following very high praise: Civilising Subjects ‘does for colonial history what E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class did for social history’.^[18] I cannot help but wonder, however, whether some scholars of colonialism and imperialism had not thought that the field of colonial studies had already been launched well before the publication of Civilising Subjects, and that Porter’s comment is thus somewhat surprising.

Here again the boundedness of Hall’s project reflects distinct features of postcolonialism as compared with other approaches to transnational history. Like The Making of the English Working Class, Civilising Subjects is closely tied to its archival sources and their parameters, for all of its significance. Hall’s project’s solid archival foundations, what Pagden identifies as the characteristics of traditional social history, form a basis for a detailed and nuanced analysis of the changing interconnections between religious thought, the legal and material conditions of black Jamaicans, racial thinking, and gendered and raced notions of British citizenship. The book reflects the attachment of most postcolonial historians to the archives, and the central place of narrative in their work. Like other postcolonial scholars, Hall’s questions are at once cultural, political and economic – a contrast to the dominant economic approach of many who identify themselves as world historians, as is, probably needless to say, her fine-grained analysis of historically evolving ideologies of masculinity.

To return to the overarching question of postcolonialism as a specific approach to transnational histories: obviously, scholars influenced by postcolonialism are far from being the only transnational historians who bring a critical or materialist political approach to their work. Adherents to schools of thought such as World Systems Theory include those motivated by the desire to reveal the historical roots of current global inequalities, the dependence of so-called Third World countries on the overdeveloped states, and the evolving historical role of capitalism in the creation of poverty, dependency and environmental ‘disasters’. Historians who find value in postcolonialism are distinguished not so much by politics of the left, but rather by their added concern to link political questions to historical specificities, and to contingency rather than large-scale narratives or social-scientific paradigms. Further, they typically are concerned with the relationship between culture and politics, as well as the ideological work performed by constructed categories of race, gender and sexuality.

It is important to note that there are historians who might be thought of as writing postcolonial transnational history but who eschew such a theoretical label. Barbara Bush’s study of connections between Britain, West Africa and South Africa in the interwar decades, specifically of British imperial attitudes and the development of anti-colonial nationalisms, bears hallmarks of postcolonial history. It is a bounded study concerned with historical specificities and change, that considers the power relations of imperialism as constituted through policy, cultural productions and material relations, and that examines colonial links between race and gender. Yet in her preface to the book Bush voices her worries about the ‘weaknesses of post-colonialism, particularly the high jargon and mystifying dense prose of much post-colonial writing’.^[19] Bush’s distancing of herself from postcolonialism is a reminder of how careful we must be in applying both labels and judgements. The legacies of Marxism, of course, continue to inflect various areas of history-writing, including histories of colonialism. While the fields of Subaltern Studies and postcolonialism bear such legacies, so too does much work in sub-Saharan African history. Yet historians in that field do not often espouse postcolonial theory, and are more likely to invoke cultural anthropology and Gramscian-derived theory on cultural hegemony. These areas of work are both connected and crosscut by lines of differentiation, necessitating careful distinctions. If some world historians share some of the materialist politics of postcolonialism, so too do other historians share much of its agenda while being wary of its theoretical roots, or preferring to align themselves with other schools.

Conversely, some world historians espouse the term ‘transnational history’ and see little if any difference between the fields. Moreover, there is evidence that the field of World History, represented by the Journal of World History, is becoming increasingly reflexive, and more inclined to question its own biases and exclusions. In the editorial manifesto published in the inaugural issue of the journal in 1990, Jerry H. Bentley outlined the field as one that ‘transcends national frontiers’ and studies the history of topics such as ‘population movements, economic fluctuations, climatic changes, transfers of technology, the spread of infectious and contagious diseases, imperial expansion, long-distance trade, and the spread of religious faiths, ideas, and ideals’.^[20] Despite the evidence of greater self-reflexivity and questioning within world history, it would seem that the field has for much of its organised life been driven by the demographic, economic, technological, and biological interests in Bentley’s original list. Cultural history, issues of gender and race, and even some of the more traditional concerns of class-driven social history, are still not equally represented in the field. Their prevalence in postcolonial history, by contrast, continues to be a distinguishing feature between these two variants of global or transnational history.

In my own latest project on the ways in which historiographical understanding of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been shaped by feminist scholarship, I constantly found myself returning to evidence of the mobility of imperial culture.^[21] Colonial rulers, colonised subjects, and specific vehicles of popular imperial culture circulated not only from the metropole, but to the metropole and between multiple imperial sites. Thus whether I was working on my chapter on the narratives of interracial sexual assault that were attached to crises of imperial rule in the latter nineteenth century and early twentieth century, or that on the connections between constructions of boyhood, masculinity and imperial wars, or that on the gendered politics of anti-colonial nationalisms, I kept seeing the ways in which events and narratives from one colonial site affected those in another. For my current work, then, a focus on the transnational is ineluctable. But whether we focus on the transnational as that which moved from colony to colony (or nation to nation), or that which belies constructed national boundaries by operating within their imagined parameters but not simply because of them, we must be clear about what questions we are asking, why we are asking them, and what are our own investments in them.

And it is here that Ania Loomba’s definition of postcolonialism is so relevant. Loomba points out, as have other critics, that colonialism is a continuing process that has survived declarations of political independence and nationhood. We need to be very clear that in many parts of the world ‘the inequities of colonial rule have not been erased’ and therefore ‘it is perhaps premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism’.^[22] Therefore, Loomba suggests, it is useful to see postcolonialism as ‘the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism’, or ‘a process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome’.^[23] Catherine Hall’s book stands out for its subjective honesty, and its clarity of personal investment and political purpose, qualities that I see as directly linked to its postcolonial transnational framework. At base, as Civilising Subjects exemplifies, postcolonial historical scholarship continues to be marked by the imperative to investigate the workings of colonialism in the past, and to expose their legacies for the present.