Chapter 8 The Imperial and World History Seminar

Origins

Between 1921 and 1938, the Seminar was convened by and synonymous with the first Rhodes chair, Arthur Percival Newton (1873–1942), a King’s graduate and lecturer in imperial history there since 1914.⁵ In fact initially Newton ran two postgraduate seminars: an ‘Introductory Course on Sources for Modern History’ – later retitled as ‘Preliminary Class’ – and, on Tuesdays, the ‘Seminar in Colonial History’.⁶ The latter rapidly established itself as the most important centre for training postgraduate students in British imperial history: the Cambridge historian of empire, Ronald Hyam, later conceded that Cambridge had ‘nothing to compare’ with Newton’s imperial history group at the time.⁷ Newton’s own work set a formidable agenda. Starting with The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans (1914) and The Empire and the Future (1916), he extended with huge chronological and geographical reach to pay attention to the ‘broad sweep of Imperial policy as seen from London’. He was also general editor of the Cambridge History of the British Empire and editor of the Longman series of ‘Imperial Studies’ which between 1927 and 1942 published nineteen volumes.

The 1921–2 session of the Seminar attracted up to eleven participants, mostly Newton’s postgraduate students. Initially, the numbers attending grew rapidly: to fifteen in 1922–3, then eighteen the following year and twenty-six in 1926–7.⁸ One early member was Eveline Martin (1894–1960). After studying history at Westfield College, Martin was supervised by Newton for her PhD dissertation, published as The British West African Settlements, 1750–1821: A Study in Local Administration (1927), the second volume in Newton’s Longman series. Her research subject exemplified Ronald Robinson’s claim that ‘Newton studied “areas” with his pupils’ even though he himself had a sense of the empire as an organic whole.⁹ Martin became university reader of African and imperial history in 1932, and subsequently taught at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Just a few decades after the partition of Africa, those associated with the Seminar were making a remarkable contribution to the pre-colonial, if not pre-imperial, history of the continent from the sixteenth century onwards, albeit with a focus on Europeans in Africa.¹⁰ Another earlier attendee was Richard Pares (1902–58), an Oxford graduate in literae humaniores who in the mid-1920s was briefly an assistant lecturer at University College London.¹¹ Pares would go to have an illustrious academic career which contributed to the advance of imperial history with War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (1936) and A West India Fortune (1950).

Of the eleven participants in the Seminar’s inaugural session, eight were women. Before 1927–8, women formed a majority in all but one year: a position that, as far as this author is aware, would not again be replicated during the rest of the twentieth century. One leading light here was Lilian Penson (1896–1963), who had transferred from Birkbeck College to University College to undertake doctoral studies co-supervised by Newton and A. F. Pollard (1869–1948). In 1921 she became one of the first, and possibly the first, of either sex to be awarded a PhD from the University of London. Penson’s thesis was published as The Colonial Agents of the British West Indies (1924), beginning a distinguished career that would include becoming chair of modern history at Bedford College and from 1948 to 1951 the first female vice-chancellor of the University of London.¹² The University had, of course, played a pioneering role in women’s higher education. Bedford College was founded as a dedicated women’s college in 1849, and in 1878 London became the first British university to admit women to degrees. Not long after, King’s College for Women opened. In 1923, the first year in which the college affiliation of those attending the Seminar is given, twelve of the fifteen attending were women: three from Bedford, four possibly from Imperial, with one unspecified and a further seven probably from King’s. It seems likely that the initially high number of women at the Seminar reflected both the wider London environment, and more specifically that at King’s, as well as possibly the impact of the war on male recruitment. By the mid-1930s the proportion of women to men had fallen to around one third. The overall attendance declined a little in the later decade, reaching only fourteen in several years, while the number of non-King’s students also dwindled.

From an early date, overseas, and especially Commonwealth, students were among the Seminar’s other attendees. Having been born in the Netherlands and raised in South Africa, the naturalized Afrikaner Cornelis de Kiewiet (1902–86) moved to London to undertake doctoral studies under Newton’s supervision. He participated in the Seminar in 1927, the same year he completed his thesis, subsequently published as British Colonial Policy and the South African Republics, 1848–1872 (1929): this was the third volume in Newton’s Longman series. Later, de Kiewiet served as President of Rochester University, President of the American Association of Universities and chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies, making a significant impact upon mid-twentieth-century academic policy in the USA, and indeed internationally.¹³ Another Commonwealth student was the Canadian, William Stewart MacNutt. The award of the Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire scholarship enabled him to study for an MA with Newton. In the 1950s he became an important figure in the Canadian historical profession, producing influential accounts of Loyalists in the Canadian Maritime Provinces.¹⁴ The first postgraduate student of colour to attend the Seminar may have been the Ceylonese/Sri Lankan, G. P. Tambayah in the academic year 1935–6. Educated at the Catholic St Joseph’s College, Colombo, he commenced an MA dissertation with Newton in January 1936. Thereafter, Tambayah appears to have entered Ceylonese public administration and received an MBE for his services as government agent in Ceylon’s Western Province in the Queen’s birthday honours in 1954, at which date the Queen was still head of state in Ceylon.¹⁵

Newton himself was visiting professor at the University of the Punjab and reader at the University of Calcutta in 1928–9. He also visited American and dominion universities under the auspices of both the Institute of International Education (est. 1919) and the Universities Bureau of Empire (est. 1913), the London-domiciled body that subsequently became the Association of Commonwealth Universities.¹⁶ In varied ways the Seminar was therefore at the heart of what Tamson Pietsch characterizes as an ‘expansive British academic community’ that spanned the globe, facilitated by the development of doctoral research and the interwar expansion of travelling scholarship schemes that encouraged the flow of foreign, and, especially, Commonwealth and colonial students to Britain.¹⁷

Newton’s successor at King’s, Vincent Todd Harlow (1898–1961), was appointed to the Rhodes chair in 1938, following posts at the Universities of Southampton and Oxford.¹⁸ In the 1930s, he and Richard Pares had run Oxford’s weekly Commonwealth history seminar, ‘working the 1830–60 period so hard and in such intense detail that it was almost killed off’.¹⁹ Once in London, Harlow renamed the IHR’s seminar ‘British Colonial History’. But Harlow convened the Seminar for only one year before the outbreak of war, whereupon he transferred to the Ministry of Information. The Seminar recommenced in 1946, when Harlow began co-convening the Seminar with Martin (the first, and until 1977, only, female convenor). Numbers were initially small, with only thirteen others present. The following year the Seminar was restyled ‘The History of British Imperial Policy and Administration’.²⁰ While Harlow authored what constitutes in many respects the most enduringly influential work of any individual associated with the Seminar, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–1783 (2 vols, 1952–64), this was published after he returned to Oxford in 1948 to take up the Beit professorship of colonial history. Back in Oxford, Harlow re-founded the Commonwealth history seminar. Like its London equivalent, this was ‘his seminar’ and in its new iteration may have been influenced by the London model.²¹

New directions

International student recruitment resumed following the war. In what would become a trend, some students began following intellectual trajectories very different to those leading the Seminar. One was the Guyanese historian Elsa Goveia (1925–80), who, having completed a BA at University College London (UCL), commenced a doctorate under Martin’s supervision in 1948. She eschewed an imperial perspective in preference for a subaltern approach. Mary Chamberlain writing about Goveia found it ‘enjoyable to speculate on the kind of contrapuntal impact’ Goveia’s ideas might have had as she doubted that some of the emerging ideas Goveia espoused had ‘penetrated Dr Martin’s seminar on the [Institute’s] third floor’. She wondered what Harlow or Martin, with her emphasis on administrative history, ‘made of Goveia’s “West Indian” mind as it grasped and then applied the insights from anthropology into explaining how the cultural, social and racial complexity of the West Indies had been historically forged’;²² in fact there is no evidence Goveia attended the Seminar in Harlow’s era, as her name first appears in the register in 1949.²³ Chamberlain notes Goveia was part of a new cohort of historians, social scientists and activists, whose lives in the late 1940s connected the distinct worlds of the West Indian Students Union (WISU) and the Institute’s seminars.²⁴ Goveia’s contemporaries included the Nigerian Kenneth Dike (1917–83), later heralded by Chieka Ifemesia as the ‘father of modern African historiography’.²⁵ Dike began work under Harlow. He would subsequently recall that Harlow was perceived by his colonial students as close to the Colonial Office and inclined to hold it ‘against them’ if they were critical of British colonial rule.²⁶ Dike was likely the first Black African scholar who had completed a PhD in history to be appointed to a lectureship in an African university. His thesis was later published as Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–1885 (1956).

Harlow’s departure coincided with a new phase in the Seminar’s history. Martin ceased to be a convenor, and the Seminar was for the next thirty years dominated by Harlow’s successor as Rhodes chair, Gerald (Gerry) Sandford Graham (1903–88), who renamed the Seminar ‘British Imperial History’, the title it would retain until the twenty-first century. In 1950–51 it moved to what became its regular slot on a Monday.²⁷ Graham was a Canadian who had transferred to London for wartime service in the historical section of the Canadian Army Overseas, following doctoral studies in Cambridge and posts at Harvard and his alma mater, Queen’s University Ontario.²⁸ The scope of Graham’s work was indicated by Empire of the North Atlantic: The Maritime Struggle for North America (1950) and The Politics of Naval Supremacy: Studies in British Maritime Ascendancy (1965). Martin may have acted as temporary convenor during some of Graham’s (many) travels but is not listed as such in the registers.

By the 1960s there were also other academics associated with the Seminar. These included Graham’s colleagues at King’s: the Canadian-born historian of colonial Africa, John E. Flint (1930–2021), and Glyndwr Williams (1932–2022), a seminar member from 1956, who took up a lectureship at Queen Mary College in 1959. Both were Graham’s former postgraduate students. In 1969, Graham’s last year in post, Williams as well as another King’s lecturer and former Graham student, the Canadian George Metcalf, are jointly listed as convenors. But while others played significant roles in the Seminar’s intellectual life, and Graham left the menial tasks of seminar organization to his junior colleagues, he presided over the weekly meetings in a room at the end of a corridor on the Institute’s third floor, ‘with a long table with ten or so chairs on each side and a large ashtray at its head’. Williams recalled that ‘No seminar began until Graham was in place and managed to get his pipe going, sometimes a lengthy business.’²⁹ This was very much the ‘professor’s seminar’. The number of those attending fluctuated between twelve (1951–2) and twenty-eight (1964–5). Among the many names appearing in the registers in the 1950s and 60s are A. G. Hopkins (1960–61) and John MacKenzie (1966–7, before listed as having ‘gone to Rhodesia’), each of whom would make singular contributions to the field. Another is John Mercer, who first appears in the registers in 1968–9, and whom generations of seminar alumni will remember from his continued involvement over many decades.³⁰

Under Graham the Seminar functioned explicitly as a form of graduate training. As he advised attendees in 1967, ‘This a [sic] research seminar in the sense that you are apprentices (I hesitate to call myself Master) and this room, and the Round Room [in the old Public Record Office, Chancery Lane] and the Reading Room in the B. M. etc are your workshops’.³¹ Research students, as well as visiting academics, applied to join the Seminar, and, at least in the early 1950s, their names were forwarded to Graham by the Institute’s librarian. Although there is no evidence of any real selection process, Graham was advised on at least one occasion that the applicant might lack ‘an adequate degree for research purposes’.³² This probably reflected the Institute’s expectation that students participating in seminars should be enrolled on research degrees.³³ Graham appears to have created an index card for each applicant, including those from other institutions.³⁴

In what is perhaps the most striking claim made about the Seminar, Flint judged that on Graham’s watch the Seminar became ‘an engine for the decolonization of imperial history’, influencing the profession in every country of the Commonwealth’, with Graham the unlikely ‘midwife to major nationalist revisionism’.³⁵ The truth of the matter was perhaps both more and less than this. But, as Flint also remarked, the Seminar’s impact was certainly not the result of Graham’s own intellectual agenda. There was ‘no “Graham school” of imperial history’. Instead, Graham’s scholarship corresponded to an established form of imperial history characteristic of the pre-war period but increasingly out of touch with newer approaches being pioneered elsewhere, notably by Ronald Robinson and Jack Gallagher.³⁶ In the three years he attended the Seminar, Graham’s former doctoral student, the Canadian Phillip Buckner, did not recall Graham or any of his students ever talking about their work. London remained ‘a lingering outpost of an older historiography’.³⁷ In contrast, Freddie Madden recalled how, after Harlow’s death and Gallagher’s appointment to the Beit chair in 1963, the Oxford Seminar ceased to be ‘largely a Commonwealth promotional industry’ and how Commonwealth history became ‘fun’.³⁸ Graham, who frequently seemed to be napping during the presentation, would invariably ask the same first question of his graduate students: ‘What have you told us that is new?’ More penetrating questions from Flint and Williams ‘saved the Seminar from being a total loss’.³⁹ Richard Price, then a doctoral student working under the radical Indian-born historian Ranajit Guha, who later helped to found subaltern studies, similarly considered the Seminar old fashioned. However, as Flint’s claim indicates, the Seminar’s importance lay elsewhere: notably in its cohort of international members.⁴⁰ Most were among Graham’s extraordinarily large number of postgraduate students: Flint put this at 200, although only around half that number can be readily verified, and some may well not have completed their studies.⁴¹ As well as from the USA, these came from across the old Commonwealth and the new, a trend likely assisted in the 1960s by the introduction of Commonwealth studentships.⁴²

Most numerous were Canadians. In the 1960s they included Phillip Buckner, Marilyn Barber, Barry Gough and Hugh Johnston. There were several reasons for this strong Canadian presence. Only some Canadian universities offered doctoral programmes, and, where they did, these took longer to complete than British ones, an important consideration for Canadians seeking tenure track positions as quickly as possible. Canadian Council fellowships provided funding for some and from the early 1960s Canadians also had access to Commonwealth scholarships. The Commonwealth connection probably also acted as a draw, notably for Anglophone Canadians. Once these had decided upon postgraduate study in Britain, Graham’s own Canadian nationality and contacts among what was still a small Canadian historical community ensured many of them applied to work with him, as Buckner recalls. When he was awarded a scholarship, Buckner thought initially of applying to Cambridge. But his advisers at the University of Toronto urged him to work with Graham, after Graham himself – a member of the scholarship committee – had contacted one of Buckner’s referees for the scholarship to propose he supervise Buckner.⁴³ At least six of Graham’s students came from the University of New Brunswick, where Newton’s former student, MacNutt, was now working: an illustration of the value of ‘old boy’ networks.

Graham and his colleagues at the Seminar also attracted a significant number of African postgraduates. These included Dike, whom Graham inherited when Harlow moved to Oxford, and who was described by Graham as ‘for two years the outstanding student in my seminar’.⁴⁴ On completion, Dike took up a post at the University of Ibadan (est. 1948), quickly rising to become head of the history department there and generating for Graham another association that proved fruitful for recruitment. Jacob F. Ade Ajayi (1929–2014), another ‘first-rate’ young Nigerian scholar whom Graham hoped ‘may be a second Dike’, applied to work with Graham because he had been Dike’s supervisor, commencing work in London in the 1950s.⁴⁵ Other notable Nigerian seminar members included Emmanuel A. Ayandele, supervised by Flint.

As these international students returned home, a growing diaspora of former Graham supervisees and of the Seminar’s alumni developed. They went on to occupy posts in Commonwealth countries, old and new. Others took up posts in the USA and Britain. By Graham’s retirement, Buckner estimates that at least sixteen former seminar members were at Canadian universities, notably at Dalhousie University, where Flint had taken up a position. Equally striking were the number of those whom one former Nigerian student, I. A. Akinjogbin, recently appointed head of history at the University of Ife, referred to in a letter to Graham in 1971 as ‘your boys in Nigeria’.⁴⁶ Many were at Ibadan, especially before civil war caused – as Graham lamented – ‘division between my old, and cherished seminar students’.⁴⁷ By 1963–4 seven lecturers at Ibadan were ‘G. S. G.’s former students’, as annotated by Graham on an Ibadan history prospectus.⁴⁸

This notable record reflected asymmetrical power relationships between London and new colonial and Commonwealth institutions, such as the Universities of Ghana and Ibadan, as well as those formed from existing colleges in Khartoum (Sudan) and Makerere (Kampala, Uganda) in 1947 and 1949. In the 1940s a new body, the Inter-University Council for Higher Education in the Colonies (IUC), was formed to facilitate the development of the new university colleges, including through the secondment of staff from British universities. The IUC worked in close association with London whose academics oversaw the creation and accreditation of the new universities’ syllabuses and examinations. But for Nigerian students the connection to Graham also provided an opportunity to get round these structural inequalities. For example, in 1956 Dike asked Graham to ‘use whatever discreet [sic] influence you can’ with the IUC to secure his promotion to chair. Graham replied ‘the chair is in the bag, and nothing can prevent you now from ascending the Golden Stool’, a reference to the traditional throne of the Ashanti kingdom.⁴⁹ By 1960, Dike had become principal at Ibadan, and, when it became a fully independent university in 1962, its vice-chancellor, a position he held until, at the start of the civil war he, as an Igbo, was forced out, moving instead to Harvard. As Dike later commented, the ‘new attitudes to the history of the non-white Commonwealth and to the cultures of Black Africa … owes more than is realized to GSG’s encouragement of young scholars from these areas’.⁵⁰ Yet biographical entries on these distinguished African scholars rarely, or never, mention Graham, perhaps because the connection to an imperial historian sat uncomfortably with those celebrating these pioneers in African studies.

At the crux of Flint’s claim about ‘decolonization’ was that the Seminar’s alumni played a crucial part in developing area studies and founding new ‘national’ schools of history that got away from Eurocentric perspectives. There is some evidence that this was the case. Buckner estimates that Graham may have produced more university professors teaching Canadian and/or imperial history in Canadian universities than any other graduate programme except perhaps for those of the Université Laval and University of Toronto, although Canadian history was already established in Canadian universities in the 1950s. Three of the Seminar’s alumni served as presidents of the Canadian Historical Society: Buckner (1992–3), John Kendle (1981–2) and Judy Fingard (1997–8).⁵¹

In Nigeria, Graham’s students were instrumental in the development of what is identified as an Ibadan school of history, a distinct nationalistic Nigerian history.⁵² This school was of seminal importance in the development of African studies generally, that put the colonial era in its place as (to employ Ajayi’s memorable turn of phrase) merely an ‘episode’ in the longue durée of African history.⁵³ But it was not without its critics, for it was traditional in method and subject, being focused overwhelmingly on matters of politics. In this respect, although the Ibadan school represented a departure from, and a challenge to, imperial history, in other ways it bore resemblance to precisely the kind of history nurtured in Graham’s Seminar. Another feature of some of the scholarship was a focus on religion and the history of Christian mission, perhaps reflecting KCL’s religious foundation.⁵⁴ Graham was a source of practical support to his African graduates, not only reviving Newton’s Imperial Studies series, but also, at a time when African history was not perceived as a commercial proposition, inaugurating the West African History book series. Published by Oxford University Press, this was supported financially by West African Newspapers Ltd.⁵⁵ He was to be of help in other ways too. For example, in 1956 Dike sought Graham’s assistance in persuading the IUC and London historians, notably Lilian Penson, a member of the IUC as well as chair of the committee on London’s relations with new universities, to agree to his curriculum reforms at Ibadan.⁵⁶

A diversification of subject matter emerged initially out of necessity. Perpetuating the Seminar’s function in doctoral training, the speakers were mostly postgraduate students who were expected to present chapters of their theses: this was perhaps the only manageable way for Graham to cope with so many supervisees. This resulted in a seminar that pulled in different directions. Graham himself acknowledged the increasingly fragmented nature of a field in which scholars sought to incorporate the experience of the colonized. Indeed, in one presentation given at the start of the academic year in 1954, and apparently recycled in 1955, 1956, 1960, 1961 and 1962, he advised that unity was difficult to achieve in the Seminar ‘unless one picks a theme, and makes demands for papers that might trespass heavily on thesis time’.⁵⁷ Ajayi recalled the Seminar, ‘increasingly dealt more with the history of the countries of the Commonwealth than with imperial history as such’.⁵⁸ Similarly Buckner remembered that whereas in the 1950s Canadian members of the Seminar were primarily interested in British imperial history, by the 1960s only one of the Canadians ‘thought of himself as an Imperial historian’, although most (but not all) were working on topics which had an imperial dimension’. Since the Canadians ‘knew little or nothing about fields other than Canada and the other groups in the Seminar knew nothing about Canada’, discussion lacked depth. The division was reproduced outside the Seminar, with little social contact between the Canadian and African contingents, perhaps because the Africans were generally older and married, while the Canadians were younger and single.⁵⁹

While seminar alumni played leading roles in the creation of new national schools of history, the development of area studies was not only at odds with Graham’s own imperially focused scholarship but his scepticism about the readiness of African states for independence.⁶⁰ In one double-edged comment, Graham worried about this ‘generation of African intellectuals’ whose lives may be ‘shortened by the enormous weight of responsibilities which African self-government is slowly bringing to bear upon them’.⁶¹ Around 1957 he canvassed opinion among other historians teaching imperial history in Britain, including E. E. Rich, Jack Fisher and Harlow, about the necessity for those doing area studies of developing a knowledge of the broader colonial context. This was apparently prompted by developments at Makerere, where in 1957 the introduction of single honours degrees enabled the institution’s historians to be ‘more adventurous’ in their teaching of African history.⁶² Robert Latham, reader in history at Royal Holloway College and, under London’s external degree programme, examiner for Makerere, responded that it was ‘dangerous for Makerere etc to be allowed their heads’, explaining ‘as you know this new syllabus scares me’. Graham also put pressure on Dike to retain imperial history. In response, Dike who led a transition to African history in 1956, was non-committal.⁶³ However, perhaps because of Graham’s intervention, students at Ibadan continued to be offered courses in the history of the British Commonwealth, but as these were optional, they did not undermine the curriculum reforms.

The challenge posed by regional studies was felt close to home and for many years led to a turf war with a new African History Seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies (est. 1916). This seminar was presided over by Roland Oliver (1923–2014), who in 1946 was appointed as the School’s first lecturer in African history; he was later holder of the London University chair in African history (1963–86).⁶⁴ Oliver was determined to foster an African history that was about more than colonialism and untainted by association with those working in imperial history. His African History Seminar, originating in a 1953 conference, was the first of its kind in the world.⁶⁵ Oliver, whose tenure in London overlapped with Graham’s for twenty-one years, was instrumental in the launch of The Journal of African History, and determined to hold his own in the face of growing ‘competition’ from a new generation of American Africanists.⁶⁶ Like Graham, Oliver expected his graduate students to attend his seminar, while participation in the Imperial Seminar was discouraged – although in a memoir Oliver acknowledged considerable ‘interchange’ with Graham’s seminar. His former student and, from 1969, colleague Richard Rathbone remembers that for Africanists the IHR was ‘enemy territory, one of the nests of those who questioned whether African history was “proper history”’. This position reflected too the struggle Africanists experienced to attain their rightful place within the academy generally and within the local context of the University of London History Board of Studies.⁶⁷ Intriguingly, the Imperial Seminar may have been influential in shaping the African seminar at least initially. In 1953 Oliver took responsibility for what he refers to as ‘Graham’s seminar’ while Graham was in Ghana. By bringing him into touch with Graham’s Nigerian students Oliver recalled he was able to reorganize his own seminar so that, instead of being a discussion group for colleagues with a marginal interest in African history’, it became a ‘place of training for future teachers in the subject’.⁶⁸

There was not the same conflict with Asian studies or Indian history, which had a seminar domiciled at SOAS. The IHR’s seminar paid little attention to Indian history until after Graham’s departure. This in part reflected the research specialisms of those associated with the Seminar in its first fifty years. However, in contrast to African history, Indian history, which emerged from ‘Oriental studies’, was long established as a distinct field, as evident in the publication of the Cambridge History of India (6 vols, 1922–37) alongside a separate Cambridge History of the British Empire (8 vols, 1929–61). That the Raj also had a separate institutional history, administered by the India Office, rather than the Colonial Office, may have contributed to this separation. Moreover, because few Britons took up posts in Indian universities (which recruited locally) there were not the same networks and associations between the Seminar and South Asia comparable to those that existed in the case of Africa.⁶⁹

Within London, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies constituted a third base for scholars of Commonwealth and empire, and a place for these to pursue agendas distinct from those associated with either the Imperial History or the SOAS Seminars. This was the case with the ‘Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries’ Seminar launched by Shula Marks (b. 1938) at the Institute in 1969.⁷⁰ This attracted a new generation of radical Africanists who associated with a Marxist, or at least Marxisant, outlook that contrasted with both the ‘liberal scholarship’ of the SOAS seminar and the more Eurocentric focus of the IHR.⁷¹ With two internationally significant Africanist seminars to attend, very few from SOAS participated in the IHR seminar. The pattern only changed in the 1990s, when Rathbone, and William Gervase Clarence-Smith, began attending.

Collaboration and reinvention

Attendance at the Seminar remained steady, varying between a peak of twenty-six (1970–71) and a low of fifteen in 1978–9.⁷² However, relative stability masked distinct changes. In the 1970s a growing proportion of these attendees were academics in post rather than graduate students. The dynamics which had formerly brought large numbers to Britain were no longer as favourable. Whereas previously there had been under-provision at higher education level in many Commonwealth countries, more overseas universities now had their own doctoral programmes: developments that ironically the University of London, through its external degree programme,⁷³ and the Seminar, had played a part in fostering. Simultaneously postgraduate study in Britain became more expensive for foreign students. Differential fees for home and overseas students, first introduced in 1967, rose steeply in the 1970s. For a while the changes suppressed overseas recruitment,⁷⁴ and imperial history was likely among the subjects most affected by measures which changed the situation of students from Commonwealth countries. The rise of area studies also served as something of an existential threat. By 1984, David Fieldhouse (1925–2018), newly appointed to the Vere Harmsworth chair in imperial history at Cambridge, was led to ask if ‘Humpty Dumpty’ could be put back together again.⁷⁵ As the field fragmented, more attendees started cherry picking, attending only when the Seminar corresponded to their interests.⁷⁶ With a growing trend for individuals to drop in on an occasional basis, the number of signatories in the register in the 1980s climbed steeply, and even more so in the 1990s, when they ran to many pages, but a ‘hard core’ of regulars was much smaller.⁷⁷ Indeed, through the 1970s and 80s numbers in any one week rarely exceeded twenty.⁷⁸ Douglas Peers, bucking the broader downward trend, arrived from Canada in 1984 to do doctoral research with Graham’s successor as Rhodes chair, Peter James Marshall (b. 1933). Attendance, he recalls, was ‘often quite sparse’. Despite the austere surroundings, with participants ‘hemmed in by steel bookshelves, dusty volumes, and with hard wooden chairs’, some still managed to doze off. With cuts to university funding, there was a wider sense of history under threat with few students around the tearoom (that is, the Common Room).⁷⁹ Regular attendees were mostly male, although there were a few female graduate students, including in the 1980s Penny Carson and Judith Rowbotham – a gender pattern still very evident when I arrived in London in 1992.

Graham’s retirement in 1970 also constituted something of a hiatus, since he was not replaced as Rhodes chair for ten years until, in 1981, Marshall, a lecturer at King’s since 1959, was promoted to the position. Marshall retired in 1993 and was succeeded by another King’s colleague, Andrew Porter (1945–2021). Porter held the post until ill-health forced his premature retirement in 2008, when the Guyanese/Barbadian historian, Richard Drayton (b. 1964), was appointed to the chair. While all three have been significant influences on the Seminar – Drayton presided over its renaming as the Imperial and World History Seminar – their tenure saw the Seminar become, like others at the Institute, less about one individual. The interlude between Graham’s retirement and Marshall’s appointment was particularly decisive for in the intervening period the Seminar was jointly stewarded by Williams and Marshall, as well as initially Metcalf. A collegial mode of working was typical of Marshall and Williams, and, on his promotion to the Rhodes professorship, Marshall, unlike his predecessors, did not think of this as ‘his seminar’.⁸⁰ Williams and Marshall were joined in 1971 by Trevor Reese, a reader in imperial history at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies until his premature death in 1976, in 1977 by Freda Harcourt, senior lecturer at Queen Mary and Westfield, and in 1978 by Porter, who took up a lectureship at King’s in 1971 on Metcalf’s death. From 1985 Jim Sturgis, a Canadian expatriate at Birkbeck, was added to the team, and later David Killingray, an historian of Africa and the African diaspora at Goldsmith’s College.⁸¹

Beginning with Marshall and Williams, those now in charge were less invested in the empire and provided stronger intellectual leadership than Graham. Robinson and Gallagher’s scholarship had become the new canon, and, at the Seminar there was much talk of ‘metropole and periphery’, the ‘official mind’, and informal and formal empires. There was no programme as such but with Marshall and Williams in charge there was a new engagement with Asia, as well as the Pacific, reflecting their own period and regional expertise.

Under Marshall and Williams, the Seminar had a reputation for friendliness and conviviality, the latter maintaining traditions dating back at least to the Graham era. At the end of his seminars Graham had taken members to Olivelli’s, an Italian restaurant on Store Street and reportedly the first place to serve pizza in London, where he footed most of the drinks bill. At the end of the academic year the last meeting of the Seminar was a sociable occasion at the Grahams’ London house in Norland Square. There students were treated to an account, often with film, of Graham’s travels, while his wife, Mary, supplied food and drink.⁸² Proceedings followed a similar fashion under Marshall and Williams, but with less hierarchy. Seminar participants would collect over tea in the Institute. With the Seminar over they proceeded to drinks at Birkbeck bar and thence to dinner. For many years, the Seminar patronized a nearby, self-service, Italian, until its closure led attendees to dine at a greater variety of restaurants. It was far from grand, and on one memorable occasion, one of the staff, familiar with the weekly visits, advised Marshall that no professor in Italy would deign to frequent such a lowly establishment. But the modest venue ensured that in contrast to many an Oxbridge seminar where speakers might be entertained at college dinners, the occasion was open to all so that everyone, including students, had their opportunity to chat informally with the speaker. The end-of-year tradition was continued too, although relocated to the Institute. A speaker, selected to convey a sense of occasion, generally kicked off proceedings, before a buffet supper prepared by the convenors and (since, with the exception of Freda Harcourt, and later myself, the convenors were male) their wives. After, washing up was done in one of the small kitchenettes.

The Institute’s location in the heart of London ensured a regular stream of visitors passing through, contributing to a sense of collegiality and sociability. Visitors included Dane Kennedy, then a graduate student at Berkeley, who attended the Seminar while in London in the 1970s.⁸³ Another was Shigeru Akita, initially during a research year in London and then on subsequent travels to the UK. He found the Seminar useful for Japanese scholars who wished to learn ‘easily and quickly, the latest research by British & European/American scholars’. The post-seminar drinks provided informal opportunities to talk, and the IHR seminar ‘became a kind of “gateway” for Japanese scholars to contact and broaden their relationship with foreign (British) scholars’. On Akita’s return to Osaka, he tried to re-create a similar atmosphere, but, since it was not possible to do this fully, the IHR seminar continued to offer ‘quite unique and valuable’ opportunities for Japanese scholars temporarily resident in London.⁸⁴

The 1990s marked a period of renewed optimism. The wider academic environment became more positive with more appointments to academic posts. Aided by overseas economic growth, recruitment also increased. Marshall retired as Rhodes professor in 1992, but he and Williams stayed on as convenors, and by 1993 the Seminar was led by Marshall, Porter, Williams, Harcourt, Killingray and Sturgis. Buckner, by then teaching in Canada, returned, joining the panel of convenors, when in 1993–4 on an academic exchange with Sturgis.⁸⁵ Later Harcourt retired as convenor, and I joined. By the early 2000s Marshall and Williams had stepped down, leaving three of us: Porter, Killingray and me. Postgraduate students associated with the Seminar continued to be engaged on a diverse range of projects, but there were notable concentrations on late nineteenth-century imperialism, missionary studies and Africa. Alongside British students, Canadians were still numerous relative to those of other national origin. However, by the 2000s the Seminar’s graduate students were an increasingly cosmopolitan group. With a few notable exceptions (such as Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo), most came from beyond Europe, with a growing number from East Asia. In the 2010s and 2020s this trend has continued although now with more Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese than Japanese graduates.

Imperial history was also undergoing a revival, invigorated by a fresh generation of scholarship – subaltern, postcolonialism and the ‘new imperial history’, and by other approaches that emphasized connectivity in different ‘worlds’, imagined and geographical, including the Atlantic and ‘British’. The latter saw the academic debate turn full circle as scholars of Britain’s ‘old’ dominions like Canada and Australia sought once again to reinsert British imperial connections into their national histories but in ways that emphasized networks rather than a ‘centre-periphery’ axis common to older scholarship. The development of ‘British world’ studies also saw historians of empire once again pay attention to the old white settlement colonies after several decades in which scholarship had focused more on Asia and Africa.

Initially the Seminar was slow to embrace some of these historiographical developments. Politics, capitalism and the military were staple fare; culture, discourse and gender (the focus of the new imperial history) less so. Religion was one notable exception, however, and in the 1990s it was discussed to a degree perhaps unusual in modern history seminars at the time. In line with Porter’s shifting research focus from South Africa and capitalism to religion, the Seminar listened to many papers on the history of missiology, including from one seminar alumnus, Ajayi. By providing a platform for those working principally in religious and missionary studies, the Seminar made a significant contribution to reinserting religion, commonly neglected, back into imperial history. Porter secured funding to help pay for some speakers through his association with the North Atlantic Missiology Project and Currents in World Christianity Project (1996–2001).

The Seminar became gradually more attentive to the new imperial history in the 1990s, with speakers including Catherine Hall. By the end of the decade and the early 2000s culture and the ways in which Britain was constituted by empire were more commonly discussed. Those at the helm of the Seminar took the new scholarship seriously, with Marshall taking it as the subject of his 1994 Creighton Lecture, ‘Imperial Britain’. Porter meanwhile engaged with the concept of cultural imperialism from the perspective of his own research on the history of Christian mission. However, for Porter especially serious engagement with any aspect of imperial history inevitably entailed robust criticism and, in the Seminar, penetrating questioning. In the case of the new imperial history, this may have contributed to a perception that he was hostile to it. When Catherine Hall (b. 1946), a leading figure in the new imperial history, arrived in London to take up a position at UCL, she and Linda Colley (b. 1949) launched a new seminar, ‘Reconfiguring the British: Nation, Empire, World, 1600–1800’, to provide an alternative forum for its discussion.

Porter’s hallmark forensic style was also brought to bear on the other key interpretative development of the 1980s and 90s that, like the new imperial history, placed Britain at the centre of analysis: Peter Cain and A. G. Hopkins’s conceptualization of a ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ centred on the City of London as the driving force behind British imperialism over the longue durée.⁸⁶ Their thesis was the subject of several papers, including two in the autumn of 1992 alone. For Akita this focus proved ‘the turning point’ of his research career, cementing a shift in his research towards the comparative economic history of South and East Asia and thence to global history, and notable interventions in debates around ‘gentlemanly capitalism’.⁸⁷

In the 1990s, while much scholarly attention was directed at analysing imperialism in its British context, a focus on Africa, Asia and the Caribbean continued to be a distinguishing feature of the Seminar. Contributions from area specialists were common and speakers’ expertise in multiple languages and world archives notable. In this respect the Seminar continued to provide a forum for an established imperial history, but one that had much in common with an emergent world history school, in which the economics and politics of empires came once more to the fore of scholarly agendas propelled by new scholarly interest in globalization and a new era of Anglo-American overseas intervention.

The Seminar’s evolution in 2009 to become the ‘Imperial and World History Seminar’ represented a natural development and corresponded to a transition already under way elsewhere, including at Oxford and Cambridge. In its latest iteration, the Seminar has proven a broad church, hosting area specialists alongside researchers in transnational, imperial and global history; connectivity is commonly, but not always, addressed. From 2009, the Seminar also ceased to meet weekly and became fortnightly: a realistic arrangement in view of the increasing difficulties academics with young families and with significant teaching and administrative commitments had in attending a weekly early evening seminar. A new seminar led by early career researchers was begun which interleaved with the Seminar. Academic posts in world and imperial history proliferated in London, including at King’s, and there were by the 2010s new convenors. At the time of writing, the current team comprises Richard Drayton, Sarah Stockwell, Jon Wilson, Toby Green, Leslie James, Simon Latham, David Motadel, Gavin Sood and Kim Wagner.

Conclusion

The Seminar, one of the oldest of its kind, has been a significant centre for imperial history for over a century. There was not one London ‘school’, but in its earliest decades the Seminar was notable for its part in the development of imperial history as a distinct field, including by the many women graduates attending. In its middling years, under the convenorship of Marshall and Williams, it held a focus on the eighteenth century; and in the later twentieth century it established a singular attention to religion. But the Seminar’s importance also lies in its role as the unlikely vehicle for the emergence of new nationalist historiographies, with which imperial history was frequently in tension. In this way the Seminar’s history is that of the history of empire itself. It encompasses the period when the empire was still an ongoing concern, and those teaching and researching the history of imperialism in London were themselves ideologically attached to it, and London, as the empire’s centre, attracted a large intake of colonial and Commonwealth students; through the challenges both to the Seminar and the wider field of imperial history that accompanied the end of empire, and then, finally, in the twenty-first century when, with its refashioning as the Imperial and World History Seminar, it has undergone its own decolonization.

Notes

1. * I am immensely grateful to the following for allowing me to interview them and/or for sending me reminiscences about the Seminar: Shigeru Akita, Phillip Buckner, David Killingray, Peter Marshall, Douglas Peers, Richard Rathbone and the late Glyn Williams. Their written testimonies, solicited for this chapter, are referenced on first citation as ‘X’s notes for this author’. Thanks also to Michael Townsend (IHR) and the archivists at King’s College London (KCL) for their help and for permission to cite papers in their collections; to attendees at the Seminar in October 2021 when a version of this paper was presented; and to David Manning, John Darwin and Richard Drayton. I first discovered the IHR, like so much else in my life, in the company of the late Arthur Burns. This chapter is dedicated with love and gratitude to his memory.

2. 1.  Institute of Historical Research, Wohl Library: IHR/3/3/5, seminar registers.

3. 2.  Archival records at the IHR and KCL shed no light on the precise origins although there may have been a link to the annual public lectures in imperial history organized at King’s College from 1913, funded by the Rhodes Trust: see R. Drayton, ‘Imperial History and the Human Future’, History Workshop Journal, lxxiv (2012), 156–72, at pp. 164–5. The Commonwealth History Seminar at Oxford existed by the 1930s, see F. Madden, ‘The Commonwealth, Commonwealth History, and Oxford’, in Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth: Essays Presented to Sir Edgar Williams, ed. F. Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse (London, 1982), pp. 7–29, at p. 16.

4. 3.  Drayton, ‘Imperial History’, 156–72.

5. 4.  The oldest is the Beit professorship of colonial history at Oxford (est. 1905).

6. 5.  King’s College London Archives (KCLA), catalogue entry for Newton.

7. 6.  It was once suggested that the latter had two strands in 1925–6: ‘The African Trade, 1660–1837’ and ‘British North America, 1763–1837’, see D. Birch and J. Horn (comp.), The History Laboratory: The Institute of Historical Research 1921–96 (London, 1996), p. 130.

8. 7.  R. Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 473–508, at p. 487; R. Hyam, ‘The Study of Imperial and Commonwealth History at Cambridge, 1881–1981: Founding Fathers and Pioneer Research Students’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xxix (2001), 75–93. It was not until 1958 that a comparable seminar, in Commonwealth and European expansion, was established at Cambridge by Nicholas Mansergh.

9. 8.  IHR/3/3/5, seminar registers.

10. 9.  R. Robinson, ‘Oxford in Imperial Historiography’, in Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth: Essays Presented to Sir Edgar Williams, ed. F. Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse (London, 1982), pp. 30–48, at pp. 33–5.

11. 10.  Early Master’s theses included: Kate Eliot, ‘The Beginnings of English Trade with Guinea and the East Indies, 1550–1559’ (1915), Elsie Harrington, ‘British Measures for the Suppression of the Slave Trade upon the West Coast of Africa, 1807–33’ (1923), and R. Mellor, ‘British Policy in Relation to Sierra Leone, 1808–52’ (1935). For more, see A. D. Roberts, ‘The British Empire in Tropical Africa’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume V. Historiography, ed. R. W. Winks (Oxford, 1999), pp. 463–85, at pp. 466–70 and 475–7.

12. 11.  IHR/3/3/5, seminar registers. A. L. Rowse, ‘Richard Pares’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xlviii (1962), 345–62.

13. 12.  R. Greaves, ‘Penson, Dame Lillian Margery (1896–1963), Historian’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online, 2004): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35468 [accessed 1 Nov. 2022].

14. 13.  R. Glotzer, ‘C. W. de Kiewiet, Historian of Africa: African Studies and the American Post-War Research University’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, x (2009), 419–47.

15. 14.  D. Green, ‘William Stewart MacNutt’, New Brunswick Literary Encyclopaedia (2010): https://nble.lib.unb.ca/browse/m/william-stewart-macnutt [accessed 7 Jan. 2022].

16. 15.  IHR/3/3/6. KCLA, Registry Slip Books, 1936–8. The London Gazette, sup. to 1/10 Jun. 1954 (no. 40191), p. 3304: thanks to Emily Dourish at Cambridge University Library for this reference.

17. 16.  KCLA, catalogue entry for Newton Papers.

18. 17.  T. Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester, 2013), p. 93, p. 154, and p. 192.

19. 18.  W. D. McIntyre, ‘Harlow, Vincent Todd (1898–1961)’, ODNB (2008): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/63794 [accessed 17 Mar. 2021].

20. 19.  Madden, ‘The Commonwealth’, p. 16.

21. 20.  IHR/3/3/6.

22. 21.  According to David Fieldhouse’s unpublished memoir: written communication from John Darwin; quote from Madden, ‘The Commonwealth’, p. 19.

23. 22.  Mary Chamberlain, ‘Elsa Goveia: History and Nation’, History Workshop Journal, lviii (2004), 167–90, at pp. 177–9. I owe this reference to Dongkyung Shin. See also L. Braithwaite, Colonial West Indian Students (Kingston, Jamaica, 2001).

24. 23.  IHR/3/3/6.

25. 24.  Chamberlain, ‘Elsa Goveia’, 177–9.

26. 25.  E. Raymond, ‘Kenneth Onwuka Dike’ (n.d.): https://www.abdn.ac.uk/stories/kenneth-dike/ [accessed 1 Nov. 2022].

27. 26.  K. Dike, ‘Gerald S. Graham: Teacher and Historian’, in Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham, ed. J. Flint and G. Williams (London, 1973), pp. 1–8, at p. 5.

28. 27.  IHR/3/3/7.

29. 28.  J. Flint, ‘Graham, Gerald Sandford (1903–1988)’, ODNB (2004): https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/50759 [accessed 17 Mar. 2021].

30. 29.  Williams’s notes for this author. IHR/3/3/7 and IHR/3/3/15, seminar registers.

31. 30.  IHR/3/3/7.

32. 31.  KCLA, Graham papers, 12/2/11: ‘Seminar file’, paper 9 Oct. 1967. Cf. A. F. Pollard, Factors in Modern History, third edition (London, 1932), p. 312.

33. 32.  KCLA, Graham papers, 12/2/11: ‘Seminar file’, Taylor Milne to Graham, 2 Oct. 1952; 2 Oct. 1953.

34. 33.  Institute of Historical Research: First Annual Report, 1921–22 (London, 1923), pp. 5–8.

35. 34.  KCLA, Graham papers, 4/12.

36. 35.  J. Flint, ‘Professor Gerald Sandford Graham, 1903–1988’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xvii (1989), 297–300.

37. 36.  Flint, ‘Graham’, 297–300.

38. 37.  P. Buckner, ‘Defining Identities in Canada: Regional, Imperial, National’, Canadian Historical Review, xciv (2013), 290–311, at p. 295.

39. 38.  Madden, ‘The Commonwealth’, p. 21.

40. 39.  Buckner’s notes provided for this author.

41. 40.  H. Perraton, A History of Foreign Students in Britain (Basingstoke, 2014), p. 65 and pp. 103–4.

42. 41.  Flint, ‘Graham’, ODNB.

43. 42.  Perraton, History of Foreign Students, p. 65 and pp. 103–4.

44. 43.  Above, all from notes, Buckner.

45. 44.  KCLA, Graham papers, 1/7: letter of reference for Dike addressed to US Educational Commission (n.d., prob. 1950s).

46. 45.  KCLA, Graham papers, 1/1: Graham to the ‘Director of Nigerian Students’, 28 Sept. 1956.

47. 46.  Buckner, notes; KCLA, Graham papers 1/1: Akinjogbin to Graham, 7 Sept. 1971.

48. 47.  KCLA, Graham papers 1/1: Graham to Ayandele, 3 May 1967.

49. 48.  KCLA, Graham papers 3/22.

50. 49.  KCLA, Graham papers 1/7: Dike to Graham, 2 May 1956, and Graham’s reply.

51. 50.  Dike, ‘Graham’, p. 7.

52. 51. Buckner, notes and correspondence with author.

53. 52.  P. Lovejoy, ‘The Ibadan School of Historiography and Its Critics’, in African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi, ed. T. Falola (Harlow, 1993), pp. 195–202.

54. 53.  J. F. A. Ajayi, ‘Colonialism: An Episode in African History’, in Colonialism in Africa 1870–1960: Volume 1: The History and Politics of Colonialism 1870–1914, ed. L. H. Gann and P. Duignan (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 497–509.

55. 54.  J. F. A. Ajayi’s PhD diss. (LSE, 1958) was published as Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite (London, 1965) and E. A. Ayandele’s PhD diss. (KCL, 1964) was published as The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914 (London, 1966).

56. 55.  J. Flint and G. Williams, ‘Preface’, in Perspectives of Empire, x.

57. 56.  KCLA, Graham papers, 1/7: Dike to Graham, 23 Nov. 1956.

58. 57.  KCLA, Graham papers, 12/2/11: ‘Seminar file’, notes, dated 12 Oct. 1953; subsequent dates annotated on paper.

59. 58.  J. F. A. Ajayi, ‘African History at Ibadan’, in The Emergence of African History at British Universities, ed. A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (Oxford, 1995), pp. 91–109, at p. 96.

60. 59.  Notes, Buckner.

61. 60.  Flint, ‘Graham’, ODNB.

62. 61.  KCLA, Graham papers, 1/7: Graham to Franklin D. Scott, 13 Dec. 1955 [recommending Dike for a fellowship at Northwestern University].

63. 62.  K. Ingham, ‘Makerere and After’, in Emergence of African History, ed. Kirk-Greene, pp. 113–33, at p. 121.

64. 63.  KCLA, Graham papers 3/21: Graham’s papers; and Latham to Graham, 6 Mar. [1957]. On reforms at Ibadan, see: Ajayi, ‘African History’, p. 100, where it is implied that the change occurred on Dike’s watch.

65. 64.  For further details, see ‘Roland Oliver (1923–2014)’: https://africanstudies.org/individual-membership/in-memory/roland-oliver-1923-2014/ [accessed 1 Dec. 2022].

66. 65.  R. Oliver, ‘African History: SOAS and Beyond’, in Emergence of African History, ed. Kirk-Greene, pp. 13–38, esp. p. 17.

67. 66.  Rathbone’s notes for this author, and interview, 12 Mar. 2021; notes, Williams.

68. 67.  Notes and interview, Rathbone; Oliver ‘African History’, p. 26 and p. 19.

69. 68.  Roland Oliver, In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History (London, 1997), p. 147.

70. 69.  Marshall notes for this author, and interview, P. J. Marshall, 19 Mar. 2021.

71. 70.  S. Marks, ‘The Societies of Southern Africa Seminar at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies’ (2012): https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/3557/1/ShulaMarks-ICS_Societies_of_Southern-Africa_seminar.pdf [accessed 2 Mar. 2022].

72. 71.  Notes and interview, Rathbone.

73. 72.  IHR/3/3/7.

74. 73.  See D. Shin, ‘ “Partnership in Universities”, British Strategies for New Universities at the End of Empire’ (unpublished King’s College London PhD thesis, 2022).

75. 74.  Perraton, History of Foreign Students, pp. 108–11 and p. 131.

76. 75.  D. Fieldhouse, ‘Can Humpty Dumpty Be Put Together Again? Imperial History in the 1980s’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xii (1984), 9–23.

77. 76.  Interview, Marshall.

78. 77.  IHR/3/3/15 and IHR/3/3/42.

79. 78.  Notes, Marshall.

80. 79.  Peers’s notes for this author.

81. 80.  Interview, Marshall.

82. 81.  IHR/3/3/7 and IHR/3/3/15.

83. 82.  Notes, Williams.

84. 83.  D. Kennedy, ‘An Education in Empire’, in How Empire Shaped Us, ed. A. Burton and D. Kennedy (London, 2016), pp. 95–105, at p. 99.

85. 84.  Akita notes for this author.

86. 85.  Buckner, ‘Defining Identities’, p. 304.

87. 86.  First expounded in articles and then in P. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism (Harlow, 1993).

88. 87.  S. Akita, ‘From South Asian Studies to Global History: Searching for Asian Perspectives’, in How Empire Shaped Us, ed. A. Burton and D. Kennedy (London, 2016), pp. 117–28, esp. p. 122.

References