The Oxford History of the British Empire is a major new assessment of the Empire in the light of recent scholarship and the progressive opening of historical records. This fifth and final volume examines the historiography of empire, investigating the shape and development of scholarly and popular opinion about the British Empire over the centuries. It discusses the ways in which public pressures, current events, the personal backgrounds of authors, theexisting literature, and even the nature of university and library development have influenced writings about empire broadly, and the British Empire specifically.

Robin Winks is Randolph W. Townsend Professor of History at Yale University.

Wm. Roger Louis is Kerr Professor of English History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin.

• List of Contributors


• 1: Introduction


• 2: The First British Empire


• 3: The Second British Empire


• 4: British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries


• 5: The American Revolution


• 6: Ireland


• 7: The British West Indies


• 8: Canada and the Empire


• 9: Australia and the Empire


• 10: Colonization and History in New Zealand


• 11: India to 1858


• 12: India, 1858-1937


• 13: India in the 1940s


• 14: Ceylon (Sri Lanka)


• 15: Pakistan's Emergence


• 16: Science, Medicine, and the British Empire


• 17: Disease, Diet, and Gender: Late Twentieth-Century Critical Perspective on Empire


• 18: Exploration and Empire


• 19: Missions and Empire


• 20: Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Abolition


• 21: The Royal Navy and the British Empire


• 22: Imperial Defence


• 23: The Empire-Commonwealth and the Two World Wars


• 24: Imperial Flotsam? The British in the Pacific Islands


• 25: Formal and Informal Empire in East Asia


• 26: The British Empire in South-East Asia


• 27: Formal and Imformal Empire in the Middle East


• 28: Informal Empire in Latin America


• 29: Britain and the Scramble for Africa


• 30: The British Empire in Tropical Africa: A Review of the Literature to the 1960s


• 31: West Africa


• 32: East Africa: Metropolitan Action and Local Initiative


• 33: Central and Southern Africa


• 34: Decolonization and the End of Empire


• 35: The Commonwealth


• 36: Art and Empire


• 37: Architecture in the British Empire


• 38: Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire


• 39: The Shaping of Imperial History


• 40: The Future of Imperial History


• 41: The Way Forward


• Chronology, Index