Empire

This section is just an update on the (brief) section in the book about teaching pupils about empires (pages 212-13). It contains references to a couple of things I have written about this topic which might have useful references, especially if you you are teaching the topic, or writing an assignment about empires, plus a few things I couldn’t fit into the book, and some things that have come out since the book went to press. 

There is a short article in Public History Weekly (April 2019), ‘Understanding empire in the 21st Century’,  in which I make some general points to keep in mind when we are dealing with the teaching of empire(s), including the need to get students to understand that empires have changed in form and scope since the territorial grabs of earlier centuries, and the question of to what extent the teaching of empire should go beyond the teaching of Britain’s empire. 

There is also a brief summary (by Warwick Mansell) of a paper presented at BERA a few years ago about the extent to which students are taught about the British Empire in schools (BERA Press Release – British Empire study “prevalent in most schools” 13 Sep 2016). It was a very small scale exploratory study, but included coverage in text books, blogs and history education websites. It also makes the point about how difficult it is to cover ‘the whole of the British Empire’, given the constraints on curriculum time. The Teaching History article, ‘Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at key stage 3’ by Michael Riley and Jamie Byrom, (TH 112: 6-14, 2008),  makes this point very adroitly, and is very useful for getting student teachers to think about the challenges of teaching ‘big’ topics.  

‘The balance sheet of empire is not always red’, David Abulafia, Daily Telegraph, 26 September, 2021. I think it is important that students realise that the British Empire is a controversial and contested issue. There are people (including some respectable historians – not just right wing politicians and newspapers) who argue that the British Empire was not unmitigatedly bad. 

I still think that Stephen Howe’s ‘Empire, a very short introduction’ (Oxford, OUP, 2002) is one of the most helpful pieces of writing for becoming informed about some of the complexities of teaching about empire(s). Chapter 1, ‘Introduction: I read the news today…’, pages 1-9, is good for getting across the point of the ubiquity of empires as a phenomenon, and how forms of empire have changed over time, and Chapter 2, ‘Who’s an imperialist?’, pages 10-35 is good for making the point that it is simplistic to teach the British Empire as if it was exactly the same thing, all over the world.  An Amazon preview/sample will give you access to Chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 2. 

A Richard Kennett blogpost, now on the HA’s ‘One Big History Department’s website, first in a series of posts about what  questions we might ask when teaching about the British Empire (Empire blogpost 1: asking different questions about Empire).