Asian Review of World Histories 2:2 (July 2014), 249-265 © 2014 The Asian Association of World Historians doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12773/arwh.2014.2.2.249 Review Article Writing the British Imperial and Colonial History: A Global Perspective Yi LI Nanyang Technological University Singapore
[email protected] Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850-1939, by Tamson PIETSCH, Man- chester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 256pp. ISBN: 978-0719085024 The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire, by Giordano NANNI, Manchester: Man- chester University Press, 2012. xviii + 254 pp. ISBN: 978- 0719091292 The British colonial world once formed a vast commercial, political, military, and cultural entity, whose sphere of influences stretched from the Far Eastern port of Formosa to the nomadic Patagonian plain of the New World in South America. As a dom- inant European seaborne Empire, Britain, albeit a latecomer 249 250 | ASIAN REVIEW OF WORLD HISTORIES 2:2 (JULY 2014) compared to Spain and Portugal, has been influential in the for- mation and transformation of considerable parts of our world from the eighteen century onwards, if not earlier. Classical au- thors, often with great works, such as James Mill and his six- volume The History of British India,1 George Bancroft and an even more colossal, ten-volume History of the United States of America, first appeared in 1834,2 as well as Seeley’s The Expan- sion of England, first published in 1883,3 presented an early stage of writing the British imperial and colonial history.