Empire and history writing in Britain c.1750–2012

Download or read book Empire and history writing in Britain c.1750–2012 written by Joanna de Groot and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging and accessible book examines the effects of British imperial involvements on history writing in Britain since 1750. It provides a chronological account of the development of history writing in its social, political, and cultural contexts, and an analysis of the structural links between those involvements and the dominant concerns of that writing. The author looks at the impact of imperial and global expansion on the treatment of government, of social structures and changes and of national and ethnic identity in scholarly and popular works, in school histories, and in ‘famous’ history books. In a clear and student-friendly way, the book argues that involvement in empire played a transformative and central role within history writing as whole, reframing its basic assumptions and language, and sustaining a significant ‘imperial’ influence across generations of writers and diverse types of historical text.