Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism [Paperback]

"The Development of the "new imperial history" is considered in this book by a scholar who helped to shape the field. Antoinette Burton has insisted that the vectors of imperial power run in many directions and that race must be incorporated into history writing, and argued that gender and sexuality are critical dimensions of imperial history. This collection of essays includes her groundbreaking critiques of British historiography, as well as essays in which she views topics from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre to nostalgia for colonial India through the lens of theory, and a coda in which she candidly assesses shortcomings in her own thinking." - Times Higher Education, February 23rd 2012 "No one has done more than Antoinette Burton to challenge the autonomies of national history, indeed the very 'certainty of the nation as an analytical category' itself. Inspired both by the archive's possibilities and the promise of feminist and postcolonial critique, she turns the ever-seductive sufficiencies of British history radically inside out. While brilliantly showing how and why the histories of nation and empire have to be written together, Empire in Question also documents the continuing transformations of the discipline of history since the 1980s, speaking eloquently to specialists across many different fields." - Geoff Eley, author of A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society "Antoinette Burton's body of work is central to the debates over national, imperial, and postcolonial histories. Empire in Question is a most welcome collection of her essays and required reading for anyone in this field. It contains classics, less well-known pieces, and new work. Characteristically, it is full of questions and challenges, both to herself and to her readers. We see a critical and imaginative historian at work, fully engaged both with the times in which she lives, and the times she evokes for us in the past." - Catherine Hall, University College London

Antoinette Burton is Professor of History and Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has written and edited many books, including "The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau" and "After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation," both also published by Duke University Press.