The Oxford History of the British Empire

File:Oxford History of the British Empire Vol. I.jpg

Volume I of The Oxford History of the British Empire

The Oxford History of the British Empire is a history of the British Empire that was published by the Oxford University Press in 1998-99. The editor in chief was William Roger Louis.

Reviews

Max Beloff, reviewing the first two volumes in History Today, praised them for their readability and was pleased that his worry that they would be too anti-imperialist had not been realised. Saul Dubow in H-Net noted the uneven quality of the chapters in volume III and also the difficulty of such an endeavor give the state of historiography of the British Empire and the impossibility of maintaining a triumphalist tone in the modern era. Dubow also felt that some of the authors had tended "to 'play safe', awed perhaps by the monumental nature of the enterprise".

Madhavi Kale of Bryn Mawr College, writing in Social History, also felt that the history took a traditional approach to the historiography of the empire and placed the English, and to a lesser extent the Scottish, Irish and Welsh at the centre of the account, rather than the subject peoples of the empire. Kale summed up her review of volumes III-V of the history by saying it represented "a disturbingly revisionist project that seeks to neutralize ... the massive political and military brutality and repression" of the empire.

Volumes

• Volume I The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. 1998. Editor Nicholas Canny.
• Volume II The Eighteenth Century. 1998. Editor P.J. Marshall.
• Volume III The Nineteenth Century. 1999. Editor Andrew Porter. online
• Volume IV The Twentieth Century. 1999. Editor Judith M. Brown & William Roger Louis. online
• Volume V Historiography. 1999. Editor Robin W. Winks. online

See also

• Historiography of the British Empire