[Apr 23] Reconceptualizing the British Empire: Global and Comparative Perspectives

Global and Area Studies presents The Braudel Lectures

Reconceptualizing the British Empire: Global and Comparative Perspectives

Date: April 23, 2025 (Wednesday)

Time: 4:30–6:30pm

Venue: CRT-4.36, 4/F., Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Speaker: Prof. Steven Pincus, Department of History, the University of Chicago

Respondent: Prof. James Fichter, Associate Professor, Global and Area Studies, The University of Hong Kong

Abstract:

The British Empire was an Empire of contradictions.  The world’s two largest democracies are former colonies.  Yet the British imperial state enslaved and transported over 3 million Africans in the 17th and 18th centuries. Colonial consumption of British manufactures enabled Britain to become the first industrialized economy, but Britain also suppressed advanced textile productions in Bengal.  Neither neo-liberal (Company-state) nor subaltern studies models can explain all these facts.  Neo-liberals can’t explain the centrality of coercion.  Subalternist or extractive models can’t account for the creation of inclusive institutions.  The solution is comparative empire studies.  What made the British Empire distinctive was the public, popular and partisan debates over longue durée about the imperial state and its political economy. This meant that in Britain there were competing imperial projects, one focusing on extraction/production and territorial empire, another on consumption and an empire based on commercial nodes and free ports. Partisans of both approaches struggled for control of the imperial agenda in every colony as well as in Westminster.  Victories were contingent and temporary, based on a dynamic and ever-changing social and economic context.  From this perspective there was no shift from a first to a second British Empire around 1800.  Instead, there was persistent partisan political-economic struggle from the 17th through the 20th centuries.  The great puzzle of why Britain lost imperial possessions in North America while gaining vast territory in South Asia can be explained by this fierce partisan struggle on a global stage. The ‘American Revolution’ was thus merely one theater in a global imperial civil war.

Speaker’s Bio:

Steve Pincus is the Thomas Donnelly Professor of History at the University of Chicago.  He has published on early modern European, British imperial, economic, and Atlantic History, including 1688: The First Modern Revolution and The Heart of the Declaration.  This talk comes from his just-completed fourth monograph, The Global British Empire to 1784, to be published by Yale University Press.  His work has been supported by fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, All Souls College, Oxford, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Council on Learned Societies.

All are welcome. No registration is required.

For enquiries, please contact us at smlc@hku.hk