Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80616 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 504 pages

Review
an immensely stimulating analysis [...] So exhaustively researched, closely argued and clearly written a book stands as a formidable obstacle to any future attempts at easy generalisation by the politically correct. The English Historical Review a vivid, compelling and closely written book TLS Immensely learned, provocative and entertaining - a powerful stimulus to a necessary debate The Independent Rich and fascinating. Sunday Telegraph

Review
...[a] spirited and wide-ranging polemic ... an important book in every respect ... highly readable, and perfectly pitched to win friends and provoke enemies. (Stuart Ward, History Workshop Journal )

...an important book on empires. (Manan Ahmed, South Asia News )

Times Literary Supplement, February 18, 2005
A vivid, compelling and closely written book.

Customer Reviews

Awful title, awesome book
When I opened Absent-Minded Imperialists, I was steeling myself for another piece of neo-con propaganda on liberal imperialism and such nonsense. It isn't that at all. This is a scholarly work on the nature and domestic impact of the British empire. Nor is the book, thankfully, a piece of self-flagellation about the injustice of it all. We are by now sadly (or fortunately) well acquainted with the miseries of racism and exploitation imperialism entailed.

Porter's work looks at the existence of an imperial culture and society in Britain. His starting question is why decolonisation was not more traumatic at home. Porter arrives at the conclusion that an imperial culture only emerged in the late nineteenth century, and that there were two empires: a white settler empire and a colonial venture, both quite separate. He shows that, up to a point, few people manned or cared about the empire. Thus on nineteenth-century working-class emigration to Australia and Canada: `You do not starve people out, forcing them from their homes and loved ones to the unknown extremities of the earth, and then expect them to be proud of it. This is not the way imperialists are made.' Porter looks at correspondence (or the lack of it) and the experience of returning colonialists to show that they were cut off from those who stayed (I found that apposite; I have travelled and lived abroad and, in my experience, people couldn't give a d... what you saw or did).

But Absent-Minded Imperialists is remarkable because it is accessible cultural history. At a time when the scrutiny of ideas is all the rage, with academic books full of abstract concepts and words ending in `ism', this is both a cutting-edge work and an enjoyable read. Porter's writing is straightforward; his examples are down-to-earth. It is occasionally rip-roaringly funny. Porter dares quote Hitler praising the brutality of the colonial staff in India. He is darkly amusing on education and imperial shows. Apparently the title is a reference to a quip from the nineteenth-century historian Seeley, itself sarcastic. I don't know how Porter expected anyone to know that, and this leaves the puzzling choice of a title. Perhaps he picked it in a fit of absent-mindedness.