Sites of imperial memory

Commemorating colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Dominik Geppert, Frank Lorenz-Muller, Dominik Geppert, Frank Lorenz-Muller

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719090813
• eBook ISBN: 9781526111883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Europe's great colonial empires have long been a thing of the past, but the memories they generated are still all around us. They have left deep imprints on the different memory communities that were affected by the processes of establishing, running and dismantling these systems of imperial rule, and they are still vibrant and evocative today. This volume brings together a collection of innovative and fresh studies exploring different sites of imperial memory – those conceptual and real places where the memories of former colonial rulers and of former colonial subjects have crystallised into a lasting form. The volume explores how memory was built up, re-shaped and preserved across different empires, continents and centuries. It shows how it found concrete expression in stone and bronze, how it adhered to the stories that were told and retold about great individuals and how it was suppressed, denied and neglected.

CHAPTER ONE

Beyond national memory.
Nora’s Lieux de Mémoire across an imperial world

Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz Müller

The imperial past is all around us. Decades have come and gone since the dissolution of Europe’s great colonial empires, but the footprints they have left in the realm of memory all over the world are plain to see. Legacies of empire are present in the demarcations of state borders, in architecture and urban topographies, on the pedestals of monuments, in books, on cinema screens, in photo albums, on the internet, in public rituals and in political debates. Heroes from the age of empire–men such as Jan Pietersz Coen, Lord Clive, David Livingstone or Captain Marchand–have not been forgotten, even though their record may now appear in a much more ambivalent light. At the same time, Imam Shamil, the Mau Mau veterans and other erstwhile insurgents rebelling against the colonial order are now celebrated as freedom fighters. Imperial institutions such as the British and the Dutch East India Companies are familiar to every schoolchild–not just in Britain and the Netherlands, but in India and Indonesia as well. Even commodities of daily life, such as coffee or rubber, bear the deep imprint of their colonial histories. More than ever, troubling elements of the imperial past such as Britain’s suppression of the Mau Mau uprising or the atrocities in the Belgian Congo are matters of public debate. This book ventures into these vast fields strewn with the debris of imperial memory. It analyses the genesis, shape and weight of some of the boulders left in these landscapes of memory and examines their function at different times and across different social, political, and cultural groups.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, Tony Judt and others have taught us, we have lived in an ‘age of commemoration’. Naturally, this observation does not only apply to national memory. It also speaks to the commemoration of an imperial past. In 2011, for instance, a 60-member delegation travelled from Namibia to Berlin. The African delegates made the journey to collect and return to their home the skulls of twenty victims of the war Imperial Germany had waged against the Herero and Nama. More than a century had passed since these bones had been brought to the German capital where they were used for pseudoscientific race research.1

On more than one occasion, though, the imperial dimension has proved hard to accommodate within established national modes of interpreting and commemorating the past. By losing their empire, it has been quipped, the British were transformed from Romans into Italians in just a matter of years. How this transformation came to pass, however, and how it effected a lasting readjustment of the nation’s identity (if it did), has not yet been fully explored or integrated into national historiography.2 Until very recently, Stephen Howe has written, ‘imperial and colonial history existed in an almost entirely separate sphere from the writing of “domestic” British history’.3 There is thus no consensus as to how the British Empire should be remembered: as something to be ashamed of or as, on the whole, ‘a good thing’ that ‘made the modern world’, as Niall Ferguson provocatively put it.4

In the case of Germany, it is not even clear when imperial history ended: in 1919 when the Reich lost its colonies in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, or in 1945 when Hitler’s attempt to establish a colonial and racialised empire in Eastern Europe was finally crushed?5 This is one of the reasons why there has been a fierce debate about whether German colonial atrocities, particularly in Namibia from 1904 to 1907, could be interpreted as something of a precursor to the Holocaust.6 The picture remains blurred when one moves on to a European perspective. The West European master narrative associated with 8 May 1945 tells a story of reconciliation and resurgence of the continent’s nations in the wake of two devastating wars. On the former colonial periphery, though, 8 May 1945 loses its narrative coherence. In North Africa, for instance, the day is remembered primarily for the violent uprising in the Constantinois area and the subsequent massacres that French colonial troops committed there.7

Dan Diner’s recent prediction does not merely apply to the Second World War: ‘The Western, European image of history is being affected by a tendency towards pluralisation … the experiences of other, hitherto neglected historical spaces will be considered: Arabic, South Asian, Far Eastern and Black African spaces of experience and memory’.8 This development, Diner assumes, will make the already complex European picture even more difficult to fathom. A more globalised and pluralised view, it should be added, though, will also result in a better understanding of an intricate past and present.

Now seems to be an auspicious time to explore the historical spaces where ‘empire’ and ‘memory’ overlap. For a number of years both issues have been historiographical boom topics. Before its recent revival imperial history had been neglected as empires seemed politically obsolete; they corresponded neither to the nation-state nor to federally conceived supranational organisations such as the European Union. More recently, however, empires have assumed a central position in historical research. Our understanding of them has been greatly enhanced by a wealth of recent studies.9 Some of this research has been explicitly comparative; other studies have analysed individual aspects of imperial rule on a more theoretical footing.10 Questions such as the extent to which imperial concerns influenced the politics and political culture of the metropole, for instance, have triggered lively and searching controversies.11 There is a growing interest in the ‘colonisation of consciousness’ concerning the white settlers and the indigenous inhabitants of the colonies as well as the domestic populations of the imperial powers.12 Historians now compare methods of expansion, practices of rule, different (re)sources of legitimacy and the civilising missions of various empires,13 and they contrast these phenomena with their functional equivalents at the level of the nation-state.14

Scholars are increasingly sceptical about a predominantly national perspective on the imperial phenomenon. Some prefer the notion of a common colonial culture: ‘a shared European experience which in many ways transgresses the particular national outlooks’.15 Others observe that among European colonial powers and their imitators in East and West, such as the United States or Japan, there was cooperation as well as conflict. Colonial forestry, scientific and technological developments, medicine, the promotion of museums, botanical gardens, and zoos are just a few areas characterised by close transnational collaboration and transfer. Although there was at times intense rivalry and conflict, their approach to the indigenous people they ruled was much the same, as John MacKenzie has noted: ‘All constructed race and related natural historical and climatic studies in similar ways. All became involved in new disciplines, such as geo-politics or microbiology, and recognised their significance in respect of both dominance of the globe and rivalries and dangers within those patterns of dominance’.16 The renewed interest in imperial history reflects a different understanding of empires: they are now conceptualised as transnational agglomerations of power, promoting cultural exchange as well as economic integration and channelling migration flows. As such they can be understood as prefiguring the globalised characteristics of the twenty-first-century world.17

The studies brought together in this volume point to the continued relevance and lasting emotive capacity of memory sites created under imperial conditions. Thus they point to the active legacies of empire in the making and remaking of our post-colonial world. Then as now, meaning and identity–as well as their expression and dissemination–had to be negotiated among different groups of agents, across shifting balances of power and with respect to the sensitivities and preferences of often disparate and far-flung audiences. That these imperial legacies of memory now work in both directions is powerfully illustrated by the call, published in a Berlin newspaper in December 2013, for the square in front of the reconstructed royal palace in Berlin to be named after Samuel Maherero (1856–1923). Forgotten in Germany but a celebrated hero in his native Namibia, this tribal chief led the unsuccessful Herero uprising against German rule in 1904 and managed to survive the colonisers’ genocidal retaliation. Rather than picking the worthy but easy option ‘Nelson Mandela Square’, Germans should, the writer argued, confront a site evoking the memory of oppression and of the struggle for freedom in a more relevant and poignant fashion.18 Memory, guilt and atonement, global brands and local adaptation, hero-worship and national amnesia: all tangled up in an idea that illuminates the reciprocal fertilisation of the twenty-first-century’s globalised memory culture and the old imperial legacies it contains and re-evokes.

One of the chief results of recent research on imperial history has been to highlight the negotiated quality of a great deal of nineteenth-century imperial rule. The century witnessed an increased formalisation of colonies’ ties to their mother countries, and this required increased representation. Alongside the hard power of military and institutional control, representation could ensure a certain degree of additional stability. Identity-forming symbols and rituals arguably played an even greater role for the maintenance of imperial cohesion than in the national context, because control through actual institutions was necessarily looser in geographically vast and multi-ethnic empires.19 In some cases, symbols of integration had to ‘serve as a functional equivalent of another, weak form of cohesion’.20 It was not just the monarch or head of state at the apex of an imperial system who could assume such a role. As the studies assembled in this volume will demonstrate, historic events and persons, institutions, commodities and concepts from the spheres of politics, administration, economics and religion could also acquire symbolic sway within the different collective memories and thus function as sites of memory.

It is hardly surprising that recent research in imperial history has accorded such a prominent place to aspects of collective memory, since historical research into ‘memory’ has also flourished over the past decades. Questions of memory, it is true, have fascinated thinkers from Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud to Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim for much of the last 150 years or so. Ever since Maurice Halbwachs published his pioneering work on Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire in 1925 and then tested his ideas in La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte, there has been a strong under-current of scholarly interest in collective memory, not least in the Annales school of French historiography and its history of mentalities.21

It was, however, only in the late 1970s and 1980s that the under-curren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Founding editor’s introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Beyond national memory. Nora’s Lieux de Mémoire across an imperial world
• Part I–Monuments
• Part II–Heroes and villains
• Part III–Remembering and forgetting
• Select bibliography
• Index