HISTORY: A HANDMAID'S TALE

Abstract

Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians’ power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Being able to narrate was itself a manifestation of power. It was only after the Second World War that history renounced its pact with power and a reimagination of the historical idiom emerged. Various shades of South Asian and Caribbean anti-colonial leaders and postcolonial writers began to think beyond the historicist category of the empire. These efforts to dismantle the empire's historical narratives were paralleled by the writings of British historian E. P. Thompson, although he remained tied to the idea of history as progress. The moral question, however, remains unsettled. It endures for present-day historians because the teleserials, nostalgic period dramas, and “great men” histories continue to hold sway over the public mind, generate debates about the “benefits” of the empire, and feed Britain's anti-immigrant sentiments. Satia's book lies at the intersection of three sets of historiographies—histories of British political thought, postcolonial writings that highlight alternate conceptions of the past and the significance of orality, memory, and community history, and, lastly, histories of violence—all of which engage the moral question in some form or another.