Few historical subjects have generated such intense and sustained interest in recent decades as Britain's imperial past. What accounts for this preoccupation? Why has it gained such purchase on the historical imagination? How has it endured even as its subject slips further into the past?In seeking to answer these questions, the proposed volume brings together some of the leading figures in the field, historians of different generations, different nationalities, different methodological and theoretical perspectives and different ideological persuasions. Each addresses the (...) relationship between their personal development as historians of empire and the larger forces and events that helped to shape their careers. The result is a book that investigates the connections between the past and the present, the private and the public, the professional practices of historians and the political environments within which they take shape. This intellectual genealogy of the recent historiography of empire will be of great value to anyone studying or researching in the field of imperial history. (shrink)

This article focuses on two memoirs written by Cornelia Sorabji in the 1930s – India Calling (1934), and a subsequent book, India Recalled (1936) – in order to explore how discourses of space and place shaped the representations of femininity which structure these texts. Specifically, I will examine Sorabji's apprehensions of femininity in relation to the Muslim and Hindu women she viewed as her legal ‘clients.’ I am equally interested in these texts as evidence of how memory works as a (...) practice of history – how events as they were recalled and recorded in the volatile 1930s and, especially in the wake of the Katherine Mayo controversy, how they helped shape the versions of the respectable feminine produced in her public writing of the period. (shrink)