Stephen Howe

Professor of History and Cultures of Colonialism, University of Bristol, UK.

My present research revolves around the history − especially the history of ideas and ideologies − of empire, its aftermaths and legacies. My main focus has been on British imperial history, including the role of imperial questions in domestic British politics; but my writing also involves a strong comparative element. Much of my recent and current work engages with the very concept of colonialism and associated terms, including reflection on and probing of the limits, the uses, and indeed, the abuses of the concept itself. Much, too, addresses broad theoretical and comparative questions about anti- and postcolonialism. I am currently completing three interrelated books: on the intellectual consequences of decolonization, on anticolonial intellectuals, and on representations and legacies of late-colonial violence.

Exceptional States and States of Exception

Rhetorics, discourses, and assumptions of exceptionalism have, as the seminar’s conveners suggest, been near-ubiquitous in the history and historiography of empires, and in those of postcolonial and postimperial states. A British-imperial exceptionalism has been, surely, among the most powerful of these – and its enduring strength is indicated not least by its often implicit, taken-for-granted nature. There have, of course, been multiple historical debates over the peculiarities of English or British historical development as such (for instance, on the growth of a “spirit of liberty,” on early industrialization, or in a Marxist tradition on a supposedly early and incomplete bourgeois revolution). But these have rarely interacted fully with, let alone been integrated into, the study of empire as such. Briefly sketching how, in my view, such integration might look, I shall still more briefly compare it with the more explicit, sharply focused German “Sonderweg” debate, and its more recent revival in the colonial sphere. I shall also, however, try to suggest that two further kinds of “exceptionalism” have been pertinent. One is the notion, found in particular strength in much recent history and theory, of the exceptionalism of the colonial itself: a powerful tendency to make assumptions about, rather than really investigate, what is distinctive (or, again, “exceptional”) about colonial situations or imperial states as against others. The other, more recent still, is the rather sudden popularity in colonial studies of ideas about “states of exception,” drawn from the work of Giorgio Agamben and, behind him, Carl Schmitt. I will suggest that this is a development linked to the older arguments by much more than a coincidence of shared terminology – and on the whole a negative, unproductive one!