What is Imperial History Now

Let me begin with some autobiography. My first formal introduction to imperial history was as a student at Bristol University in the early 1970s. The subject was personified there by a very considerable specialist on British colonial Africa who was often to be seen dressed in a khaki safari suit. From observing him, his students and his course schedules, I jumped to certain conclusions about imperial history. These reflected in large part the woeful extent of my own undergraduate ignorance. But I was also reacting to certain characteristics of British imperial history as a discipline at that stage which tended, I suspect, to put many of my generation and later generations off the subject, and caused us to misapprehend what it was potentially about.