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标题：Perspectives on the End of the British Empire : The Historiographical Debate
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作者：Richard Davis
期刊名称：Cercles : Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1292-8968
出版年度：2013
期号：28
出版社：Université de Rouen
摘要：It is usual in the numerous publications on imperial history that have appeared in the recent past to begin by pointing out that this has been the subject of a renewed interest over the past twenty years. It may equally be said that the interest in this particular area of history has not been limited to the university world. Indeed, unlike a great many other fields of history, the British Empire has roused widespread debate in the media and has been the subject of much comment on the part of leading politicians in Britain and elsewhere. Ignorance of, and a general disinterest in, our history may be a regrettable fact of life in early twenty- first century Britain. Questions of Empire, however, still seem to be able to raise strong passions and provoke debate across society. Clearly our imperial history still has much life left in it: we are still far from putting this particular part of our history to bed, even fifty years after the Empire seemingly disappeared from the map. That the subject should continue to provoke such a debate is surely a sign of a healthy interest in our past; its often passionate, sometimes vitriolic, nature and the lack of any consensus emerging over it, are to welcomed, particularly coming after a long period when, for many in Britain at least, there was a comfortable but deceptive sense that this history had been put behind us once and for all. We can, however, regret that there is still all too often a refusal to face up to some of the darker sides of this story and at times a blatant misuse of this history for present- day political needs