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I Index Overall Rating
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50/100Critics
10/100Scholars
92/100Author:
Priya Satia
Publisher:
Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
Date:
October 20, 2020
British historians influenced the empire in critical ways. Time's Monster shows how the modern vision of history as a form of ethics empowered historians to shape policy, while history became a justification for domination. Later, alternative notions of history revised the discipline's ethics and effects, reminding us that ideas have consequences.
What The Reviewers Say
How did the British get to be so blinkered about their own history? In Time’s Monster: How History Makes History , a probing new book, the Stanford professor Priya Satia argues that British views of empire remain 'hostage to myth' partly because historians made them so.
Time’s Monster is a coruscating and important reworking of the relationship between history, historians and empire. It is also a frustrating account. The thread running through Time’s Monster is the need to understand the catastrophic consequences of rooting ethical claims in particular historical narratives.
... a book that explores the ways in which the field of history 'helped make empire.' The empire in question is Britain’s; and in her telling of the imperial tale, British historians were the ethical and moral enablers of the statesmen, soldiers and adventurers who would, by cannon and cunning, conquer half the world.
In Time’s Monster.
