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Imperial Possessions, Cultural Histories, and the Material Turn: Response

we might call the material turn in historyrichly displayed at this year's NAVSA Conference, in several important recent publications, and in forthcoming journal issuesis not new. It is, indeed, a cliche to say that the Victorians themselves were fascinated by things. And it has been nearly two decades since Asa Briggs asked historians to contemplate Victorian materialities. Since Briggs published his study, however, the discussion has turned to foreign objects and what they can tell us about Britain's imperial and world histories. As it has made this turn, the study of material culture has drawn out competing ideas about historians' attitudes towards historical subjects, the nature of evidence, the aims of historiography, and the integration of analytic frameworks. Some have declared that sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, shawls, and calicoes were among the most pervasive and everyday expressions of imperialism in Victorian Britain.1 For these scholars, commonplace commodities tell extended yet far from obvious stories about Britain's overseas possessions. They reveal imperialism as an act of acquiring and collecting places, people, and things (Jasanoff 10-12). In this formulation, imperialism is consumption, ingestion, and decoration. These everyday commodities taught Britons (and at times their colonial subjects) to be at home or comfortable with their Empire (Hall and Rose 1-31; de Groot 166-90; Burke). Yet, as these historians also note, some of these commonplace things became quite painfully weighed down with the meaning of colonialism, and their rejection helped articulate political interests and ignite colonial rebellions (Breen 294-331; Bayly 285-321; Cohn 303-53). Heretofore, the everyday and the rare have occupied separate analytic frames; foodstuffs and works of art have seemed to suggest different kinds of colonial relationships. If, for instance, the everyday,