Small stories of Little Britons: scale and the ethics of imperial histories

Abstract

Categories are useful but deceptive tools, enabling the historian to build totalising models of historical change that at the same time may take us further away from understanding individual and everyday experience. This article seeks to balance big and small histories, and in so doing to fracture monolithic and predetermined conceptions and mechanisms of ‘British’ imperial history through a reflection on the methods and messages of microhistory in a study of colonialism in north-east India. The article further draws out some of the affective implications of doing British and imperial history from an Australian perspective and with an Antipodean sensibility.