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With few exceptions postcolonial theories of colonial power and anti-colonial resistance have privileged the relationship of European self and other of colonizer and colonized. The aim of Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial is to swivel this conventional axis of interaction laterally by examining how, around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, certain early anti-imperial and nationalist movements, and nationalist and anti-colonial leaders and writers, found inspirational solidarity and instructive models in one another’s work and experience.3 The ‘contact zone’ of cultural and political exchange conventionally located between the European colonial centre and its periphery will instead be positioned between peripheries.

Whereas, following the Subaltern school of Indian historiography, or the Lacanian theory of Homi Bhabha and others, critics have in recent years given more attention to the ‘continuities and intimacies’ as well as the antagonisms of the colonial relationship, to rereadings of the colonial tradition from the position of otherness, the intention here will rather be to consider the ways in which such continuities were manifested between colonial (and proto-national) spaces, especially between native elites, during the decades of formal or high empire, 1890–1920.5 The book will investigate how definitive concepts of self-realization often seen as originating within European political traditions (self-help; boycott; imperial ‘loyalty’), were critically appropriated and remade not only by native nationalists as such, but through borrowing, exchange, and even collaboration between anticolonial regions.6 The central question will be how resistance emerged not so much from the place of otherness as amongst others.

Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial by ELLEKE BOEHMER