Volume 46, Number 20 · December 16, 1999
Buried Lives
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century
by William Roger Louis editor-in-chief, edited by Nicholas Canny
Oxford University Press, 533 pp., $45.00
The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: The Eighteenth Century
by William Roger Louis editor-in-chief, edited by P.J. Marshall
Oxford University Press, 639 pp., $45.00
It must be said immediately that its first two volumes get The Oxford History of the British Empire off to a strong start.[*] Both books consist of essays that break much new ground and do so with a confidence based on extensive research and with refreshing lucidity and frankness. The authors, rightly, often use direct quotation. There is none of that extensive resort to paraphrase, which can so easily be used to inflect an account in a particular direction that the documents in question, when directly examined, fail to sustain. The most flagrant effort in this respect in modern American historiography was Dumas Malone's six-volume Life of Thomas Jefferson. With copious resort to paraphrase, Malone managed to produce a sanitized and sanctified Jefferson, one not borne out by the original documents once they were carefully scrutinized. There has been quite a lot of that kind of writing, but there is none of it in these volumes.
Review, 3577 words
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