Ornamentalism
David Cannadine’s reply to Edward Said’s Orientalism. He argues that the British saw their empire less through race than through rank, and set out to reproduce at home and abroad a single hierarchy of monarchs, princes, chiefs and gentlemen. Hierarchy, not otherness, is his key to how the empire was imagined and run.
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Adam Foulds
Part of Cannadine’s argument is that there was much more cultural interpenetration in the British Empire, certainly in India, than Said suggests. But also its central contention is that the British Empire wanted to see in other cultures a replication of its own power structure, and of its own aristocracy and royalty, and wanted to weld them into the British Empire.
Interview · February 2010
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