Paul Warren’s Reviews > Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire > Status Update

Author actually uses the term "imagined community" but fails to recognize that all communities are "imagined" when he attempts to describe past as less real than reading news in the present and feeling a certain way about the empire.

Extremely odd framing to pretend that "official terminology" devolved from historians [previously] and not political framing. I don't know any country where the former have more influence in newspapers than the latter.

Finally differentiating areas "not settled and created by the British"... in the last 9 pages.

Still no discrimination of the ways that hierarchy, though sharing titles top down, was being fitted in to vastly different experiences: colonized, populated by another European nation, or simply wholly run extractively via "indirect rule", etc.
Also, there is just no context of what additional resources were given to governors etc. vs just titles and parades?

Again, author claims that supplanting imperial British rule with local based, democratically (or in hopes of doing so) elected officials as not being based in "history".
Maybe the British rule was historical in England, but for every other country and peoples it is foreign and new... excepting Ireland in which case it was not a hierarchy entered into willingly. But the author positions empire as default instead.

I find it very very odd to lump the white,
Dutch Afrikaners with the actual native peoples of India, the Irish of Australia, the British and French of Canada, etc when it comes to “nationalism”

"progressives" - scoff
Expressing interest in anti-British groups inherently means "weak, devious, indecisive". What if they British just chose shitty families who did not, in fact, favor British rule. This is what happened to US in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I'm just now realizing how infrequently the author mentions democracy. Also, that instead of associating the desire for home-rule and more responsibility of policy and hierarchy to local rule is considered "nationalism" and not democracy (again). Also a bias that any sort of strengthening of urban people power is a negative and inherently oppositional to monarchy - without any backing.

I understand that the author wants to drive home how commonplace the ornamentalism is to English subjects and could/should be projected onto the empire.
But, he presuppose that just because the landed gentry voted and wished to keep in place hierarchy at home and in their wishes to prefer that to more “capitalist” without any references to even newspapers much less original plebe text.