William Gallois – författare

This book forms part of the scholarly rejection of the ‘experts’ of empire and calls for us to centre our understanding of colonial praxis upon the lives of the colonised peoples of the past and the present.

Western publics are constantly being told by ‘experts’ that they ought to rethink the history of empire. They are told that their (presumed) guilt regarding their countries’ imperial pasts can be assuaged: if people were only able to deploy a ‘balanced scorecard’ they would then recognise that imperialists brought roads as well as death, schools as well as national borders, and hospitals as well as racialised forms of ethnic conflict. Building around an essay by the Algerian writer Hosni Kitouni (here translated into English for the first time), this book shows how the genre and forms of imperial history mirror the actions of colonists and the documents they left behind, erasing the suffering of indigenous people and the after-effects of empire, which last into the present and will continue into the future.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

This book forms part of the scholarly rejection of the ‘experts’ of empire and calls for us to centre our understanding of colonial praxis upon the lives of the colonised peoples of the past and the present.

Western publics are constantly being told by ‘experts’ that they ought to rethink the history of empire. They are told that their (presumed) guilt regarding their countries’ imperial pasts can be assuaged: if people were only able to deploy a ‘balanced scorecard’ they would then recognise that imperialists brought roads as well as death, schools as well as national borders, and hospitals as well as racialised forms of ethnic conflict. Building around an essay by the Algerian writer Hosni Kitouni (here translated into English for the first time), this book shows how the genre and forms of imperial history mirror the actions of colonists and the documents they left behind, erasing the suffering of indigenous people and the after-effects of empire, which last into the present and will continue into the future.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

What is time? How does our sense of time lead us to approach the world? How did the peoples of the past view time? This book answers these questions through an investigation of the cultures of time in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and the Australian Dreamtime. It argues that our contemporary world is blind as to the significance and complexity of time, preferring to believe that time is natural and unchanging. This is of critical importance to historians since the base matter of their study is time, yet there is almost no theoretical literature on time in history.

This book offers the first detailed historiographical study of the centrality of time to human cultures. It sets out the complex ways in which ideas of time developed in the major world religions, and the manner in which such conceptions led people both to live in ways very different to our contemporary world and to make very different kinds of histories. It goes on to argue that modern scientific descriptions of time, such as Einsteins Theory of Relativity, lie much closer to the complex understandings of time in religions such as Christianity than they do to our common-sense notions of time which are centred on progress through a past, present and future.

What is time? How does our sense of time lead us to approach the world? How did the peoples of the past view time? This book answers these questions through an investigation of the cultures of time in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and the Australian Dreamtime. It argues that our contemporary world is blind as to the significance and complexity of time, preferring to believe that time is natural and unchanging. This is of critical importance to historians since the base matter of their study is time, yet there is almost no theoretical literature on time in history.

This book offers the first detailed historiographical study of the centrality of time to human cultures. It sets out the complex ways in which ideas of time developed in the major world religions, and the manner in which such conceptions led people both to live in ways very different to our contemporary world and to make very different kinds of histories. It goes on to argue that modern scientific descriptions of time, such as Einsteins Theory of Relativity, lie much closer to the complex understandings of time in religions such as Christianity than they do to our common-sense notions of time which are centred on progress through a past, present and future.