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David Cannadine

David Cannadine was born in Birmingham in 1950, and educated at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Princeton. From 1975 to 1988, he was a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, and University Lecturer in History and has taught at Columbia University, New York. He is now Director at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He is the editor and author of many acclaimed books, including The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, which won the Lionel Trilling Prize and the Governors' Award; Aspects of Aristocracy; G. M. Trevelyan; The Pleasures of the Past; History in Our Time and Class in Britain. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Past and Present, and he is General Editor of the Penguin History of Britain series. He writes regularly for newspapers and reviews in London and New York, and is a well-known broadcaster on radio and television.

Aspects of Aristocracy, G. M. Trevelyan, The Pleasures of the Past, History in Our Time and Class in Britain are all published in Penguin.

How would you define Ornamentalism?
Ornamentalism is a vision of empire based on the notion of social hierarchy in Britain, which is exported to, and analogised back from, the Empire overseas, and which is articulated, made real and brought alive by extravagant displays of the ceremonial, and by the general delight in dressing up.

What would surprise most readers about the central thrust of the book?
That the British Empire was as much about race as about class, and that in certain contexts and circumstances, the British were more admiring of those in the Empire with dark skins than of those who were white.

In the book you point out that the British Empire was an enormously dynamic and varied organism. Do you think that ornamentalist views and the limits of that view were important in its downfall?
A delight in hierarchy, and a preference for the countryside over the town, meant the Empire was increasingly vulnerable to middle-class, urban-based colonial nationalism in the decades after the Second World War.

Looking at contemporary Britain do you think we still fall prey to ornamentalism?
Our post-imperial ceremonials are less splendid than they were, and our clothing is generally less elaborate than in the heyday of empire; but many Britons still like dressing up.