Dorset Days

There are four questions behind this account of my childhood. One concerns who I was and how I came to be as I am. So this is the autobiographical quest for personal roots and identity. I hope to throw some light on the wider nature of an experience which is not confined to me - the evolution of a certain sort of middle-class, English, male in the middle of the twentieth century. A second question concerns my family and its history. It seems that I come from a well-documented and...
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There are four questions behind this account of my childhood. One concerns who I was and how I came to be as I am. So this is the autobiographical quest for personal roots and identity. I hope to throw some light on the wider nature of an experience which is not confined to me - the evolution of a certain sort of middle-class, English, male in the middle of the twentieth century. A second question concerns my family and its history. It seems that I come from a well-documented and interesting family whose tentacles spread across the world and can be traced in detail from the later seventeenth century. In particular, there are sets of letters and memoranda which give an insight into the inner dynamics of colonial family life. Not the least of these are my mother's letters and other writings which I hope to reassemble and expand. This is the genealogical quest. A third question concerns England and Britain. I came back from India when I was six and encountered a new land. I needed to start to understand its distinctive history and culture. This is an exploration I have engaged in since, both as a historian and an anthropologist. The theme here is 'the peculiarity of the English (or British)', and what its causes and effects have been. From 'The Origins of English Individualism' written in 1977, through to my latest book in 2009 on 'Reflections on Cambridge', much of my work has been exploring the bundle of contradictions and strange cultural pattern of this small island. Through examining my family, and myself I hope to throw further light on this. My final question concerns the British Empire. Britain was just the small hub of a great empire for more than a century. The British created this empire, but equally it created Britain. It has a very distinctive character which makes it different from other empires in the way it worked and imagined itself. I am particularly interested in what held it together and how the identity of those who were involved with it, such as my ancestors, was constructed. This knits together the three previous questions - my own education for empire, the experience of my far-flung family, the peculiarity of their British home, and how all this was shaped by, and shaped, the British Empire.