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Rating: 
Summary: essential reading for students of imperialism
Review: The first customer review of this book (by a reader in Atlanta) is completely off. It was obviously written by someone with an ax to grind, but it is not representative of Burton's work. Burdens of History is a nuanced and thoughtful examination of the role of British women both in relation to their efforts to secure the vote, but also (for lack of a better word) their "complicity" in the imperial project. This is not a matter of anachronistically applying 20th c. liberal ideas to a 19th c. imperial context. Only someone who skimmed the book could think this. This is a wonderful book which has rightfully earned Burton wide-spread respect throughout the field of British imperial history.
Rating: 
Summary: The kind of scholarship that makes me sad.
Review: This is the sort of book that says, "Oh, those naughty people a century ago! They were so unenlightened, compared to us." A hundred years ago, there were these horrible women called "suffragists," you see--sure, they wanted votes for WHITE women, but all the time they had all sorts of horrible, imperialistic stereotypes about people who weren't white! If only they'd had modern academics to keep them in line! The scholarship here is often as disappointing as the conclusions are predictable. Burton will take an analysis of a single journal and make it do duty for the whole of a movement. Literary-critical types (and I am one myself) shouldn't delude themselves into thinking they're writing history. This kind of academic book makes me say to myself, "Maybe it's not such a bad thing that academic publishing is dying." Sigh.
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