Book history, in particular the history of the press, provides an important means for exploring the construction of national identities, since while the press presumes to speak for a nation or a public, it speaks, as Julie F. Codell states in her introduction to this edited collection on the British and colonial press, “conditions and identities always in process and always multi-voiced” (15). The press is thus particularly valuable for exploring the construction of identities within and between colonies and their metropoles, for not only did British newspapers and periodicals circulate in British colonies, but colonial news circulated in Britain and throughout the Empire. Since news was “both geographically located and dislocated,” the press, according to Codell, “vanquished distances between ‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’” and produced “new identities not definable as ‘British’ or ‘native,’” but as something less homogenous and unstable (17). The aim of the book is thus to examine what she refers to as the “imperial co-histories” produced in the “in-between” spaces produced by the British and colonial press.

Codell has assumed an ambitious task given this collection's broad focus. While this is undoubtedly due in part to her own scholarly interests (see, e.g., Julie F. Codell and Diane Sachko Macleod, eds., Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture [Aldershot, 1998]), it is also, I suspect, due to a desire to raise the status of book history. Book history has grown as a field of study in recent decades, but one of the reasons that it has not achieved greater prominence is the tremendous methodological and theoretical discrepancies in the works produced by book historians. That such tensions still remain in a relatively new field, and one, moreover, that is so multidisciplinary (the contributors to this volume, for example, hail from the disciplines of history, literature, anthropology, art history, and gender and media studies), should not be surprising. But when book historians turn their attention to colonial studies, a similarly multidisciplinary area, the results can be even more fraught. Does Codell's volume, therefore, succeed in overcoming these disciplinary hurdles?

To some extent, yes. It is notable, first, that none of its twelve contributors homogenize imperialism or colonialism or totalize concepts such as “colonial discourse.” One of the virtues of book history is its study of the particular and the local—individual journals, authors, publishing practices, readerships, and so on. This is precisely the approach that Nicholas Thomas recommends scholars of colonialism to take to escape the pitfalls of what he views as a postcolonial blender, namely, the practice of “put[ting] Fanon and Lacan (or Derrida) into a blender and tak[ing] the result to be equally appetizing for premodern and modern; for Asian, African and American; for metropolitan, settler, indigenous and diasporic subjects” (Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government [Cambridge, 1994], ix). However, acknowledging the existence of a multiplicity of “imperialisms” and “colonialisms” does not necessarily equate with producing Codell's co-histories. And this is where, I think, the volume does not entirely succeed in overcoming the disciplinary challenges that it faces.

It is worth exploring, for a moment, exactly what Codell means by the term “co-histories.” The concept is taken from an essay by Edward Said in which he argues that the point of the work of Franz Fanon was “to force the European metropolis to think its history together with the history of colonies awakening from the cruel stupor and abused immobility of imperial domination” (“Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 [1989]: 223). But what exactly does it mean for Europe to think its history “together with” its colonies, how should it be done, and who is qualified to do so? It is perhaps ironic that Said, who devoted such considerable attention to the subject position of academics in the construction of Orientalist discourse (as well as his experiences as an “other” writing in the West) should not choose to address this issue in an essay examining anthropology's complicity with colonialism and the means to rectify this. Yet Fanon, the most prominent individual to urge Europe to write co-histories, was a colonized intellectual able to straddle the history of Europe and its colonies by virtue of his subject position in the colonial encounter.

I am not, of course, arguing that only individuals such as Fanon or Albert Memmi can write the co-histories that Codell claims are represented in this volume. But writing such co-histories should entail more, for example, than writing about images of India in a magazine written by British men and published in Britain for British middle-class readers. Such analysis can afford valuable insights into the role of Empire in the imperial imagination, or in the construction of Britishness, as is the case of the essays in the first half of the book, “Sites of Authority: Imperial Domination and Press Intervention.” Yet this does not, I believe, conform to Fanon's idea of writing the history of Europe “together with” the history of the colonies. The essays in the second half of the book, “Sites of Fracture: Resistance and Autonomy in Imperial Representation,” are, however, more successful at achieving this, particularly the contributions by Denise P. Quirk on gender and national identity in the Victorian Women's Periodical press, by Codell on “native informants” in the Victorian press, and the superb essay by Aled Jones on Welsh missionary journalism. These essays reveal not only the fragility of the boundaries between “colonizer” and “colonized,” but the ways in which, via the press, each contributed to constructing the identity of the other—precisely, I think, what Fanon had in mind. While the volume thus does not entirely succeed in meeting Codell's claims for it, it will hopefully serve as a catalyst for further studies on the relationships among imperialism, colonialism, and print culture, and on the myriad and complex identities that the press helped to construct in both metropolitan and colonial contexts.