“The third in [Brantlinger’s] trilogy of studies . . . dealing with race and imperialism in British culture from about 1800 into the modern era” (1), Taming Cannibals follows 1988’s Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 and 2003’s Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (both also published by Cornell). At once theoretically sophisticated, historically grounded, and deeply analytical (close readings abound), all three monographs are also impeccably organized (each chapter, like each book, building on the previous one), masterfully comprehensive (drawing on a variety of forms of discourse, interweaving the canonical and the non-canonical, including relevant Romantic and early twentieth–century references, matching the empire’s geographic reach), broadly retrospective (presenting superb summaries of contemporaneous and contemporary thinking on the topics at hand), and confidently original. Rule of Darkness, which was among the first self-consciously styled “cultural histor[ies]” of imperial literature from the Victorian era through the beginning of World War I (x), explores generic developments and changing socio-political perspectives, while—just a decade after Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978)—still foregrounding the argument that “imperialism . . . influenced all aspects of Victorian and Edwardian culture” (8). The more narrowly focused Dark Vanishings, which takes as a given—and presumes its readers do the same—the imbrication of the metropolitan and the colonial, examines the wide-ranging influence of “extinction discourse” (1), in particular on racial ideology and imperial expansion.

Although all three texts scrutinize the relationship between race and imperialism, the central argument of Taming Cannibals is that these “ideologies . . . were powerfully symbiotic and often indistinguishable from each other” (6, emphasis added). Not just imperialism, but also racism, Brantlinger concludes, “informed virtually all aspects of Romantic and Victorian culture” (7). If imperial expansion hinged on Britain’s sense of its own racial superiority, nothing less than “the British future, especially after publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, was understood in terms of racial progress or degeneration” (20). Making his way through debates about cannibalism, representations of the “demise” of Tasmania’s aboriginal population (20), literary and historical narratives of “going native,” Benjamin Disraeli’s views on race, race-based representations of Britain’s “residuum” (21), stereotypes of Celtic levity, Rider Haggard’s “racial archaeology” (159), and futuristic invasion stories, Brantlinger winds up with the twenty-first-century echoes of Rudyard Kipling’s nineteenth-century call to America to take up “the white man’s burden.”

Taming Cannibals is strongest when it addresses shifts over time, for instance from the perception of an expanding to that of a shrinking “frontier” or from class- to race-based descriptions of the residuum; when it draws links between ideologies, practices, cultural narratives, or events, such as “stories about humans turning into beasts” and “those about going native” (78), or evolution and the fear of displacement by machine; and when it explores ideological contradictions, like the necessity and impossibility of civilizing “the savages” or the purity and fragility of the Anglo-Saxon “race.” It is valuable reading not only for those attentive to race and empire, but also for anyone interested in genre (an underlying theme), the effects of Darwin on Victorian culture, and the fin de siècle.

I have two criticisms, the first of which is semantic. I dislike the term negative Orientalism (102, 105), which he uses without scare quotes or any other form of explicit distancing. Though neither is quite what Brantlinger means, overt Orientalism or Said’s “manifest” Orientalism would be less problematic (with some qualification) because they suggest, respectively, implicit Orientalism or Said’s “latent” Orientalism rather than positive Orientalism as its obverse. The second criticism is that although each chapter makes a strong, clear argument, collectively they don’t move beyond the centrality of race. Perhaps they don’t need to. In concisely articulating and convincingly demonstrating that which has long undergirded critical thinking since the imperial turn—that race was not only used by Victorians in the service of empire, but that it “helped [them] interpret and categorize all humans everywhere and throughout history, including themselves” (19, emphasis added)—Brantlinger makes the latent manifest.