In what ways have New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, and Australians thought of themselves as British? To what degree did groups such as French Canadians and Welsh immigrants to Australia develop an identity linked simultaneously to sites of origin, arrival, and imperial allegiance? The essays that constitute The British World ponder such questions as they undertake what editors Carl Bridge and Kent Federowich call the “delineation of Britishness as understood across the old Dominions” (2). Their focus is less upon formal governmental ties than upon the sentiments, networks, and practices that constituted a “consensual association” (8) of those who considered themselves to be partly or entirely British.

The editors present this examination of “Britishness outside Britain” (8) as a corrective to the last few decades’ historiographical interest in national and postcolonial identities, an interest they argue has led to relative neglect of colonies whose self-definition did not emerge from an awareness of racial or cultural otherness. If the book's topic in some ways harks back to earlier imperial histories, its methodology is current: the book's contributors gain much from recent work on nationalism and postcolonial studies, bringing to their projects a sophisticated understanding of both individual and communal identity formation.

The collection's organization is rather tacit, with four essays of broad geographical scope bracketing six more focused studies. The first essay, by Stephen Constantine, argues that while from 1880 to the 1940s emigrants from Britain to the settlement colonies “enjoyed an apparent ease of entry into … British, or at least British-derived, societies” (18), changing migration laws, labor markets, and patterns of movement made their experiences after World War II “more akin to a diaspora” (19). Lisa Chilton's “A New Class of Women for the Colonies” shows how the writings of the British Women's Emigration Association and the South African Colonisation Society, especially its journal The Imperial Colonist, argued that the emigration of single gentlewomen from the British isles would be of multifold benefit to those women and to the empire. Simon J. Potter's essay on the British and Dominions Press from 1876 to 1914 demonstrates that economic factors, especially the affordability of syndicated news services, led to a high degree of empire-wide uniformity in the Dominion newspapers. The final article by Siân Nicholas outlines the BBC's largely unsuccessful effort to integrate Dominions coverage fully into its more populist broadcasts during World War II and to interest British audiences in such coverage.

Two of the six articles at the core of the book are historiographical. Neville Meaney's “Britishness and Australia: Some Reflections” calls for a new Australian history that avoids teleological nationalist claims and comes to terms with Australia's reluctance to sever ties with Britain. Vivian Bickford-Smith's “Revisiting Anglicisation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony” surveys what was until recently a dearth of scholarship on the ways in which Afrikaners and indigenous South Africans not only resisted but also accepted the pressure of anglicization.

The remaining articles feature studies of particular locales. “The Welsh World and the British Empire, c. 1851–1939” by Aled Jones and Bill Jones, explores how two Welsh-language periodicals: Y Cenhadwr (The missionary) and Yr Australydd (The Australian), rhetorically structure Welsh immigrant communities in India and Australia. They also delineate the changing status of Welsh culture in the British world, from “‘semibarbarous’ obstacles to the political and cultural integration of the United Kingdom” (75) to standard-bearer of Christian civilization. Donal Lowry's “The Crown, Empire Loyalism and the Assimilation of Non-British White Subjects in the British World: An Argument against ‘Ethnic Determinism’” examines the ways in which groups such as Canadian Catholics and Australian Jews retained fervent loyalty to the monarch. Lowry discounts any causal link between the twentieth-century diminishment of such loyalty and the ethnic diversification of Dominion societies, citing instead events such as Britain's entry into the European Common Market. Ian van der Waag's essay argues that Hugh Wyndham, who emmigrated to South Africa in 1901, lived as a landed gentleman after working for Alfred Milner, the British High Commissioner for South Africa, held office, and returned to Britain after the political tides had turned against the Progressive government, “epitomised the overall failure of Milner's ‘anglicisation’ policy” (152). Phillip Buckner's “Casting Daylight upon Magic” shows how the royal tour of Canada in 1901 “increase[d] public interest in Britain in the ‘little Britains’ overseas” (165) and demonstrated the commitment of the Canadian public to the British monarch.

The essays that constitute The British World are interesting, substantial, and insightful. Although the editorial introduction could have made the links among these contributions more apparent, the articles do speak to each other in fascinating ways. Buckner's study of the royal tour of Canada, for example, reinforces Lowry's argument about the integration of Catholics into Canadian British culture, while Chilton, Jones and Jones, Potter, and Nicholas collectively demonstrate the central role that newspapers and radio played in the development of a transcontinental British culture. For all the strengths of the collection, there is a significant weakness: the lack of attention paid to race. The editors do note, “Whiteness was a dominant element. Nevertheless, this world was not exclusively white. People from many ethnic backgrounds (both white and non-white) eagerly adopted British identity and were accepted to varying degrees as part of the British world” (3). Several of the essays also treat the topic of race briefly—Constantine discusses the role of racial discrimination on migration laws, Bickford-Smith refers to the anglicization of both blacks and whites in South Africa, and others make reference to white settlements or the rhetoric of whiteness—but the book contains no focused interrogation of how race defined cultural self-identification in the Dominions. Important questions are left, hopefully, to be answered by future work in this area: How is whiteness defined in the British world? Exactly when and how do nonwhite residents of these regions come to define themselves as part of the British world? How did the embrace of British identity by white inhabitants of the Dominions differ from the adoption of British culture by the indigenous residents of, say, India and Kenya? The book would have been stronger if it had engaged directly with these issues. Nevertheless, that the book provokes these questions is significant and noteworthy. The British World’s contribution to scholarship on British culture beyond the boundaries of the British nation, as well as to our understanding of the complex dynamics of transnational identity formation, is a valuable one.