In recent years an ever-increasing number of scholars have questioned the extent to which empire shaped Britain during the long nineteenth century. Historians such as Bernard Porter and Stephen Howe have sought to demonstrate the limited impact of imperial endeavors. In contrast, Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose have asserted that although empire's impact was uneven, it was simultaneously ubiquitous and ordinary. In these debates historians have primarily tracked imperial impact through practices and texts, but much less attention has been given to built environments and the material cultures of Britain's domestic spaces. In Country Houses and the British Empire, 1700–1930 Stephanie Barczewski moves the debate into the realm of country houses and explores the multiple ways in which empire came to shape these icons of Britishness. Barczewski investigates the numbers of country houses built or acquired with imperial wealth between 1700 and 1930. She also examines the architecture and interiors of country houses to analyze how they served as expressions of imperial engagement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through this ambitious project, Barczewski makes two significant contributions to current debates. First, her research prompts scholars to question the specific chronology of impact. Second, in Country Houses she asks historians to consider the geographic distribution of empire's influence on the metropole. Barczewski finds that although imperial presence was “pronounced in country houses,” it also “varied over space and time” (244).

Barczewski provides an impressive range of examples in Country Houses, demonstrating the breadth of her engagement with archival sources from across the British Isles. Barczewski looks to all four nations—England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland—and uses a broad (and somewhat vague) definition of the country house, which includes villas and “immense country piles” (15). At the same time her research examines a broad selection of “imperial” connections, from colonial merchants to Indian nabobs, West Indian planters, military and naval officers, returnees from settlement colonies, and imperial investors. Given the very different imperial contexts and chronologies at stake, Barczewski contains her analysis by asking when country house purchases took places, where the houses were located, and why these groups sought out landed property. She finds that men who had made “their money in the Empire” purchased “around 1100 individual landed estates” between 1700 and 1930 (122). Depending on the definition of country houses employed, Barczewski estimates that “between 6 per cent (using Boyd Hilton's figures) and 16 per cent (using David Cannadine's) of all the country houses in Britain were at some point in this span purchased by men whose money came from the Empire” (122).

While Barczewski's general estimates span the entire date range from 1700 to 1930, the specific moment of acquisition or substantial rebuilding is important in attempting to analyze when Britons felt empire's impact. Barczewski shows that country house purchases and building activity funded by imperial wealth peaked between 1760 and 1810 (see 126). While this upsurge might be dismissed as merely referencing a period of heightened country house building and acquisition across Britain, it does suggest the need to engage more critically with chronologies of imperial impact. Similarly, by analyzing the geographical distribution of country house purchases and rebuilding a distinct pattern emerges. Barczewski finds that the South of England and Scotland remained consistently important regions throughout the period. In fact, if viewed in combination “these two regions never fail to exceed two-thirds of the total” (133). The high proportion of country house acquisitions that took place in Scotland and the South of England reaffirms both the extent of Scottish involvement in empire and that many returnees wished to be near London to pursue business and parliamentary careers.

Why did individuals who acquired wealth through imperial endeavors seek out country houses and landed estates? Although individual circumstances often structured family motivations, Barczewski suggests that across the different groups land was seen as a relatively stable investment, an opportunity to firmly locate themselves in Britain and as a clear step towards achieving status and respectability. While the first half of the book analyses the purchase of land and hints at the reasons for making such purchases, the second half of the book looks more extensively at the material impacts of empire by interrogating what happened to these houses once they were acquired. Barczewski analyzes architectural motifs and designs and the objects that came to fill these spaces. She identifies four different discourses through which material assemblages, and the expressions of empire they attempted to communicate, can be understood: discourses of commodities, cosmopolitanism, conquest, and collecting. Barczewski argues that these were “the basic categories in which empire was represented” in the country house context (245). She identifies a shift at the turn of the nineteenth century, when men went from viewing empire as a space for self-fashioning and refashioning to returning from empire with objects that no longer reflected a new identity but rather served as unproblematic souvenirs of an imperial excursion. While these categories might offer useful heuristic devices for considering what was at stake in country house interiors, they fail to capture the multiplicity of meanings contained within these sites and how such meanings depended on geographical as well as chronological contexts. In examining the meanings expressed by objects, interiors, and architectural features Barczewski productively employs chronology to consider change over time, but she does not consider how the geographical clusters and differences included in her earlier analysis may have affected the creation of these houses.

Barczewski's contribution is important to both imperial historians and country house scholars in revealing the extent to which imperial wealth and experiences shaped landed estates between 1700 and 1930. Little explored by country house scholars, the rereading of many diverse sites as inflected with empire will challenge existing scholarship. At the same time, by analyzing the when and where of imperial impact, Barczewski prompts imperial historians to become more specific in tracing the trajectory of empire's influence. In considering the impact of empire upon the built environment of country houses and the objects that filled their interiors, Barczewski's range of example demonstrates the potential for significant new work, which will stretch our understanding further.