This book, appearing shortly after Linda Colley's Captives (New York, 2002), invites scholars of both the British metropole and its multiple peripheries again to think more broadly about early modern overseas expansion. P. J. Marshall, an expert on colonial British India, explores in unprecedented depth what has long been apparent but rarely considered: the simultaneous demise of empire in the thirteen North American colonies and its growth in India. Yet while this provocative and deeply researched comparative study promises a thoroughgoing challenge to historiographical regionalism, in the end the author seems more at ease considering his two case studies largely in isolation from one another.

For Marshall, the key explanatory factor in the differential fates of the British empire in the thirteen colonies and India lies in the divergent response of elites in both places to British imperial initiatives after circa 1750. Marshall acknowledges that his case for focusing on elites in the thirteen American colonies in chapters 9–10 “flies in the face” (277) of current scholarly interests in nonelite historical actors, but his rationale stands because he distinguishes between his analysis of the unmaking of empire vis-à-vis attempts to understand the creation of the new American republic. These two chapters, notwithstanding a curious assertion early in the book that British Atlantic expansion occurred in a context largely “separate from the exercise of overt coercion” (4), offer a highly convincing interpretive synthesis of the British perspective on their efforts to reorganize their North American empire between 1763 and 1775. In India, however, Marshall's case appears somewhat less compelling, due in part to inconsistencies in his comparative structure.

While Marshall's elites in the thirteen colonies are prominent settlers of British descent, India's elites are defined initially as the indigenous rulers who in his view gradually acquiesced to East India Company rule (especially in Bengal). Yet by the end of his analysis in chapters 7–8, Marshall has made a more persuasive case for the East India Company as the most significant group of compliant elites for the survival, and later success, of the British empire in India. In other words, imperial officials enjoyed far greater success in reining in the tendencies of East India Company servants to line their own pockets than they did in their effort to convince residents of the thirteen colonies to accept Parliament's sovereign right of taxation. Why was this the case?

Based on Marshall's description of the Indian and American contexts, the key differences appear to be in no small part a function of the respective economics of the two situations, the contrast between means of regulating divergent forms of colonialism, and the contrasting longevity and scale of the respective empires. The yielding over time of the East India Company's claims to autonomy between 1750 and 1783 makes sense when one compares their circumstances to those of the thirteen colonies: the greater economic importance of the thirteen colonies to the empire at the time, the demographics of franchise colonialism in India (where a small number of whites sought to manage a huge indigenous population while succumbing in great numbers to disease), the more urgent need of the company for imperial military assistance against European rivals (notably France) after 1763, and the relative novelty of the British presence in South Asia in the first place. Marshall's treatment of settler colonialism in the thirteen colonies suggests that negotiating imperial reforms with colonial elites there was another matter entirely. These elites, unlike either the East India Company or the indigenous Indians who cooperated with them, knew their economic significance, enjoyed a booming population that expanded into the former homelands of displaced Native Americans (over whom they also enjoyed a tremendous demographic advantage), lacked problems with rival European powers after 1763, and developed the fundamental workings of self-government during a long period of the crown's “salutary neglect” of their internal affairs.

Marshall's largely independent treatment of these two cases succeeds in making these important comparative points. The author seems chary, however, of attempting very much in the way of integrative analysis. Overt comparative stitching between the two imperial contexts is left largely to the introductory and concluding paragraphs of individual chapters, with a few nuggets sprinkled throughout the narrative. Yet there were opportunities, it seems, for the author to have pushed his analysis further. Consider the Tea Act of 1773, all too often an American historian's only exposure to the East India Company. The Tea Act, and the Boston Tea Party it inspired, arguably represented a crucial moment in the movement toward American independence. This imperial effort to bail the East India Company out of financial disaster by granting a monopoly on the shipment and sale of its tea to the thirteen colonies interrupted a nearly three-year lull in Anglo-American hostilities, during which time the colonists complied with imperial duties on tea; these duties, moreover, were accomplishing their intended imperial purpose of paying the salaries of governors and judges in the truculent colonies of New York and Massachusetts. Was Lord North, architect of both the Tea Act and the Regulatory Act of 1773, which enhanced crown sovereignty over the East India Company on the ground in India, thinking integratively about the empire as a whole or was he simply unwilling or unable to consider the potential impact of his legislation? What of the striking resemblance between the ways in which East India Company officials interpreted conditional grants of trading privileges (which “implied duties to higher authorities in the exercise of rights conceded” [155]) from Indian rulers as blanket grants of sovereign authority and the persistent tendency of American colonists to disregard Native Americans’ demands for the retention of usufruct rights in lands they had ostensibly “sold”? Finally, the author describes the Camden-Yorke Opinion of 1757, which attempted to establish royal sovereignty over territory granted by Indian rulers as “unworkable” (208) in India, yet neglects to mention its subsequent revival in fraudulent form in several notorious colonial American swindles of Native Americans’ land.

If Marshall can perhaps be faulted for failing to go the extra mile in several instances, he nevertheless asks important new questions and grounds his conclusions on an impressive array of archival evidence conducted on both sides of the Atlantic. He offers much food for thought, not least of which is an important challenge to segregated analyses of the “First” and “Second” British empires. This book deserves careful consideration by a wide audience.