In recent years, the topic of empire has become all the rage. Major new syntheses from Anthony Pagden, Felipe Fernando-Armesto, and John Darwin offer it as a unifying theme of world and comparative history. Meanwhile, monographs are rolling off the printing presses. To some extent, this reflects a post-Cold War effort to grapple with the historical analogies for our age: do we live in a unipolar era? Is Rome the precedent? Or should we think in terms of an emerging decentred set of systems of regional emporia? Gone are the underlying idealist polarities of socialism and liberalism. What we have now, it would appear from the flurry, is the triumph of the reasons of state – a vogue for what political scientists call realism.

In all this quest for new universal coordinates to make sense of the big picture, what is often left out are the histories of the colonized, who more often appear as the bit-players or stage-setters for emperors from London or Beijing. What Imperial formations sets out to do is to challenge this formulation, to insist that empires are formed out of asymmetrical relationships between social and spatial parts, and do not simply radiate from the mind’s eye or the interests of a centre. Moreover, these relationships belong to – and change – a set of belief systems about civilization, space, and race. The big-picture dichotomy of realist and idealist impulses is a false one.

This book is the product of a series of workshops sponsored by the School for Advanced Research in New Mexico, and to some extent builds on the pioneering anthology Tensions of empire, edited by Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper. It goes further in important respects and does not presume that empire was a western European phenomenon: the Chinese, Ottoman, Russian, and Japanese emporia join the pantheon.

What motivated the participants was a desire to grapple with ‘the degrees of tolerance, of difference, of domination, and of rights’ that inhere in empires. Indeed, as the editors argue, they prefer the coinage ‘imperial formations’, to capture the dynamic of relationships between parts, over ‘empire’ as a thing. It is certainly a suggestive proposition and should be aligned with some of the big syntheses as a challenge for how to conduct a more global history. Imperial formations is an important contribution and a corrective to propensities to see empires with core values, interests, or institutions that simply radiate outwards, with varying capacities to fill further geographic spaces as colonies.

But does it work as a volume? Not really. The result is a book that is less than the sum of its parts. Indeed, it is a book of parts. There are wonderful essays, from Makdisi’s fine-grained examination of American protestants plying their bibles in the Ottoman empire, or Jane Burbank’s sweep across centuries of Moscovy’s habitus of creating flexible legal mechanisms to cope with far-flung and highly variegated regions and faiths, to a couple of essays about Chinese efforts to promote the idyll of racial homogeneity while trampling on and promoting its benevolence to near and distant parts (such as Tibet). Then there is a set of essays looking at the ways in which imperial ideologies or self-conceptions wracked their architects and rulers – from Irene Silverblatt’s study of the Spanish Inquisition in early modern colonial settings, to Nicholas Dirks’ analysis of the dust-up over Warren Hastings and the significance of scandal and moral outrage in late eighteenth-century Britain, and ending with Fred Cooper’s essay on the tension between imperial subjecthood and republican citizenry in France since the Haitian Revolution.

Most of the case studies are illuminating essays in their own right. But the result is a bit of a pastiche. The essays rarely ‘speak’ to each other. Few authors bother with the concept of ‘formation’, though in spirit and execution there is some tacit consistency. The section headings are arbitrary (if well turned): what does, for instance, the title of the last cluster of essays, ‘New genealogies of empire’, really mean?

In the end, this is a book that tends to particularize each case. One is tempted to ask if this reflects the nature of the collective venture: to get away from universal postulates with which we are all too familiar, and to examine the negotiated and contested features of empire, are we inevitably bound to push the analysis inwards and make the narratives much more introspective? It is telling, for example, that ‘formations’ are almost entirely endogenous: no essay, the introduction included, deals with empires in relationship to each other, as highly porous, invidious, competitive, emulative, and therefore unstable constructs; this, despite the fact that Part 2 is purportedly about ‘Rethinking boundaries, imaginaries, empires’. The result is paradoxical: a series of discrete, bounded studies that reify what the editors appeared to have sought to transcend.