Dror Wahrman has written an important book to advance a big idea. He sets out to chart a dramatic transformation in the way in which identity was imagined in the late eighteenth century. Within the space of a couple of decades in the 1770s and 1780s, an entirely new mode for characterizing the self emerged. The gulf between what Wahrman calls the two “identity regimes” was great. Since we inhabit the world of the “modern self,” the belief in “an essential core of selfhood characterized by psychological depth, or interiority,” we have a hard time understanding that it arose relatively recently (xi). Wahrman aims to carry out an epistemological excavation in order to show us when it emerged and to help us understand what went before.

Wahrman writes as an unrepentant cultural historian, one indebted to the theories and approaches of contemporary literary studies. The practice of social or intellectual history has little to offer him. He is in pursuit of something more elusive than they usually seek, the “habits and structures of thought and feeling that are rarely observable directly, but are nevertheless an essential underpinning of the way people experience their world” (45). His strategy is to study little noticed patterns across a wide range of seldom examined sources. These patterns, he asserts, reveal the existence of categories or the operation of a logic that regulated what could be thought or experienced at a particular moment. They were not the product of conscious intellectual activity. Rather the discourses that Wahrman describes operated behind the surface effects that normally preoccupied contemporaries or constitute the stuff that most historians study.

Wahrman's basic tale is quickly told. The eighteenth century was characterized by what he calls the “ancien regime” of identity. Female actresses played male roles on the stage; stories of women passing as men in the military were popular, accepted more often with curiosity than complaint. Peg Woffington and the Chevalier D’Eon were celebrities. Their status demonstrated the public's ability “to imagine and even appreciate porous gender categories” (37). Above all, it was the popularity of the masquerade that establishes most forcefully the existence of an alternative understanding of identity. These events reveal to us a culture that was open to experimentation with alternative identities. While these examples of gender bending provide Wahrman with the widest number of examples, his examination of racial and ethnic identities discloses that they were equally ambiguous and fluid. Stories from the colonies suggested that “the distinction between Indians and Europeans proved to be contingent, circumstantial, and alterable” (85). The effects of climate and education could alter who one was. Even the line between human and animal did not always appear fixed. Though they were in no sense responsible for the creation of this perspective, philosophers too testified to the belief that identity was constituted through human sociability and was, therefore, malleable. Identity, they held, emerged from “outward, toward what one shared with others, rather than inward, at one's quintessence” (185).

Quite suddenly, however, in the 1780s, this identity regime collapsed. The imperial crisis associated with the American Revolution triggered, though it did not originate, a profound and permanent shift in the conception of the self. Throughout the eighteenth century there had been some measure of unease with notorious examples of deception and what seemed too frequent transgressions of gender boundaries. Still, the tension had been “held in check by the dam of eighteenth-century confidence” (216–17). The civil war between Britain and her American colonies was a trauma that consolidated and intensified the dismay felt at what appeared to be the dire consequences of confusions about identity. The condemnation of masquerade mounted; the event soon went out of fashion. What emerged from this period of turmoil was a new notion of the self. “Identity,” Wahrman argues, “became personal, interiorized, essential, even innate. It was made synonymous with self” (276). A woman who acted or dressed like a man was unnatural; the spectacle produced revulsion and moral outrage. An Englishman, no matter how long a captive, would never become an Indian. In just a few years the transformation was complete: “from mutability to essence, from imaginable fluidity to fixity, from potential for individual deviation from general identity categories to an individual identity stamped indelibly on each and every person” (128).

Wahrman presents his thesis in compelling prose reinforced by a wealth of delightful detail. He has an eye for the surprising example and demonstrates time and again that he is a patient reader of the sources. Who else has made so much of the portrayal of queen bees or of the successive prologues to Hannah More's Percy? His central contention is breathtaking; his exuberance is contagious. Still, there are moments when a reader stumbles over a step in the argument. Wahrman builds his case by searching for the repetition of themes in a wide variety of sources. The simple number of these examples can obscure the fact that most of them are literary. They come from works that were produced in London for a very narrow readership. If his theory about the pervasiveness of the identity regime is true, he should have been able drop his bucket anywhere and pull up instances that illustrate the power of the structures he sets out for us. What would have happened had he turned to religious works or economic treatises? It is not surprising that the theater or the masquerade support his argument, but what happens when we look to other institutions and practices? A shift so profound should have left some trace in the diaries and correspondence of the period.

Another problem with this book is more distressing. Wahrman presents his argument as if it were obvious what consequences followed from this remarkable transformation. Yet it is never precisely clear what results flowed from this transition. How, for instance, did conduct change? Can we discover the impact of different identity regimes upon social thinking or policy decisions? In a crucial sense, Wahrman short-circuits such investigations by the labels he chooses to identify his two moments, the “ancien regime” of identity and the rise of the “modern” notion of the self. Each of these terms carries a lot of baggage. Their use, no doubt, helps to heighten the drama of his story, but they tend to obscure what is problematic about his portrayal of each period. Was each age as monolithic as he seems to suggest? Is rupture the only way to characterize the transition from the earlier to the later regime?

Wahrman's book is a tour de force. It compels us to rethink a crucial period and proposes new terms for considering its importance. It also consolidates Wahrman's reputation as a leading theorist and practitioner of cultural history. This book will excite, challenge, and infuriate scholars of eighteenth-century Britain. It deserves to be read.