Those who are in London, Paris, or New York do not have to go far to find objects from the East. Tipu's Tiger at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that once stood outside the Luxor Temple, and the whole Temple of Dendur encased within the Metropolitan Museum of Art all speak of both connection and displacement: what was once in India or Egypt is now in England, France, or the United States. Maya Jasanoff's Edge of Empire tells the stories of these and other objects, of the ways in which they came to find new locations, and of the people who made them, their movements, and their meanings part of their lives. These are stories of empire and stories of collecting, of the ways in which empires were made through collections of objects, and how those collections were formed through the making of empires. They are often great stories. Jasanoff has marshaled a fine array of characters, including a French mercenary turned Enlightenment philosophe, a Paduan strongmen who became expert in finding the tombs of ancient Egyptian kings, and more arrivistes on the make than you can shake a stick at. She tells their stories beautifully, weaving their passions and anxieties, and their collections of objects, into a broader tapestry of imperial politics and of the rivalries between the empires of Britain and France as they were made in the East in the century after the end of the Seven Years' War.

At its best, this book offers a way of doing cultural history with all the politics left in. Jasanoff shows a stunning ability to distil the complex changing geopolitical entanglements of the British and French empires, and of those other empires and polities—including the Mughal empire, the Ottoman empire, the kingdom of Awadh, the House of Savoy, the Egypt of Muhammad Ali, and the independence movement in early nineteenth-century Greece—with which they became entangled. These geopolitical machinations are interwoven with questions of personal and cultural politics in three successive contexts: first, the nascent British empire in late eighteenth-century India, understood through Robert Clive's conquests and collections, but also via the curious collectors and cosmopolitans of Asaf ud-Daula's Lucknow; second, the decisive years around the turn of the century, when Napoleon invaded Egypt and the British finally defeated Tipu Sultan's Mysore (and then invaded Egypt themselves); third, the informal empires of British and French influence in early nineteenth-century Egypt. In each of these cases, the making of identities, of interpretations, and of collections are not simply arrayed against this backdrop but are understood as a vital part of the shifting political scene. Instead of the simplicities of colonizer and colonized we are presented with collectors, soldiers, emperors, kings, mercenaries, diplomats, savants, and travelers in all their biographical detail making themselves and conducting the politics of empires under complex and changing conditions. However, across this century of shifting allegiances and alliances Jasanoff also constructs a compelling case for explaining political and cultural changes by understanding the British and French empires as locked into an enduring contest for power and influence, which bound together their interests in both Egypt and India and which often broke out into open warfare. This is a rare imperial history, and an even rarer cultural history of empire, that is concerned as much with the relationships between European empires as it is with what went on within them, and as much with culture as with politics.

What of the history of collecting as a way into the history of empire? The message is clearly that understanding empires through the history of collecting and collectors, indeed, understanding empires as collections of territories and peoples pieced together over time, reveals that “power and culture intersected in tangled, contingent, sometimes self-contradictory ways” (6). These practices of collecting and these collectors’ lives, through their identification as marginal characters engaged in processes of self-fashioning, are said to show us the cracks, insecurities, and obstacles to the exertion of imperial power. As such this book fits into an increasing array of studies demonstrating in various ways the contingencies and ambivalences of empire, and it adds to them a very useful account of the cross-cultural inclusions and negotiations that empire building necessarily involves. However, there is perhaps not as much here about how these objects and these collections fit into the wider histories of collecting as might be expected. This, along with the geographic and temporal shifts of the book's structure, makes it hard to judge the conclusions on the relationship between culture and power in the making of collections and the making of empires. First, for eighteenth-century India it would have been useful to have had Clive and the cosmopolitan collectors of Lucknow set much more clearly alongside those more familiar “Orientalist” collectors such as Warren Hastings, William Jones, and Charles Wilkins. If the latter were not “marginal men” (as is suggested for Hastings at least) then what were their collections doing in relation to imperial power and how were they doing it? Second, the switch in the course of the book from India to Egypt is based on following the locus of Anglo-French imperial rivalry. However, it does mean that there is no developed sense of what happened to collecting in India after the fall of Seringapatam. There were of course the state-sponsored surveys (including the mapping of India), but what was the nature of private collecting, and how did it relate to the forging of a company-state and of imperial identities before 1857? Both these absences are briefly justified in the author's note on sources as diversions from the personal histories that are the main focus here. However, without them we are left to wonder about how what happens on the edges of empire relates to the center that an evocation of the margins implies. If these, perhaps more familiar, stories of other collectors and other collections can also be retold in ways that combine the dramas of geopolitics and cultural politics as well as Edge of Empire does, then all the better for our understanding of the processes by which empires were actually built out of tangled, contingent, and contradictory forms of power.