Historians of the British Empire have long sought to understand the mechanisms and personnel that made imperial rule possible. Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins famously articulated their model of “gentlemanly capitalism” (British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 [1993]) while Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford more recently developed their concept of “middle power” (Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850 [2016], 8). Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell's Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation, and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century British Empire fits snugly into this historiography. It is a history of the British Empire told through one of its chief institutions, the Colonial Office. As such, this history is in many ways an old-fashioned study of the “official mind” of empire—a hearkening back to the structural histories of imperial administrators and “men on the spot” made famous by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher (Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism [1961], xxi). Like these older histories, Ruling the World also centers elite, white, metropolitan actors, most of whom were men. Where Ruling the World differs from its Cambridge School predecessors, though, is the careful attention that Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell pay to the experiences of Indigenous and colonized peoples. In that way, the title Ruling the World is a bit of a misnomer, for the book is concerned not only with the individuals embedded in the imperial hierarchy, even if it primarily adopts their perspectives. In addition to this inclusive approach, Ruling the World shines because of the deceptively simple question that Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell pose and the methodology that follows from it: How was the British Empire ruled everywhere, all at once?

To answer this question, Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell breathe life into administrators such as James Stephen, the workaholic micromanager who played an outsized role in determining British imperial and colonial policy during his tenure as the chief civil servant in the Colonial Office (1836–1847). Stephen, who is the protagonist for the first half of the book, had an unenviable dilemma: to strike a balance between the overarching goals of the British Empire across the globe while attending to the myriad concerns of individual colonial contexts. Simultaneously, Stephen had to emancipate enslaved persons while securing the interests of the British planter, square the metropolitan desire to protect Indigenous peoples with white settler demands for land, and navigate discourses of natural rights, free trade, and personal autonomy for white Britons against their denial for colonized peoples. Thus, unlike other histories of the British Empire, which often treat one subject or agenda at a time, Ruling the World shows how Colonial Office officials tackled multiple issues, at multiple sites of empire, concurrently.

Stephen's conundrum in the Colonial Office is also the underlying puzzle of Ruling the World. Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell handle this issue by adopting a unique and highly effective structure. The book is organized into three sections, each of which highlights a specific year: 1838, 1857, and 1879—dates of some of the most significant developments in the Victorian-era empire, including the end of slavery after the apprenticeship period (1838), the Indian Rebellion (1857), and the Anglo-Zulu War (1879). Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell also map onto each year a specific ideological dimension—an imperial zeitgeist that allows them to track change over time and engage with the big questions of imperial historiography: 1838 is coded as the year of freedom, 1857 is the year of civilization, and 1879 is the year of liberalism. This structure is valuable insofar as it allows Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell to link the central authority of the Colonial Office to concurrent developments throughout the British Empire while also demonstrating how separate colonial contexts affected imperial policy. For example, the uprisings in Lower and Upper Canada over the issue of self-government in 1837–38, from which originated the famous Durham Report, also inspired movements toward responsible government in the Cape Colony in southern Africa and in New South Wales in the Australian continent. It is in the demonstration of these interlinkages that the book is impressively successful and original.

In Ruling the World Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell also carefully unravel the tangled web of connections between Colonial Office policy, actions taken by men on the spot, and the lived experience of colonized people. This last point is especially important to the authors. Each story around imperial agendas, such as emancipation for formerly enslaved peoples, is accompanied by a detailed consideration of the effects on colonized people, such as the mass indenture of South Asian peasants to ensure a continued supply of cheap labor. By following this formula, Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell expose the dark underbelly of their three major themes of freedom, civilization, and liberalism. These apparently emancipatory ideologies and the policies that they inspired always contained within them contradictions and exclusions. For example, the moral promise inherent in the British concept of civilization was undermined by its facilitation of colonization efforts in southern Africa. George Grey, governor of the Cape Colony in 1857, used the humanitarian crisis sparked by the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing to repackage settler demands for Xhosa land into a program for assimilation premised on saving the Xhosa from their own backwardness. The stark contrasts between the supposedly enlightened ideal of civilization, and the rapaciousness that accompanied it in practice, paint a grim picture of a Janus-faced empire.

Though much of Ruling the World is about imperial administration and its consequences, it also elucidates a more pernicious aspect of modern British history. Ruling the World tells the story of how the Victorians developed a sophisticated sense of self-importance; it narrates the growth of British imperial hubris based on racial and civilizational supremacy. Some might like to see this theme further developed in the book, as Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell are clearly engaged with the politics of contemporary Britain. Perhaps a conclusion—absent in this book—could have provided room to elaborate the bigger takeaways and meanings for the present. Additionally, some may balk at how the authors, by and large, reproduce their archive and the categories generated from it without analyzing or thematizing the politics of the archive and its production. Ruling the World is a remarkable history that belongs on the shelf of any individual interested in understanding how the British Empire was ruled everywhere, all at once.