How do you historicize evil? The collection edited by Tom Crook, Rebecca Gill, and Bertrand Taithe takes on this difficult task in a series of thematically arranged essays focused, but not exclusively so, on the British story. Interdisciplinary in its approach, Evil, Barbarism and Empire understands evil as “subject to discursive mediation” (2). The book deals in turn with metropolitan, imperial, and geopolitical contexts to explore discourses of evil at home and abroad. In the end, the essays in this collection understand evil as a problem of representation placing a cultural historical lens on the age-old attempt to comprehend man’s inhumanity to man.

The editors’ coauthored essay, “Liberal Civilisation and Its Discontents,” opens with a critique of liberal imperialism and its role in shaping discourses of evil and barbarism. What appears at first blush as a wholesale condemnation of nineteenth-century liberalism is made more subtle with the acknowledgment of the role played by open societies in creating a space for dissent where “evil and barbarism are always under scrutiny, always being questioned” (7). This reading of liberalism engages present-day concerns. Repeated references to 9/11 cast the event as a new touchstone for representing evil as a battle between the Muslim and the non-Muslim world. Whereas scholars previously understood evil as a practice engaged in by totalitarian states that resulted in the Holocaust, the focus of this collection on discourse roots the problem of evil in a liberal imperial ethos.

“Metropolitan Evils,” part 1, explores representations of prostitution, anarchism, and “Asiatic evil” in popular discourse. Tom Crook’s essay, “Evil in Question,” dissects debates over prostitution as a necessary or unnecessary “social evil” (36). The battle to control how to represent prostitution produced a pragmatic response that prevented any one view from dominating. Crook concludes by evoking the post-9/11 moment when a “pragmatic understanding of evil” has made it possible for scholars such as himself to focus on “process more than principle” (50). David Speicher explores the process of media representation in “Terror Spectacle and the Press” and its role in fueling “race and immigration” (61) fears in the representation of Edwardian anarchists. For Antony Taylor, understanding the representation of the fictional character Fu Manchu in Arthur Ward’s novels reveals how concerns over a rising China produced “a prototype of popular suburban perceptions of evil” (91).

This pragmatic approach informs subsequent essays that explore the failure of liberal democracy in an age of empire. Part 2, “Imperial Evils,” critiques colonialism’s corruption of notions of liberty at home. Eugenio Biagini’s essay, “The Politics of Italianism,” explores mid-Victorian radical critics of the Indian Mutiny to show how an ultimately limited and ineffective discourse of evil called into question liberal imperialist agendas. H. S. Jones’s essay, “The Victorian Lexicon of Evil,” examines Frederic Harrison’s positivist critique of the British empire. Harrison’s worry over the effects of colonialism on English liberalism led him to cast international law as a “positive morality” that would offer a potential solution to the problem of liberalism and empire (132).

The three essays in “Geopolitics of Evil” understand evil as an almost rational response to particular political agendas. Bertrand Taithe’s essay, “Evil, Liberalism and the Imperial Designs of the Catholic Church,” examines representations of the slave trade in the Francophone empire as a problematic “moral absolute” (162). Here the Catholic Church and antislavery campaigners provided a cover for further colonial incursion by the state. Rebecca Gill in “Now I Have Seen Evil, and I Cannot Be Silent about It” explores the representation of Greek atrocities in the postwar writing of Arnold Toynbee. Gill’s analysis of Toynbee’s utilitarian response to Muslim-Christian violence after World War I, however, remains limited when read in isolation from his earlier wartime writings that condemned the Ottoman persecution of Christian minorities and offered a very different and more emotive view of the problem of massacre and genocide. Christina Twomey’s “Atrocity Narratives and Inter-Imperial Rivalry” looks at the “political uses” of atrocity stories in foreign policy (202). Questioning the authenticity of representation of German massacres of the Herero people in Southwest Africa, Twomey reads documents collected by the British as political propaganda used to further their own colonial agenda. Any possible humanitarian motive is superseded in this reading by the geopolitical context leaving advocates who lobbied on behalf of the Herero people to look like little more than colonial yes-men. The doubt Twomey casts over the origins and motives of representations of atrocity leads her to question recent attempts to label massacres of the Herero people as genocide.

The problem of the representation of evil in literature, film, and critical discourse is raised in the final section, “Agents of Evil.” Thomas Osborne’s rereading of The Heart of Darkness (1902) in his essay “Conrad’s Horror” and Scott McCracken’s analysis of the movie The Lives of Others (2006) in an essay of the same title explore evil as a story of cultural texts and contexts. Tim Jacoby’s “Islam, Violence and the New Barbarism” concludes the collection with a critique of the political uses of the “New Barbarism” thesis that uses assumptions about “barbarous” Muslims to explain terrorism and violence based on “the fixed and innate propensities of the illiberal ‘other’” (268).

Political agendas, as the essays in this collection demonstrate, always have accompanied attempts to represent atrocity. The focus on the impure or conflicting ideological motives of the historical agents who uncovered and reported evil, however, disturbingly suggests that atrocity can never truly be represented at all, for fear of miscasting a particular act or blaming the wrong party. Seeing evil as a cultural construction that requires a pragmatic response by scholars who study its many manifestations serves as a warning to be careful when labeling acts as atrocity. At the same time, understanding evil primarily as a problem of representation can stand in the way of the meaningful consideration of inhumane acts that include the practice of massacre and genocide as deeply embedded in historical realities with real consequences and victims.