This collection contains a number of interesting and useful essays on topics within British imperial and international history, but the collection as a whole strains for a kind of agenda-setting impact that it largely fails to deliver. According to the introduction, the editors see the book as a challenge to a narrative, which they seem to think pervasive in ‘transnational studies’, that treats globalization primarily as the product of the institutions of geopolitical stabilization set up in the post-1945 period. Their collection offers, they write, ‘an alternative framework of analysis’ and a ‘profoundly different periodization’ (p. 2), one that locates the origins of transnationalism as much in the intellectual, economic, and political networks and relationships that sustained and transformed the British empire in the decades before and after the First World War. Such an approach, they suggest, can also offer a more complex and less binary (metropole-versus-colony) understanding of the global workings of the British empire.

Even leaving aside the question of whether this characterization of the sorry state of the transnational and imperial history is terribly accurate (to my mind, it is not), it has to be said that most of the essays in the book do not exactly cleave to this revisionist agenda. Indeed, the only one that really successfully does so is Kevin Grant's thoughtful piece on the ways in which ideals and evolving norms about trusteeship negotiated and promulgated by British imperial activists and statesmen were then embedded within, and disseminated by, the transnational processes and institutions of the League of Nations. This persuasive and lucid essay is a model of the sort of history called for in the introduction (which Grant co-authored), but it is not one that most of the other authors have chosen to imitate.

Yet, if the individual essays do not really herald some new analytical breakthrough, most are useful and well-researched interventions. If anything, they attest to the vitality of, and reflect current preoccupations within, the fields of imperial and international history. Significantly, all of the pieces dealing with imperial history eschew a strictly metropolitan perspective, instead focusing on the way that ideas, campaigns, and people circulated throughout the empire, often with unexpected results. Essays by Philippa Levine and Madhavi Kale on imperial efforts at cultural transformation (in the first case, the 1890s campaign to raise the age of consent, and, in the second, the interwar transmission of British films in India) thus concentrate less on British aims than on the way such initiatives were debated and reworked in different locales. Much recent work in imperial history has also stressed the way that India in particular came to serve as a kind of productive nexus of imperial administration and anti-imperialist ideals alike; and in their very different ways, both Thomas Metcalf's essay on the recruitment and deployment of Sikh police throughout the empire and Faisal Devji's thoughtful recovery of Islamic attempts to work out a theory of sovereignty attest to the fruitfulness of that line of research.

Three other essays introduce a ‘transnational’ element by recovering some less-studied aspects of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. Robert Gregg's timely essay on early efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to invent police methods able to track and repress transnational ‘terrorism’ reminds us of the long history of Anglo-American collaboration over security. Yet, such shared geopolitical interests notwithstanding, American institutions and ideas could also confound or undermine British imperial imperatives. Thus, Douglas Haynes tracks how colonial medical students, frustrated by the inadequate education provided in the colonies and by the limits placed on their access to British training, turned to Canadian medical schools or (during the Cold War) US institutions to gain access to higher qualifications and better careers than the British colonial establishment had envisaged for them. And John Stuart, in a piece that nicely complements Kevin Grant's, shows how the growing weight of America within the international mission movement heightened that movement's already considerable discomfort with imperialism, turning it, by mid century, into a sharp critic of empire.

Two further pieces examine the evolution and operation of interwar internationalism. During the twenties and thirties, humanitarian organizations and nation-states built up regimes, often through the League of Nations, aimed at combating the traffic in drugs, persons, and arms, but relatively little research has been done on those subjects. Barbara Metzger's lucid and detailed account of the League's efforts to combat the traffic in women and children is thus very welcome: as Metzger shows, the League's innovative methods of transnational inquiry, and its incorporation of NGOs into its institutions, served as precedents for later United Nations’ practices. Finally, Frank Trentmann's essay examines the way in which a number of significant British liberal thinkers – especially A. E. Zimmern and Arthur Salter – came to articulate a critique of nineteenth-century ideas of national sovereignty and sought to imagine a ‘new internationalism’. A number of these men, Trentmann notes, were involved in managing inter-allied economic collaboration during the First World War and hence gained experience in international decision-making: peculiarly, however, he neglects to mention that they worked on these bodies with a group of European politicians and planners (including, notably, Jean Monnet and the Norwegian Erik Colban), many of whom went on to the secretariat of the League of Nations. It is odd, in a book ostensibly on transnationalism, to overlook such networks and treat the British contribution to internationalist thought in insolation.

This book offers, then, an interesting tour of some of the research and questions driving the linked fields of British imperial and international history. It is probably better read for its parts than as a coherent whole. Indeed, if one does take the book as a whole, one might read it less for its programmatic claims than for what it reveals about the difficulties faced by British historians seeking to respond to the current call for ‘global’ perspectives. British history as a field has been, historically, at once persuaded of its own agenda-setting significance and woefully ignorant of other languages and other fields: it is not surprising, then, that British historians would respond to the pressure to ‘globalize’ their work by insisting on the importance of imperial history and of Anglo-American dynamics in particular. This volume exemplifies that response, given its tendency to equate ‘transnationalism’ with imperial and Anglo-American ties (and omission of any consideration of Japan and China), and with only two of the ten research essays (those by Metzger and Devji) using any non-English-language sources. No-one would deny the historic significance of those imperial and Anglo-American ties, but one might also hope that globalization (or, at least, the rise of China) might lessen British historians’ propensity to place themselves so persistently at the centre not only of their national, but also of international, history.