This unique collection of essays looks at ten books that variously illustrated, encouraged, or critiqued the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its historical scope is broad (1829–1960), and its objects of focus diverse in language of composition and in form (including political tracts, histories, and a novel). Some of the texts are familiar, others virtually unknown. The texts illuminate each other in different ways, and the essays differ in their methods and approaches. The diversity of the content is at one time the book's strength and weakness: there is much to be learned by reading all of the essays together, but most readers will read more selectively. There is content here to interest historians as well as literary critics (though not always both at the same time), as well as the scholar of politics or rhetoric.

In the introduction, editors Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr explain that the collection is not about “the ten most significant books, but a diverse set of titles whose influence on imperial discourse and power we could trace through the careers of the texts themselves” (3). The collection's contributors consider books as “mobile objects,” circulating ideas and discourses across time and space, specifically about the function, nature, and future of empire. The texts they have selected purport to be books that “help to bring imperial publics and their critics into being” (9). In short, these are books that gave a shape to the empire and communicated its values, potentials, and problems. They did so by means of the “imperial commons,” which refers to the circulation of texts without hindrance across the diverse communities that made up the British Empire. Via the imperial commons, the editors contend, these texts circulated without regard to copyright, either in the form of excerpts, quotations, or cuttings, or less directly, in the form of influence or citation.

A brief review of the chapters suggests the range of texts addressed. Tony Ballantyne opens the collection with an essay on Edward Wakefield's A Letter from Sydney (1829), which imagined Australasian emigration to be the solution to Britain's pressing social problems, namely crime, poverty, and overpopulation. Charlotte MacDonald focuses on Jane Eyre (1847) to illustrate the global book trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Catherine Hall's contribution looks at Macaulay's History of England (1848), which promoted the empire as the guardian of global liberty and progress. The wide circulation of Macaulay's book was made possible by (and illustrates the existence of) the “imperial commons” (81). Marilyn Lake argues that Charles Pearson's National Life and Character (1893) shook British confidence in the longevity of the empire, encouraging African independence movements by imagining a world in which Asian and African societies eclipse that of Europe. André du Toit writes on A Century of Wrong (1899), an anti-imperial tract that called attention to the Boer War as an international humanitarian and human rights crisis. The book cited British notions of individual rights and liberties as the basis of its challenge to the legitimacy of British rule in South Africa. Elleke Boehmer discusses Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (1908) and contends that the scouting handbook constructed an image of masculine imperial bonding across the lines of race and class. Tridip Suhrud argues for the importance of reading Ghandi's manifesto, Hind Swaraj (1909), as a bilingual text, calling attention to Ghandi's choice to write in Gujarati. Mrinalini Sinha looks at Totaram Sanadhya's Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh (1914), a slim volume that is important for its illustration of the beginnings of mass politics in India. The book exposed the problems of India's system of indentured labor and was made possible by the “‘democratization of print’ in late colonial India” (174). Aaron Kamugisha takes up C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins (1938), the most influential and famous account of the Haitian Revolution. Kamugisha traces the book's origins and its legacy, arguing for its importance to the modern fields of history and postcolonial studies. Derek Peterson looks at Gakaara wa Wanjau's Mĩhĩrĩga ya Agĩkũyũ (1960), an ethnographic account of the Gikuyu clans that was not translated into English or read outside of Kenya. The importance of the book, Peterson contends, is its contribution to the development of a cultural identity for a colonized people.

Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire quite helpfully draws attention to some lesser-known but arguably significant texts, including Wakefield's Letter from Sydney and Pearson's National Life and Character. Wakefield's book established both a rationale and pattern for the colonization of Australasia, while Pearson's imagined an end to Britain's global supremacy, inspiring Australia's Chinese community to demand racial equality. Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh and Mĩhĩrĩga ya Agĩkũyũ are interesting but curious additions to the collection. As Sinha and Peterson note, these are texts that did not have wide circulation or particularly broad impact. It is hard to see these as books that “shaped” the British Empire: as with some of the other texts selected for inclusion (Jane Eyre), their relevance seems to be that they illustrate the workings of the imperial commons and are examples of the sorts of texts that circulated within it.

The approaches taken by the various contributors vary greatly. Suhrud performs a close reading of Ghandi's Hind Swaraj with a focus on language; Hall and Ballantyne ground their arguments in studies of textual circulation and readerships; Lake, Boehmer, and Kamugisha focus on longevity, legacy, and the impact of their books on later writers; MacDonald and Sinha select books that illustrate particular operations of print culture. Perhaps the biggest and most consistent contribution of the collection is the tracing of each book's publication and circulation history. For those who will research or teach these texts, this historical and contextual information will be quite helpful. All of this is part of the collection's focus on the operations and impact of the “imperial commons,” an active network that circulated texts within and between communities of readers across the empire. The collection focuses attention on the empire's constitutive communities of readers and on texts as the vehicles for the exchange of the ideas that either supported or challenged the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.