Manchester University Press's series Studies in Imperialism has published numerous monographs examining a great number of lacunae of popular culture including museums, aviation, hunting, theater, and film. However, what has been generally missing is the embrace of local studies as the focal point of such scholarship. Brad Beaven's intriguing book Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870–1939 sets “the city as the centre piece of analysis” (208). In doing so, he is able to show the instability and mutability of popular imperialism and avoid the usual pratfalls of generalizing about national trends. Beaven has done some innovative work in linking the local and the national. He makes intriguing points about how civic ceremony, music halls, patriotic commemorations, and education all delivered differentiated messages according to their urban location. However, he might have improved his study further by providing a more sophisticated view of how gendered and racialized messages of imperialism fit into their localized contexts, a rethink on the concept of “imperial slums,” and further research into the role of popular imperialist organizations.

Beaven's book focuses on three cities in particular—Coventry, Portsmouth, and Leeds. The cities are well chosen because they avoid the obsession that previous scholars have had with London as the center point of British popular opinion. Each city had a very different character. Coventry was an emerging center for the motor and bicycle industry. Portsmouth was a naval town. Leeds was an aging manufactory of textiles. With this three-city focus, Beaven has assembled a good collection of primary sources. Naturally, provincial newspapers play a major role. In addition, he has made creative use of school logbooks from the various cities to compare the imperial content of various lesson plans. The local archives of each city have yielded some files on local controversies (including a Coventry teacher who refused to endorse Empire Day) as well as scattered diaries and memoirs. The National Archives were consulted mostly for Home Office and cabinet documents on national issues that affected the featured cities such as the labor situation, anti-Semitism, and military recruitment. Where Beaven might be criticized is in not consulting a fuller collection of published local histories, diaries, or memoirs of local persons. Besides newspapers, his list of contemporary publications contains mostly national journals, such as the Contemporary Review, and publications by well-known national contemporary figures like Lord Meath, J. A. Hobson, H. G. Wells, and C. F. G. Masterman. This reviewer would have liked to see more locally published memoirs of local politicians, labor organizers, artists, and others.

Beaven's repeated emphasis on the instability of the popular imperialist message is a strong point of his book. According to Beaven, “[B]etween 1870 and 1939, the ‘imperial message’ was neither uniform nor static but was filtered through local elites and communities where it became altered and adapted to address local anxieties, enhance civic reputations and engage the local populace” (210). This thesis is repeatedly demonstrated through Beaven's discussion of differing ideas of the imperial mission, the impact of the Boer War on civic ceremony, the disruptive experience of the First World War, the limits of the classroom in inculcating popular imperialism among the working class, the reception of popular imperialism through special occasions like Empire Day and the 1924 Wembley Exhibition, and the role of mass entertainment and imperial societies. This wide-ranging menu of topics works because Beaven considers them through the local filters of the three cities. He is able to demonstrate how local loyalties mattered and how national events were always viewed through local lenses. Thus, he portrays the very different civic responses given to troops embarking for the Boer War from their home cities. Similarly, Empire Day evoked different responses: civic authorities in naval Portsmouth actually opposed its celebration; Coventry viewed it as a means of dealing with poor labor relations; Leeds embraced the celebration but primarily to instill Anglo-Saxon values on Jewish immigrants. The investigation of education and popular imperialism forms a major part of this book. Beaven creatively uses school logbooks to measure how much of a role popular imperialism played in the curriculum. He also studies the varying attitudes on drill held by the various city authorities. In this comparison, he is able to show how drill was linked to examinations for physical degeneracy in Leeds but linked to military training in Portsmouth. All of these comparisons are rewarding and reenforce his main point about the varied impacts of popular imperialism. The selection of cities works fairly well, although it might have been interesting to make a few additional comparisons between the cities of his study and other “imperial” cities outside of London such as Glasgow or Dundee.

Beaven could have strengthened his argument with a more explicit focus on gender. Masculinity is an undercurrent in Beaven's discussions about boisterous sailors in Portsmouth, “unmanly” Jewish immigrants in Leeds, and assertive trade unionists and businessmen in Coventry. Nevertheless, Beaven does not develop this theme at length. It would have been interesting to analyze how gender operated in a local context. Similarly, if a different city had been made part of the study, it would have been fascinating to see if there was a domesticated or feminized version of popular imperialism dominant in a more sedate community. In a related criticism, Beaven could have strengthened his analysis of racialized messages of popular imperialism in a local context. He does give prominence to the question of racial degeneracy and local concerns over Jewish slum dwellers. Similarly, racial stock characters in music halls are discussed. However, it would have been valuable to provide more attention to differing views of racialized others from Africa, Asia, or even Ireland within the local contexts of the three cities.

Among his chapters, the second chapter of Beaven's book on the city and the imperial mission is less effective than the others. Beaven insists that London formed the model of the imperial city and that commentaries on local slums were in some ways reflections of the worries over London's “imperial slums.” Undoubtedly, there is some truth to this assertion. The problem is that the chapter seems at times to dwell too much on Charles Booth and Jack London's views of the London slums and not enough on the Portsmouth ministrations of Father Dolling. Beaven also needs to think more deeply about the role of popular imperialist organizations. His discussion of the Primrose League relies on Janet Robb's study, which was published in 1942. He could have supplemented Robb with a check for local primary references in the Primrose League papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford or more recently published secondary sources.

Overall, Beaven's book is one of the better recent contributions in the Studies in Imperialism series. By shifting his gaze from the usual national level of such studies to the locality of three provincial cities, Beaven has revealed that popular imperialism was not monolithic nor was it unchanging. His intraurban comparisons yield some fascinating contrasts in the way the imperial message was disseminated by local elites and received by local audiences. He might have expanded his own lens to take new analytical categories like gender into account and given a bit more thought to questions of race. Nevertheless, by so thoroughly comparing the empire's varied presence in three disparate communities, Beaven has added an important chapter to the study of popular imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.