Onni Gust's thought-provoking Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760–1830 presents a strong explication of the mental gymnastics and contradictions writers can force themselves into when they try to champion humanity while accepting as natural white—and often, British—supremacy. Gust describes a late eighteenth-century discourse that expressed an inexorable entanglement of imperial expansion with loss: longing for home and a sense of belongingness, on the one hand, and the omnipresence of British imperial trade and travel, on the other. The book, the title of which is an obvious reference to Freud's formulation of unheimlich as that which is at once familiar and defamiliarized, has three interconnected premises. One, Scottish thinkers who attached sentiment to the capacity for moral being formulated a love of home as a fundamental moral bellwether. Two, “a hegemonic configuration of belonging” became omnipresent to British character because it ran through virtually every genre of writing (3). Three, this British construction of a sentimentally freighted home life was fundamentally connected to patriarchal white supremacy. Gust's twist is that mobility took on a specific, politicized resonance to the British consciousness. Laying claim to a home, even—especially?—one always already lost, came to resonate as “civilization,” with all attendant baggage.

Gust expresses the complications of the book's argument cleanly and clearly while also engaging extensively in the scholarship of empire, race, and Enlightenment. To some degree, the book's organization is episodic: the chapters are thematically connected, but their subjects differ greatly and the connective narrative tissue is embedded rather than foregrounded. Gust does not delve far into the reception by non-white and non-British people of British imperial notions of the home, and the book's principal figures are generally uninterested in any such perspectives.

Gust first engages the “racialization of belonging” (19) in Adam Smith's work. Gust points out that Smith calls sympathy the “calling home to ourselves” the lived experience of another; it entails a certain mobility of consciousness, or sensibility (25). Smith's writing finds the practice of African race chattel enslavement morally appalling because it testifies to a lack of sympathetic feeling—a sign, for Smith, that white enslavers were and should be cut off from human society. Yet Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, argues Gust, accepts patriarchal notions of racialized difference, and so notions of belonging that followed in Smith's footsteps likewise replicated its white supremacy. Smith is by no means convinced that all humans have the full capacity for sympathy: the sufferer and the stoic—even the enslaved—is to Smith's line of thinking necessarily also the insensible. Following Smith is the career of the influential Dugald Stewart, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh who “taught three generations of young men who would go on to occupy positions in the upper echelons of British metropolitan and colonial administration” (39). A firm abolitionist, Stewart believed human variety was due to a number of interconnected factors, climate and economy being two of them—but he endorsed racial difference, and dismissed the creative arts and capacities of sub-Saharan African people (literature, especially, he believed was absent). Stewart was part of a group of interconnected intellectuals promoting the notion that to maintain an ideal attachment to a home was a sign of morality, and to wander without this emotional attachment was its opposite.

After diving into the Scottish Enlightenment, Gust pivots genres to interpolate the travel writer Maria Graham and the novelist and educator Maria Edgeworth. Both accepted Stewart's premise that enslaved Africans were characterized by a longing for home and family. Both were active participants in empire, writing with sympathy about the plight of enslaved people, but also warning that the white home is corrupted by the presence of enslavement, and leaning hard into white dread of armed rebellion, brought to a head by the revolution in Haiti. Gust points out that women were barred from being taken seriously as philosophers, but as well-read popular writers, they could wield meaningful power to persuade.

Following another influential white woman, Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk (who, Gust points out, was educated by Anna Laetitia Barbauld) argued that he was preserving the Highland way of life by transforming Highlanders into colonists among the Mi'kmaq people—sending them to cultivate a land already peopled and cultivated. It was popular to conceive of the Highlanders as Romantic scions of hardy, time-tested, and bellicose masculinity (a stance that effectively erases women in a scheme that depended on robust reproduction in the colonies). Forced abroad, Highlanders were contemplated anew as virtuous, invested in land ownership and family, as manly—as white. One of the things Gust does especially well is illustrate how writers did not need to participate in colonial travel themselves to affect imperial thought—their embeddedness in social networks could create spheres of influence outside the university and colonial metropoles. Men like Selkirk (who, like most of the main characters in this work, opposed the slave trade), following the racist culture put in place by Hume, Smith, Stewart, and others, displaced thousands of inhabitants while reserving the comfort of the metropole for themselves.

The final two chapters are something of a departure, but also the most compelling movement of the work. Gust gives an account of the Anglo-Indian family of Court Recorder of Bombay Sir James Macintosh, including the teenaged Kitty—a strong-willed person whom her father called “irreclaimably womanized” at a young age by “the hothouse of an Indian society” (128). Anglo-Indians were understood essentially as unrooted wanderers, but this was no happenstance. It was the role of white women to ensure, by resisting networks with non-English women in India and by decrying Anglo-Indian mores and society in favor of English ones, that Anglo-Indians would not acclimate to India as home. The matriarch Catherine Mackintosh's inscrutable private musings ground the book's conclusion in a haunting example of the complexity and complicity of white British women in the imperial project.