Exiled in England, Duleep Singh, the last king of Punjab, was nicknamed the Black Prince of Perthshire. During his lifetime, his prowess at hunting and shooting earned him a name among British aristocrats, just as his good looks and winning ways made him one of Queen Victoria's favorites. His place in British history seemed to be officially acknowledged when the Prince of Wales unveiled a statue at Thetford in 1999. However, the ramifications of Britain's imperial past in the present are rarely so simple. “Multicultural” Britain's large Punjabi population has fostered a cult of revering Duleep. Many British Sikh families make holiday pilgrimages to Elveden, his Norfolk country estate. He is their link to the glories of Ranjeet Singh and the Lahore court, as well as to British elite culture. Duleep spent a good part of his life as a Christian, but his late readoption of the Sikh faith and his attempt to defy his British political masters and return to India allow even the most fervent nationalist to hail him as a hero. However, as Ballantyne describes, Norfolk's residents have scant respect for Duleep's memory and the visibly different troops of Asian visitors who honor it. Thetford's statue has been attacked many times, despite Duleep's legacy of munificence toward the town.

The effervescent frontispiece of Between Colonialism and Diaspora sets the tone for Tony Ballantyne's reflections on Sikh cultural formations. The essay themes include colonial rule, labor migration, and systematizing faith, remembering Duleep Singh and negotiating identity, the invention of bhangra, and its link between British Asian and Afro-Caribbean youth culture. The choice of the Singh Twins' artwork for the cover of this eclectic volume is telling. Amrit and Ravinder Kaur Singh's paintings such as Wedding Janga (reproduced in the volume) and my personal favorite, Mr. Singh's India, combine Eastern and Western aesthetic techniques in their characteristic Past Modern style of postmodern miniature as a playful riff on the relationship among global, diasporic, British, Punjabi, Sikh, and South Asian cultures and experiences.

The Khalsa formally came into existence in 1699; in 1849, Punjab was annexed into British India, while in 1947–48, the Punjab was partitioned between the new nation-states of India and Pakistan. Even before that, a small number of Punjabis, especially veterans of the Western Front, worked as peddlers and salesmen in Britain's port and industrial cities. Just a cursory overview of British India's Emigration Department indexes in New Delhi's National Archives reveals the amazingly mobile nature of Punjabis, with early twentieth-century Sikhs cited in cases as far as Pernambuco and Marseilles. The famous Komagata Maru incident in Vancouver and the links among Canadian racialized immigration laws, Ghadar rebellion, and metropolitan Britain's desire to monitor South Asian subversive activity are a useful reminder of the globalized nature of this migration and the imperial and governmental structures within which it was located. In Britain itself, Punjabi numbers went up substantially during the 1950s and 1960s, in response to postwar labor shortages. Academic scholarship and recent media projects have documented the predominantly male character of this early migration, the migrants’ downplaying of visible symbols of Sikh identity, and the marked changes that developed in urban, work, family, and community cultures from the 1970s as subsequent generations of Punjabis became part of the British landscape. Wedding Janga's portrayal of a plurality of participants and observers is both a product of and commentary on this history.

Ballantyne here extends the notion of webs within an imperial social formation that appeared in his previous works. Writing about imperial knowledge systems, he emphasizes their horizontal and vertical connections, the creation of what he termed as “webs of empire” that operated to link not only metropole and colony but also colonies to one another. The development of Sikh culture, he suggests, has to be located within such webs, within the structures that knit together people and processes within empire and helped foster a multiplicity of relationships among individual, disparate parts. The first two essays in the book are invaluable in illustrating these workings. Ballantyne shows how colonialism, imperial politico-economic transactions, and population mobility to the farthest reaches of the empire were crucial in constituting a Sikh national story within the Punjab. Indeed, as his opening essay's reframing of Sikh historiography shows, the volatile, fissured, and public nature of the turf wars affecting today's Sikh studies are themselves a constitutive part of such a web world. His questioning of the chronological inevitability of prior national narratives leading to the development of diasporic structures is impressive, both in the theoretical and in the empirical insights it provides.

This volume adds substantially to recent South Asia research such as Karen Leonard's wonderful book, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). Again, it has been some time since historians such as Catherine Hall showed how modern Britain was constituted by empire, as well as the reverse, but Ballantyne's work certainly illustrates this point, not least with his musings on the role of Duleep Singh and bhangra in contemporary British culture. However, to my mind, the book's importance lies in its clear commitment to the idea that any study of diaspora or empire or both has to be closely connected to homelands, imagined or otherwise. Diaspora studies in North America, in particular, have been particularly notorious for ignoring language materials, local cultures, or sometimes even the basic historiography of groups in countries and regions of origin. Similarly, area studies scholars often disregard the mobile networks linking their subject groups and locations to interregional and international spaces and imaginations. These exclusivist tendencies are magnified by the separate academic and professional spheres within which historians of Sikhism, Britain, the British Empire, South Asia, Asian diasporas, and popular culture operate. I venture to predict that Ballantyne's essays will be illuminating for all these groups and will perhaps inspire attempts to create webs linking them, as much as their subjects of study.