The suburbs are much maligned, often satirized, and far too often dismissed as marginal or even irrelevant. Yet, despite this tendency to trivialize them, it is surprising how often the suburbs, and suburban concerns, crop up in texts produced in any period since the suburbs began to proliferate in earnest. Both in America and in Britain, once you start looking, the suburbs are everywhere, literally and figuratively. Todd Kuchta’s book Semi-detached Empire: Suburbanization and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to Present is a very fine addition to a growing body of scholarship that takes the suburbs seriously, both as a cultural phenomenon and as a signifier of dissonance and dislocation in the dominant culture. Kuchta’s study focuses on the connection between the British suburb in the modern period—both at home and abroad—and two related cultural phenomena: anxiety about the decline of empire and anxiety about the decline of the Briton, or more specifically the British male.

Kuchta’s primary focus is on cultural analysis of literature of the modern period, but this analysis is well supported by evidence from contemporary primary texts documenting the history, economics, politics, and culture of the Victorian and Edwardian suburbs. While Kuchta divides his study into three parts, in truth he makes two interrelated arguments: first, that there was a direct connection between the suburbs (of London especially) and existing colonies in Asia and Africa and, second, that the suburbs represented a kind of reverse colonization of Britain itself.

The first argument is perhaps the more straightforward; Kuchta provides ample evidence that the administrative living spaces constructed by the British, particularly post-1857, were built along suburban lines and re-created suburban attitudes among the colonists who resided there. Not only were “garden city” planners brought in to help design New Delhi in 1911, for example, but Kuchta also points out the ways in which E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell explicitly critique “white colonial communities” as “mediocre if not despicable suburbs” (150) in their novels dealing with empire. Rows of identical bungalows, laid out on neat grids with similar landscaping (imported from England), contain Britons who exemplify stereotypes of the shallow suburban, jingoistic consumers of disposable literature, comic opera, and amateur theatrics. The problem with the attempt to re-create suburban England in the colonies, Kuchta argues, was twofold: first, the separation between colonizer and colonized that was built into these settlements contributed to the decline of empire by allowing the colonizers to see the indigenous people as “work,” something that was encountered away from home and thus easily objectified and dismissed. Kuchta reads Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) as a direct engagement with this problem of separation. However, there is a second component to the suburbanization of the colonizers—their ultimate powerlessness to effectively do the work that they were sent to do. It was this powerlessness, aptly demonstrated in Forster’s novel as well as Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934), that created a resentment that transformed itself into ressentiment, a means by which colonizers directed their frustration not at its source (the upper echelons of imperial rule) but at those whom they were meant to be controlling, making a virtue out of treating the “native” as an unworthy Other. Kuchta aptly demonstrates this ressentiment at work in literary representations of colonists, representations that were at times critical but that could also be conflicted or ambivalent.

Kuchta employs the concept of ressentiment as the key link between colonial “suburbs” and the suburbs back home. In the first place, Kuchta shows that the suburbs of London were literally refuges for the returned colonizers, Anglo-Indians in particular. Not only did those returning from service abroad “colonize” the suburbs, but they contributed in some ways to the negative stereotypes of suburban life. Kuchta shows that, in part, this was because serving in the colonies had a negative impact on one’s social status back home; thus, the powerlessness experienced abroad was duplicated on return, as the Anglo-Indians were relegated to something akin to cultural irrelevancy. If the suburbs were perceived as culturally problematic (and they were), then the return of the petty imperial contributed significantly to that problem.

Kuchta’s second main argument looks more closely at how and why the suburban stereotype signified both the decline of the empire and the (arguably rotten) fruits that imperialism bore at home. This argument is more complex and less intuitive, but for the most part Kuchta succeeds in making it. The key to understanding how the suburbs could be read as a colonizing of Britain itself is to consider ways in which the stereotype of the suburban inhabitant (primarily the suburban male) invokes the image of the “savage,” “barbarian,” or Other, putting the suburban on the same footing as colonized populations, while at the same time recognizing the long-standing anxiety expressed virtually everywhere that the suburbs themselves were “taking over,” that the “real” England was disappearing, and that the character of John Bull was forever and irrevocably changing for the worse as a result. From the endless red tile roofs that symbolized suburban sprawl, which Kuchta convincingly argues are reflected in the red vines of the alien invasion in War of the Worlds (1898), to the shoddy construction and physical decay that typified suburban building and was reflected in themes of cultural death and decay in much suburban literature, the anxiety regarding the impact of increasing suburbanization was widespread.

But Kuchta’s argument raises several questions. If suburbia, propped up by imperial investment but disintegrating nonetheless, was indeed colonizing the indigenous English population, on whose behalf was it doing so? If the British suburban male had become weak, feminized, passive, and motivated primarily by ressentiment, if he is himself the barbarian Other, then why was he, at the same time, such an effective interloper? Who is the tyrant against whom Orwell, for example, wanted the suburban to revolt? Presumably it is the system itself (for Orwell, specifically the capitalist system) that had generated the means of its own transformation into something that is ultimately self-sustaining but no longer a unifying source of national pride and identity, as the empire arguably once was. And yet, as Kuchta points out in his epilogue, the London suburb today is itself a source of identity for many of those who came to Britain as “reverse colonists” after 1948. The empire failed, yet the imperial suburb persists—what are the implications for postmodern (or post-postmodern) Britain? Kuchta’s argument raises, but does not fully answer, these provocative questions.