Rediscovering the British World arises out of the Calgary conference of 2003—the third of its kind, after London in 1998 and Cape Town in 2002—that sought to reposition the Dominions within the historiography of the British empire. Motivating this program of scholarship is a series of interlinked themes. First, there is a concern with British migration and settlement and the way in which these gave rise to the idea of shared world that lasted from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth. Second, there is a concern with how nationalism could overlap with imperial sentiment, a questioning of the teleology of the colony-to-nation thesis, and the assertion that the analytical framework of decolonization does not apply to the Dominions. Traditionally scholars of the “white colonies” have focused heavily on how the two world wars redefined their relationship to the “mother country.” Here again, this group of scholars urge that warfare cemented British loyalties and that nationalism and imperialism were not incompatible. Third, this project follows closely on the heels of the recent transnational turn in imperial history, with an attempt to compare the histories of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and Britain itself. In all this makes for a very ambitious project, and the scope of the nineteen essays in this volume reflects this by the breadth of coverage. From early nineteenth-century Jamaica to post–Second World War Rhodesia and Nyasaland, from the display of Khoi Khoi in Britain by missionary organizations to the self-presentation of an early twentieth-century Indian prince, the use of the British world is seen to encompass a range of contexts, individuals, and phenomena.

Overall, there is more cultural history here than anything else, and Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis signal this in their introduction by showing how their attention to overlapping identities descends from Linda Colley's work. They also allege that they are less concerned with policy makers and imperial elites and more interested in the middling class of settlers. But despite this inclination toward the cultural, there is an attempt to integrate economic, literary, and political perspectives at several points, and this is crucial if the kind of Britishness that this volume hopes to uncover is to have a material reality. James Belich in a very colorfully written essay brings to life “the Anglobooms” of the long nineteenth century, which saw explosive multiplication of settlers and economies, their busting, and their releasing into the metropolis. He explains that this arose not merely out of the mass export of staples such as cotton, timber, wheat, and wool, but also out of a combination of factors that linked settlers’ dreams with conventional cycles of supply and demand. Adele Perry brings a literary perspective in telling the story of the author Frances Herring, who lived in late nineteenth-century British Columbia. In her writing, Herring credited indigenous women with the capacity to be superior mothers but described how they could not control their men. Herring's ability to speak as a settler woman was thus predicated on an agenda that was both feminist and imperialist in turn; she took on board a transnational language and molded it to suit a local context. Meanwhile, Frank Bongiorno attempts to link a political perspective to the cultural, by urging that Fabian Socialism in Australia was closely modeled on the political culture of Britain and became popular because of its association with Britain.

The volume of essays is extremely successful at pointing to hybridity. This comes out especially clearly in a number of essays that make the point that political organization could sit well with monarchism and in a later period that nationalists could be imperialists. In studying protest against convict transportation, Paul Pickering very tellingly illustrates how the language and organization of the Australian League against Transportation was modeled on the British Anti–Corn Law League. This movement of protest was directed at a lingering body of the bourgeoisie in Australia and against Earl Grey, the British secretary of state for colonial affairs, rather than at the monarchy in Britain. In Hobart, an effigy of Grey was burnt to the sound of “God Save the Queen.” In this way, an important moment in the emergence of political organization in Australia saw not the birth of republican separatism but the entrenchment of popular monarchism. Buckner makes the case that Canada's part in the British World lasted long and right up to the Second World War. Central to this claim is an insistence on the centrality of the liberal imperial idea, where the British empire was envisaged as a collection of autonomous units linked by sentiment and culture. Buckner claims that those who took this position have in the past been mistakenly labeled as anti-imperialists and nationalists by historians. In the interwar period the liberal idea persisted in popular organizations from war veterans to Boy Scouts, and even after the Second World War, a large portion of Canadians held onto a belief in British supremacy. Patrick Brennan develops this argument further in studying the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War; he roundly disputes the contention that those Canadian troops that battled on Vimy Ridge as British came down as Canadians. He urges that they took on board sentiments of “imperialist-nationalism” (242). In creating the account that the Canadians had routed the Kaiser's troops almost single-handedly the commanders of the Corps signaled that British opinion counted.

This collection raises its head very admirably from a linear and reductionist view of the placement of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada in the British Empire. It makes a powerful case for a rebalancing of imperial studies between so-called settlement and occupation colonies and is a truly valuable contribution to the historiography. But as with all reinterpretations of this scale, there are some serious questions about limits. There is a confusion here about who could belong to the British World. At one level it seems that the British World was not predicated by race, while at another the authors of this volume imply that it was confined to settlers. In an excellent article, Satadru Sen makes the case that an Indian prince, Kumar Ranjitsinhji, did not see race as a barrier to membership of the governing elite of the empire. With a Cambridge education behind him, and as a delegate at the League of Nations in the 1920s, he presented himself as a loyal subject of the empire, and one to whom the empire had obligations. Sen urges that Ranjitsinhji represents a group of Indians who are difficult to pin down as nationalists or imperialists: even as he moved between Europe and India he moved between different political agendas with opportunism. In making this argument, Sen raises a question that deserves an answer by the British World project. How can we reassess the status of settlement colonies without interrogating why the twin ideas of settlement and occupation continue to polarize imperial scholarship when in fact there was movement between these poles? In devoting so much attention to settlers, this volume also walks a very tight political rope. As Stuart Macintyre very shrewdly points out in his essay on the History Wars in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the British World project does raise a political challenge. How can scholars devote their attention so closely to settlers without following the kind of bullying that has characterized state intervention in calling for more “white” history in museums in Australia, for instance? In effect, should not this volume have had more on those who were excluded from the British World and how they responded to being excluded from this network that allowed such luxuries as migration and the cultivation of new ideas, commodities, and identities?