John Fisher’s Outskirts of Empire: Studies in British Power Projection examines the roles that British soft power played in strengthening Britain’s positions beyond its imperial borders. Fisher emphasizes substructures, or British interests that served as an informal extension of their empire. Relief efforts, commerce, military and civil advisors, scholars, and dilettante archaeologists all played a role in maintaining British influence beyond the British Empire’s periphery. Fisher highlights these various actors by utilizing archival sources beyond government papers, including documentation from missionary groups and scholarly organizations that were directly involved in those regions just beyond Britain’s reach. Fisher focuses on the Middle East, particularly Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Outskirts of Empire is a useful source for those who are interested in the history of the Middle East or British cultural history.

Fisher’s key strength lies in tying British machinations in his subject regions with greater, overarching trends that were prevalent at the time, and he does that almost immediately out of the gate in his first chapter. That is where he connects the political instability in the Antebellum United States to Britain’s attempts to find cotton elsewhere, namely by establishing commercial assets in Abyssinia. In this way, Fisher examines substructures not as institutions operating in a vacuum, but as an appendage of British influence operating at the empire’s extremities. Fisher also presents peripheral regions as constructs of transnational creation, wherein Abyssinia can be understood as the nexus of commerce, Christianity, and political competition between Egypt, Russia, France, and the Ottoman Empire.

Fisher continues by examining Mesopotamia in the next chapter. He contends that most historians who study wartime Mesopotamia focus on security, oil, and diplomatic efforts to drive a wedge between Arabs and Turks, but Fisher adds that Britain’s efforts in that region were actually extensions of nineteenth-century efforts. Historians whose research involves the Great Game would benefit tremendously from this chapter. The Euphrates River valley had been considered a bulwark to thwart Russian ambitions in the region and became both more vital and viable with the advent of railroads. Given the contemporary emphasis on Protestant evangelism, British sensibilities were quite keen on Biblical archaeology. This held true particularly in Mesopotamia as it transitioned from Ottoman vilayets to a British mandate. Educated Britons, namely those in overseas postings, were aware of Babylonia’s prominence in the Old Testament, and so they were eager to revive ancient Mesopotamian civilization with a significant British flair. There were obviously the practical, strategic considerations surrounding World War I and the search for oil that drove British foreign policy in the region, but that was accompanied by an intense British interest surrounding Mesopotamian archaeology. The field of Assyriology accompanied British intellectual curiosity through World War I, although Egyptology would certainly steal the scene in the 1920s.

Fisher then proceeds with an examination of British philanthropic and humanitarian organizations as a supplement to British diplomacy. During the mid- and late-nineteenth century, evangelical moral crusaders were a ubiquitous presence in Britain. The activists who campaigned for temperance and voting reform in Britain were likely the same sort who advocated for schools that marketed to Ottoman Christian children. Activists were also driven by a need to be recognized in polite society, so participating in charitable efforts doubled as self-aggrandizement. At the same time, diplomatic posturing over Central Asia as part of the Great Game was adjacent to humanitarian efforts. For example, caring for wounded Ottoman soldiers facilitated the Ottoman Empire’s military campaigns in the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War. Those readers who specialize in cultural or political history can again use these connections. The trendy concept of “muscular Christianity”—the belief that physical fitness, mental acuity, and spiritual devotion strengthened the British Empire—that prevailed during the mid-to-late Victorian Era also meshed well with British attempts to support Christian minorities as the Ottomans continued their decline. A great deal of Orientalism also played a role in British intellectual life as well, and I would recommend that general readers first peruse Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) before reading Outskirts of Empire so they might understand how the Middle East seemed so exotic to contemporary Britons.

Fisher strengthens his arguments further in Chapter 4 by examining the roles that British military consuls played in Turkey between 1879 and 1882. As the Ottoman Empire convulsed, military consuls sought to enhance pro-British sentiment while navigating Ottoman bureaucracy and judiciary that were corrupt to the core. In the midst of this frustrating assignment, the military consuls nonetheless embodied a salutary sentiment toward the peoples they worked with. Given their social class, these officials expressed sympathy for Christian minorities they encountered. They were also imbued with a drive for reform, although they could do little to actually effect change.

In the next chapter, Fisher connects the British admiration of technology to the emphasis on railroads in the Ottoman Empire. Fisher strongly relies on Daniel Headrick’s Tools of Empire (1981) to support his case, and he does so adeptly. The British, who seemed to believe that technological advances would harness nature to improve the world at large, would have naturally gravitated toward telegraphs and railways as a means to upgrade Ottoman territory. As the British sought to influence the Ottoman Empire in its final years, they emphasized commerce in the form of the New Levant Company that established subsidiaries throughout the eastern Mediterranean. This new emphasis was also driven by nostalgia for the original Levant Company that had gone defunct nearly one hundred years before.

Finally, Fisher ends with the role that British consulates played in Morocco throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The cultural events that consulates hosted for the expat population helped to foster a sense of British identity and still do today. Even in a country where Britain held no official dominion, Christmas parties and well-maintained cemeteries reminded Britons that they were still part of the British community. This connection still persists in the present day in expat communities, where British embassies host Trafalgar Day celebrations while rugby clubs hold St. Patrick’s Day parties. Although greatly diminished as an imperial force today, Britain’s expatriates across the globe still coalesce around their political and cultural institutions.

Throughout the book, Fisher’s arguments are further reinforced by including remarkable figures who became some of the “who’s who” of the Victorian age. For example, he describes how observers such as William Howard Russell encouraged British funding of field hospitals in the Ottoman Empire. In that same vein, Fisher brings up other Victorian figures such as Valentine Baker, who finished his military career desperately modernizing the Egyptian army as one of its many pashas during the Mahdhist War. This work could have been improved with the addition of some more information about those characters. Even mundane activities involved such individuals who were actors in many significant events throughout the empire. By connecting British consuls, merchants, and scholars to a greater informal substructure, Fisher excels in describing the myriad ways in which Britain influenced its periphery beyond hard military strength or formal administration. He shows that whether motivated by an interest in the antiquities, futurism, philanthropy (yes, often steeped in Anglo-Saxon supremacy), commerce, or evangelism, British actors left their mark well beyond where the sun never set.