A New Imperial History, edited by Kathleen Wilson with contributions from fifteen other scholars of history and literature, addresses a cluster of themes that have together refashioned imperial history: questions of cultural representation, of ethnic and racial difference and encounter, and of identities gendered and otherwise. Whether or not these topics still count as “new” is perhaps an open question. And as with many edited volumes, the chief value of this book lies in its individual contributions, many of them outstanding. But taken together, A New Imperial History convincingly demonstrates that investigating empire through the lens of culture, identity, and difference remains a vital, necessary pursuit.

The book is divided into four subsections. Part 1 advances the now-familiar agenda of situating imperial and British histories in the same frame. Gillian Russell and Felicity A. Nussbaum explore representations of empire and difference in London society and on the London stage, respectively. Margaret Hunt, in an ingenious essay, gets at the everyday practices of the military-fiscal state by describing the methods used by sailors’ womenfolk to redeem navy pay tickets; Michael H. Fisher uncovers the substantial population of Asians (chiefly lascars and “black” Asian servants) who came to Georgian Britain. Part 2, “Promised Lands: Imperial Aspirations and Practice,” reaches from specific voyages of discovery as outlined by Philip J. Stern in a strong article on the African Association to the fictional journeys of Robinson Crusoe, analyzed by Hans Turley; from the theory and practice of liberalism in East India Company government, described by Sudipta Sen, to Eitan Bar-Yosef 's creative discussion of English millenarian visions of the Holy Land. Part 3 shifts focus to the Atlantic world—virtually a historical subfield in itself—represented here by contributions from Walter Johnson, in a suggestive piece on structures of time in American slave societies, and three excellent historical chapters by Kevin Whelan, Nicholas Rogers, and Colin Kidd. The book concludes with looks at South Asia and the South Pacific. Harriet Guest and Kathleen Wilson explore gendered identities in the context of Cook voyages, while Kate Teltscher and Durba Ghosh offer methodological insights with their work on South Asia—Teltscher by emphasizing the value of personal letters as sources in imperial history, and Ghosh, in one of the book's most valuable chapters, by skillfully resurrecting Indian women from the colonial archive.

This is not a book for the lay (or undergraduate) reader. The introduction can be alienatingly dense at times, which is a pity given its obvious depth of theoretical analysis. (There are also numerous typographical errors in the book: a trivial criticism, but symptomatic of relative inattention to the reader's needs.) Structurally, too, A New Imperial History somewhat disappoints. Because the sections are defined so loosely, this book is difficult to read cover to cover—though presumably few people will attempt to do so. After all, an edited volume is in some senses a conference in print; its goal is more to provoke than to pronounce, and not all contributions are of equal interest to all readers.

As such, A New Imperial History is able to give perspectives on imperial history that a monograph could not, in two major ways. One lies precisely in that wide geographical scope. Most cultural histories of empire focus on a single site of imperial intervention; here we have contributions reaching from the Atlantic to the South Pacific, with healthy helpings of Africa and Asia in between. Readers will have to draw their own links between, say, Nussbaum's exploration of black characters on the English stage and Guest's discussion of Omai's progress through London society; the key is that both are there to begin with. The other clear virtue of the volume lies in its sustained attention to issues of “difference,” as Wilson suggests in her introduction, and to multiple varieties of representation. It joins the small number of edited works on imperial history that organize themselves around theoretical, interdisciplinary, and transnational concerns.

The collection does, however, invite an important challenge. Where exactly does one draw the boundaries of “imperial” history? Many of the sites, enterprises, or actors described in this book did not formally belong to the British Empire, yet we recognize them to be “imperial” in some sense nonetheless. We read Robinson Crusoe today as a novel of empire, despite the fact that Crusoe is an allegorical imperialist at best. We look at the Cook voyages as imperial undertakings even though they did not specifically undertake colonization. We understand such organizations as the African Association to have had imperial agendas, and we read British responses to the Orient or the Holy Land as imperial in spirit. All of this seems instinctively right, especially to a cultural or a “new” imperial historian. But there is a significant, if often unacknowledged, point to be reckoned with here, which is that we regularly construe “empire” as something far more expansive than its formal parameters. As long as Britain was an imperial power, was every British engagement with foreign cultures, with racial or ethnic “others,” with travel and exploration, therefore “imperial”? Quite possibly yes. But it would be worth trying to articulate more precisely the relationship between tangible imperial power (territorial occupation, economic dominance, and political manipulation) and the culture produced within or by an imperial power. The concept of “informal empire” deserves to be revisited and reckoned with directly.

As for the title's promise of the “new,” Wilson's own sensitivity to the shortcomings of the adjective is enough to refrain from much further comment—except to remark that imperial history still has plenty of room for novelty even in its traditional forms. After all, the most controversial book in imperial history in the last few years—Niall Ferguson's Empire—is quite “old” in its method and tenor, yet its generally proimperial slant makes it perversely novel at a time when the vast majority of academic studies of empire (like this one) take an opposing view. Another recent provocative book—Caroline Elkins's exposé of the shocking repression of the Mau Mau—underscores the continuing need for “new” imperial history in the classic sense, of bringing new experiences and sources to light. Yet there are still many imperial archives waiting to be read and reread. Hopefully the theoretically informed “new imperial history” offered in this volume will continue to generate, and be complemented by, new imperial history in a wide range of forms.