During the 1980s and 1990s, Patrick Joyce emerged as one of the most assertive deconstructors of British social history as it had solidified in the Marxist and modernization paradigms. More recently, he has devoted his energies to seeking alternative explanatory frameworks that might take the place of these deposed traditions. In the present book, he draws largely on the ideas of Michel Foucault (with an assist from Bruno Latour) to make sense of Britain's nineteenth-century liberal state. During the nineteenth century, Foucault had argued, the state was transformed from a violent repressive sovereign into a subtle and yet pervasive disciplinary agent, operating through a range of diverse institutions, from clinics and prisons to armies and schools. Whereas the early modern sovereign imposed order through fear and brute force, the new liberal state enlisted its subjects to internalize their own order, so as to become capable of functioning effectively in the modern market world. To make the Foucauldian case, Joyce focuses on three institutions: the post office, the public school, and the India Office bureaucracy that replaced the old East India Company, after 1858.

His argument follows closely along lines that had been laid more abstractly by Foucault: through its transit structures, delivery schedules, telegraphic networks, money orders, penny post, and savings bank schemes, the Royal Mail trained Britons of all stripes to adopt new modes of self-expression and new regimens of delayed gratification. Through the post they were endowed with new capabilities for rapid communication at a distance and with new vehicles for actuating self-help and achieving respectability. Through its official forms, circulated documents, office architecture, and filing protocols, the India Office bureaucracy trained its functionaries to handle cases according to precedent and regulation, while permitting individual clerks and officials to exercise their agency via the marginal comments that each added to the files. Through their Latin exercises, corporal punishments, homoerotic culture, sporting obsessions, and residential house organization, the English public schools raised generations of elites to embrace a service ethic and a hierarchical authority structure, while endowing graduates with the competence and confidence to rule an empire.

So far, so good. In many ways, Joyce's book is a tour de force, a masterpiece of theoretically informed historical analysis grounded in deep research and enlivened by innovative arguments that all historians of nineteenth-century Britain may admire and appreciate. Joyce's discussion is full of incisive assessments and shrewd observations that draw links between seemingly disparate phenomena and reexamine familiar landmarks from a fresh and original point of view. In addition, Joyce has read everything—plowing his way through an extensive, indeed exhaustive, secondary literature that he helpfully synopsizes for the benefit of the reader. Yet this book also has its drawbacks. At times, the writing becomes slack, clotted with jargon, and cluttered with frequent signposting to future chapters, as well as cross-references to points that have already been made. More problematically, Joyce has almost willfully weakened and diminished the force of his own analysis. Here there is an irony: Joyce has so thoroughly expunged the Marxist and modernization approaches from his own theoretical repertoire that he is unable (or, more likely, unwilling) to see how they might have strengthened (but also qualified) his own analytical frame.

One problem is exemplified by a certain reification of the state. By attributing modern “discipline” to such a wide range of diverse sources and institutions, Foucault had left hanging the question of how far they were really embodied in the specifically political authority of the state. By arguing explicitly what Foucault had merely left implied, Joyce diminishes the plausibility of his case. The distinction between state and society is artificial, he tells us (6, 14, 16). Joyce explains: “The state was critical in establishing the fundamentals of the state/society divide in the first place” (18). This dismissal of the exigency of civil society is possible only because Joyce has completely banished capitalism from his frame of analysis. His British (substantively English) state turns out to be remarkably insular. His account makes it out to be an all-powerful prime mover that has moved its subjects through a sequence of individual liberalism (before ca. 1940), social liberalism (ca. 1940–80), and neoliberalism (since ca. 1980), without any reference to the wider forces of global political economy that have been buffeting this state from beyond England's shores.

A second self-imposed impoverishment flows from Joyce's near-complete neglect of the operation of social class. But class constituted a key dimension through which each of his three institutions of disciplinization worked. His own analysis of the post office demonstrates the remarkable extent to which it served as a catalyst, enabling middle-class and respectable working-class people to leverage their positions and enhance their capabilities over the course of the nineteenth century. The post office, in other words, was an adaptive institution that helped individuals to adjust to an otherwise constraining and harshly competitive emerging industrial capitalist milieu. Joyce's tour of the India Office reveals much about the ways in which policymakers made their decisions and about the agency sometimes exercised even by lowly clerks, but what about the Indians who were the targets of these decisions that were taken in London (or even Calcutta), many thousands of miles away? Very few of them got to comment on the margins of official documents, but they had other ways of influencing the implementation of policy on the ground. Finally, the public schools, as even Joyce has to acknowledge, were about the creation a novel and hybridized elite class, which joined together the children of upper-middle-class bankers and professionals with the scions of what remained of the landed aristocracy. How exactly did the sports, the grammatical exercises, the homoeroticism, and the house hierarchies that they shared with one another impact on their subsequent civil service, business, or legal careers? Joyce offers many shrewd insights and specific hints, but he has debarred himself from explicitly addressing these subjects by his class-evacuated analytical approach.

However, it is very easy for a reviewer to criticize a book for the things it does not do. Joyce must finally be praised for doing quite a lot. He has produced a powerful and illuminating piece of work. It represents the second of what he projects as a three-volume survey of the “rule of freedom” that transformed Britain and its empire during the long nineteenth century. As such, this book is a fitting climax to the career of a major historian. It stands as Joyce's best, most innovative, and most insightful book—so far.