For academics interested in the history and current workings of the institutions within which they are employed, there is much that is intrinsically interesting about Tamson Pietsch's study, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939. The book provides a careful overview of the most significant British Empire–related shifts in academics' relations with each other across social and political borders, and in the process, some of Pietsch's findings connect in thought-provoking ways with issues that are all too familiar in academia today. For example, Pietsch discusses the pressures that universities and their faculty faced during the nineteenth century to justify their existence—to demonstrate their relevance—to taxpayers, to private funders, and to prospective employers of university graduates. In response to these pressures, faculty were strongly encouraged to connect with the university's local community by giving public interest lectures at a wide range of social venues outside of their regular teaching schedules, and university promoters worked hard to show that the training that students received in the classroom did, in fact, prepare them well for the world of work beyond academia. Pietsch explores the ways in which universities sought to expand their student bases, and thus make themselves more financially viable, by marketing their products to various groups of prospective students who had not attended university in the past. And a central theme in this book is that nepotism regularly determined how university departments would be populated. Pietsch demonstrates how exclusive white, male, British-centric academic social networks could make or break an individual's career. Those working within the university context today are likely to be reminded of numerous parallel cases from their own work world when reading this book.

Of course, universities today are, in many respects, strikingly different institutions to those that were established during the nineteenth century in locations across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Pietsch shows how professional schools became absorbed into universities during the second half of the nineteenth century, how administrative processes around academic appointments were regularized and made more transparent in the early decades of the twentieth century, and perhaps most significantly, how the First World War and then the social and political turmoil of the 1930s fundamentally altered both student and faculty populations. Pietsch's central argument is that during the first century of colonial universities' existence, these institutions' relationships with British imperialism were far from static. In line with the findings of other historians of British imperial relations, Pietsch notes that British-colonial networks grew in size and in influence during the nineteenth century, reaching a peak of organizational power in the period just prior to the Great War. Like other institutions across the British Empire, universities rallied behind the war effort, providing intellectual support, practical expertise, and large numbers of students and staff for war service. And in the war's aftermath, as American philanthropists' academic funding programs enticed scholars situated in British colonies and in the United Kingdom to study and to work in closer association with American institutions, and as German cleansing programs initiated a mass movement of refugee scholars out of central Europe and into English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, New Zealand, Australian, and South African universities, the tight networks of British imperial association were loosened, paving the way for a more serious break from Anglo-British exclusionary attitudes at universities as decolonization movements gained momentum at the middle of the twentieth century.

Empire of Scholars is an ambitious study. It endeavors to make sense of a century's worth of evolution in the social and political relations among communities of university faculty across the British Empire and beyond over the course of a century. In many respects, the book is successful. It covers an enormous amount of ground in ways that will be useful to historians of higher education and of the British Empire. However, there are aspects of the work that readers are likely to find frustrating. It is not always easy to follow the plot in this book. The author has made a concerted effort to demonstrate that the specifics of universities' locales were fundamental to how they responded to outside pressures, such as those associated with British academic tradition. Thus, we learn that universities in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa did not follow exactly the same path in their associations with British academia, and that in fact there were significant differences in attitudes and practices across each of these British settler societies. While this information is essential to the book's message, the way it is conveyed can sometimes look like a string of examples of location-specific differences. From my perspective, the study would also have been strengthened by more attention to the heated social politics that surely lay behind the changes in university structures and practices that are enumerated here. At the grass-roots level, there would have been faculty who fought passionately about the incorporation of professional schools, the acceptance of women, the opening of doors to students of color, the hiring of refugee scholars, the embrace of nontraditional sources of funding, the adoption of significant curriculum changes, and the adding and dropping of British Empire–related rituals at their universities. While some very interesting specific examples of professors' attitudes are provided in the text, the general impression that is left with the reader is that change was inevitable because of the larger political circumstances. Empire of Scholars provides excellent evidence of the dynamic nature of scholars' professional associations and identities within the British Empire, but there is little sense of the drama, self-searching, and conflict that inevitably went with change.