| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Kathleen Wilson, editor. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 385. Cloth $75.00, paper $34.99.
"Can there be a 'new imperial history'"? With the profusion of "new" histories that have appeared in the last twenty years, the answer would appear to be a rather straightforward yes. As Kathleen Wilson reminds readers of this volume, however, the question of whether a new history of the British Empire can avoid replicating old patterns of European dominance is anything but straightforward. One of the new history's central premises holds that imperialism is a construct sustained by culture, especially cultures of "difference ... between 'us and them'" (pp. 1–4). Given the overwhelmingly European and North American institutional basis of the historical profession, how can any historian hope to write narratives that do not reproduce, on some level, the very hierarchies that critical histories of empire ought to reject?	1
Faced with this problem, Wilson acknowledges the many pitfalls of even attempting such a history. "The new imperial history," she cautions, "is very much a work in progress" (p. 26). Wilson seems especially mindful of the danger that, in seeking to eradicate the biases inherent in writing history from a Western or metropolitan vantage point, new imperial historians will end up creating postcolonial orthodoxies of their own. Nonetheless, both Wilson and many of the contributors to this volume make a strong case for the new imperial history, one centrally concerned with the primacy of culture in replicating, sustaining, and contesting British and European imperial power. Although the volume only covers the early modern period, it makes a significant contribution to the new imperial history, as well as supplying a good overview of the field as it currently stands.	. . .

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