Reviewed by Philip J. Stern | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2

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Reviewed by Philip J. Stern | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Philip J. Stern, American University

Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and the Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. By Maya Jasanoff. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. 413 pages. $27.95 (cloth), $15.95 (paper).
In 1776 Claude Martin, the Frenchman and former East India Company surveyor and soldier, arrived in the north India princely state of Awadh to assume employment as head of the nawab's arsenal. It did not take long for him to amass a remarkable fortune. Martin was more than a trader or a soldier; he was a "gentleman farmer ... solider, trader, banker, entrepreneur, farmer, inventor, and architect" exhibiting his newfound wealth and status as only an aspiring European gentleman would know how: through his vast collections of Indian and European books, objects, artwork, weapons, scientific instruments and specimens, most on display at his plantation and estate of Najafgarh. As Maya Jasanoff describes him, Martin was "an archetypal man of the Enlightenment on an imperial frontier," one who "invites comparison with another inveterate collector and polymathic gentleman: Thomas Jefferson, who carved out his own patch of Enlightenment on the edge of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains" (76).	1
This is where Jasanoff's comparison ends, yet it highlights why Americanists and Atlanticists should find a book about the expansion of European empire in the East most inviting. Jasanoff offers a compelling and self-consciously cultural approach to the history of empire, which at times also embodies social, political, and even military history, that puts center stage the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and non-European antiquarians, social climbers, soldiers, collectors, connoisseurs, and sojourners who formed the foundations for empire in South Asia and Egypt. Though America appears briefly and rarely in cameos, vignettes, or metaphors—the comparison of Martin to Jefferson, passing reference to a United States Army captain lieutenant who finds himself in the officer corps of a Maratha sepoy army, a discussion of the Battle of Quebec with a plate of The Death of General Wolfe—pushing the American and Atlantic story to the margins is very much part of this book's design. Even Wolfe appears largely to serve as a foil for another figure also famously preserved for posterity by the brushstrokes of Benjamin West: Robert Clive, East India Company captain and conqueror of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. "So what," Jasanoff asks, "did the British Empire look like viewed from the mango groves of Plassey, instead of from the Plains of Abraham?" (22).	2
Her answer, "in many ways, rather different" (22), serves as the launching point for an account of the emergence of the British Empire in Asia and north Africa that is not primarily about land acquisition, imperial policies, or even their political and ideological baggage. Rather this book details the desires and demands of the men and women on empire's "edges," offering a vision of empire not as an institution or a structure but as a contingent and uncertain process of "conquest, collecting, and cultural crossings" (319). What emerges is a picture of a process neither accidental nor well-designed, neither disorganized nor guided by an overarching and monolithic project, neither wholly metropolitan nor entirely peripheral. At times the growth of empire in the East seems to be a highly ambiguous and contingent affair consisting variably of explorers, collectors, and conquerors buttressing their position at home through acquisitions abroad, of the re-creations (and recreations) of European gentility in the East, and of the parallel use of Indian and Egyptian antiquities on country estates in Britain and European objects in the imperial collections of powerful South Asian sovereigns such as Asaf ud-Daula of Awadh and Tipu Sultan of Mysore. In this world of collecting, objects, identities, and allegiances were remarkably fluid. Frenchmen were in the East India Company service, Britons served South Asians, and diplomats served themselves (and not always effectively). At other times the uncertainty of these kinds of cultural encounters met a remarkable confidence furnished by the icons of status and power that were its spoils.	. . .

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