| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Tony Ballantyne. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. (Cambrdige Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.) New York: Palgrave. 2002. Pp. xi, 266. $72.00.

The new history of British imperialism still struggles to overcome certain obstacles. These include a residual metrocentrism and, in reaction, a postcolonial reluctance to transcend the national packaging of history. Another obstacle is that willingness to acknowledge the centrality of racialism in nineteenth-century imperial thought is not always accompanied by a willingness to explore its implications. Finally, the cultural turn, and extreme empirical reactions to it, mean that myth and history are too seldom allowed to influence each other. Tony Ballantyne's study of Aryanism in the British Empire successfully surmounts all four of these obstacles. Beginning with the remarkable philologist William Jones, who learned Sanskrit in less than one year in 1785–1786, Ballantyne traces Aryanism in India, New Zealand, and the British Isles. This may seem an eclectic selection of sites, but the three countries were in fact the centers of British Aryanism. He shows that this was a negotiated and renegotiated product of the colonial encounter, used by Indians and New Zealanders—including indigenous Maori—for their own purposes, as well as by British—and Irish. . . .

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