| 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

Asia

Purnima Bose. Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 278. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.

Purnima Bose's monograph seeks to illuminate the degree to which the vast and well-articulated corporate enterprise of British colonialism was ideologically invested in the figure of the individual and in the ideology of individualism. Conventional imperial histories, especially of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have been predicated to a significant degree on the Carlylean notion of the great man as the embodiment of his age and as the maker of history. It is worth noting that nationalist narratives have not been exempt from this heroic, isolationist, and emphatically gendered model of historical teleology, as the iconicity of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Muhammed Ali Jinnah in the Indian and Pakistani contexts demonstrates. Moreover, Bose suggests, even certain forms of feminist nationalism, putatively committed (like anticolonial nationalism) to forms of collective struggle, have been characterized by a similar biographical and charismatic framework. Bose gives us four case studies of individuals (or groups of individuals) as a way of engaging what the ideology of individualism simultaneously enables and obfuscates. As her analysis clarifies, the fetishization of the individual serves all too often to obscure her ideological, institutional, and material links to the larger collectivities—in the form of the colonial state or a broad-based feminist movement—that sustain her.

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