| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Maya Jasanoff. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2005. Pp. ix, 404. $27.50.

Maya Jasanoff's book tells stories of men who built lives, fortunes, and collections (of antiquities, books and manuscripts, and curios) in India and Egypt while they were in the service of Indian nawabs, Egyptian pashas, or the East India Company. In doing so she follows the recent lead of several historian-storytellers like Linda Colley, who focus on the lives of Europeans who were able to exploit (or indeed were victims of) the commercial and career possibilities opened up as European trading companies or governments established control over territories in Asia and Africa. Unlike older imperial historians who lavished attention on the political and military leaders who crafted modern European empires, these historians pay attention to those Europeans whose place in the apparatus of empire was more uncertain and whose motivations for being in what Jasanoff calls the "East" were more varied. At its best, this makes for entertaining vignettes of men (and some women) whose cupidity, innovative and corrupt commercial practices, and cultural flexibility—a necessary condition of doing business with local ruling elites—mark them as different from the racist imperialists who ruled European empires after the mid-nineteenth century.

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