| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Barbara Bush. Imperialism and Postcolonialism. (History: Concepts, Theories and Practice.) London: Pearson Education Limited. 2006. Pp. xxiv, 280. $27.99.

Students of imperialism in a global age—that is, those interested in global empires of the past and those aware of the ramifications of global imperialism in the contemporary moment—are seeking authoritative syntheses and overviews of the British Empire for research and teaching purposes, and historians of empire are obliging. Publishers have flocked to meet market demand, through series and short titles, primers and blockbusters, many of which rehearse the rise and fall of Victorian imperialism from its early triumphs through its mid-twentieth-century dissolution. This book by Barbara Bush, part of a series emphasizing history's "concepts, theories and practices," is more than a standard narrative of the empire's fate, although readers will find aspects of that story herein as well. What makes Bush's contribution unique among the recent gaggle of British Empire books is her conviction that "new approaches to imperial history need to build upon existing conventional studies within a critical framework that incorporates fresh insights informed by postcolonial theory" (p. 6). Although this hardly seems a revolutionary proposition, given the impact of postcolonialism on imperial studies in the three decades since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), the fact is that few texts explicitly embrace such a claim. Equally distinctive is Bush's determination to decenter British imperialism—to provincialize it as one of several imperialisms at work in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and to insist on a comparative method that allows us to evaluate extra-European rivals in the same frame of analysis. The result is a rich, stimulating, and at times breathless account of how and why imperialism "is one of the most influential forces which has shaped, and is still shaping, the world" (p. 7).

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