Book Review

Both books under review reflect the growing desire among scholars to incorporate relations with indigenous peoples into our understanding of the British Empire. The scale of the two books is very different, however. Empire and Others grew out of a 1997 symposium at University College London that sought "to reintegrate the history of colonial North America with British and imperial history." The editors argue that American scholars have done more than their British counterparts to incorporate encounters with indigenes into new, comprehensive narratives, while British scholars can offer Americans an awareness of imperial chronologies and comparative contexts. The volume includes eighteen essays. The first three offer broad interpretive accounts of British imperialism and contacts with indigenous peoples; the rest deal with specific locales.	1
The editors emphasize that the volume reveals linkages between the construction of a British state and the emergence of new identities in imperial settings. Identities shaped power relations: they determined who controlled polities, who had access to welfare and property rights, and who enjoyed the economic benefits of empire. Yet there were substantial variations from one setting to another. Maoris, Australian Aborigines, and Scottish Highlanders all experienced different levels of recognition of property rights, for example. Though recent attention to identities has been valuable, according to the editors, it should not lead scholars away from analyzing "the process of capitalist development as a global phenomenon." Their essay is followed by C. A. Bayly's stimulating examination of the period 1760–1860, when, he argues, British imperial expansion was reshaped by the need to supply armies in colonial territories. This "military fiscalism on the periphery," which often conflicted with the empire's mercantile interests, demanded an increasingly intrusive "imperial garrison state." After midcentury, British thinkers articulated notions of racism and liberal humanitarianism in tandem, while indigenous peoples employed the "hybrid products of Anglo-native education" to create new polities and new forms of resistance to imperialism. Philip Morgan next offers a thoughtful, nuanced taxonomy of encounters that resists easy summary but crosses a wide range of literatures and suggests that scholars must "integrate the local and the general" in their analyses of encounter.	2
The remaining essays adhere to this principle. American historians may be disappointed (or perhaps pleased) to discover that nine of the remaining fifteen essays focus on mainland North America and two more on the West Indies, while only one, for example, treats India. This imbalance limits the volume's usefulness as an exercise in comparative history but does not detract from the high quality of its contents. They range widely, from Kathleen Brown's essay on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century concepts of race and Louise Breen's account of the missionary enterprise in seventeenth-century New England to Russell Smandych and Anne McGillivray's essay on aboriginal childhood in western Canada, Andrew Porter's analysis of missionary practices in Africa and the Pacific, and Andrew Bank's consideration of liberalism in the Cape Colony in the mid-nineteenth century. Three essays consider the English West Indies: Hilary Beckles argues, unconvincingly I think, that English policy toward the Karifunas of the Lesser Antilles amounted to genocide, Catherine Hall charts the remaking of colonial subjects in postemancipation Jamaica, and Madhavi Kale juxtaposes the British antislavery movement with the rise of indentured migration from India to the Caribbean. Despite their diversity, many of the essays share common themes. Ruth Wallis Herndon, Jean O'Brien, and Ann Marie Plane all trace processes by which Native communities or individuals were deprived of property rights in early New England. Greg O'Brien and Nathaniel Sheidley show how gender ideologies and intergenerational tensions within Native American communities impacted their relations with Great Britain. Peter Way and Smandych and McGillivray analyze the adaptation of Britons to indigenous social and cultural practices—in Way's case, soldiers serving in North America during the Seven Years' War; in that of Smandych and McGillivray, traders who adopted Indian child-rearing practices in Canada—and the resistance of imperial authorities to those adaptations.	. . .