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Reviewed by:
  • Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons ed. by Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr
  • Lisa Chilton
Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, edited by Antoinette Burton and Isabel HofmeyrandIsabel Hofmeyr. Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2014. vii, 283 pp. $89.95 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper).

Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire is a well-conceived way of exploring British imperialism and how it was undermined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Together with an introductory essay by Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, the book consists of ten essays written by authors with a wide range of academic expertise. Each essay takes as its muse a “book” that was published somewhere within the British Empire, and that had a profound impact on at least some of its readers’ relationships with and understandings of that empire. The chosen texts range from classic works of imperial celebration, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay’s The History of England (London, 1906) reviewed by Catherine Hall, to texts that would never usually make a list of selected books of the British Empire, such as Gakaara wa Wanjau’s Mīhīrīga ya Agīkūuī (1960) a work of ethnography written in the language of the Gikuyu peoples and assembled during the Mau Mau detentions in Kenya, studied by Derek Peterson.

The primary aim of the book is to trace ten books’ influence on imperial discourse through an exploration of the “careers of the texts themselves.” In some of the articles, the material history of a book under review is of considerable significance. For example, Charlotte Macdonald provides a history of the published novel in her essay on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (London, 1847); she relates the history of the growing market for novels in the nineteenth century, and she considers the role of a more informal system of book-borrowing that served as “an important mode of secondary circulation.” In so doing, Macdonald reminds us that reading books was often a socially interactive undertaking. Mrinalini Sinha’s study of Totaram Sanadhya’s Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh (Agra, 1914) relates the history of [End Page 688] this book’s production in the context of a growing reliance upon newspapers and cheaply published books written in the vernacular to disseminate ideas and communicate protests against an unjust colonial system in India. Her essay also recounts some of the impediments that played a part in limiting the number of books like Fiji Mein Mere Ekkis Varsh — books authored by individuals situated within some of the empire’s most thoroughly dispossessed populations — that would see the light of day.

The place given to the authors of the books likewise differs from essay to essay. In some studies, the identity and intentions of the author are of critical importance; in others they are not given much attention. The author of The Black Jacobins (1938), C.L.R. James, is the primary focus of Aaron Kamugisha’s essay, and the fact that it was Mohandas Gandhi who wrote the relatively little-known book, Hind Swaraj (from Indian Opinion, 1909), is central to Tridip Suhrud’s analysis. On the other hand the authorship of A Century of Wrong (London, 1899), the anti-British Afrikaner tract explored in an essay by André du Toit, is not of much concern in that essay. For du Toit, the relationship between the specific authors and the text itself is of far less interest than the work the text itself performed in various South African and international socio-political contexts.

A central organizing idea behind Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire is that published literature existed within a textual “imperial commons,” an environment in which access to literary resources presumably required no permission. An important corollary is that texts had lives of their own after their release to the public. Once published, they entered a space in which authors’ intentions and official readings might have little influence over how they could be used. How readers (who were not necessarily the texts’ originally-imagined audience) chose to consume these texts — what they elected to take away and share with others...

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