C is for Colonies

Anthony Pagden

• Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750-1850 by Maya Jasanoff
  Fourth Estate, 405 pp, £25.00, August 2005, ISBN 0 00 718009 8

A new history of empire, no longer either triumphalist or cast in the shades of black and white favoured by the post-colonialists, is beginning to be written. It assumes that the metropolis and the colonies were not self-contained realms (as the older ‘imperial history’ often assumed); it recognises that empires were made and ruled by individuals with often very different, even conflicting aspirations. Above all it recognises that all empires were precarious, porous, multicultural and multilingual, and that of all the political orders ever devised they, more than any other, defy simple description or heavy abstraction. Maya Jasanoff’s book – her first – is a brilliant contribution to this literature.