The editors of this volume stress its contribution to two themes that have informed much recent scholarship about the British imperial world. One is the mutually constitutive relationship between metropolitan Britain and its overseas territories, often labeled the “new imperial history.” The other is the array of cultural networks that connected the British and other peoples, creating what some have characterized as a “British world.” Integral to both approaches is the notion of culture, which the editors employ in a loose and capacious fashion, identifying it with “leisure, family organization, ideologies, legal cultures, religion, and scientific practice” (2). The eleven chapters that follow address these and other topics in a variety of chronological and geographical contexts, as well as across a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Among the regions of the world that garner attention in the volume are the Caribbean, China, India, the Ottoman Empire, and West Africa. The chronological...