Edited by Jatinder Mann and Iain Johnston-White, Revisiting the British World: New Voices and Perspectives reintroduces the British World as an idea to be historicized; a scale of inquiry; and a category of analysis in global, imperial, national, and transnational studies in history and political science. The contributions trace its intellectual genealogy back to J. G. A. Pocock's “British History: A Plea for a New Subject” (New Zealand Journal of History 8, no. 1 [1974]: 3–21), which was built upon in the edited collection by Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, Rediscovering the British World (2005). As Mann and Johnston-White narrate it, British World historiography emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when some scholars felt that postcolonialism and histories of enslavement, dispossession, and colonial violence dominated the field. Referring to Historiography, edited by Robin Wink (vol. 5 of the Oxford History of the British Empire [1999]), they write that the perceived peripheralization of “the former British dominions . . . was one inspiration for British World historians to draw focus back to British migration and colonies of settlement” (253). The volume's contributors are aware of the many criticisms of British World historiography that have resulted since then, as voiced by Rachel Bright and Andrew Dilley (“Historiographical Review: After the British World,” Historical Journal 60, no. 2 [2017]: 547–68); Saul Dubow (“How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 1 [2009]: 1–27); Tamson Pietsch (“Rethinking the British World,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 2 [2013]: 441–64); and the contributions by Tehila Sasson, James Vernon, Miles Ogborn, Priya Satia, and Catherine Hall in “Britain and the World: A New Field?” (Journal of British Studies 57, no. 4 [2018]: 677–708). Prominent among this criticism is the imprecision of the term “British World” and how it can facilitate the uncritical recentering of the histories of white people, good-intentioned colonialists, and Anglocentric culture if used in an ethnonationalist, colonialist, or imperial nostalgic way. Revisiting the British World does not offer a direct refutation of these critiques. Instead, the collection of seemingly disparate pieces under the rubric of “British World” suggests the diversity of scholarship that could exist under a big tent understanding of the concept.
The volume's nine chapters are bookended by an introduction and conclusion from Mann and Johnston-White. While the chapters are not organized into subsections, the first three, the middle three, and the final three have enough elements in common to suggest they belong together. The first grouping entails chapters about a specific topic within one setting, namely separation movements in nineteenth-century Australasia by André Brett; sahib-subject relationships in India by Sucharita Sen; and settler colonial discourse in two Canadian textbooks by Danielle E. Lorenz. None of these authors use or need the British World as an organizing principle; instead, they are focused on intervening in their respective national and colonial historiographies. And yet they offer approaches that could be used fruitfully elsewhere and show how “Britishness” was also created within and tempered by colonial interactions. Sen's chapter is one of two in the volume that discusses race in any sustained way and Lorenz's is the only one to engage with settler colonialism as an anti-Indigenous project.
The second group is focused on people and forms that traveled around the British World: Karen Fox's take on the celebrated Australian opera singer Nellie Melba; Paul Kiem's chapter on the Australian caricaturist Vasco Loureiro; and the standout piece of the volume, Richard Scully's “‘For Gorsake, Stop Laughing! This Is Serious’: The British World as a Community of Cartooning and Satirical Art.” Scully shows how satirical publications, especially Punch, developed out of the crisscrossing network of artists moving about the Anglophone sphere (including India, Hong Kong, and the United States) and created a British World brand of visual satirical humor that had transformative local inflections. Anyone interested in Punch, visual discourse, or Anglo-American commonalities will find this chapter engrossing.
With chapters from Mann, William A. Stoltz, and Andrew Kelly, the third group is about high politics in the twentieth century in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Canada, particularly in terms of international relations, foreign policy, immigration, and citizenship. This last group of essays shows that the British World as an imagined community had very real consequences, structuring dominion immigration and citizenship policies and serving as an alibi for Australian imperialism.
Ultimately, it is unclear whether readers of this volume will come away with a new appreciation for the “British World” as a heuristic framework. In terms of politics, it is clear that dominion policy makers took the British World seriously and created structures whose legacies continue today. Post-Brexit overtures to an ethnonationalist British World in Britain and elsewhere, particularly apparent during Charles III's coronation, show the renewed popularity of the concept and the need for it to be historicized. What critical leverage does the British World get us? This is still fuzzy. The volume reproduces aspects of the historiography that have already been critiqued by those mentioned above. There is a slipperiness between Anglophone, Englishness, and Britishness, an almost willful avoidance of the growing literature on whiteness, and silence about anything transnationally Indigenous or African. With the exception of Kiem's chapter, continental Europe's influence is noted but rarely analyzed, to the extent that Canada is too often reduced to “English Canada” in order to cram it into a comparative framework with Australia. Nevertheless, the efficacy of the concept, much like all transnational analysis, continues to be most apparent when scholars use it to critique insular nationalist historiographies; this is showcased well in Revisiting the British World. This collection will intrigue scholars interested in complicated histories of Britishness that happened outside of Britain and how the question of Britishness shaped developments in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Canada.
