Over the past fifteen years, Oxford's Companion Series to the history of the British Empire has added a wealth of themes to the study of British imperial history. Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail, edited by Douglas Hamilton and John McAleer, extends the series. In the context of the series, this collection takes a fresh approach, and the novel perspectives of the contributors are highlighted fittingly in the introduction. Yet, given that the history of islands has been a topical theme in historical and literary studies since at least the early 2000s, the volume may also seem like a late addition to an already established field. On closer inspection, however, the timing may well be a particular advantage. By drawing on both experts in island studies and naval historians of Britain and the British Empire, Hamilton and McAleer offer essays that both summarize existing research in the field and add new geographical and thematic layers hitherto little explored from this particular perspective. The result is a book of admirable coherence and geographical range, covering, if not every island ever to have been in the domain of the British Empire, at least most corners of its vast geographical extension expressly during the age of sail—roughly, from the end of the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Within this predominantly maritime focus, most topics are approached from a naval perspective and many themes involve naval logistics and strategies. Focusing solely on the age of sail is a prudent self-limitation with a view to the coherence of the volume. Hamilton and McAleer organize the chapters geographically rather than thematically or chronologically, and extending the coverage to the age of steam would doubtlessly have ruptured the narrative at too many points. However, lest anyone miss the forward look toward the steamship entirely, the volume ends with an afterword written by Huw Bowen, sketching the ways in which technological change affected the British Empire's relationship to islands over the course of the nineteenth century.
In their introduction, Hamilton and McAleer situate the contributions in imperial history and island studies, recapitulating, the wealth of literature in both areas and merging the two into a set of questions and themes explored in subsequent chapters. In taking up the established trope of islands’ ambiguous nature, Hamilton and McAleer establish two central themes for the book, positioning islands as geostrategic nodal points in the British Empire and sites of conflict over empire. Their main argument is that islands, despite their often-marginal location and small size, are key to the enterprise of empire and thus key to the historian's understanding of how these spaces contributed to the “establishment, extension, and maintenance” (4) of empire in the age of sail. Because the focus is almost exclusively British, other imperial contexts, despite their admittedly similar island experiences, therefore remain at the margins of the volume. Only a few exceptions, such as Stephen Royle's chapter, explore these structural similarities. Despite the stated intention of the introduction, moreover, the agency of the Indigenous and the related question of how the imperial experience shaped the islands (rather than vice versa) is somewhat less explored throughout the book than the more familiar focus on the experiences of the colonialists, with Sujit Sivasundaram's chapter the most prominent exception.
The chapters are written to the highest standard and each provides a comprehensive introduction to a geographical scene, its island formations, and their importance to and within the imperial context. Not all authors follow a strictly geographic structure: some, such as Michael J. Jarvis, adopt a chronological approach, and others, such as Sarah Longair, favor a thematic approach. This flexibility in style reflects the overall approach—even though a common set of questions is always visible, each author works from their own perspective. A naval historical perspective, in many ways seemingly at the origin of the volume and, for instance, employed by James Davey in his chapter on the Mediterranean, thus makes way for a perspective from the history of science as in Alison Bashford's study of Oceania. Many authors in fact employ different perspectives and thus successfully multiply the scholarly perspectives on any given setting of islands. In doing so, they also apply different conceptual frameworks, most of which have become popular in maritime history over the past two decades, such as Sivasundaram's idea of “islanding” (137) or Bashford's terminology of “terraqueous histories” (157). Given this variety, each chapter is more than an introduction to a common theme or to a respective geographic setting, providing, in their sum, a comprehensive set of examples of the importance of islands within and to imperial endeavors of the early modern period.
Overall, one cannot help but notice that the admirable variety of themes is, to some extent, unbalanced. From the introduction forward, there is a slight proclivity toward the practical, logistic, and strategic demands of empire to the disadvantage of otherwise well-explored cultural themes hinging on the “metaphorical power” of “island imaginaries” (1). It is noteworthy in this respect, moreover, that despite Hamilton and McAleer's awareness of the particular role of islands in the context of Britain's “island identity” (7) and the related origins of imperial aspirations, there is no one chapter where this connection is explored in any depth. Nor are the islands closer to home—that is, in the British archipelago—and their presumable role in the imperial project given much room in this story. Such quibbles, however, should not distract from the merits of a book that comprehensively connects island studies with the maritime and naval history of the British Empire, ultimately providing an invaluable reference for any historian interested in these intersections.
