Interdisciplinary in scope, Imperial Co-Histories addresses and synthesizes historical, literary, and anthropological interests, offering arresting insights into the inescapable effects of colonization on various forms of writing and representation in the media, from art history to missionary reports. Postcolonial theory informs and ultimately unifies these essays, and a major strength is the collection’s interweaving of eclectic readings of empire into a coherent narrative that reveals and responds to colonialist ideologies and processes. The essays target the British popular press of the second half of the nineteenth century as a site of contestation where national identity was constructed and, often, deconstructed. In so doing, they respond to a historical coincidence since the rise of the press coincided with the height of empire and with early modern doubts about it at the end of the nineteenth century.

Julie Codell engagingly introduces the volume’s dozen essays, which are divided into two sections: Sites of Authority and Sites of Fracture. As this division suggests, the press is seen as a point of intersection between national and imperial discourses, an instrument of empire and of postcolonial resistance, enabling the construction of “co-histories” whereby metropolitan and colonial histories are forced into mutually influential contiguity.

Part 1 engages with representations of imperialism in the British press, the studies extending to The Imperial Gazetteer, Blackwood’s Magazine, and the construction of South Africa in the Pall Mall Gazette, the Daily Graphic, and The Times. These are supplemented by studies of the rise and political impact of the telegraphic news agencies in London, Paris, and Berlin, and of the imperial Press Conference of June 1909, with the mother country’s tacit appeal for support against Germany from the empire, dubbed ‘Greater Britain.”

In keeping with the collection’s breadth, essays on the visual representation of the colonized Other affirm that we are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we see. Deepali Dewan examines the construction of a self-serving, imperialist “narrative of decline” in the Journal of Indian Art and Industry (1884—1917). Similarly, Michael Hancher’s study of illustrations in the Imperial Gazetteer reveals how these provide an alibi for imperial interference by concentrating on “past opulence and present indolence.” A telling aside reveals that the journal’s India correspondent, Henry Beveridge, never visited the subcontinent, constructing his accounts from research in the British Library. Alex Nalbach’s, David Finkeistein’s, and J. Lee Thompson’s essays confirm the political purpose and colonial agency of the press. Nalbach’s discussion of the three telegraphic news agencies and, in particular, their partition of the globe via “a secret imperialist pact” for collecting and distributing information offers a narrative to parallel Western Europe’s colonial expansion.

Part 1 closes with Dorothy Helly and Helen Callaway’s essay on the “construction” of South Africa in the early 1890s in the writings of the journalists Edmund Garrett (who called the 1890s “this African decade”), Flora Shaw, and Lord Randolph Churchill. Comparing and contrasting these independent accounts, written against the backdrop of the discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886 and under Cecil Rhodes looming presence, the authors demonstrate the degree to which such re porting relied on standard colonial tropes. Garrett, for instance, claimed that Africans were “always, at bottom, children.”

Sites of Fracture refocuses the discussion by attending to conflicts and contradictions in the periodical press. This balance confirms a single narrative offering not only a critical assessment of competing colonial arguments but also a welcome corrective to these. Put another way, the battle for the right to narrate the Self motivates this study, as the impetus behind the essays that comprise Sites of Authority is refigured in Sites of Fracture where the press becomes the site for interpretive and cultural contestation.

As Catherine Pagani shows, representations of Chinese material culture at London exhibitions in 1842 and 1865, used as a signifier of nationhood, meant that “the lure of the beautiful, the exotic, and the pleasurable competed with imperialism and jingoistic pride.” Revised attitudes to Chinese art in the British press during these decades, from Oriental ingenuity to signs of Chinese backwardness, reflect a shift in economic and military power in Britain favor. Nonetheless, press coverage of the exhibitions demonstrates how colonial art helped to define English taste and Englishness, and, in so doing, confirms the truism that to colonize is always, to some degree, to be colonized.

The essays by Denise Quirk and Med Jones attend to gendering imperialism. Concentrating on the increasing numbers of Englishwomen who travelled to India in the 1860s and 1870s, Quirk finds in the representation of Anglo-Indian women’s experiences and debates about Anglo-Indian identity in the women’s press a “colonial circuitry” influenced by and influencing constructions of national identity and gender. Jones provides an interesting extension of this in his review of the work and writings of female Welsh missionaries in Khasia, India, arguing that, by discussing race, difference, and power, their reports of the missionary experience had consequences for Welsh political discourse. These essays, as do several in Part 2, confirm Homi Bhabha’s claim in The Location of Culture (and cited at the conclusion of Jones’s essay) that “The Western metropole must confront its colonial history as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its own identity” Jones’s valedictory observation that the Anglican church has recently considered canvassing for ministers in Khasia to re-evangelise secularized Wales appears deft and apposite.

In “The Empire Writes Back,” Julie Codell shows how “the discourses of colonialism and Orientalism become convoluted, fold back upon them selves” as a result of articles by “native informants” in the Victorian press. Combining scholarship and common sense, she examines the writings of Indian colonial subjects in the mid- and late nineteenth-century British press on the recurrent topics of imperial policies and ad ministration, women, and Islam.

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s subject is the Picturesque Atlas of Australia. Published to mark the centenary of European settlement in 1888, it ex poses the fault-line between allegiance to empire and commitment to nation. D’Aeth’s essay demonstrates how the Atlas-project reflects the ambivalence about national origins: in its desire to proclaim the out come of origins, in Victorian terms of progress, it suppresses the country’s founding as a penal colony. An engraving of Cook rather than of Arthur Phillips, who landed convicts at Sydney Cove in 1788, thus pro vided the frontispiece. Such ambivalence extends to the absence of aborigines from this “national” history. D’Aeth shows how the illustrated narrative within the Atlas complicates the view of Australian history as simply a chapter within the broader history of the British “race,” arguing that it attempts “to delineate a subject position that was both within and outside that broader narrative.”

In the collection’s final essay, Douglas M. Peers considers the nonfictional writings of J. W. Kaye, a leading authority on India in the early- and mid-Victorian era, An Anglo-Indian, Kaye wrote both for British and Anglo-Indian publications and, employed by the East India Office and later the India Office, had access to flows of information between India and Britain. Peers traces in Kaye’s writings the presence of alternate voices, if Kaye was torn between Britain and India, he was also trapped between the Romantic and Victorian eras, for, as Peers shows, the “conquest narrative” uniting his works is embodied in the blend of the exotic, the tragic, and a romantic heroism that, in its turn, “helped legitimate middle-class claims to respectability by demonstrating that it was middle-class virtues that would ensure the survival of the British Empire.”

This refreshingly wide-ranging collection, coherent in scope, offers arresting insights into diverse texts. Collectively the essays demonstrate that the nineteenth-century press was simultaneously the agency of empire, in which imperial reporting amounted to constructing the Other, and, toward the century’s close, provided the point of intersection between metropole and colony, a site where such reporting coexists with resistance and cultural hybridity to allow for the production of co-histories that unravel and subvert imperialism’s fabric.