The best of these papers are models of efforts to transcend such boundaries. They do so by investigating the complex and often contradictory roles of the imperial press by either concentrating on specific periodicals or issues across several periodicals. One example is Dorothy Helly and Helen Callaway’s solidly researched and contextually grounded exploration of diverse voices in the South African press in the decade prior to the Second Anglo-Boer War. It deals brilliantly with the construction of South African and British imperial identity during this crucial period in the history of the Empire. David Finkelstein focuses on roughly the same period and similarly examines images of empire constructed in the pages of Blackwood’s Magazine and the assumptions on which they were based. A fascinating and multi-layered essay by Aled Jones looks at the varied identities of Welsh missionaries in India, many of whom were women, and the ambivalences inherent in their self-perception as well as how they came to be viewed in the context of modern Welsh history. This is representative of the effort by several of the authors included here to explore the formation of national identities within the British-Irish Islands as well as overseas.

One of the goals of this collection is to fire another shot at the simplicities of traditional “core-periphery” interpretations with examples of the intricacies of “intercoloniality” discernable in imperial history. This is nothing new to most historians of empire, as demonstrated in the outpouring of recent books and articles that reveal just how deeply theory and the insights of other disciplines have informed the writing of this history. But additional studies are always welcome, and collectively the contributors to this volume go far in demonstrating how profitably scholars in different disciplines can examine the ways in which art, history, language, and gender transcend the boundaries of nation and empire.

People both in Britain and the Empire created through the press new and often fluid identities. Identity and “place” are closely interwoven, and one of the great values in this book lies in what it tells us about how the press manufactured an imaginary empire at the same time that it was assumed by most readers to be a transmitter of the “truth” of real events. As an agent of change the press provided a voice for many colonial experiences both to and from readers who existed in both a real and a “virtual” empire. These readers were called upon to make judgments about far away peoples and places described by texts and images they often could scarcely understand.

Julie Codell has done an excellent job of bringing together and editing these twelve essays. The authors included have explored texts in various new ways to illuminate the press as social discourse that reveals much previously overlooked. The book has an excellent bibliography and Fairleigh Dickinson University Press has done a good production job. This book would be a wise acquisition for university libraries and anyone interested in the rapidly growing literature of British imperial studies.

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