Antoinette Burton. Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4880-1. Price: US$94.95/£67.00

Imagine three scholarly ideal types: the theorist, the textualist, and the tactician. Theorists universalize, they put forward propositions. Jean Luc Nancy on presence and Harry Frankfurt on bullshit, diverse as their politics and their beliefs are, are alike in arguing their way from axioms to (potentially timeless) conclusions. They aim to command readers’ assent to what has self-evidently always has been the case. Textualists read: they unpack telling encounters with artworks, or, more broadly, with “working objects” (to borrow Lorraine Daston’s suggestive term). Hypotheses or convictions come into contact with a particular artwork or event, and the collision produces microscopic examination of how a particular case inflects the general: if theorists aim to be right, textualists aim to have good judgment. Tacticians, though, act: they write interventions. And to intervene always means to be aware that your own account is shaped as much by your present company as by the past into which you delve: their notion of what a particular event in 1865 looks like has everything to do with what people started saying about similar events in 2010. These scholars are attuned to Benjamin’s version of dialectical historicism, which insists that the jetzzeit always threatens to pop out of every purported past—or to Faulkner’s similar credo “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In extreme forms each member of this trinity has problems. Propositions grow arid: Frankfurt’s bs detector ignores significant differences between Enlightenment, Romantic, Existential and Postmodern notions of truth and reference. Encounters can lose their exemplary or casuistic virtue and shrink to mere points of light: Cleanth Brooks never disguised his hostility to critics who wanted his brilliant isolated readings not just to be, but also to mean. And interventions? They fade, victims either of their failure (who ever thought that?) or of their success (everyone knows that). In Gertrude Stein’s account of “composition as explanation,” every intervention is doomed because any given artwork (or event) is always meaningless until the moment it becomes meaningful—at which point it has always been meaningful, so that any intervention on its behalf seems absurd, overactive and pointless. This is an admiring review of a tactician by an avowed textualist. So alongside my professional disclaimer (Antoinette Burton and I taught at the same university for a short time, and one of her many edited collections included an essay of mine) is another disclaimer: I can sense only at a remove the tactical urgency that drives Burton—who is currently Professor of History at the University of Illinois and, alongside numerous articles and edited collections, author of four previous monographs: The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (2007), Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (2003), At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (1998), and Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (1994). Just finishing up the second decade of a brilliant career that has helped reshape both gender and imperial history, and especially the crucial intersection between them, Burton reflects on her intellectual path in this collection of some of her most influential articles. The book is made up of 16 previously published pieces, bookended with a pair of 2011 pieces that reflect on the changing historical moments that inspired the original articles and up the ante by proposing a fresh intervention for the field as it now stands. The first seven pieces are marked as surveys of the scholarly moment (1994 to 2008), while the second seven are labeled “Theory into Practice.” In …