How the East was won
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1562198,00.html
A deeply strange British empire is revealed in Maya Jasanoff's
brilliant new study, Edge of Empire, says Robert McCrum
Sunday September 4, 2005
The Observer
Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750-1850
by Maya Jasanoff
Fourth Estate =A325, pp404
Bright, young historians are attracted to the British empire as
tropical moths to a coppery lamp. But, against the odds, Maya Jasanoff,
who has undertaken a risky encounter, survives and even triumphs in
this memorable debut. This is partly because, mirroring her subject,
she has adopted a vivacious methodology that defies category. At first,
we seem to be in familiar terrain. Early in her absorbing and
well-researched study of Britain's imperial adventures in India and
Egypt before and after the pivotal years of the Napoleonic wars,
Professor Jasanoff makes a conventional, even obligatory, reference to
Edward Said's Orientalism, the classic indictment of Western cultural
imperialism. But as her narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that she
might equally have nodded towards David Cannadine's Ornamentalism, a
study of empire that emphasised the vanity of the late-Victorian
imperialists' passion for the toys of empire.
Maya Jasanoff
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/153c8d9a41a2c2fc
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