Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire

"The new critical history of empire and the freshly theorized transnational history of the book are together at last, each enhancing the other in a superb collection edited by the leading scholars in studies of the British world. Neither 'book' nor 'empire' is a straightforward idea. Focusing on ten influential works, the editors and contributors show how readers appropriated ideas as they circulate—often without regard for intellectual property—in periodical, pamphlet and volume forms." - Leslie Howsam, author of Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain 1850–1950

"Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire is a collection of engaging essays by an impressive group of contributors. The volume coheres around the political mobilization of print cultures by the British Empire's various constituent communities, and that coherence is reinforced by each essay's concentration on a single book. To my knowledge, nothing else remotely like this collection exists." - Dane Kennedy, author of The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World

"Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons will prove invaluable to scholars working on imperial print cultures, attempting to think globally in Victorian or American studies, or otherwise seeking to unfield British Empire studies." - Kellie D. Holzer, History: Reviews of New Books

"Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire . . . sketches an important new nexus for the analysis of print cultures and empires, tracing the ways in which print was embedded in imperial contexts and could inflect those contexts." - Robert J. Mayhew, Journal of Historical Geography

"Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire works well because the books reviewed in it are diverse in origin, subject, and intention, and because the essays are all of a very high quality; the essays work together to inform and stimulate their readers’ further thinking about the cultural workings of colonization and decolonization. It is a book well worth reading as a whole. Together, it becomes much more than the sum of its many parts." - Lisa Chilton, Canadian Journal of History

"All of the authors are finely attentive to the conditions under which texts were produced, including fascinating details of translation, book design, and local and global audiences. The editors and authors are to be commended on this often provocative and always insightful contribution to what they rightly term the communicative history of empire." - Jordanna Bailkin, Journal of Modern History