In The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (1993) Thomas Richards claimed that the British Empire was the first information society of the modern era in the 19th century. His reasoning is simple and far-reaching at the same time: the accumulated knowledge in the form of books, newspapers and magazines has been gathered from all corners of the globe. The British colonial empire tried to meet its administrative role by creating a myriad of maps and statistical surveys, and in this respect it is hardly surprising that narrative colonial utopias of the late 19th century, launched an imagination of a colonial empire, which has not been brought together by military force or civilian control, but was created by a tightly interwoven information network.
The recent Duke University Press publication Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, edited by Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, attempts to illustrate the heterogeneous information network of British colonialism. In ten book-historical essays on print material from 1829 to 1960 that marked the British colonial empire, each contributing scholar successfully provides new insights in England’s imperial past. As the editors express in the introduction that they treat their ten books “as intellectual and political configurations shaped by the historical conditions in which they operate, whether by affirmation of the status quo or dissent from it” (9). That is to say, the selection brings together world literature, monumental History, portable manuals, as well as an anti-colonial manifesto. Hence, we find Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847) next to Thomas Macaulay's History of England (1849), and Mohandas K. Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909) swiftly follows Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908).
The formal structure of Burton’s and Hofmeyr’s book-historical publication is reminiscent of John Carter’s and Percy H Muir’s Printing and the Mind of Man (1963). While Carter and Muir focus on the progress print media has brought to humanity, the editors of Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire deliberately move away from this evolutionary approach. Instead, Burton and Hofmeyr want to show how contemporary books presented the imperial world at the time, and how the printed matters diagnosed the effects of the successes and failures for the future of the global hegemony of Great Brittan. This book historical approach to British colonialism is the major appeal of Burton’s and Hofmeyr’s volume. Instead of merely applying the Robert Darton’s communicative model, Tony Ballantyne’s essay on Edward G. Wakefield's A Letter from Sydney (1829) points out that Darnton’s communication circuit from author, via the publisher to reader, is insufficient to capture the polymorphic production of a versatile colonial writer like Wakefield.
The concentration on one book object at a time assures that the edited volume captures the politicisation of the entire book culture that occurred due to the diverse colonial communities. Thus the attentive reader realises—supported by innovative book historical approaches—that neither the British Empire, nor it’s far-reaching book culture can be taken for granted. Instead both entities justified each other during colonialism. Keeping this complex, and often diverse social field in mind, the editors admirably managed to give a coherent outlook on the transnational book history of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth century. ( )