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Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax, by Mark Doyle; pp. 304. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016, £90.00, $122.00.
Mark Doyle's Communal Violence in the British Empire: Disturbing the Pax is an insightful book, as much for its method as for the arguments and evidence it musters. Doyle has chosen four discrete "flashpoints" across the nineteenth-century British Empire to demonstrate how, why, and under what conditions the notion of Pax Britannica was a consequential fiction in this period (32). Taken together, he suggests, riots and other outbreaks of lawlessness and disorder in 1850s British Guiana, in 1870s Belfast and Bombay, and in the 1890s Raj point to a pattern of communal violence that contradicts claims of peace as the order of the day. Yet these are not simply case studies, nor are they connected in time and space as part of a larger set of arguments about the transnational character of resistance to Victorian imperialism-its "chaotic pluralism," as historian John Darwin once termed it (The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British WorldSystem, 1830-1970 [Cambridge University Press, 2009], 3). Rather, Doyle is after a bigger target: he wants us to think more carefully about the ways in which liberal imperial ideology worked to sponsor the kind of unrest that, in turn, threw British supremacy into question.
Each of the disruptive events Doyle identifies has its unique features, reflecting the particularity of imperial power in local contexts. So, for example, John Sayers Orr was a mixed-race agent of "evangelical incendiarism," preaching...