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Imperial Formations. Edited by Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, MX: School for Advanced Research Press; Oxford: James Currey, 2007).
This volume is the product of a School of Advanced Research seminar on "Empires: Thinking Colonial Studies Beyond Europe," held in Santa Fe in 2003. The seminar was organised to challenge the paradigmatic hold of the modern British and French empires on colonial and imperial studies. What about Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Soviet, and Ottoman empires, for instance? Can modern and early modern, European and non-European empires be considered "in the same analytical frame?" (xi). A welcome anti-Eurocentrism animates this venture. In view of the popularity of-and controversy about-the empire motif in political and academic discourse over the past decade, particularly regarding the projection of US power, the book seeks to not only to attend to the specifics of imperial rule in concrete cases across time and space but also to "confront the confusion of empire in the present" (xi).
Without doubt, the essays in this book confront this apparent confusion. Whether they resolve it is another question, because each operates with different definitions of the salient keywords: empire, imperialism, colony, colonization, colonialism, and so forth. But the problem inheres not so much the individual contributions, written in the main by leading historians at the top of their game. It is the long, programmatic introduction that must necessarily tend towards diffusion in order to integrate such a disparate collection. So the editors are forced to make descriptive statements of the lowest common denominator, such as 'Imperial formations practice toleration and discrimination to different degrees' (22). If no logics obtain besides processes of inclusion and exclusion-processes inherent in any society-little remains beyond banal generalizations in the book's vaunted project of comparison.
The anti-essentialism...