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RR 2016/112 The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Edited by Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope Palgrave MacMillan Basingstoke and New York 2016 2 vols. ISBN 978 0 230 39277 9 (print); ISBN 978 0 230 39278 6 (e-book); £300 $480
Keywords Encyclopedias, Imperialism
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-01-2016-0023
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism is a very big book. The paper version, as here reviewed, has been printed and bound to make it as compact as humanly possible - saying that no space is wasted hardly does it justice. In its small print and double columns, the publishers have crammed over a million words. The effect is rather forbidding. Most of the entries are really short essays around seven pages long. Some of them, like the entry on Apartheid, are triple that length. The "feel" of the work is highly academic. The authors have not bothered with fripperies like illustrations: instead, we get dozens of these heavy-duty essays. Very occasionally, one finds a table or map or graph but, in the main, just an overwhelming mass of dense prose. It must be said that the writing is never jargon-ridden and the authors get high marks for their clear and simple English. Each piece concludes with reference notes and further reading.
A straight alphabetical arrangement has been eschewed in favour of seven broad thematic sections. It is worthwhile listing them: Biographies, Country and Regional Analysis, Culture and the Arts, History, Movements and Ideologies, Political Economy, Themes and Concepts. Each one is almost a book in itself. The contributors, about 150 of them, are from many varied fields of social science and the humanities. When using the book, I was stumped to find that there is no list of entries at the beginning: This was intensely frustrating and slowed me up when I was trying to find an article. The index is not terribly useful either because it is not annotated - the entries are just page references. All in all, the Palgrave Encyclopedia is not easy to use.
Which "imperialisms" does the book cover? Russia's imperial expansion into central Asia and the Far...