Empire Without a Centre?
Denys P. Leighton
DECENTRING EMPIRE: BRITAIN, INDIA AND THE TRANSCOLONIAL WORLD by Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy Orient Longman, 2007, 406 pp., 845
February 2007, volume 31, No 2

2005 saw the publication of Forging the Raj, a collection of more than a dozen essays by Thomas R. Metcalf, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. That collection clearly indicated Metcalf’s participation during the later part of his career in a scholarly movement that has sought to reframe the object ‘British Empire’ first, by writing away—rather than merely outward—from the London-based colonial archive, and second, by directing attention to the epistemological frameworks within which texts, artifacts and social practices are created or enacted and interpreted. Some fruits of an attempt to de-centre the British Empire are evident in the collection of fourteen essays here under review,

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