• About this Book
• About the Author
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Written by Maya Jasanoff

• Format: Hardcover, 416 pages
• Publisher: Knopf
• On Sale: August 23, 2005
• Price: $27.95
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-4167-1 (1-4000-4167-8)

about this book

Winner of the 2005 Duff Cooper Prize

A Palladian villa filled with Western artifacts in the middle of Calcutta's central banana depot, the Mughal Emperor's letters uncovered in the back room of an archive in the French Alps, the name of a long-dead English diplomat feebly scratched into the stone of an Egyptian temple, the discovery in a Tuscan villa of a tiger-hilted sword, seized in 1799 from the South Indian city of Seringapayam in one of the British Empire's most dramatic battles.

These scattered testaments—ranging across Europe and even America, as well as Britain and its former empire—are the kind of personal evidence that have remained relatively unexplored in conventional imperial histories.

In this remarkable book, Maya Jasanoff shows how each of these, and many other, material remains is the legacy of a person, an individual collector who lived in India or Egypt, the eastern frontiers of the British Empire, during a formative period of imperial expansion, from 1750 to 1850. They were on the edge of empire in time as well as in space, before either the cultural or physical boundaries of the empire were fixed and they acquired objects as they went, to understand different societies and often to refashion their own identities.

In tracking these objects and the experiences of their collectors, Jasanoff tells an alternative history of the British Empire, one that breaks away from the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance, to delve into the personal dimensions of imperialism. Edge of Empire enters a world where people lived, loved, and died, and identified with each other in ways considerably richer, if more complicated, than were suggested by later imperial chauvinism—or indeed by many treatments of empire today.


“This brilliant insight has produced a riveting and original book that gives an entirely fresh dimension to our understanding of the creation and expansion of the empire….[A] historical tour de force, with wonderfully original and unusual material moulded into a convincing new narrative. Britain’s empire will never look the same again.” —Richard Gott, Guardian

“Jasanoff shows how collecting antiquities formed part of a cultural posture that legitimated and facilitated the assertion of European power in a thoroughly researched book that in its range and depth fully reflects the cultural riches it describes.” —BBC History Magazine

“A captivating…fascinating book, packed with information and insights and written in vibrant, mellifluous prose. Nobody interested in imperialism and its history could fail to learn from this truly innovative work, and it is a welcome corrective to the many simplistic studies of imperial history.” —Literary Review

“Jasanoff writes with verve and confidence, marshalling a huge amount of fascinating material into a book that is both highly readable and genuinely revelatory.” —Peter Parker, The Telegraph

“Maya Jasanoff is brilliant, perceptive and writes like a dream: almost every page contains startling new insights that make you look afresh at subjects and ideas you thought you knew well. With this ambitious, imaginative and mould-breaking book, she has shown herself to be a major new star in the historical firmament. She is destined to shake up the post-colonial academic establishment and reverse all our lazy Saidian pre-conceptions.” —William Dalrymple

“This is a very clever and wonderfully researched and written book, which illumines French as well as British imperial experience, artifacts and culture, and which looks at all the actors involved in a vivid and nuanced fashion. An original new voice.” —Linda Colley, Shelby M.C.Davis 1958 Professor of History, Princeton University

“This is an extraordinary debut. Maya Jasanoff is one of the most exciting historians to emerge in years. Her crackling prose and outstanding research have resulted in a ground-breaking book. Edge of Empire is a must-read.” —Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire