Edge of Empire - by Maya Jasanoff (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff uncovers the extraordinary stories of collectors who lived on the frontiers of the British Empire in India and Egypt, tracing their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Jasanoff delves beneath the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance to look at the British Empire through the eyes of the people caught up in it. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire enters a world where people lived, loved, mingled, and identified with one another in ways richer and more complex than previous accounts have led us to believe were possible. And as this book demonstrates, traces of that world remain tangible--and topical--today. An innovative, persuasive, and provocative work of history.

Review Quotes

"Spirited, teeming. . . . Jasanoff wants us to rethink the imperial experience." -The New York Times"Astute and moving. . . . As original--and beautifully written--as it is compelling to read." -The New York Sun"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."-The Guardian"Instead of concentrating on the 18th-and 19th-century European empire builders. . . . Jasanoff focuses on several ambitious, energetic, and eccentric men who used the East as a way to reinvent themselves....a fascinating and untold story." -The Boston Globe

About the Author

Maya Jasanoff is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard. She is the author of the prize-winning Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 (2005) and Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction and the George Washington Book Prize. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Jasanoff won the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Her essays and reviews appear frequently in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books.