Eacott's Selling Empire represents a new interpretation of the making of a global British imperial system between 1600 and 1830. The author shows India—as an idea, a place, and a source of commodities—to be an essential component in the formulation and development of imperial ambitions and practices across the world. They argue that “Britons sought to sell the idea of empire using ideas about India”, and present India as vital for understanding the imperial system that emerged from ongoing material and metaphorical interaction. In doing so, this book contributes to burgeoning fields of British corporate and imperial history not by further demonstrating the interconnectedness of disparate regions and approaching these links through a range of thematic lenses. The book emphasizes the cultural conditions of these links, their political ramifications and how societies in America, Britain, and India responded to them, and we are encouraged to shift our perspective of the British Empire towards a multi-nodal system — both geographically and conceptually. Eacott suggests that through its imperial programme, “Britain had made itself into an India”, as had its colonies in North America, the Caribbean and Asia (437), contributing to dramatic shifts in the global economy and revolutionary changes to localities across the world.

In part, Selling Empire’s success rests on successfully bringing together often-disparate historiographies, recognizing especially how new research on the East India Company feeds into ongoing debates about Britain's American colonies. More importantly still, by encouraging this cross-pollination of ideas, Eacott re-assesses sources imaginatively and introduce some fascinating new material. Two elements of their analysis are particularly impressive. First, Eacott takes great care in handling Parliamentary and public debates on the regulation of Britain's India trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (72–117). By drawing together the concerns of participants as diverse as monarchs, merchants and weavers, Eacott shows a dissonance within the British empire about how to understand India, culturally and economically, and how this created instability within its emerging global system. Second, Selling Empire treats us to an interpretation of imperial and political ideas that rests firmly on their cultural underpinnings and the materiality of Britain's experience of India. Whether in revealing how contemporaries conflated “the horrific tyranny of India with Indian goods” (42) or assessing the relationship between tastes, sensation, and regulation (327), Eacott supplements his detailed study of political debate with a vibrant vision of this global marketplace—and what it meant to contemporaries. The impressive depth of Eacott's research in state, corporate and private archives flourishes within a rich narrative tapestry that never lets the reader forget the luxurious vibrancy of many Indian commodities.

However, while Selling Empire presents an array of interesting material and makes a significant contribution to our conception of the global British imperial system, there are places where its vast intended scope is detrimental to the thoroughness of Eacott's research. For example, the first half of the seventeenth century is given only a very shallow treatment, which is probably to be expected in a single monograph covering over two centuries but is inherently problematic given Eacott's goal to trace changing practices and behaviours from this period. Conversely, the geographical scope of Selling Empire could be judged too limited to offer a thorough analysis of the global British imperial system. In particular, Europe, and British trade with the continent receives too little attention. In focusing strictly on the relationship between Britain, India, and America, Eacott underplays the weight of economic, cultural and political interaction between Britain and its closest neighbours. This fact weakens attempts to place Britain's empire within a global, entangled environment by simplifying Britain's understanding of its commercial activities and side-lining the lives of actors whose experience of India was rooted in pre-existing trading relationships rather than colonial endeavours in the Atlantic. As such, we are left wondering just what a broader, global interpretation might reveal regarding the shape and nature of Britain's multi-nodal empire.

Selling Empire is an ambitious, engaging and critical piece of work. It will contribute to ongoing discussions about how the British Empire emerged and operated within an increasingly global economic environment. Eacott's passionate and detailed accounts of regulatory debates and political discourse, embellished with an appreciation of their cultural and social dimensions, offer a valuable window into the integration of India with British conceptions of state, empire, and identity.