At a time when voices increasingly suggest that the imperial turn is over, this fine essay by Antoinette Burton comes as a salutary reminder that even in the case of Britain, much work remains to be done before we have anything like a complete account of the imperial experience. Burton maintains that conventional histories of the British Empire, which are framed by powerful but overly simple narratives of rise and fall, rarely capture the extent to which the empire was contested, not merely during the final years of decolonization but throughout its entire existence. To understand more fully the challenges to which the empire was subject, we therefore need to acknowledge and take seriously the multiple forms of resistance that were mounted by colonial peoples. This is not a matter of simply adding instances of insurgency to the story, however, but of incorporating them analytically to provide counter-narratives of protest and resistance, thereby disclosing the fragile and tenuous hold that the imperial metropolis held over its subject peoples.

In some respects, the thesis is not a new one; no serious account of the empire has ignored, say, the events surrounding the Indian Revolt of 1857 or the Irish Home Rule movement of the 1870s, let alone the protracted and painful experience of decolonization, but what Burton does so well is to demonstrate that such incidences, far from being sporadic and isolated, were part of the quotidian reality of colonial rule, and unless and until they are integrated fully into narratives of empire, our grasp of the imperial experience as a whole remains impoverished. Much of the book serves to remind us, therefore, of how the military, economic, and sovereign power of the colonial state, from Afghanistan to Zululand, was constantly under siege. The cover illustration provides a strong clue to what follows. In an etching taken from Le Petit Journal, Paris, British soldiers making up a contingent of the Malakand Field Force come under attack from a well-armed group of Afghans, forcing a retreat. Because of the strategic importance of the Swat Valley in Afghanistan to the security of India, the 1897 siege was of particular significance, so Burton takes up the story in some detail. This she does by providing a response to Winston Churchill's The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which was written as a firsthand account of the campaign. At face value, Churchill's rhetoric is of a confident imperial expansion based on a conviction of the civilizing mission, but beneath this is a deep apprehension about the military capability of the British, particularly when faced with a “primitive,” “savage” yet determined challenge from hostile forces.

Important lessons follow from this. It is not merely that a sense of insecurity can be detected in prominent imperial activists such as Churchill but also that the Malakand campaign and many other acts of insurgence prompt us to decenter much better-known incidences, such as the Indian Revolt, and help move lesser insurrections center stage. Much of the remainder of the book, therefore, is taken up with Burton's skillful discussions of instances of insurgency from across the temporal and geographical span of the British Empire in all their various manifestations. Thus, we learn of attempts of the British to neutralize the threat posed by Dost Mohammed, the emir of Afghanistan, who held the key to a network of complex alliances and eventually declared jihad against the East India Company; the series of wars launched against Maoris from the 1840s to 1870s; the role of boycotts in the long history of rural protest in Ireland, culminating in the Land War of 1879–1882; the anti-tax campaign of 1913–14 led by the Mekatalili Wa Menza, the leader of coastal Kenya; the international Ghadar movement of the early years of the twentieth century, which created an enduring revolutionary network of sedition; and many more. Striking here is the extraordinary diversity and resourcefulness of indigenous resistance—and its longevity: the struggle for decolonization was contingent on imperial expansion from its earliest phase, not merely a feature of its terminal years.

The agenda placed on the table by Burton is compelling, even more so if we note what other lines of inquiry it opens up. The fragility and insecurity of empire derived not merely from challenges mounted by the resistance of imperial subjects but also from fault lines in the imperial formation itself. To take the example of India, the authority exercised by the East India Company was severely compromised by internal and external conflict. Internally, fissures between the court of directors and court of proprietors (which in principle at least had ultimate authority) constantly hampered the management of company affairs, while the relationship between the directors and imperial administrators on the ground in India was fraught, often reaching the breaking point. This is to say nothing of the rivalries which beset the Governor General's Council in the various presidencies, most notably, the bitter rancor between Warren Hastings and Philip Francis in the late eighteenth century. Externally, company affairs came increasingly into conflict with Parliament, leading to the gradual supersession of its authority. No other issue better epitomizes these fissiparous tendencies than the whole messy business of reform to the administration of land revenue, which was dogged by internal indecision and a considerable repertoire of indigenous resistance, from a reluctance among zamindars to provide information on land holdings to incidences of armed insurrection.

It is important also to recover the patterns and networks of resistance. What were the synchronicities and homologies between, say, Ireland and India in terms of the organizations, strategies, and political programs of anti-colonial struggles? How can we better locate critiques of empire which emerged within the colonial metropolis (a topic raised by Burton but little developed)? Finally, although Burton's focus is on Britain, much can be learnt from comparative studies of other imperial formations. What forms of resistance were mounted to French and Dutch rule? Were the Mughal and Ottoman empires similarly fractured by dissent?

These are weighty questions; to provide satisfying answers, historians of empire will, one hopes, find gainful employment for some time yet.