In this excellent book, Vanita Seth provides this story: “In November 1726, news had reached London that the wife of Joshua Toft, a poor cloth worker residing in Godalming, had a month earlier given birth to a rabbit” (p. 190). Got that? Seth mobilizes the legend of Mary Toft and her litter of 17 rabbits to illuminate the transition from the Renaissance era (the so-called Age of Discovery, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries) to the Classical period (roughly seventeenth to eighteenth centuries), when the emergence of the Age of Reason came at the expense of the epistemic value of the body itself. The question of whether a woman could give birth to a rabbit was available for thinking at this time, though not for long. Toft's story is just one of the effective ways in which Seth engages the fundamental concern of this book, which is the history and construction of the self–other relationship in European discourse, culture, and politics from 1500 to 1900. More pertinent figures to this study are the likes of Las Casas, Vitorio, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Herder, and Foucault. In all, Seth has synthesized an impressive range of materials to generate a wide-ranging, compelling, and important analysis.

To Seth, the “self” in her story is that of the European and the “other” is that of indigenous people of the Americas and the people of India under British colonial rule. Prior to the eighteenth century, she asks, “who precisely is the self being posited in relation to the American other?” (p. 28). While the subtitle of the book might lead one to think that the pursuit of this question is fundamentally about tracing the production of “racial difference,” the author notes that her investigation is “only ostensibly about race” (p. 174). Indeed, at base, this book is about epistemology—colonialist epistemology—and the political implications for the production of difference(s) entailed therein. Undoubtedly, race and racial difference are critical concerns for Seth, but she rightly argues that we can know how we know and think about race today only by unpacking the history of the construction of the modern self, which occurred fundamentally in European meaning making necessitated by colonial conquests, encounters, and governance in and of the Americas and India.

The starting point of the study is nicely signaled in the title of Chapter 1, “Self and Similitude.” Seth claims here that European political actors of the Renaissance era sought to make knowable the identity of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas not through othering and differentiation but, rather, via a genealogical effort to locate—read construct—similar origins between the New and Old World. Chapter 2 takes us into the Classical era when “Europe's Indians” are those that define the “state of nature” in the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Seth looks to them “as conduits for exploring the changing face of European representations of difference” (p. 65). This differentiation begins to appear with the emergence of the modern, individuated European subject. Without naming it as such, what she traces here is the Promethean turn in European political and cultural discourse, where, for example, in Hobbes's “moment of contract” man “creates history out of nothing. He creates time as the God of Genesis created man” (p. 72).

Scholars of these three canonical theorists may not find much new in the textual analyses offered here if assessed on their own, but Seth's larger point is more profound than the sum of its parts. As she walks us from Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau, she deftly argues that the construction of indigeneity as a marker of pre- or antipolitical conditions was a central and irreplaceable constituent—and not at all a marginal by-product—of European subjectivity and how it moved further down the path of knowing itself, and speaking in the language of self. Key to this development is the way in which the mutually constitutive placement of indigenous and European identity in history became an increasing marker of differentiation rather than similitude. Indigenous people came to represent those who “cannot be agents of history” so that Europeans can imagine themselves being so (p. 100). This discursive move is prevalent in our time, as settler–colonial discourse in contexts such as the United States and Canada locates indigenous people out of history, presumptively undermining contemporary indigenous claims to political agency, sovereignty, and land rights.

The temporal displacement of colonized others is not limited to the Americas, as Seth demonstrates in Chapter 3 by shifting the analytical focus to British colonial India in the nineteenth century. Here, the politics of epistemology and history writing come to the forefront through such contrived distinctions as that between a “traditional people” and a “people of history.” The inhabitants of India are seemingly trapped in traditions, such as the caste system, that leave them in “natural” time, unable to progress in “secular” time, their villages embodying “historical inertness” (p. 167). The emergent disciplines of history and anthropology play a vital role here as Europe finds, by creating, its colonial other in the archives and labs where social science practices of textual, bodily, and comparative examination produce the knowledge of self by the production of the other. The European self bespeaks itself in academic theses and treaties on the other.

Moving logically forward in this narrative, biopolitics and racialization then become the central focus of Chapter 4. The body is back! In particular, Seth offers a fascinating discussion of the development of the sciences of anthropometry and fingerprinting, the latter first applied comprehensively by the British in India in the late nineteenth century. By that time, the body stands literally and metaphorically as a stable, fixed form of evidence—evidence for crimes, evidence of race, and evidence for the imbrication of the two—in the European self–other imaginary and colonialist epistemology.

Overall, what is compelling about the arc of Seth's narrative is that while she ends with a distinct focus on the “body as/of evidence” in the nineteenth century, her claim is that we cannot begin there. Rather, we must trace and deconstruct the way in which the body and self became historical and political subjects, making and being made by history, in order to grasp the ways of thinking and knowing that are the roots of racial and colonial differentiation and hierarchies that we live with to this day. The only way to challenge these constructions is to see them as made, and thus capable of being unmade.

I expect that readers will find places to quibble, possibly even quarrel, with Seth's specific readings of some of the political theorists she deploys in this argument, but I would recommend keeping her larger argument and aim in mind. She demands that we interrogate our presumptions about what we make available to thinking in the same way that cynics of yore raised an eyebrow at the idea of a woman giving birth to a rabbit. After all, the latter notion is no crazier epistemologically than the racial construction of the human body that today is so readily available for thought. Oh, and what was the deal with Mary Toft's litter of rabbits? For that you will just have to read the book. I highly recommend it.