This impressive collection of essays highlights the difficulties inherent in writing about “race” and “identity” in the colonial period due in part to our inability to reach consensus on common terminology. The editors challenged the contributors to consider how colonials understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and ultimately as imperial subjects, particularly when they employed discourses of difference in reference to themselves and others. Doing so, they suggest, requires the exploration of “history from below”; an understanding that racial classifications were too narrow to express the full identity of an individual and were qualified in myriad ways in practice; and the consideration of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group associations and externalized social norms and categories. The contributors take this charge seriously and tend to agree that identity formation was occurring on three overlapping levels: individuals reading other individuals; institutions reading individuals;...

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