The role of empire in understanding colonies—or, in various segments of scholarship, the former colony—has been the subject of scrutiny, debate, and some of the most theoretically advanced work in recent history. In his forward, Nicholas B. Dirks briefly outlines this trajectory, focusing on the historiography of the imperial state; he locates Fringes of Empire within a discourse that seeks to reevaluate the stability of imperial power by reexamining what he calls “tensions and contradictions” within the British Empire (p. xi). Fringes of Empire, edited by Sameetah Agha and Elizabeth Kolsky, is a volume looking to explore precisely the actors and locations often overlooked, under-studied, or assumed absent: namely, borderlands, seemingly bounded communities, and communities that must be fluid, and the ways in which these actors—geographic, human, and social—speak to the decentralized nature of power, and in turn, a vision of a more permeable British Empire.
In fact, in...