671Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 648e688

Lindsay J. Proudfoot and Michael M. Roche (Eds), (Dis)Placing Empire: Renegotiating BritishColonial Geographies, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005, 228 pages, £47.50 hardback.

This volume emerged out of the International Conference ofHistorical Geographers held inQuebecin 2001. Its editors’ intention is to provide a ‘substantial commentary’ on one of the themes of thatconference e ‘the spatiality andmateriality of colonialist experiences of Empire’. In a further refine-ment of objectives, they explain that ‘the heterogeneity of the ‘‘white’’ experience of Empire . is thebook’s fundamental locus’ (p. xii). This heterogeneity is borne out through an extended introductionand nine substantive chapters, before a brief afterword by the editors wraps things up.

The introduction makes a decent job of discussing the intersection between postcolonial theoryand critical historical geography, focusing largely on the ways that historical geographers canbring the materiality of place and space, and the connections between place and subjectivity, tobear on broader postcolonial discussions of identity. Each of the substantive chapters is well-written and edited and I found all of them to be of considerable interest.

Paddy Duffy’s chapter is on the Irish landed estate as a site of both the elaboration of co-lonial projects such as ‘improvement’, ‘civilisation’ and industry, and of resistance to thoseprojects. Resistance, he finds, was most marked on those estates where landlords’ interventionsintruded most into domestic relations. Joy McCann’s chapter is a nuanced history of settlers’collective and contested imaginings of Australia’s wheatlands. It takes in myths of pioneeringand mateship that were mobilised in the project of constructing Australian national identitiesin the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more recent discourses of rural declineand ecological degradation, before it culminates in an assessment of the recent impact of in-digenous land claims.

Lindsay Proudfoot’s chapter is a close study of theological and personal disputes within thePresbyterian community of settlers in early nineteenth-century New South Wales, and betweenits mutually antagonistic local representatives and those of the metropolitan church. It uses thepapers of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, William Hamilton, as a lens through which to highlightthe heterogeneity of settler experience, and its relationship to locality, even within such a relativelynarrowly defined group of colonisers. Di Hall’s contribution is a counter to those analyses ofpublic displays of Irishness in Australian history that focus largely on masculine performancesand practices. It tells the story of a violent dispute between two Irish settler women who workedin a hotel in the small settlement of Glenorchy during the 1860s. Through its ‘detailed investiga-tion of local circumstances’, in which different notions of Irishness were deployed, and in whichthe domestic spatial and social arrangements of the hotel were contested, Hall argues, ‘the greatdiversity of experiences of Irish-born women in colonial Australia is revealed’ (p. 82).

The following chapter, by Yvonne Whelan, is the last in Part One of the book, entitled ‘Dis-locations’. This is a well-constructed study of conflictual responses to Queen Victoria’s visit to Dub-lin in 1900. The city authorities used the occasion to bolster Ireland’s status as a partner in theBritishimperial enterprise, while nationalists, republicans and socialists sought to actively resist such con-notations, deploring Dublin’s diminishing status: ‘the once-proud capital of a free nation’, as a na-tionalist newspaper put it, ‘degraded to the level of the biggest city of a decaying and fetteredprovince’ (p. 106). Whelan points out that contestation took the form of competing uses and inter-pretations of public space, spectacle, colour, decoration, forms of welcome and procession, all ofwhich conjoined to produce a moment of focus and intensity for the nationalist struggle.

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Part Two of the book is called ‘Translocations’ and consists of four chapters. Joe Powell’s con-tribution is a call to broaden the range of imaginaries that we conceive as contributing to newnational identities. He argues that it was not just ‘appropriations’ of ‘new’ landscapes such asAustralia’s by novelists, poets and artists that formed the basis for an imagined national commu-nity, but also the processes by which Australians came to terms with the ‘real’ environmentsaround them, through scientific understanding, natural history writing and the application oftechnology. In the course of the argument, significant linkages are uncovered between Australia,Britain and the USA, in terms of people, ideas and techniques of environmental management.Michael Roche’s chapter examines the ways that New Zealand’s relationship with the Empirewas configured during post-World War I parliamentary debates on the resettlement of dischargedsoldiers. In many ways, Roche concludes, these debates had the effect of reinforcingNew Zealand’s commitment to Empire, even though a general view among historians is thatthe bitter experience of the war led to a nationalist reaction against loyal ties to Britain. Thetale of association between war against Germany and war against nature on resettled land isespecially interesting, as is that of the effects of (white) soldier resettlement on Maori landholding.

The two concluding chapters in this part of the book both deal with the social and spatial reg-ulation of prostitutes within the British Empire during the nineteenth century, Satish Kumar look-ing at India and Philip Howell at Hong Kong. Both are subtle and well argued chapters,identifying colonial regulation as a hybrid product of imported British notions (many of themof recent invention) and pre-existing local regulatory practices. Both also allow space for prosti-tutes’ own manipulation of, and resistance to, regulationism. Nevertheless, as Kumar notes in theIndian context, ‘[m]edically inspected and licensed to practice, each prostitute acquired an identityas the property of a given regiment’ (p. 171). He thus reveals just how powerful was a particularcolonial disciplinary regime that is often overlooked by historical geographers of colonialism ethe military. Howell’s chapter, more than most, conceives of its subject as a project constructedthrough multiple, contested, networked associations across the British ‘imperium’ (a usefulterm of his denoting the field of interconnected metropolitan and colonial spaces). It is also par-ticularly adept in considering the ways in which indigenous practices could inform and delimitcolonial interventions, especially once these practices were incorporated within colonists’ own dis-courses as forms of ‘local knowledge’. The need to take on board such ‘local knowledge’ e oftenmanifesting itself as an awareness of the contours of likely resistance e meant ultimately thatcolonial officials were content to try to manage rather than comprehensively control Chineseapproaches to prostitution.

Aside from the merits of each individual chapter e none of which I would particularly want tocriticise e where, I think, the collection as a whole e at least as it is configured by the editors’introduction and afterword e makes its most valuable contribution, is in its Massey-like treat-ment of particular colonial spaces as ‘polyvocal’ sites, supporting ‘a variety of symbolic meaningsconstructed through the agency of those people whose life paths intersected through them’(p. 202). Rather than the imagination of colonial self and colonised other taking place throughthe projection of that other into a discrete, fantasised and distant space such as the Orient, thefocus here is on some of those places in which significant British colonial settlement led tomore proximate colonial relations. Within these spaces that settler Britons unevenly sharedwith other Britons, with Irish emigrants, and with indigenous peoples, the reference points forthe construction of self and other were intensely intimate and often domestic, rather than

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distanced and projected. Social and spatial boundary formation was, accordingly, all the moreintense.

The book’s main limitation, I think, is that the powerfully localised identities fashioned in thesesites of settlement are not so well articulated with more distanced metropolitan and other colonialidentities as the editors seem to promise. In their concluding discussion, entitled ‘Displacement’,Proudfoot and Roche argue that the collection emphasises the ‘diverse localism of [colonial] ex-perience’, its ‘contingent and heterogeneous character’ (pp. 205 and 201), which is true. But theygo on to suggest that all the contributors have taken care ‘to place this [localism] within the con-text of the broader discursive flows of people, ideas and material which articulated Empire as cul-tural practice’ (p. 205). While each author has certainly theorised their localised study so as to giveit purchase in broader debates about colonialism, however, this is not the same as locating theplaces studied within broader, actual, flows of people, material, capital and ideas. Some chapters(Howell’s and to a certain extent Powell’s for instance) do undertake this exercise of geographicalassociation and connection, but the majority, whatever their other strengths, do not. In any case,though, this is still a collection of very interesting and well crafted discussions of local colonialrelations which the editors have done well to put together.

Alan LesterUniversity of Sussex, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.04.010

Helen M. Rozwadowski and David K. van Keuren (Eds), The Machine in the Garden: HistoricalPerspectives on Technology and the Marine Environment, Sagamore Beach, Science HistoryPublications, 2004, xxviiiC371 pages, US$49.95 hardback.

In their introduction of this collection of essays, Helen Rozwadowski and David van Keurensuggest that the history of oceanography is absent from much historical scholarship. Whilstoceans are present in histories of military endeavour, fishing and whaling, transatlantic trade,and exploration, there is little emphasis on the ocean environment itself other than as a stagefor human activities. This, they argue, is even the case in the relatively new sub-discipline ofenvironmental history. The present volume, it will be no surprise to hear, sets out to fill thislacuna. In particular its introduction and ten substantive chapters focus on the close relationsbetween oceanography and technological developments. Oceanography, the editors argue, ‘re-quires an almost constant intercession of technology between the observer and the observed’(p. xiii) and this is traced through from the early use of tide gauges in the 1830s, to deepsea drilling, acoustics technologies, up to an artificial research ‘island’, planned in the 1960s.In other words, just as oceanographers have relied almost entirely on technology to grasp theirobjects of inquiry, so might historians of science use technologyeoceanography interdependen-cies to grasp oceanography’s histories.

The book is organised chronologically, beginning in the early Victorian period, jumping up tothe last twenty-five years of that century, then up to the onset of the Second World War. Severalpapers consider the significance of that conflict for the development of oceanography, particularly