The Arabs and the Scramble for Africa by John C. Wilkinson, and: The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz by Mostafa Minawi, and: Identifying With Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria by Will Hanley

Abstract

The political arguments and ideological differences between Bell’s thinkers are superbly reconstructed thanks to the author’s meticulous research and multidisciplinary framing. Nonetheless, the pretensions to world or global history implied by the book’s title are hindered by the focus on this small coterie of metropolitan intellectuals. The dense inter-textual exegesis of “polyphonic” (p. 67) liberalism is prioritised over and above the conditions of possibility that allowed many and varied liberal notes to reverberate around the world in the first place. As with his earlier seminal interventions in British political thought, Bell is at his most incisive when examining the interface between liberalism, imperialism, and international relations in the shaping of our contemporary global order. This is without a doubt an excellent book and, in the age of Brexit, perhaps its most topical contribution is to show how the dream (or spectre) of the “Angloworld” as a bastion of liberal fraternity continues to exert a powerful pull on the minds of politicians and public alike. VIKRAM VISANA University of Huddersfield The Arabs and the Scramble for Africa. By JOHN C. WILKINSON. Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2015. 512 pp. $115.00 (hardcover). The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz. By MOSTAFA MINAWI. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 240 pp. $24.95 (paper). Identifying With Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria. By WILL HANLEY. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. 416 pp. $65.00 (hardcover). Nationality, Empire, and Africa in the Age of High Imperialism The three new books under consideration here show the payoffs of a new kind of comparative imperial historical framework for world history that mediates between local, regional and global scales. All three books are indebted to the pioneering works of Fred Cooper, Ann Stoler, Mahmood Mamdani and Khaled Fahmy, among others in the 264 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2019 field of imperial and colonial history.1 In a groundbreaking work that opened up many of the theoretical questions investigated in these works, historian Fred Cooper argued that Ottomans and other nonEuropean states, “began to act more colonial in the late nineteenth century, trying to impose an imperial civilization along the edges of empires, although constrained by the practical necessity of working with local elites” (2005, p. 28). More recently, in his magisterial history of the long nineteenth century, Jurgen Osterhammel argues that one characteristic of the nineteenth century is that the world was colonized, governed and ruled with more intensity than ever before, a process not only limited to projects of European expansion.2 Though vastly different, the three books are woven together by their focus on aspects of this process, what is often called in the historiographical literature, “secondary empire” or “new imperialism.” JohnC.Wilkinson’sbookisthemostencyclopedicinscope,astudyof Omani Arabs in East and Central Africa over several centuries, with a particularfocusontheOmanistateinZanzibaranditssphereofinfluence in the African interior in the nineteenth century. Will Hanley’s monograph is a micro-level case study of nationality in colonial Alexandria, using a trans-imperial framework to capture Alexandria’s position between different imperial regimes. Mostafa Minawi’s slim but dense volume is an ambitious re-imagining of the “scramble for Africa” through the lens of the Ottoman empire, based on original sources from theOttomanarchives.Minawiissimilarlyexplicitabouthisuseofatransimperial framework. Wilkinson and Minawi’s books are the most geographically diffuse in scope, spanning continents and empires, as well as seas and oceans. Hanley, although focused on the city of Alexandria, also draws the reader into a wider Mediterranean world. Hanley and Minawi share a focus on the Ottomans, while their citational practice makes evident the deep reading both have done in the existing historiography on colonialism and empire. Wilkinson has previously written a number of important studies in the field of Omani history; his Imamate Tradition of Oman is a towering work in the fields of Ibadhi and Islamic Studies. In his newest book, Wilkinson turns his attention to the Omani presence in east and 1 See Fred Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: UC Press, 2005); Ann Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (University of California Press, 1997); Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late...