MacPhee, Graham and Prem Poddar, eds. 2007. and After: Englishness in Perspective. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. $60.00 hc. 211 pp.Empire and After: Englishness in Perspective is valuable addition to what, since early 1990s, has been a sustained renewal of interest in national across diverse disciplines and inter-disciphnes, including history, Uterature, politics, and cultural studies (1). Revisionary in scope, and robusdy critical in its emphases, an important strand in this academic renewal-to which essays in this coUection belong-is focus on this identity's contradictory, ambivalent, and mutuaUy contaminating relationship with ideologies of building, such that presumed opposites like national and supranational, local and global, and and British can be seen as interpenetrating each other.This collection is comprised of nine essays, with first five appearing under rubric of Nation and Empire and next four under Postcolonial Legacies. The former group addresses experience (and consequences) of an internal, presumably demarcated (national) English identity that is, however, informed by, and itself informs, an external, (imperial) one various locations and at different moments during period of formal colonialism (18). The latter focuses on postcolonial and postimperial world (19), with aU but one essay concerned with conflation of national with supranational within territorial boundaries of England/Britain itself.The coherence of volume derives from-and it is, in some respects, remarkably coherent volume-an introduction that anticipates, indeed, provides theoretical coordinates through which individual essays frame their analyses. this introduction, editors survey some of recent scholarship on English/British national identity, specifying significant emphasis of volume by engaging more substantively with three texts: Krishan Kumar's The Making of English National Identity (2003), Ian Baucom's Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and Locations of Identity (1999), and Simon Gikandi's Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in Culture of Colonialism (1996). Whereas Kumar, they suggest, argues for a strict and absolute terminological distinction between 'English' and 'British' [and thus between nation and empire] and strongly linear and unidirectional chronological scheme (6), Baucom and Gikandi argue that empire and nation both conflict with one and mutually inform, reinforce, and shape one another (8). This latter assessment is privileged in introduction, and is also more frequendy invoked by essays in volume. The introduction's distinctive contribution to an analysis of complex imbrication of colonialism with nationalism emerges from editors' extended critical engagement with Hannah Arendts evaluation in The Origins of Totalitarianism of the development of nation-state in which imperialism is not an external factor or an afterthought, but an integral and internally constitutive (9), comment anticipated in epigraph to introduction, also from Tide Origins of Totalitarianism: In theory, there is an abyss between nationalism and imperialism; in practice, it can and has been bridged (l).This engagement yields thoughtful and acute analysis of continuing interaction of national and imperial in current historical moment as evidenced by war on terror.The coherence of volume also derives from overlaps-the deployment of certain recurrent objects of analysis and theoretical/ thematic concerns and motifs-between essays collected within, but also across, two rubrics. …