Reviewed by: Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870–1939 by Brad Beaven Tom Crook (bio) Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870–1939, by Brad Beaven; pp. 240. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012, £70.00, $95.00. How did Empire affect Britons’ sense of themselves and the wider world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? For more than twenty years historians have been debating this notoriously difficult question. Or, more accurately, they’ve debated a whole complex of questions concerning, among other things: how we measure this impact and what kinds of source material we use, given the proliferation of media (from [End Page 761] autobiographies and press reports to classroom texts and music hall songs); on which Britons, precisely, this impact registered, given differences of nation and class, gender and age; at which points in time, given the succession of imperial wars, crises, commemorations and celebrations; and in relation to which piece or pieces of an increasingly contested and composite imperial-geographical jigsaw. Published as part of Manchester University Press’s Studies in Imperialism series, which began in the mid-1980s, Brad Beaven’s Visions of Empire provides some much needed local and civic perspective. Beaven is on the side of those who think that Empire was indeed important in terms of the formation of British popular culture, eschewing the sniffy skepticism of works such as Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2004), which have argued for a more marginal impact, especially among the workingclass majority. While Beaven’s account shares at least something of this skepticism, imperial hegemony, he suggests, was not the popular or cultural “given” assumed by “new imperial historians” such as Antoinette Burton (3). Rather, it was something that was made and contested in quite specific and peculiar urban contexts and through an immensely complex, class-based mechanics of cultural diffusion. The book is thus an exercise in both urban and imperial historiography, focusing as it does “upon how a town’s urban elite was a significant conduit of empire, while recognising that differing urban contexts were vital in shaping the imperial message in terms of its form, tone and reception in the larger community” (5). It performs two key maneuvers in this respect. Both are welcome and both make the book an important intervention in the sprawling, still-rumbling debate noted above. The first is to shift attention away from London, so much the focus of earlier studies, to three provincial cities during the period from 1870 to 1939: Portsmouth, Coventry, and Leeds. This is a partial selection, of course; but it is a useful one that addresses the complexities of context and reception that interest Beaven as he sets out in chapter 1. An established naval town and home to a royal dockyard, Portsmouth had immediate imperial-military interests; Coventry, by contrast, depended on new industries such as bicycle and car manufacturing; Leeds was different again and altogether more Victorian, both in its reliance on textile manufacturing and in its civic self-consciousness and pride. In each case Beaven draws on local newspapers and archival material relating to schools and other local institutions. The second maneuver is to analyze these case studies thematically. Chapter 2 examines the depiction of inner-city slums and the use of racialized imagery and anthropological tropes. Chapters 3 and 4 detail the local impact and civic mediation of the Boer War and the First World War. The final three chapters recover the complexities of imperial transmission in the context of the classroom; Empire Day, which began in 1903, and the 1924 Wembley Exhibition; and mass entertainment, particularly the music-hall stage and the cinematic screen. “Filtering” is one of Beaven’s favorite metaphors for conveying the multi-layered workings of cultural diffusion, and indeed the central thrust of his thesis: namely, that although imperial culture assumed a national form and presence during the period in question, what mattered was how it was made and remade in peculiar local circumstances (54). The “‘imperial message’ was neither uniform or static,” he writes in the conclusion, “but was filtered through local elites and communities where it became altered...