Reviewed by: Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture by Saree Makdisi Antoinette Burton (bio) Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture, by Saree Makdisi; pp. 304. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, $90.00, $30.00 paper. It has been over twenty years since Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993) made the domestic colonial plot at the heart of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) a parable for the interdependence of national-imperial histories in the context of English modernity. In the interim, the space between home and Empire that undergirded decades of scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain has collapsed under the weight of research that illustrates the impact of Empire “at home” and, by extension, the feedback loop between metropole and colony. Despite the often fractious debates about the role of imperialism in making the modern western subject—debates that left their mark in book reviews, conference panels, and even some career trajectories in British studies—claims about the interrelationship between Empire and the nation are no longer contentious. Indeed, the ways that Britain was made and remade by imperial subjects, goods, ideas, and politics are considered so commonplace that the contours of earlier disputes are scarcely visible on the landscape of the field anymore. Thanks to Said’s work, we can see that Mansfield Park does more than simply model a pattern of relationships between the west and the colonies. It archives the historical moment when that pattern came into view for an important segment of the British reading public. From the vantage point of 2016, his take served as an entry point into new imperial histories that refuse the distinction between native Britain and its imperial ambitions. In this erudite and intelligent study, Saree Makdisi reopens conversations about the relationship between metropole and colony by arguing that until the 1830s, Britain was actually only a would-be metropolitan center and that the west itself was an equally unrealized phenomenon. In so doing he asks us to dwell in the possibility that one side of the equation—England on the threshold of the Victorian period—was not the coherent space [End Page 352] of home we have assumed it to be. Far from being self-evidently national, England between the 1790s and the 1830s was a rather more jumbled set of social communities in which axes of difference cut as much across local populations as they did between self and other. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s arguments about the role of complex, contradictory pluralities in shaping racial and class formations, Makdisi returns us in the first instance to Henry Mayhew, whose journalistic forays into London street life remind us of the “notyet white, not-yet Occidental” people to be found at the heart of the capital city (8). Viewed alongside images of the “City Arab” in Church Lane and the great teeming varieties of semi-savage denizens to be found in London’s rookeries and back alleys, Mayhew’s costermongers look like powerful evidence for the argument that a stable English identity cannot be assumed in our readings of the period because of “the sense of alienation some English people felt toward others” among them (2, xvi). It is precisely the struggle over how, and through what terms, to stabilize the dynamic forces at work in English social life, Makdisi argues, that accounts for the explosion of civilizational and racial categories that end up mapping the interior spaces of London across the long nineteenth century. At the start of Victoria’s reign, then, the nation was “a category to be filled in” and the west a geopolitical formation that had to be actively made through “acts of configuration” (xvi). Makdisi’s canvas is London itself, whose evocations across a wide variety of texts he uses to make the case that far from being settled, England was on exactly the same developmental pathway as its far-flung colonial possessions. What was needed at home as well as away was self-regulation and biopolitical discipline: models of being modern in an occidental way, if you will. Here the “tempus incognitum” of the city is key, for it suggests that for observers before the age...