| Book Review | Journal of World History, 14.3

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| Book Review | Journal of World History, 14.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. By TONY BALLANTYNE. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xi + 266. $72.00 (cloth).

Ideas circulate as surely as trade goods, but their paths are a bit trickier to follow. Tony Ballantyne has done a masterful job in mapping an interlocking network of perceptions reaching across the British Empire. In Orientalism and Race, Ballantyne pursues a line of scholarship inaugurated by Edward Said in 1978, but draws a more complex conclusion. Ballantyne traces the migration of rapidly evolving concepts of "Aryanism," beginning with Sir William Jones's scholarly and rather benevolent philology in the late eighteenth century. Ballantyne focuses on India and New Zealand, but touches briefly (and tantalizingly) on Scotland, Ireland, and the birth of German Romanticism. He gives full recognition to indigenous agency by adhering to the analogy of a web rather than that of spokes radiating out from a wheel, believing that the latter would carry implications of intellectual imperial cores versus subordinate peripheries. The metropolis was not necessarily the center of intellectual power. Ballantyne portrays colonies as powerful intellectual frontiers, "where new identities and social formation" grew from the "intellectual engagement and innovation" of all parties (p. 4).

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