Julia Wright. Ireland, India and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. ISBN: 978-0521868228. Price: US$106

If the title of Julia Wright’s Ireland, India and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century seems curiously inert, evoking a world in which territories and topics do not change and knowledge is straightforwardly cumulative, the argument within is animated by a shadow title—“West Britain.” This shadow-title picks out its argument by way of a kind of referential lightness, an ephemerality in which the pointing to one thing alters the objects in its ambit and analysis takes the form of a tracing of the history of those alterations. For William Drennan, a leader of the United Irishmen movement, a 1790s urban, Protestant nationalist movement that attempted to forge alliances with rural Catholics (as well as the author of the epigraph with which Wright opens her monograph), “West Britain” names both a territory and an anxiety. Writing to William Pitt in 1799, Drennan lodges his political protest in the form of a semantic intervention: “‘I see, not an East-India Bill, but a West-Britain bill preparing for dissolving not only all principles of constitution, but the constituency itself, for removing the seat of government for ever from the soil, and eternalizing the provinciality and servitude of my country [Ireland], under an administration unalterably English’” (1, emphasis in original). Were we to go on to imagine for a moment Drennan as a reader of Wright’s historical account and not merely an actor within it, we might anticipate his resisting the title’s “eternalizings”: “Ireland,” “India,” and “nationalism” do not simply name places or describe topics but present and represent political accomplishments—the transformation of mutually ramifying relations into something “unalterable.” Happily, both Wright’s field of investigation and her mode of analysis are infused with the spirit of her shadow-title “West-Britain.” Her topic, she informs us early on, is understudied—“Little attention has yet been paid to the ways in which nineteenth century writers from colonized nations wrote about colonization beyond their own borders” (1)—but, more to the point, analysis of the ways in which Irish writers represented colonial India (and, to a lesser extent, the British Middle East) matters because it offers a prism through which to view the transformations of British colonial relations over time. As Wright explains, “When the British Empire began to expand rapidly in the eighteenth century, Irish writers could respond to that expansion by drawing on a centuries-old national tradition of cultural responses to colonialism and foreign invasion. They also had unique access to British readers and publishers because of a shared cultural economy facilitated by both geographical proximity and a language shared after centuries of colonial domination” (1-2). Studying the Eastern expansion of the British Empire by way of the responses of Irish writers and political actors reveals the complexity and tenuousness of relations between metropole and colonies. In her account, the sort of transparency and self-evidence signaled by her title’s inventory is colonialism’s accomplishment: a web of cultural, linguistic, institutional and economic intimacies born of relations of political domination and subordination—the threat evoked by the Drennan’s coinage “West Britain.” Even—indeed, especially—when the political relation between colonizer and colonized remains in place over time, the cultural interactions that both subtend and are the consequence of that political link do not remain unaltered. If most postcolonial theory conceives of its project as elaborating the relations between “this” and “the Other,” Wright’s nineteenth-century historicization follows the example of John Barrell by introducing another term to the deixis—a “that” that points to Ireland, and glosses Ireland’s power to trouble colonialism’s dichotomies. Ireland is “European but exotic, Christian but Catholic, literate but culturally impoverished, enfranchised but colonized, white but feminized.” (7) Proximity and immediacy, it turns …