Indonesian archipelago, to Mauritius, Malacca, Persia, Surat, and Ceylon. A series of different zones and sub-circuits receive special attention, most notably the Southeast Atlantic/Southwest Indian Ocean zone, centred on the Cape; and also the ‘South West Indian Ocean subcircuit’ which connected Mauritius, Madagascar, and Rio de la Goa (p. 146). Initially important as strategic refreshment stations, Ward shows how these colonies developed into slave trading depots, penal stations, and European settlements. Her approach allows Ward to draw attention to inter and intra-imperial connections between the VOC, other European enterprises, and indigenous networks. This works particularly well in the final chapter, which explores the transition from Dutch to British sovereignty at the Cape. Ward’s disruption of territorial concep- tions of empire is also compelling: both seaborne transportation networks and the seasonal nature of shipping were critical to shaping the empire. As Ward argues, we should keep ‘both land and sea in sight, as this was the perspective of the world inhabited by those who lived at the time’ (p. 176). Ward is centrally concerned with accounting for the extension of sovereignty and assertion of power within the empire. Networks of Empire demonstrates how ‘partial territorial and legal sover- eignties’ were haltingly brought into a ‘single imperial web’ (p. 5) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as they travelled from the United Provinces, to Batavia, and then back and forth across the Indian Ocean arena incorporating significant regional variations. Systems and forms of justice, and the study of criminal cases involving indigenous peoples, Europeans, and non-European migrants allow Ward both to illuminate general processes and to provide specific illustration. Her second chapter incorporates a valuable introduction first to the Dutch East India Company, explaining the development of its institutions of governance and justice, underlining its patrimonial nature, and demonstrating the importance to both company servants and supplicants of forging and utilising personal connections. It was, Ward argues, not enough simply to recognise the complicated lines of communica- tion and authority through which power flowed; one had also to know how they operated, and be in favour with those who controlled them. This account also emphasises the extent to which the company’s developing networks e of ideas, money, and labour as well as goods e were ‘intertwined with indigenous Indian Ocean trading networks’ (p. 59). But Ward’s use of court records to demonstrate the responsiveness of the company’s legal system to the distinct demands of Batavia and Cape Town also underlines the need for careful, specific analysis of each colony. This works particularly well in a discussion of how the status of the Khoekhoe at the Cape of Good Hope changed as company jurisdiction shifted from being ‘embodied’ in VOC servants to residing ‘on the land’ (p. 163). Ward’s analysis of the development of forms of governance and systems of justice within the empire emphasises the empire’s dependence on a variety of forms of forced labour and migration. The consideration of convicts and political exiles alongside slaves offers some new perspectives. Batavian court records, for example, are skilfully exploited to demonstrate the mutability and flexibility of the categories employed by the VOC to define populations within and between colonies. Thus Batavian households were charac- terised according to the status of the male patriarch, obscuring the frequently different backgrounds of wives and servants. Moving between colonies also affected the company’s categorisations. Ward argues that ‘becoming a criminal overshadowed other forms of personal classifications for the individual being punished’ (p. 117), whether a slave or company servant. Similarly, the force of religious and ethnic distinctions varied with location. Ward focuses her analysis of the ‘circuits of exile’ travelled by high profile religious and political figures focuses on a series of individuals, most notably Shaykh Yusuf. She demonstrates how the exile circuit ‘operated.as an unintended conduit for religious and political movements’ by extending Islamic practices from Batavia to southern Africa. Equally, exiles of high rank disrupted colonial hierarchies that ‘equated rank and privilege with ethnicity, religion, and freedom’ (pp. 230À231). The approach Ward develops in this study of forced migration offers a productive way of coping with often fragmented sources, even if definitive proof that, for example, high-ranking exiles brought Islamic practices to southern Africa can never be found. Ward is right to conclude that historians’ too frequent obsession with self- contained units, such as ‘nations’ and ‘empires’, stems as much from historiography as history. What she offers in Networks of Empire is a productive way of complicating the story. Zoë Laidlaw Royal Holloway University of London, UK doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.08.016 W. David McIntyre, The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907e48. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, xvi þ 377 pages, £65 hardcover. W. David McIntyre’s book considers a moment often neglected in accounts of the British empire: the ‘Britannic vision’ that briefly dominated early twentieth-century ideas for imperial relations between Britain and the Dominions. It highlights two broad schools of thought: those who foresaw closer union between Britain and the dominions, and those who wanted to see more independence and a looser, scaled back relationship. These ideas contained different understandings of the place of India within the Britannic vision, the possibility of dominion status in Africa, the changing role of the crown, and the international and domestic relationships between the self-governing colonies and Britain. The book takes us through the development of these ideas, and the formal constitu- tional developments that accompanied them, from the 1907 designation of dominion status, through the strains of two world wars, to Indian independence and its subsequent declaration as a republic. This fundamentally shifted the balance of the Commonwealth debate away from some sort of unity through a Britannic vision, towards the less ambitious and more diverse ideas of Commonwealth that exist today. The epilogue charts this shift towards a ‘post-Britannic vision’. The book focuses on seventeen historians whose writings about empire and Commonwealth ‘not only recorded and interpreted’ but also ‘helped to formulate’ this Britannic vision (p. x). The historians in question are a motley crew, from familiar names in imperial history such as Reginald Coupland, Keith Hancock, Nicholas Man- sergh, Vincent Harlow, and Margery Perham, to those better known as politicians, such as Leo Amery, Patrick Gordon Walker, and J. Enoch Powell, or as political theorists such as Lionel Curtis and Alfred Zimmern. The book has an unusual structure. It begins with stern images of the historians in question, followed by a section (‘historiography’) in which we are introduced to each individually through short pen portraits of their life and contributions to the ‘Britannic vision’. These biographies provide a useful point of reference, and, for those of us who like to glimpse faces, fashions, and furnishings from the past, the portraits are intriguing. More importantly, the combination of biography and image highlights the uniformity amongst the assembled contributors; they are all white, all but one are male, and Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 484e497 490