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Robert G. Ingram, Jason Peacey, and Alex W. Barber, eds. Freedom of Speech, 1500–1850. Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 280. $130.00 (cloth).

interconnected intellectuals promoting the notion that to maintain an ideal attachment to a home was a sign of morality, and to wander without this emotional attachment was its opposite. After diving into the Scottish Enlightenment, Gust pivots genres to interpolate the travel writer Maria Graham and the novelist and educatorMaria Edgeworth. Both accepted Stewart’s premise that enslaved Africans were characterized by a longing for home and family. Both were active participants in empire, writing with sympathy about the plight of enslaved people, but also warning that the white home is corrupted by the presence of enslavement, and leaning hard into white dread of armed rebellion, brought to a head by the revolution in Haiti. Gust points out that women were barred from being taken seriously as philosophers, but as well-read popular writers, they could wield meaningful power to persuade. Following another influential white woman, Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk (who, Gust points out, was educated by Anna Laetitia Barbauld) argued that he was preserving the Highland way of life by transforming Highlanders into colonists among the Mi’kmaq people— sending them to cultivate a land already peopled and cultivated. It was popular to conceive of the Highlanders as Romantic scions of hardy, time-tested, and bellicose masculinity (a stance that effectively erases women in a scheme that depended on robust reproduction in the colonies). Forced abroad, Highlanders were contemplated anew as virtuous, invested in land ownership and family, as manly—as white. One of the things Gust does especially well is illustrate how writers did not need to participate in colonial travel themselves to affect imperial thought—their embeddedness in social networks could create spheres of influence outside the university and colonial metropoles. Men like Selkirk (who, like most of the main characters in this work, opposed the slave trade), following the racist culture put in place by Hume, Smith, Stewart, and others, displaced thousands of inhabitants while reserving the comfort of the metropole for themselves. The final two chapters are something of a departure, but also the most compelling movement of the work. Gust gives an account of the Anglo-Indian family of Court Recorder of Bombay Sir James Macintosh, including the teenaged Kitty—a strong-willed person whom her father called “irreclaimably womanized” at a young age by “the hothouse of an Indian society” (128). Anglo-Indians were understood essentially as unrooted wanderers, but this was no happenstance. It was the role of white women to ensure, by resisting networks with non-English women in India and by decrying Anglo-Indian mores and society in favor of English ones, that Anglo-Indians would not acclimate to India as home. The matriarch Catherine Mackintosh’s inscrutable private musings ground the book’s conclusion in a haunting example of the complexity and complicity of white British women in the imperial project.