Edited by JOHN M. MACKENZIE Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011 x + 242 pp., ISBN 978-0-7190-7994-8 (£60.00 hardback)'What should they know of England, who only England know?' 1 The famous Kipling line could be the motto for John MacKenzie's pioneering work over the past 25-odd years, which came as such a boon to those of us who had been labouring in the imperial historical vineyard for so long before then, largely unappreciated by more parochial British historians, who thought our work had nothing to say to them, and even rather distrusted by the social historians among them, who assumed we must all be imperialists. It was MacKenzie's Propaganda and Empire (1984), 2 of course, that first introduced us to the myriad ways in which late nineteenth and early twentieth century imperialism consciously impacted on British society at so many levels, including the 'lower' ones the social historians of that time generally concentrated on (as if the 'higher' orders were not part of society, or did not constitute 'societies' of their own), and made the latters' avoidance or denial of it look so very foolish. Not only social and imperial history, but also cognate disciplines like English literature and various other 'cultural' studies, were never to be the same again. That is quite a contribution, for one man; and of course for the scores of other historians he has inspired, taught, and often published, in the long-running Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism series of which this volume, MacKenzie tells us, is nearly the ninetieth.In my view-which is alluded to several times in the book-this was sometimes taken too far. Great new ideas often are. The brilliant light they shed, at least initially, can blot out duller features. The main offenders in this case were the 'cultural theorists', who did not know much history, either imperial or parochial, but felt they did not need to, with this simple analytical tool to hand. (Empire was everywhere. No-one