In this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff uncovers the extraordinary stories of collectors who lived on the frontiers of the British Empire in India and Egypt, tracing their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Jasanoff delves beneath the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance to look at the British Empire through the eyes of the people caught up in it. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire enters a world where people lived, loved, mingled, and identified with one another in ways richer and more complex than previous accounts have led us to believe were possible. And as this book demonstrates, traces of that world remain tangible—and topical—today. An innovative, persuasive, and provocative work of history. "Spirited, teeming. . . . Jasanoff wants us to rethink the imperial experience."  – The New York Times "Astute and moving. . . . As original--and beautifully written—as it is compelling to read.” – The New York Sun “A historical tour de force, with wonderfully original and unusual material moulded into a convincing new narrative. Britain’s empire will never look the same again.”– The Guardian "Instead of concentrating on the 18th-and 19th-century European empire builders. . . . Jasanoff focuses on several ambitious, energetic, and eccentric men who used the East as a way to reinvent themselves....a fascinating and untold story." – The Boston Globe Maya Jasanoff  is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard. She is the author of the prize-winning  Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East ,  1750-1850  (2005) and  Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World  (2011), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction and the George Washington Book Prize. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Jasanoff won the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Her essays and reviews appear frequently in publications including  The New York Times ,  The Guardian , and  The New York Review of Books . Most histories would begin the account of Britain, France, and their empires not in the East, but in the West: in North America, where Britain’s thirteen colonies and New France commanded the Atlantic seaboard, and where the two powers had been vying for dominance since the early 1600s. Their competition reached its climax in the middle of the eighteenth century, during the Seven Years War. The focus of their antagonism was access to the alluring expanse of land beyond the Pennsylvania frontier. With that struggle, Britain and France were effectively fighting for the future of North America: who would win the right to shape it, and whose empire would thrive. Perhaps this story should begin in the West, too, on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, in the summer of 1759, where the best-known eighteenth-century scene of Anglo-French imperial war unfolded—the battle of Quebec, whose set-piece quality brought recurrent patterns of British and French conflict vividly to life. Since the declaration of war in 1756, British attempts to advance into New France had been frustrated. But in the early summer of 1759, a British offensive advanced into Canada along the lower St. Lawrence, arriving at the key French city of Quebec. All summer long the British lay camped by the river, besieging the heavily fortified town perched on the cliffs above. But the French, secure in their position and numbers, remained implacable, while British attempts to attack the city from below were repulsed. In September, British commanders fixed on a plan to strike Quebec from above and so lure the enemy out to battle on the Plains of Abraham, to the north. It was a bold maneuver. The cliffs were steep, the city was strong, the British severely outnumbered. But now, three months into the siege, it was time for such a move. On the night of September 12, 1759, a silent flotilla of British boats crossed the perilous St. Lawrence River and landed nearly five thousand men, who scrabbled up the beetling cliffs in a thin red line. With the sun rising in a low mist, the black, pungent smell of waterlogged soil, damp, but no more rain: it was as good a day as any for battle. Behind Quebec’s thick stone walls, the sleepless French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, had heard cannon fire in the night and knew that some sort of trouble was at hand. In the morning, he gathered his men and trooped out of the city to see what had happened. Perhaps the British had managed to squeeze a few hundred men up the cliff? Instead he confronted a stunning sight. There, not one mile ahead of him, stood the entire British force, thousands of redcoats like beacons in the mist. There was no choice but to attack. At ten o’clock, the French charged, only to be cut down, just forty paces from the British line, by a barrage of musket fire. Through the clearing smoke and chaos of bodies, the British began their counterattack; the French, confused and terrified, scattered in the face of a