Eva-Marie Kröller: Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853–1948. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021.

Henry James characterized Victorian serialized novels as “loose baggy monsters,” and somehow this impressive and wide-ranging volume, offering readers over five hundred densely printed pages covering several branches of a Scottish family that, starting in Victorian times, spread over various parts of the British Empire (and beyond), reminded me of that term. Having read Eva-Marie Kröller’s exhaustive study, which she defines as “a type of prosopography, a study of large families over several generations” and as a microhistory (within the macrohistory of the British Empire), from beginning to end, I would claim that its chapters do not only and not so much invite sequential reading, but rather offer themselves to postmodern or deconstructive reading practices not unlike those invited by the major work of one of the most famous members of the McIlwraith family, the renowned Canadian anthropologist T. F. McIlwraith: The Bella Coola Indians, worked on since the 1920s and finally published in 1948. Kröller writes that understanding it “as a collaborative work in no small measure shaped its assessment as ‘important instrument of reclamation’” which thus invited, for example, “Barker’s ‘postmodern’ reading of McIlwraith’s research as collaborative”.