Crossing empires: taking U.S. history into transimperial terrain

mens and study skins, as well as to the cultural context in which these birds take on specific imperial meanings. Readers interested in the formation of the material and the cultural dimensions of what Greer calls the “avian imperial archive” will be captivated by the book’s fascinating introduction. The chapters that follow are built around the biographies of the aforementioned men and birds, in the order I have listed them, and they examine the construction of the “scientific war hero in British military culture” (7); the formation of nineteenthcentury ideas about climate and masculinity; the role of ornithology in shaping imperial culture and notions of place; and, in the book’s fifth chapter, how the ornithological work of officers in the Mediterranean contributed to the construction of domestic ideas about “British birds” (8). In the book’s final chapter, Greer puts the pieces of her biographical approach together to examine the interplay between placemaking and imperial culture. “By paying attention to situated knowledge and place in the production of geographic knowledge,” she writes, “this book has attempted to uncover the ways in which British military ornithology produced the British Mediterranean as a militarized, moral, and zoological region for the benefit of Britain’s global empire” (97). While Greer’s analysis holds space for the “heterogeneity of experiences, networks, and cultural encounters” (102) within the British Empire, as well as for the challenges and limitations of this emphasis on “life geographies” (103), she models a generative approach for engaging the “‘more-than-human’ world” (6). In sum, Red Coats and Wild Birds is tightly argued and theoretically rich. Students and scholars interested in natural history, empire, military history, environmental history, and animal studies (in addition to the geography and history of the Mediterranean) will find much to appreciate and to think with in Greer’s book. I certainly have.