Like most of us I am more of an accumulator than a collector, but I’ve known a few serious collectors in my time, and all of them, to a man or woman, were slightly mad. The madness was genial enough; it manifested itself in the form of a systematic obsessiveness and was harmful more to themselves, and their budgets, than to others. In all, however, I had the sense that the gaps in their collections somehow represented gaps in their very selves; that the objects with which they surrounded themselves – whether cigar wrappers or Faberge eggs or first editions “in mint condition” – buttressed and somehow augmented their identities. Beyond that, there’s something inherently disturbing about collecting: Collected objects often take on a robust luster of their own, a kind of spooky surrogate life.

In his wonderful novella, “The Spoils of Poynton,” Henry James explored this question. His collector, Mrs. Gereth, who is determined to safeguard the contents of her exquisite house against the rampages of her son’s unsuitable bride, has spent her life, prompted by “taste and curiosity,” in the pursuit of rare and beautiful objects. So finely pitched are her collector’s nerves that when she has to spend a night in the kitschy parental home of her future daughter-in-law, it is “hard for her to believe that a woman could look presentable who had been kept awake for hours by the wallpaper in her room.” Her things – what James terms “the Things, the splendid Things” – have an insistent presence, they exert a kind of claim on their possessor; or, as he puts it,”the ‘things’ are radiant, shedding afar, with a merciless monotony, all their light, exerting their ravage without remorse.”

James’s novella appeared in 1897, by which time a century-long splurge in collecting on the part not only of affluent individuals but whole nations was reaching its apogee. The collecting impulse sprang from an irresistible source, especially in England: the vast new domains of the Indian subcontinent that, together with Egypt, came almost completely under British control in the beginning of the 19th century. Now, in “Edge of Empire” (Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages, $27.95), the historian Maya Jasanoff has linked the acquisitive impulse with the imperial mandate in a narrative that is as original – and beautifully written – as it is compelling to read.

Ms. Jasanoff has had the fruitful and interesting idea of telling the rise of the British Empire over one decisive century through the interlaced lives of a number of vivid individuals, some famous, most obscure, all avid collectors. Through journals, letters, official documents, and archival records, as well as published sources, she creates a glittering gallery of largely forgotten destinies. She has a knack for the unexpected collocation, too.

For example, by juxtaposing the crucial events of the Battle of the Nile and the siege of Seringapatam, in 1799 (the first in Egypt, the second in Mysore, India), Ms. Jasanoff shows how perilously aligned French and English rivalries and aspirations were at this fateful juncture. Control of Egypt meant effective control of India. French imperial ambitions in Egypt, which went back to the time of Louis XVI, spelled a recurrent threat to British shipping and mercantile interests. The English defeat of Napoleon’s army in Egypt and the capture of Seringapatam (where the vehemently Anglophobic Tippoo Sultan had for decades allied himself with the French) made eventual British hegemony triumphant in both spheres of influence.

Though an “imperial historian,” Ms. Jasanoff is wary of theory and skeptical of labels. Once or twice she gives a nod to such pundits as Edward Said, but this seems more out of courtesy than conviction; in fact, her account constitutes a powerful, if tacit, rebuke to Said’s shallow and specious theses on the subject of “Orientalism.” For Ms. Jasanoff shows, again and again, how little such flimsy distinctions as “the other” hold up against the facts, especially during the early period of British involvement in India, from 1750 to the end of the 18th century. Her “orientalists” have such fluid identities of their own that they often seem quite other to themselves.

Take the case of Antoine Polier, originally from Lausanne, who served as a soldier and engineer for the East India Company and who later rose to wealth and influence during his 15 years in Lucknow. Ms. Jasanoff, in one of her most astute and moving vignettes, parallels the career of Polier with that of his sometime patron (and debtor), the nawab of Awadh, Asaf al-Daula. Polier embraced Indian life with immense gusto, becoming fluent in Persian (then the language of the court), marrying two wives, both of whom bore him children (and with whom he communicated solely in Persian), dressing and comporting himself in full Indian style, and acquiring a large and discriminating collection, not only of objects but of precious manuscripts.

Asaf al-Daula, the fat, indolent, feckless ruler of Awadh, who held court in Lucknow, was also a collector, rivaling Polier in extravagance and obsessiveness. Ms. Jasanoff provides a cameo of this “obese nawab, coiled and quivering with fat,” who “positively oozed debauchery” through a depiction of his lavish ways:

He spent money everywhere: on his eight hundred elephants (in days when a decent elephant cost L500) and his thousand horses (“kept merely to look at,” as he was too fat to ride them); on his hunts, gargantuan processions a thousand animals long, weighed down with everything from his mistresses to ice blocks for his drinking water. He spent money on his wardrobe, banquets, dances, and cockfights. He spent money on his army – of servants, that is, to trim his mustache, snuff out his candles, and feed his pigeons.

To her credit, Ms. Jasanoff doesn’t stop here. She speculates shrewdly that Asaf al-Daula’s “debauchery” as well as his avidity to collect may have arisen from the very position of powerlessness in which he had been placed by the East India Company and its machinations. He was one of those, as she puts it, “whose life was lived in and through objects,” in much the same manner as his European subjects and companions. Moreover, for all his vices, the nawab was overwhelmingly generous. His building projects – especially the shrine known as Bara Imambara, which cost L1 million to construct – as well as his personal magnanimity made Lucknow the most glittering Indian capital of its time.

The book abounds in such contradictory characters, whether English, Indian, or “European” (a label that covered a multitude of conflicted nationalities). Ms. Jasanoff recounts their stories with wit, sympathy, and a pronounced taste for the outrageous. Her account of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt provides one such instance. Mishap succeeded mishap with almost comical precision. Cut off by sea (by the future Lord Nelson), repudiated by the Ottomans (in whose name he had claimed to conquer), faced with uprisings and seditions, Napoleon hit upon the happy expedient of presenting himself as a Muslim Mahdi, or “Abdullah Napoleon.”

Proclamations, in shaky Arabic, were issued; he attended recitations of the Koran; he even promised to have his army convert to Islam (if the requirements of circumcision and tee totaling could be waived) – all this in a desperate bid to slip out of the country he had hoped to conquer. Ms. Jasanoff, though she has great fun with this episode, recognizes the seriousness of French ambitions in Egypt and includes capsule portraits of several memorable figures, including the youthful Champollion, decipherer of hieroglyphic.

The great distinction of Ms. Jasanoff’s account, quite apart from her cogent presentation of the Anglo-French rivalry that spawned the British Empire, lies in its careful, nuanced, and sympathetic depiction of its protagonists. She has a novelist’s gift for characterization. Her portrait of the astonishing Tippoo Sultan is a particular success. His refinement and delicacy of taste as a connoisseur and collector are set in balance with his military ferocity and frequent cruelty. The traits do not contradict but coexist, and Tippoo, the bete noire of 19thcentury English propaganda, emerges as a complex, mercurial, but breathing human being from her pages.

After 1799, as Ms. Jasanoff shows, the British Empire became consciously hegemonic, striving not merely to preserve mercantile interests but to possess and dominate. And she notes, “a state’s forcible acquisition of land, people, and resources – imperialism – is ‘collecting’ on a scale different from an individual collector’s acquisition of an object. It involves collecting human beings, with deeply significant cultural and moral consequences.” Is this really true? Did the British, or the French, really “collect” Egypt or India in this way? Or, conversely, is the impulse of a private collector really different only in scale from that of a state or an institution?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but Ms. Jasanoff has made me think about them. She has laid bare the intricacies of human lives too often masked by slogans and trendy formulae. She is herself the best kind of collector: a collector of neglected, but priceless, histories.