Review: Robert the Bruce: King of Scots, by Michael Penman

Reviews and Short Notices

General

Clio among the Muses: Essays on History and the Humanities. By Peter CharlesHoffer. New York University Press. 2014. ix + 186pp. $29.00.

This short engaging volume opens up some important questions concerningthe relationship between history and other academic disciplines. In doing soHoffer shows very well why those questions are not simply of academic interest.Unfortunately he tends to misrepresent and even dismiss the core intellectualproblems that animate an inquiry that he rightly presents as pressing andpertinent to the modern world, and for which he seeks a wider audience.

In many ways the volume should be seen as a companion piece to Hoffer’searlier work The Historian’s Paradox: The Study of History in Our Time (thesubtitle of which is constantly referred to in the present volume asAPhilosophy ofHistory for Our Times – one imagines a last minute editorial decision that did notin the end sit well with the author). The paradox that Hoffer there identified asthe key difficulty facing historical study in our time is that ‘history is impossibleand yet it has never been more necessary’. The exact status of the apparentimpossibility of history is never precisely defined or pinned down, but it is drawnto the fore in a number of overlapping contexts, andClio among theMuses adds aseries of significant appendices to that project.History, it seems, is only impossibleif we begin with rather overblown expectations, whilst its necessity for humanestudy and civilized life cannot be overemphasized.

Clio among theMuses presents us with seven chapters, in each of which historyencounters a significant other from among the modernmuses. In effect, we followClio as she embarks on a series of speed dates with other disciplines and humaninstitutions: religion; philosophy; social sciences; literature; biography; policystudies and law. Frequently she is still filling in the scorecard from her previousencounter when she is faced with another likely contender for her affections. Atthe end of this stimulating if somewhat overwhelming process, it might be wellfor the reader to return to the epigraph from Charles Downer Hazen that Hofferposts at the beginning of his introduction: ‘It is said that Clio cannot be taken bystorm, but requiresmuch patient and skilfulWooing, Clio likes a certain degree ofself effacement in her suitors.’ Certainly there are various points throughout theevening when both parties would do well to take the self-presentation of the otherand the nicely crafted anecdotes with a pinch of salt, and certainly they wouldwant to take stock before throwing themselves into anything more long term.

In fact, in contrast to Hazen’s rather antiquated image of the wooing process,Hoffer is clear that these are complex and multi-faceted relationships between

C© 2016 The Author. History C© 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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various parties, each with something to learn from the others. History has beenguided and shaped by each of these encounters, and yet it has a distinctive andnecessary contribution to make in return. That is all to the good.

On the other hand, one can find a great deal of imprecision in the course ofHoffer’s presentation of these encounters. Many of the problems that he posesthick and fast are, even in the course of a single paragraph, not so much tackledas displaced by another set of partly related problems. Chapter 4, for example,on ‘History and Literature’, begins with a line of thought explaining that therequirement for literary skill in historical writing arises from the ‘blanks andspaces in the evidence that the historian’s wit and artistry must fill’ (p. 72). Thispoint is then immediately taken over by a concern for what might count as ‘witand artistry’, so that by the end of the paragraph we arrive at the idea that ‘arelativistic view of historical truth has plenty of room for literary imagination’.Both imaginative responses to lack of evidence and the potential relativity of truthare significant concerns, but they do not amount to the same thing and Hofferhas not specified any real connection between the two.

Hoffer’s range of reference is impressive, but again, frequently imprecise andsometimes quite misleading. For example, R .G. Collingwood, whose work Iwould have expected to play a central role in both the argument of this book andThe Historian’s Paradox, is cited only once (he doesn’t make it into the index)as a defender of the view that history is a science. This is done via a second-hand quotation taken from W. J. Van der Dussen’s 1983 study of Collingwood’sphilosophy of history History as a Science (p. 162, fn. 10). Hoffer pastes thisquotation into the opening section of his chapter on ‘History and Social Science’,where he is trying to show that, in dialogue with the social sciences, historyassigned itself the task of discovering ‘laws of society and the state’ (p. 53)modelled on the laws of natural science. He takes Collingwood to be a primeadvocate of that view. Of course nothing could be further from the truth. WhilstCollingwood understood history as a supreme science in the broad sense ofsystematic and sustained inquiry, he consistently argued against the idea that itwas an inquiry of the same kind as natural science.

The real problem with Hoffer’s narrative is not so much its misleadingpresentations and representations as its tendency to de-historicize its own modeof inquiry. The book is presented as a roughly chronological sequence ofencounters, and within each chapter the account is supposed to be a roughlychronological presentation of the development of that relationship. One couldquibble about the accuracy of such a self-presentation. But it is Hoffer’s failureto reflect upon the historical emergence of the questions that he is posingthat is most troubling. These are essays on the relationship of history to the‘humanities’, but there is no discussion of how the humanities came into being,how they have changed and are changing. Hoffer’s modern muses include socialsciences, biography, policy studies and law, but not philology or archaeology.Why not? That kind of question might be too self-reflective for Hoffer, who isvery much against what he considers to be postmodern navel gazing, but it is aquestion that this kind of study needs to address. Hoffer confines his discussion of‘deconstructionism’ to the chapter on history and literature, where he offers somecliched and fairly glib comments on its stimulating but self-defeating project.Foucault was dealt with in the bibliographical essay in The Historian’s Paradox,where he was found to engage in ‘a little too much self-reflection’. Yet surely here,


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in a discussion of the historical condition of the modern humanities, Foucault’smode of self-reflection is precisely what is called for. After all, Hoffer has an allyin a thinker who showed us that, far from being impossible, history is impossibleto avoid.University of East Anglia THOMAS GREAVES

Medieval

The Collectio Burdegalensis: A Study and Register of an Eleventh-Century CanonLaw Collection. By Kriston R. Rennie. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.Brepols. 2013. xiv + 247pp. $95.00/€75.00.

Students of early medieval canon law frequently complain about the lack ofcritical editions. They do so with good reason. Only a few canonical collectionshave been edited and critically examined.Most remain either unedited or trappedin early modern editions that occasionally found their way into the PatrologiaLatina. This lack of editions is understandable. The sheer size and complexityof manuscript traditions – coupled with the limited number of trained scholars– has made it unlikely, if not impossible, for an edition measuring up to modern,critical standards to see the light of day. The Panormia attributed to Bishop Ivoof Chartres illustrates this. Even when a collection had a more modest, regionalreception, scholars have been reluctant to edit because, among other things, theyhave felt it necessary to have editions of its formal sources first. One such regionalcollection is the Collectio Burdegalensis, which survives in two manuscripts.Dr Kriston Rennie deserves our thanks for his detailed study. While not a criticaledition, it lays the foundation for one and provides the reader with a clear senseof this eleventh-century compilation’s contents, origins and purpose.

As Dr Rennie notes in his introduction, ‘A thorough analysis of the CollectioBurdegalensis can help reshape our modern historical views on law and practicein the age of church reform’ (p. 1). He reminds us that reform, indeed Christiansociety in the late eleventh century, should not be viewed solely from theperspective of Rome. The Burdegalensis enables us to survey the ‘landscape’ ofreform in western France (p. 3).

After a thorough discussion of older scholarship, which placed it at Poitouduring the last quarter of the eleventh century, Dr Rennie argues persuasivelythat it was, instead, compiled at Bordeaux. Using the invaluable Clavis canonumprogram developed by Dr Linda Fowler-Magerl, and available online courtesyof the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Dr Rennie provides a detailed analysisof its sources and organization. The bulk of his study is a careful register of thecanons. (This reviewer also appreciates his decision to use a positive apparatuscriticus, so that the reader not only has the lemma but any variant.) He notonly identifies these texts but also their formal sources, principally Burchardof Worms’s Decretum, Pseudo-Isidore, and the contemporary, reform-inspired,Collection in 74 Titles.

In his source-analysis, Rennie connects the Burdegalensis with the web ofcanonical collections spreading throughout the west during the eleventh century.This web was spun, as he has shown in previous studies, by travelling legates,



whose councils not only advanced the Roman understanding of ecclesiasticalreform, essentially inseparable from her claims of primacy and power, but alsowere the locus for dissemination of manuscripts. The Burdegalensis was on sucha strand, likely coming from a legatine council (pp. 14ff.), and it leads us, to usehis term, the ‘grassroots’ context of reform-era canon law.

Dr Rennie is cautious in his appraisal of the Burdegalensis. He will not labelit a ’reforming collection’ (p. 51), but notes that it does reveal ‘strong links withchurch reformers in both Rome and Aquitaine’. This reviewer welcomes suchcaution, for there has been a tendency ever since the work of Paul Fournierand other scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to forcecanonical collections into such categories, as if their only function was to servea single, albeit vital and contemporary, concern. Beyond any ‘reform’ messagesit undoubtedly proclaimed, the Burdegalensis was also probably conceived as a‘reference tool’ (p. 21).

Perhaps the day will come when all the canonical collections of the eleventhand twelfth centuries will be edited, that there will be a textual and editorialrevolution in early medieval canon law to match what has taken place over thelast twenty years with the work of Dr Winroth, and others, on Gratian. If thatrevolution ever takes place, it will be due to studies such as this.West Texas A&M University BRUCE BRASINGTON

Domesday: Book of Judgement. By Sally Harvey. Oxford University Press. 2014.xxi + 335pp. £35.00.

This important and stimulating book, based on the deepest learning andvigorously, and sometimes beautifully, expressed, sets Domesday Book and thegreat survey that preceded it into a context that encompasses both the Englishand the continental background. Taking full account of the huge historiography,it decisively takes Domesday out of the limiting historiographical frameworkof either administrative or fiscal history. As a result, while attributing somesignificance to the invasion scare of 1084–5 as a motivating factor, it becomesa commentary on the regime initiated by the conquest of 1066, on its strengthsand limitations, its engagement with the English past, and, also, on its anxietiesand concerns. While not explicitly claiming to be a study of Norman rule inEngland, it frequently comes close to being one, integrating Domesday into thedynamics and complexities of rule over the preceding twenty years and mostoriginally arguing for it as sitting in judgment on those whomade it, as well as onthose recorded in it. The idea that it was followed by an Inquest of Officials is afascinating one. And the references back toCharlemagne and themoral authorityof idealized kingly rule are excellent.

Part I (‘The Making of Domesday Book’) begins with an examination ofthe English background. It then looks at the multitude of individuals whoparticipated in its making, a cast list that includes ‘TheMastermind’, the hundredjurors, a multitude of individual witnesses, and many others. The section on theLotharingian networks that encompassed Normandy and England before andafter 1066 and the general emphasis on the political and intellectual importanceof bishops are excellent and persuasive. I might personally argue for Saint-Denis


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and the Ile-de-France being brought in as well, but this is in no way to detractfrom the importance of the book’s arguments. The centrality of Winchester tothe operation of the new regime is well highlighted. Part II (‘The Purposes ofthe Inquest and the Book’) works its way through central Domesday topics,such as coinage, values, taxation, as well as the arguments for an Inquest ofOfficials, making an important contribution on all of them. Part III (‘Domesdayand the Day of Judgement’) brings all the arguments to a rousing conclusion.Older controversies, such as whether Domesday is a geld book or a feudatory,no longer have any place in the discussion. The motivations and the processeswere multi-layered. David Roffe’s arguments for a separation of the survey andthe writing of Domesday Book, which he would place well on into WilliamRufus’s reign, are firmly rejected, although one argument Sally Harvey uses, theuse of the phrase filia regis, will not bear the weight put on it; the Conqueror’sdaughter Cecilia was still so describing herself in charters well on into her brotherHenry I’s reign. Although no one nowadays would describe the survey thatproduced Domesday as a ‘judicial eyre’, in reading some of this book’s sectionson Domesday and judgment, the opinions of a seemingly forgotten Domesdayscholar, David Douglas, came to mind, buried as they largely were in the post-Galbraithian era.

Sally Harvey has no doubt that the regime that took over England after 1066was a very exploitative one, with the usual suspects, sheriffs, and reeves of allkinds, being in the foreground of the process. It was also one in which theConqueror’s closest associates were milking England’s unique system of taxationthrough extensive tax exemptions. In terms of England’s long-term economicdevelopment the Conquest is not seen in positive terms. Out of Part II emergesthe conclusion that tenure was ‘the point of departure’ for the survey and forDomesday, and that ‘the primary objective . . . – largely fulfilled – was to obtainthe annual value of estates’ (p. 235). On this basis, after the Conqueror’s deathDomesday did become the handbook of ruthless rule. But it could have becomeeven more so. The process both highlighted ruthlessness and supplied the meansto curb it. Domesdaywas a ‘register of title’, the basis fromwhich claimantsmightfight back. On the controversial subject of the values recorded in Domesday, ajudicious conclusion is offered that property and resources were so complex as tomake it impossible to treat all values as necessarily having the same significance.The section on coinage is important with the various types of methods of makingpayments excellently analysed. The comments on thePaxs issue are an importantcontribution to an ongoing debate. Reference to Jens-Christian Moesgaard’swork on Normandy’s very different coinage would, however, have been helpful.A powerful impression from reading this book is of just how deeply the powerof the state penetrated local societies and how well organized the group thatmanaged the later eleventh-century royal treasury was. This leads inexorablyto the conclusion that the Exchequer was basically an early twelfth-centurytechnological innovation within an already well-established structure. When itcomes to the aftermath, I personally would doubt that the making of Domesdaywas a cause of the cross-Channel civil war that started in 1088. This is one ofmany subjects that scholars will henceforth want to discuss. Errors are few. Thesection of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum dealing with the measuring by rope ofTonbridge was actually written by Robert of Torigni (p. 128). The distinguishedFrench scholar’s name is Dominique Barthelemy (p. 311, n. 244). An extra ‘been’



has survived copy-editing in the penultimate line of p. 104 as also has the omissionof an acute accent on Preaux (p. 170). On the legal significance of the St Martin-le-Grand diploma (p. 44), Dr Harvey has no need of my mistaken observations,even if they at first sight appear to support her arguments. This excellent bookmust be compulsory reading for all interested in its important subject.University of East Anglia DAVID BATES

Robert the Bruce: King of Scots. ByMichael Penman.Yale University Press. 2014.xi + 443pp. $45.00/£25.00.

The reign of Robert I of Scotland is perhaps one of the most dramatic andimportant in the history of the British Isles, while the king himself (better knownas Robert the Bruce) is one of the few figures in medieval history famous amongsta popular audience. This was the king who issued one of the most evocativeand best-known testaments of regnal identity – the Declaration of Arbroath –and whose spectacular victory over the ‘auld enemy’ in 1314 is celebrated inScotland’s unofficial national anthem. Interest in Robert was renewed recentlywith the coincidence, in 2014, of the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn with thereferendum on Scottish independence, spotlighting Robert as a Scottish nationalicon. It is not surprising, therefore, that a new work on this most celebrated ofScottish kings should have been commissioned by Yale, which has published inthe past scholarly biographies of medieval monarchs designed to be accessible tostudents and a popular audience.

In his introduction, Michael Penman locates his purpose in producing a newbiography (Geoffrey Barrow’s widely read Robert the Bruce and the Communityof the Realm of Scotland was first published in 1965) principally in the needto fit Bannockburn into a broader narrative of Robert’s rule. The battle hasgenerally been treated as the climax of a great enterprise, whereas it marked theend only of the first third of Robert’s twenty-three-year reign. Penman thus setsout to explore the ‘crucial period’ that followed Bannockburn ‘in search of bothhis regime’s long-term plans and real-time reactions to wider crises and events’(p. 5). The book, therefore, is split in two. Part I looks at Robert’s upbringing,his family’s part in the Great Cause of 1292 in which the successor to AlexanderIII was decided, his ascent to the throne and his great victory of 1314. Thesecond, longer part (‘After Bannockburn’) follows the course of the king’s careerthrough the travails of ongoing Anglo-Scottish conflict, Robert’s struggle tohave his authority recognized by the papacy and his counterpart south of theborder, as well as his efforts to win the support of his subjects, until his death in1329. Like so many ‘national’ anniversaries, Bannockburn has been the subjectof much myth-making over the centuries, to which this structure provides anantidote.

An important contribution of Penman’s narrative is the emphasis placedon Robert’s devotion to particular saints. The king’s choice of patrons wassignificant, part of ‘his invocation of a wide range of saints, feasts, relics,individual churches and religious orders that had provincial, Scottish and oftenanti-English significance’ (p. 326). Thomas Becket, for instance, offered supportagainst the tyranny of English rulers whilst St Margaret watched over queens


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and kings of Scotland. Robert’s regular visits to his favoured shrines are weavedinto Penman’s account, demonstrating how highly the king valued the saints’support as well as his appreciation of the symbolic capital they could provide.Robert’s activities also reflected, as the author suggests, the king’s personaldevotion, especially at times of personal crisis. Here, the saints are embedded ascharacters in the narrative, as their extensive listing in the index testifies. Theyappear as numinous yet tangible figures with whom the king sought to buildand maintain relationships, active members of the ‘community of the realm’.The result is a sensitive appreciation of royal piety and its role in government.Penman’s approach here will, one hopes, influence other biographers of medievalpotentates.

In other ways, however, the author’s approach is less successful. Any biography(especially one intended to appeal to a non-specialist audience) ought to inductthe reader into the world of its protagonist, in order to provide a cultural contextfor the values and actions of its subject and to ensure that its narrative anddiscussion are comprehensible to the uninitiated. A painting, with broad strokes,of the landscape would have helped the reader navigate the minutiae with whichPenman is principally concerned. What, one might ask, was the shape of theScottish kingdom and what was the nature of its government? Some introductorydiscussion would have demonstrated the task facing Robert on his successionand helped to make sense of much of the narrative that followed. For instance,not until page 197 (narrating events of 1318) is the reader confronted with thefact that two-thirds of Scotland lay outside the king’s control (in contrast, asthe author points out, to England where royal government reached into all buta handful of territories). Such a failure to take a ‘heads up’ approach to thenarrative also means that the reader will struggle to appreciate the significance –and indeed the excitement – of key events. For example, perhaps one of the mostdramatic episodes of Robert’s career was his murder of his rival, John Comyn,in the church of the Greyfriars in Dumfries in 1306. Penman treats this event bymeans of a painstaking comparison of the various chronicle accounts. Althoughdone in such a way as to rob the event of its drama, this is undoubtedly useful asan example of historical excavation. Its only confident conclusions are that themurder took place after the two partiesmet bymutual agreement and that Comynrefused to give way to Robert’s claim to the throne, although Penman moots ‘thevery real possibility’ that this was an act of ‘premeditated slaughter’ (p. 91). Thelack of certainty as to how this event played out is a problem with which anymedievalist can sympathize and one which could, in itself, have been instructiveto the reader if it were explained. But themost important point about this episode,surely, is that it happened. This was an act thatMatthew Strickland has identifiedas pivotal in Anglo-Scottish relations and as heralding a sea-change in Britishchivalric culture (in Given-Wilson, Kettle and Scales (eds),War, Government andAristocracy in the British Isles, c.1150–1500, 2008). It transformed Robert, inEdward I’s eyes, into ‘a sacrilegious homicide’, provoking the English king tounleash ‘the bloodiest reprisals seen in England since the Conquest’ that saw thenumerous Scottish nobles captured four months later at the battle of Methvendrawn and hanged, or beheaded, while female relatives of those implicated wereshut in cages. This was, according to Strickland, ‘the fundamental watershed inpolitical violence between king and magnates’. Although Strickland’s article isincluded in Penman’s bibliography it is not cited in reference to the murder and



there is scarcely a comment on the place of the deed in the broader politicaland cultural landscape. The result, especially given Penman’s remarks that acoming-to-blows between Comyn and Bruce was somehow ‘inevitable’ (p. 86),is that the reader unfamiliar with the period might assume that this event wasnot particularly remarkable.

Other key points, denied discussion in the author’s account of events, aretreated in the final two chapters, for which all analysis and reflection are reserved.Robert’s ‘illness’ is mentioned several times in the course of the narrative withoutcomment and it is only at page 302 that the author discusses Robert’s ailmentand speculates as to its cause – leaving the reader frustrated for a significantstretch of the book. The more important result of this approach, though, isthat Penman’s conclusions about Bruce and the significance of his reign standcompletely separate from the main text. The less persevering of readers might,therefore, be encouraged to bypass the majority of the book and head straightfor the conclusion. This is a puzzling approach given that biography, unlike someother genres of history, usually requires a reader to follow the course of thesubject’s life through its full course, reading cover to cover.

Certain other problems mean that Robert the Bruce is not all that it mighthave been. The prose is inelegant, making this a difficult book to read. Thebibliography is not included in the book itself but is provided in a downloadableformat from the website of the author’s university. Although this will befrustrating for many readers, a larger question mark must hang over thecompilation of the scholarly apparatus rather than its presentation, given thatthis reviewer found her own work misleadingly and incorrectly cited both in thebook’s endnotes and in the bibliography. Numerous photographs – of manuscriptilluminations, seals, buildings and the accoutrements of noble culture – areincluded in a central section. These might have added to the work if they hadbeen given in colour, rather than in drab and lifeless black and white, and if theywere discussed explicitly. To give one example, St Fillan’s crozier, an image ofwhich appears as plate 12b, is not mentioned in the text and its significance onlybecomes apparent when the reader traces an index reference to the saint to anendnote (p. 366 n. 125) listing the relics possibly collected by Robert ‘as totemsfor his host’ (p. 139) prior to campaign in 1314.

The criticisms levelled here do not undermine the book’s strengths and willnot prevent Penman’s book proving useful to scholars and postgraduate studentslooking for a narrative of Robert’s career. For others – whether undergraduates ornon-specialists – it is likely to present an unappealing prospect. This must, giventhe subject, be regarded as an opportunity missed.University of East Anglia SOPHIE AMBLER

Heresy, Inquisition and Life Cycle in Medieval Languedoc. By Chris Sparks.Boydell. 2014. xii + 170pp. £60.00.

There have been seismic shifts in the research of the Cather heresy inLanguedoc over recent years, led by Mark Pegg and even by Robert Moore,the latter bravely discounting much of his earlier, seminal work on the subject.Much of the standard interpretation is now challenged for Catharism’s dualist


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leanings and Bulgarian, Balkan and Byzantine contacts (arguably inflated byInnocent III’s acute awareness and knowledge of Bogomilism there); especiallyundermined is the idea of a strongly unified and coherently organized Catharchurch structure with a clearly delineated organizational set-up staffed bydeacons and bishops. Uwe Brunn has come to much the same conclusionsfor the Rhineland (his work is not cited in the book under review). As Moorerecently put it, ‘Catharism’ was artificially created, ‘contrived from the resourcesof [the] well-stocked imaginations’ of churchmen, ‘with occasional reinforcementfrom miscellaneous and independent manifestations of local anticlericalism orapostolic enthusiasm, and confirmed from the 1230s onwards by the ingenuityand assiduity of the Dominican inquisitors’ [REF?]. In crude summation,the Cathars were imagined heretics, the product of febrile, ecclesiasticalfabrication of those searching for an enemy to persecute much like Bismarck’sReichsfeinde.

The trouble with such explosive revisionist thrusts is that they often go toofar, with insufficient thought given to applying brakes at tight corners. Certainly,this reassessment has divided the community of Cathar scholars – perhapsunnecessarily so – as it too comfortably fits into the frustrating new trend of ultra-scepticism over the veracity of medieval sources, in yet another manifestation ofchronocentric superiority. Chris Sparks’s new book on the Cathar heresy is, onthe one-hand, somewhat weakened by the lack of engagement with this debate –a sturdy rebuttal of revisionism is needed to reinforce the undoubted importanceof his research, especially as the book’s cover blurb refers to the ‘perceived threatof heresy’. Sparks spends only a page in discussing Pegg’s The Corruption ofAngels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 (2001), mostly to praise it effusivelyand stating his intention to emulate the lived religion element, especially of thoseoutside the elite minority, before briefly questioning and gently rejecting Pegg’sthesis in just six lines. Sparks might have been more confident in applying hisrobust and valuable evidence to the important task of refuting the wilder claimsof revisionism.

On the other hand, however, there is no distraction from the focus of thebook on the interactions between heterodox and orthodox life cycles in chapterson childhood, youth, marriage and death. In taking this approach, Sparks isoffering a valuable alternative to Le Roy Ladurie’s all-conquering Montaillou;as Sparks rightly points out, Montaillou has only a limited interest in religion,focusing instead on peasant life, mentalities and outlooks. Sparks’s interest – andthe book’s – lies in the lived religion of the Cathar laity: those who supported,funded and venerated the exclusive perfecti, providing them with food, shelterand security. He extracts his information from ten registers for the period 1245 to1325, from the Lauragais inquest of Bernard of Caux and Jean of Sainte-Pierre,via the Doat collection, Geoffrey d’Ablis and Bernard Gui to Jacques Fournier’sfamous inquiry in the Pyrenean foothills.

The longest chapter by some margin is the first, on childhood. Here we arein the realm of the canonical age of discretion (sometimes conflated with theage of reason – seven years old). The Languedocian councils interpreted theFourth Lateran Council’s emphasis on discretion to include only those abovetwelve or fourteen years in their inquisitorial remit; as ‘childhood was a period ofmoral incapacity . . . no one, it seems, thought that children were capable of thediscernment necessary to commit heresy’ (p. 67). The sins of the fathers were not



visited on the children. (It might have been usefully pointed out that this was notconfined to religious matters but can also be seen to apply widely to criminal law.)That said, Sparks shows that children as young as twelve, ten and younger couldreceive the consolamentum and live as perfecti, but not beyond the 1240s. It mighthave been interesting here to have discussed child oblates in the Catholic Church.The boundaries between reluctant acceptance of ‘ignorant’ deviance and outrightheterodoxy remained fairly delineated in the chapter on youth, ‘who were rarelyreceived as good men or good women, and nor do they seem to have played aparticularly significant role as lay followers’ (p. 90). While this may seem obviousit is nonetheless very helpful that Sparks’s trawl through the registers leads usto this firm conclusion. He does not offer a gloss where evidence is weak and isopen in observing that the records afford us little opportunity to identify clear,distinguishing heretical traits peculiar to young people. Hence the relative brevityof this chapter.

Marriage gives more for Sparks to dig into. While Catharism offeredwomen high rewards and respect, as childbearers in an anti-incarnate andanti-procreational religion they were often harshly treated for carrying demonsin their wombs (there is something of a persistent myth that the Cathars’abhorrence of blood-letting rendered them more gentle and benign in theircharacter). Sparks offers examples of good women such as Guiruade del Riuwho ‘tired of the ascetic life and returned to their families’ (p. 119). This ishardly surprising for a puritanical religion that eschewed sex and meat andmade great demands on spiritual devotion. Marriage also brings the Catharscloser to everyone else: many good men and women, aspiring or otherwise,were far from perfect in their marital accommodations, failing – and often notattempting – to be celibate. Cathar denigration of marriage had to be temperedas persecution increased and the perfecti relied ever more heavily on their laysupporters. The role of the deathbed consolamentum in Cathar belief ensures thatdeath has already received considerable attention. Here, Sparks adds more usefulresearch to the topic in his last chapter, especially in the legally invalid area ofwills and estates and on the lateness on the scene of the often dismissed endura(self-starvation).

As well as the revisionist debate discussed above, there is room in the volumefor developing some commentary on the political influences on belief and also therole that regional identitymay have played in affecting heretical lay responses. Butwhile the book does not have any ambitions beyond being a thesis in publishedform, it is nonetheless a succinct and well-presented portrayal of the lived religionof the Cathar non-elites; therein lies its strength and considerable value.Plymouth University at Strode College SEAN MCGLYNN

Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities. ByCarole Rawcliffe.Woodbridge. 2013. xiii + 431pp. £60.00.

Since the publication of Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England in1995, now a staple for the study of the history of medieval medicine, CaroleRawcliffe’s works have continually emphasized the importance of taking ahistorical perspective and the need for a concerted multi-disciplinary approach


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in order to develop a deeply nuanced understanding of the social, political andcultural effects of disease. A culmination of three decades of research, UrbanBodies has emerged from these interdisciplinary investigations into medievalhealth and medicine. Throughout her latest monograph Rawcliffe demonstratesan astute consideration of the social and religious contexts of public health,by examining how medieval people perceived their bodies and souls, and howphysical health and moral health interacted.

This book is innovative in that it challenges the traditional view of themedievalEnglish urban environment as filthy and infected. Rawcliffe argues that a majorrevision of the historiography is imperative. She compares a range of locationsbetween c.1250 and c.1530, a period when English towns faced rapid populationgrowth, drastic changes in weather patterns, famine and repeated outbreaks ofplagues. Following the lead of E. L. Sabine, who made a major contribution tothe rehabilitation of fourteenth-century London by documenting the social elite’sefforts to safeguard the health and environment of their city, Rawcliffe questionsthe idea of the ‘primitive’ nature of late medieval health provision. Her criticaleye is cast over not only the work of historians, but also that of Le Corbusier,whose influential remarks on the insanitary conditions of the congested spacesof medieval cities have had long-lasting repercussions for our view of the pre-modern environment.

Rawcliffe’s assertion is consistently founded on the systematic and sensitiveanalyses of a variety of sources, ranging from archaeological evidence,architectural and archival sources to devotional and secular literature. Shedevelops her clear argument through an exemplary interdisciplinary approachto medieval medicine. One example is the working of the civic body with regardto the interconnection between good health and good governance. Based on thewidely held theory of the body politic, in which the human body is comparedto body of the city, she emphasizes the importance of understanding that moralhealth was inextricably intertwined with the health of the urban corporate bodyand environmental health.

Hugely important in this context is the religious and devotional significanceof public rituals, such as processions. Rawcliffe argues that ‘recourse to spiritualprophylaxis, in the form of “celestial helpers”, civic precessions and religiousimagery formed an important weapon in the authorities’ armoury’ (p. 8), andtapped into the late medieval preoccupation with spiritual health and salvation.In view of spiritual prophylaxis, such activities as the Corpus Christi celebrationswere considered to be as integral to a town’s medical provision as the protectionof Christus medicus, whose body was described by John Lydgate as the ‘richchestmedisyn’.

Also revealing is Rawcliffe’s characteristically erudite reading of the culturallyidiosyncratic use of medical tropes embedded in politico-religious writing. Thediscussion of the relation between heresy and a miasmatic flooding in Oxfordmay be of particular interest for literary historians. In Arundel’s Constitutionsof 1409, the archbishop ‘abandoned the traditional analogy between heresy andspiritual leprosy in favour of a more compelling . . . reference to the spread ofplague’ (p. 193). Rawcliffe argues that Arundel’s anti-Lollard campaign to purifythe infected flood (that he felt might cause miasmas of Lollardy) was receivedby his contemporaries as a convincing example of an equation of sin with themiasmatic water.



It is also notable that pious works were another powerful prophylactic forthe urban elite, who were induced to invest their capital into such projects asthe upkeep of roads, bridges and conduits, to secure their place in heaven. Thespiritual merits are conveyed in the metaphors of Christ as ‘a “blessid brigge”,over which the soul might cross the turbulent waters from this world to thenext, while His mother, the Virgin Mary, seemed like an aqueduct, bearing apure draught of grace from heaven’ (p. 223). These examples elucidate howthe medieval culture was predicated upon an interaction between medical andreligious discourses.

Urban Bodies is an impressive contribution to our understanding oflate medieval communal health, and offers an important insight into theinterconnected relationship between the history of medicine and the religiosityand materiality of urban life in the Middle Ages. Last (but not least) we haveto thank the author for producing such an illuminating tapestry of communalhealth in late medieval England.Shizuoka University NAOE KUKITA YOSHIKA

Early Modern

Hero or Tyrant? Henry III, King of France, 1574–89. By Robert J. Knecht.Ashgate. 2014. xiii + 356pp. £75.00.

Henry III of France was a complex character, as the title of this book indicates.The youthful military hero would come to be vilified as a friend of heretics andan insincere Catholic. Deeply aware of the power of ritual, Henry was almostoblivious when court reforms alienated key political figures as well as his subjects.Most notoriously, he was depicted by his enemies as being in thrall to his coterieof favourites, the mignons, as well as being a seducer of nuns, a devil worshipperand profligate pleasure seeker; in reality he was a hardworking, intellectuallyengaged monarch, devoted to his wife andmother. So complete was his characterassassination at the hands of the Catholic League, and so great the contrastbetween the later Valois and the subsequent Bourbons, that it has taken fourcenturies for Henry’s reputation to be re-evaluated and somewhat restored byFrench and anglophone historians.

Robert Knecht’s scholarly biography aims to make English-speakingaudiences more aware of this complicated monarch, and it fulfils this ambitionin exhaustive yet adroitly handled detail. There are few better qualified to dothis than Professor Knecht. There is extensive recreation of Henry’s movementsacross France and Europe, and of the actions of other key figures such as theQueen Mother Catherine de Medici, Henry’s younger brother the duke of Anjouand his rivals, Henry of Guise and Henry of Navarre. The detailed breakdownof the military campaigns which punctuated the period are matched by thedescriptions of the many and varied ceremonies and entertainments that Henryattended throughout his life. Archival material is relatively scarce, but thoughtfuluse is made of Henry’s own correspondence – so much government being doneby letter – as well as that of Catherine de Medici and court ambassadors.This is supplemented with material from well-known observers of the period,


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including Pierre de l’Estoile and Claude Haton. Where this study really succeeds,however, is as an erudite synthesis of the most recent scholarship of Henry’sreign. Knecht introduces recent French scholarship on Henry, with the worksof Nicolas Le Roux being given particular attention. On the anglophone side,he often reflects on works like Mark Greengrass’s Governing Passions (2007),particularly in the sections dealing with Henry’s ultimately doomed attempts tolegislate and reform a way out of the conflict. Such distillations mean this bookwill be invaluable for students coming to Henry and the period of his reign forthe first time, though more established scholars will find less here that is entirelyunknown.

Although the title implies a primary focus on Henry’s years as king, the workcovers the entirety of his life. Knecht outlines Henry’s childhood and youth insome detail: the first six chapters cover Henry’s childhood, his emergence as amilitary leader in the 1560s and early 1570s, his brief and not entirely happy stintas king of Poland, and his leisurely journey home. This lengthy preamble to hisreign neatly establishes why, as king, Henry was such a disappointment to somany, particularly given his status as ‘Catholic Hero’ after the royalist victories atJarnac andMontcontour in 1569 and his involvement in the Saint Bartholomew’sDayMassacre. The detailed exposition of theGrandTour of France (1564–6) andits attendant pageantry and symbolism is seen to make a clear mark on Henry’sideas of kingship. The latter part of the book details his reign chronologically, butwith three ‘breakout’ chapters examining ‘Henry III, the man’ (ch. 8), ‘The Courtof Henry III’ (ch. 11) and ‘TheArchimignons’ (ch. 12). Compellingly written and,particularly in the case of chapter 8, addressing Henry’s persistent bad press overthe last four centuries, these chapters nevertheless pause the narrative momentumof the work.

Reading Knecht’s work, several things become apparent. Henry was not astupid man, but he lacked political insight. He continually found himself pitchedagainst skilled politicians who were able to outmanoeuvre him by luck or design,and in comparison with Henry of Guise, Henry of Navarre and most of allCatherine de Medici, Henry III seems all the more politically inept. At times,he seems to fade into the background as others drove events – notably Anjouand Guise. Knecht shows time and again that when Henry took the least awfulof several unpalatable options, he nonetheless ended up appearing weak. Whilstnot lettingHenry off the hook, Knecht deftly underscores the challenges of rulingFrance: the sheer scale of the country, themany regional differences which existedbefore potent elements like religious difference emerged and the enormous castof characters with something to play for.

By following Henry over the course of his life, Knecht shows how man,monarch and myths all formed. Events which might get overlooked in smaller-scale studies are put fully into context. It is hard not to see parallels betweenthe different episodes showing Henry’s poor judgement: his flight from Pragueafter the death of Charles IX in 1573 appears almost farcical, whereas his escapefrom Paris after the Day of the Barricades (1588) was far more damaging. Thebarrage of pamphlet literature aimed against Henry and his circle by the CatholicLeague was but one form of criticism he faced over his reign. Henry of Guisewas only a pressing issue for the final stages of the reign, even if unrest had beenbrewing since he took the throne. In defence of Henry, his penitential piety makessense here in terms of his upbringing steeped in public shows of power and his



experiences of Counter-Reformation piety. The dominance of themignons showshis loyalty to those with whom he fought and travelled as a young man.

Knecht never really addresses if Henry was a hero or a tyrant. Instead he showshow these understandings of Henry were manufactured at the time, but is moreinterested in presenting Henry the man, the people and ideas that influenced him,and above all the complex situation in which he found himself. As such, this is avaluable addition to the literature on the French Wars of Religion.University of Leeds SARA BARKER

Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters. Edited by Julian Goodare. PalgraveMacmillan. 2013. xiii + 258pp. £58.00.

We now know more about witchcraft and witch-trials in Scotland than wedo about any other country or region (Salem possibly excepted). This is due inpart to the nature of the Scottish records: in contrast to the fragmentary Englishrecords, eked out through reference to a tendentious pamphlet literature, Scottishwitch-trial records after 1608 are voluminous and centrally preserved. Our goodknowledge of the Scottish trials is due also to the pioneering work of ChristinaLarner, Brian Levack, and other luminaries in the study of European witchcraft.But it is due most of all to the tireless scholarly and editorial work of JulianGoodare. Scottish Witches and Witch-Hunters might best be read as the fourthvolume of a series edited or co-edited by Goodare, including The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context (2002), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (2008),and theWitchcraft Survey, an online searchable database of Scottish trials (2003;a revised and expanded version is promised soon).

As Goodare notes with modest pride in his introduction, several chapters ofthe present volume make extensive use of the Survey, finding large-scale patternsand challenging accepted historiographies through the scholarship it makespossible. Alistair Henderson demonstrates through carefully analysed statisticsthat Scottish witch-trials were much more urban than previously thought: inregions such as Fife nearly two-thirds of the trials occurred in the small townsalong the Forth coast. Michael Wasser pushes the arrival of large-scale witch-prosecution from 1590 to 1568, when the reforming earl of Moray personallyoversaw a hunt resulting in accusations against eighty-one witches. At least elevenwere executed, but Wasser describes this episode as a ‘failed hunt’, lacking themechanisms of waking and (informal) torture that made Scottish witch-trialsso deadly in later decades. Paula Hughes provides the first in-depth study ofone of these later episodes, the hunt in 1649–50 which saw at least 800 peopleaccused of witchcraft. The radical covenanting parliament sought a ‘secondReformation’, cleansing Scotland not only of witchcraft but also of fornication,adultery, drunkenness and swearing (p. 86). However, the hunt ended abruptlywith Cromwell’s invasion: suddenly there weremore tangible threats to the nationthan witches and fornicators. In contrast, Alexandra Hill looks beyond theintense seventeenth-century hunts to show how witch-trials rather dribbled to ahalt in the first three decades of the next century, when growing judicial scepticisminteracted complexly with continued local fear of witches and a burgeoning anti-Sadducistic literature.


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A second series of chapters explore the dynamics of witch-trials throughcase studies. Liv Helene Williamsen attends to the epidemiology of witchcraftthrough the career of John Cunningham – – Scottish sea-captain, Danish navycommander, and, as governor of Finnmark, ‘exporter’ of collective, feminized,diabolical witchcraft to an area previously prosecuting Sami shamans for sorcery.Victoria Carr untangles the complex family dynamics behind attempts to blameDame Jean Lyon for the magical murder of her husband, the earl of Angus.Against Carr’s emphasis on ulterior motives one must place Laura Paterson’sdetailed explication of the finances of prosecution. Paterson shows that the longprocess of imprisoning, watching, torturing and executing a witch was ‘laboriousand expensive’ (p. 196), decisively refuting persistent interpretations of the witch-hunts as money-making affairs. Lauren Martin’s important chapter traces thelong build-up of a reputation for witchcraft through the biography of the peasanthouseholder Isobel Young. Through the practical exigencies of the ‘verbal work’(p. 80) by which Young managed her family’s small wealth, she accumulated arecord for threats and curses stretching over four decades before her trial andexecution in 1629. Complementing rather than contradictingMartin’s argument,Anna Cordey points out that ‘suspects who had long-term reputations attractmore attention because they generated the most paperwork’ (pp. 111–12); heranalysis of a small group of trials in Dalkeith leads her to suspect that somewitches gained ‘instant reputations’ when neighbours, in hindsight, reinterpretedtheir interactions with the accused.

A final series of chapters leaves behind the daytime world of statistics andcourt procedure, plunging into the shadowy crannies of experience and belief.Goodare contributes a chapter surveying witch-flight as it appeared in trialdocuments: for ‘the common folk of early modern Scotland’, ‘flying witcheswere normal witches’, carried by the wind on a cat or a bit of straw (but neveron a broomstick). Goodare also co-authors a chapter with Margaret Dudley,arguing provocatively that some experiences of bewitchment may have beengrounded in the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. A relatively common condition,related to narcolepsy, sleep paralysis involves semi-wakeful awareness while beingunable to move; it often includes hallucination of an intruder in the room ora monster pressing on one’s chest. Dudley and Goodare avoid neurobiologicalreductionism: ‘people have to interpret their terrifying experience retrospectively’,as bewitchment in the seventeenth century, as alien abduction today (p. 124).Less convincingly, Emma Wilby seeks to interpret Isobel Gowdie’s malefice interms of ‘dark shamanism’ – – a cultural pattern of spirit-predation known fromthe ethnography of Amazonia. Though Wilby adduces alleged examples fromCorsica and elsewhere, she fails to demonstrate that dark shamanism will aid ourunderstanding of European witchcraft.

Some chapters of Scottish Witches and Witchfinders give the impression thatwe are running out of new things to know about witchcraft in Scotland – these arewrapping-up hexercises, filling in the few remaining gaps in our knowledge.Most,however, make exuberant use of the unparalleled Scottish sources (and theirunparalleled accessibility via the Witchcraft Survey) to push the boundaries ofour interpretations in unexpected and interesting directions. This is an importantbook, worthy of its predecessors.University of Queensland MICHAEL OSTLING



Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain: Abracadabra Omnipotens. By MariaTausiet. Translated from Spanish by Susannah Howe, with a foreword by JamesAmelang. Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. xiv + 254pp. £50.00.

The subject of witchcraft or rather the witch craze or witch hunt (or hunts)in early modern Europe (and beyond) has boomed in recent decades, triggeringpublication of a host of studies of individual episodes, monographs, works ofsynthesis and now a dedicated specialist series in the shape of the ‘PalgraveHistorical Studies inWitchcraft andMagic’ series, which gives us the book underreview. Tausiet’s study is invaluable for a number of reasons. For one thing Spainoccupies a curious position in the historiography, due to the crucial changeof attitude and policy on the part of the Inquisition (i.e. its governing body,the Supreme Council, or Suprema) in 1614 following the condemnation by thetribunal of Logrono of the witches of Zugarramurdi (six of whom were burnt atthe stake), an episode familiar to historians following Gustav Henningsen’s study(1980). In fact, the ruling of 1614 was less of a radical departure than appears.As early as 1526 the Suprema had ordered a less punitive approach to witchcraftaccusations and, after the conviction and execution of a necromancer in 1537,the death penalty was never again imposed on anybody convicted of witchcraftor sorcery by the tribunal of Saragossa in the kingdom of Aragon. From thesecond half of the sixteenth century on, there were many acquittals and staysof proceedings as moderation became the official policy of the Inquisition. Theruling of 1614 did not deny the reality of witchcraft, but it made it much harderto prove and in consequence to condemn for this and related offences. This waspart of a larger transformation. Whereas at the start of the sixteenth centurythere was a widespread belief in the reality of witchcraft, this was not the case acentury later; in the seventeenth century the Inquisition was pursuing those guiltyof fraud, of claiming magical powers with intent to deceive others. However,this does not mean that those accused of sorcery and witchcraft did not end upbefore the Inquisition. In consequence the Inquisition records (i.e. the transcriptsof trials, or relaciones de causa introduced in all tribunals from c.1540), nowin the Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid, continue to provide rich sourcematerial for the historian of witchcraft andmagic. Tausiet’s study is also welcomebecause, whereas witchcraft and its associated attitudes and practices are studied– and thought of – primarily as rural phenomena, the author (who has alreadyestablished herself – as James Alenag observes – as an authority on witchcraftand magic in early modern Aragon) fixes them firmly in the urban environmentof Saragossa.

By way of prologue Tausiet briefly describes early modern Saragossa beforeturning to magic and witchcraft, or rather the ‘myth of witchcraft’. Witchcraft,she argues, was largely absent from the town, but magic – or a belief in it –was present there in abundance. But the sixteenth and seventeenth centurieswitnessed a flowering not only of magic but also of a campaign which targeted aphenomenon regarded as an attack on official religion. Tausiet insists on the factthat despite the apparent opposition between religion (the Church) and magic,the two might be difficult to distinguish. Hence the book’s title, combining thequintessential magical word and an essential attribute of divinity. But preciselyfor this reason the new models of Reformation and Counter-Reformation pietyfound their antithesis and a target in magic and ‘the myth of witchcraft’. Therest of the book builds on these insights. A first chapter discusses the three


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jurisdictions operating in Saragossa, the municipal authorities (the harshest indealing with witchcraft), the archiepiscopal court – which dealt with only eightcases of witchcraft throughout the early modern era (between 1561 and 1605)and the Saragossa Inquisition, one of the most active in Spain. Most of thosetried by the Saragossa tribunal were pursued for practising sorcery or other formsof superstition and most were immigrants from rural areas, trying to keep bodyand soul together by defrauding others or being defrauded themselves. Tausietexplores the relationship between sorcery and the search for wealth, and the use ofsorcery by those seeking love and/or sex. There is a superficial gender divide: menseemed to be seeking sex, women affection. However, trials of many women alsorevealed a more mercenary element, thus undermining this stereotype. Tausietalso considers saludadores (magical healers), who exploited anxieties and fearsregarding physical and mental disorders and who also functioned as witch-finders. Tausiet then returns to an earlier theme, discussing Saragossa’s role asa refuge for those persecuted for witchcraft in the countryside. These individualsmight still appear in the courts of the Aragonese capital, but their fate was lessgrim than it might otherwise have been. Tausiet seeks to identify more clearlyand fully the differences between rural and urban magic and the factors whichmade towns less fertile ground for the ‘myth’ of witchcraft. In an epilogue dealingwith reactions to plague in Saragossa in 1652 Tausiet revisits another core theme,the difficulty in distinguishing religion from superstition. An invaluable appendixtabulates the cases of the 136 men and women tried by the Inquisition for crimesrelating to magic in Saragossa between 1498 and 1693 – names, dates, offence,place of origin, penalty.

Maria Tausiet has greatly enhanced our understanding of witchcraft and theurban environment in early modern Spain. She makes excellent use of Inquisitionrecords to explore the relationship between religion and magic in Saragossa,throwing invaluable light on mentalities there. There are some remarkable storiesand some outrageous rogues, including the sexually voracious Pablo Borao.The book throws some (positive) light on the operations of the Inquisitionwhich gradually abandoned any belief in the heretical nature of magical actsand increasingly equated magic with fraud. Clearly, many women accused ofwitchcraft were saved from the most extreme punishment because their offencefell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. But did the villains and their victimsreally not believe in the reality of sorcery by the middle of the seventeenthcentury, or were they “playing the system” in order to ensure a lighter penaltyfrom the Inquisition? And what happened in the eighteenth century? The Goyaillustrations suggest that many of the popular attitudes and practices which theInquisition sought to eradicate were alive and well in 1800. It is to be hopedtherefore that Tausiet will pursue her theme into the century of the Bourbons.University of Dundee CHRISTOPHER STORRS

The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Modern Europe. ByLaurence Fontaine. Cambridge University Press. 2014. vii + 320pp. £19.99.

Credit and debt have been prominent topics of discussion in academia andbeyond ever since the financial crisis began in 2007 with the collapse of the



subprimemortgagemarket and the implosion of Northern Rock. Even before thecrisis hit, many scholars, policy-makers and philanthropists had begun debatingthe role of ‘microcredit’ as a tool for reducing poverty and promoting economicdevelopment. Laurence Fontaine’s book helps to historicize these discussionsthough an examination of the importance of credit to both the rich and the poorfrom the sixteenth century to the Industrial Revolution. The analysis she presentsis wide-ranging, but several key points emerge from this book that should not beignored by anyone with an interest in early modern history or in any period ofeconomic history.

First, The Moral Economy shows that networks of credit and debt wereall-pervasive in early modern Europe. Craig Muldrew’s work has alreadydemonstrated that this was in the case in England, but Fontaine extends this tomany other parts of the continent. Villagers were frequently indebted to eachother, to the church, to their lords or sometimes to urban creditors. The samewas true of townspeople. For example, in early eighteenth-century Paris, abouttwo-thirds of day labourers were indebted at the time of their death (p. 96). Eliteswere also heavily involved in these networks. Fontaine cites studies from half adozen countries to show that the nobility routinely became heavily indebted inorder to fund dowries, political activity, military service and endless rounds ofconspicuous consumption. No matter where one stood on the social spectrum,one was almost certain to be a debtor or creditor or, in a remarkable number ofcases, both.

Second, Fontaine persuasively argues that these complex and overlappingnetworks of credit and debt were not merely a series of financial transactionsbased on depersonalized contracts as with our credit cards and mortgagestoday. Instead, credit networks were built on personal trust, social power,community solidarity and other ‘non-economic’ foundations. Thus, loans werejustified by family ties or noble patronage rather than by ‘rational’ monetarycalculations, because relatives and landlords ‘could not refuse providing credit’ toimpoverished peasants (p. 44). It was only migrants, the ‘disreputable’ poor andothers excluded from such personal bonds who were forced to turn to foreignmoneylenders for help when they fell on hard times. In the vast majority of cases,loans were predicated on some existing social link and, in turn, they created anobligation that was more than purely financial.

Finally, this book demonstrates that credit and debt were sources of greatanxiety and debate in early modern Europe. As is well known, the churchcondemned ‘usury’, but both clergymen and laypeople often disagreed on howthat term should be defined. Was all lending at interest forbidden or only lendingat extortionate rates? Should loans by charitable institutions be exempted? Thesewere issues that sparked heated arguments. Likewise, people worried about theunstable relationship between the period’s two contrasting ‘moral economies’,namely the gift-based aristocratic economy and the contract-based bourgeoiseconomy. These dual approaches overlapped but also clashed, as in Shakespeare’sMerchant of Venice. Fontaine suggests that although the aristocratic emphasison honour and patronage remained important throughout the period, ‘thelanguage of trade progressively invaded all spheres of thought and activity’(p. 245).

Fontaine is a distinguished scholar who knows this material very well. Shehas written extensively on peddlers, second-hand markets and other aspects of


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the ‘informal economy’, so she is able to adopt a very wide lens, purportedlyincluding the whole continent over the course of three centuries. This broadperspective is both a strength and a weakness. On one hand, her voluminousreading of the secondary literature allows her to draw on evidence from a rangeof countries, including France, England, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany andSpain. She makes astute comparisons between these different contexts, notingcommonalities but also contrasts. On the other hand, it is obviously impossibleto produce a study that deals thoroughly with the whole of early modern Europe.Nearly all of the primary research – apart from a fewEnglish pamphlets and plays– is focused on eighteenth-century Paris. For example, the book includes brilliantdetails of the importance of the city’s pawnbrokers – drawn from their archivalrecords – and it also elegantly reconstructs the credit networks that entangled theFrench aristocracy on the eve of the Revolution. However, Fontaine is able to tellus rather less about credit in, say, seventeenth-century Germany, and other areassuch as eastern Europe and Scandinavia are not discussed at all. This means thatit is difficult to know howmany of the specific details described here were presentin other times and places or were unique to eighteenth-century France.

Still, Fontaine should be commended for her broad canvas and often insightfulcomparisons. More importantly, her central conclusions about the pervasivenessof debt, the importance of non-economic ties and the contested nature of creditare persuasive. This is a book that will serve as a valuable survey of a crucialaspect of the early modern economy.Birkbeck, University of London BRODIE WADDELL

Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850. Edited bySusan Broomhall. Routledge. 2015. xvi + 241pp. £29.99.

The history of the emotions is a stripling field in the huge canvas of historicalstudies. But we can celebrate its coming of age with this splendid volume,carefully edited by Susan Broomhall of the Australian Research Council Centreof Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100–1800. Much of the inspirationfor this collaborative project came from the late Philippa Maddern (1952–2014).The book is essentially about affection and associated feelings (or ‘affect’ to usethe modish term); the reference in the title to spaces, another currently modishhistorical term, is appropriate, for ten essays explore a great variety of emotionalexperiences over space and time. Broomhall’s historical spaces are Scottishtowns and villages where infanticide narratives received public notice in the earlyeighteenth century; Athol House in Perthshire where the second duke plannedan elaborate representational scheme celebrating his family; EnlightenmentEdinburgh where an interesting and movingly pathetic ‘kept mistress’ wrotefrequently to her lover; the Britain of this time in general as an arena for weeping;and the wynds of Edinburgh, whose people in trouble are treated from earlynineteenth century police court records. These, declares Broomhall, besidesother fictional spaces, ‘are understood as communities formed by a sharedidentity or goal, practised through a specific set of emotional expressions, acts orperformances and exercised in a particular space or site which may be physicalor conceptual’.



There are five authentically historical essays here, two of them by Broomhallherself, who writes about Athol House as well as the Edinburgh delinquents. Therest of the book is a miscellany of literary and philosophical pieces, includingwork on two accounts of the Inquisition, on Eliza Heywood, Jane Austen,William Hazlitt and eighteenth-century social satire. This rather unwieldymixture, it must be said, hardly bears comparison in quality with the corehistorical pieces, based on manuscript or printed documentation. This reviewwill focus upon them. Broomhall’s team and her achievement is largely anAustralian one. But inclusion of work here by Thomas Dixon, who directs theCentre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary College, University ofLondon, should be noted.

Following the statute of 1690, in place until 1809, hundreds of Scottish women,usually bearing illegitimate babies, found themselves charged with child murder.Joanne McEwan’s essay shows the power of the kirk in this respect in ruralScottish communities. Drawing on work by Lynn Abrams, she sees these womenas protected by their families and protecting each other, sometimes innocentenough girls till a late stage in households where it gradually became clear therewas ‘a bairn to bear’. Parents, aunts and even siblings could act as emotionalrefuges, providing spaces for affective negotiation. The dominant emotionalregime calling for condemnation, exclusion and censure could be circumvented bywomen’s agency in a pregnant girl’s favour. Personal choices of places for burialof a dead infant suggest emotional attachment, expressed by the desire to keepbodies physically close to them. Girls, in this dilemma, sought to fulfil a need fortheir own spaces for feeling. So McEwan indicates how the bastard bearer, aloneor with friends, could be fully involved in decisions on where a dead child shouldbe buried.

Broomhall’s remarkable essay about the Edinburgh back streets, titled ‘Feelingin the wynds’, tackles the media’s representation of feelings between 1800 and1860 in reporting cases coming before the police courts. She is writing aboutsocialized emotions, that is, ‘expressions and practices that reflected class andgender performances and expectations’. She sees the accused as positioned‘in relations of power within the court and within society’. In other words,middle-class reporters conveyed and interpreted didactic stories for a particularreadership, distinguishing distinct groups, the vicious and themselves, the feelingobservers. The lower classes, always potentially violent, Broomhall argues, ‘breda contagion of strong passions’. This could easily run out of control as streetand household life was perceived by the civic authorities. This is detailedand fascinating material, which exemplifies Broomhall’s case that ‘the policecourt functioned as a space for feeling that served middle-class interests andindividuals’.

Equally remarkable is Katie Barclay’s exploration of marginal householdsand their emotions, through her case study of the ten-year relationship betweena professional man with standing in Edinburgh society in his sixties, GilbertInnes, and a 27-year-old girl, Mary Hutton, who became his ‘kept mistress’. Sheprovided him with sex, affection and emotional support; he gave her food andperiodic attention as she sought to survive in her vagrant life. ‘When I becameyour whore’, she told him, ‘I lost all and everything that was previous to me,an outcast from society, sad and solitary.’ Once they were exposed in 1819, shewas shunned, losing her employment as a governess and her ‘character’. Laura


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Gowing, Tim Hitchcock and Keith Snell are among many who have writtenrecently about the mobile poor, who lost ‘selfhood weaving together family,community, social status and household into personal identity’. Barclay is in thistradition, but demonstrates an exceptionally keen understanding of how such aperson’s life was shattered, not just by physical and moral risks but especially by‘a reduction of her sensibility’. Mary could not even cry. Homelessness showeditself by ‘wearing at the self and emotional health’, besides producing ‘spatialdistancing from respectable society’. Space and place became key elementsin a story of personal collapse such as this one, so movingly told by KatieBarclay.

Thomas Dixon’s powerful analysis of ‘tears, feelings and enthusiasm’ ineighteenth-century Britain deserves more space than it can be given here. But hisfull monograph studyWeeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears, publishedby Oxford University Press, is promised very soon. Meanwhile Broomhall’scollection of essays illustrates the huge potential there is for thorough anddetailed work on the emotional lives of the British people in the early modernand late modern periods. This is exciting and truly pioneering work.Moreton-in-Marsh ANTHONY FLETCHER

Natural Law and Toleration in the Early Enlightenment. Edited by Jon Parkin andTimothy Stanton. Oxford University Press. 2013. xxi + 231pp. £60.00.

This book challenges the long-lasting idea that the concept of toleration inthe early modern era emerged as a fundamental part of a teleologically orientedprocess of secularization. The essays in this volume re-evaluate the religiousinfrastructures of tolerationist thought in the early Enlightenment, with specialfocus on tolerationist discourses grounded in natural jurisprudence. As JonParkin notes in his preface, thinkers like Pufendorf, Locke, Leibniz, Barbeyracand Hutcheson concentrated on ‘the relationship between God and His creationand its implications for human life and the institutions through which it is lived’(p. xi). Religion had an ambiguous status in relation to natural law and toleration.Whereas natural law could not adjudicate between different doctrinal claims,‘it could be useful in establishing through natural reason the general forms ofexternal conduct God found acceptable and so in placing side-constraints on theforms of worship thatmight ormight not be appropriate’ (p. xiv). This means thatnatural law could support both toleration and persecution, given that religiontranscended the magistrate’s earthly concerns, but it still took place within civilsociety.

The first two chapters explain Pufendorf’s views on toleration. In chapter 1,Simone Zurbuchen argues that Pufendorf ‘ultimately defined toleration in termsof “reason of state”’ (p. 3). Therefore, Pufendorf justified the ruler’s right to grantor withhold toleration in the name of state interest, but he defended the rights ofreligious communities which had been legally granted toleration. In chapter 2,Thomas Ahnert observes that Pufendorf saw toleration as justifiable in somecircumstances, and in the name of the reason of state, but not as something goodin itself. To Pufendorf, who was committed to the project of a national church,toleration was only a first step toward the establishment of religious uniformity.



And Pufendorf’s toleration was limited, in any case, to those who lived underthe standards of natural religion.

The following three chapters are devoted to Locke. In chapter 3, TimothyStanton reconstructs the development of Locke’s views on natural law andtoleration. In the 1660s, Locke rejected the idea of an authoritative conscience infavor of the authority of an easily identifiable natural law. But, as Stanton notes,by the late 1680s Locke had reached the conclusion that all areas of human life,including politics and religion, were bound to their specific laws: this idea ledLocke to distinguish between state and church. The significance of natural lawin Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia is detailed by Ian Harris in chapter 4. Harrisargues that Locke viewed religion as a matter of duty dictated by natural lawrather than right: this is why he excluded atheists from toleration, while hisadvocacy of the separation between state and church led him to oppose tolerationof Roman Catholics, whose religious leader was also the head of a foreign state.But, according to Locke, natural law also required that people love each other;and this requirement implied that people should tolerate each other’s manner ofworship. Locke’s natural law approach distinguished him from other advocatesof toleration, including Christian Thomasius, whose justification of toleration,as Ian Hunter shows in chapter 5, was based on scepticism about the capacitiesof human reason in matters of religion. However, to Thomasius, natural lawstill played a role in the magistrate’s decision to grant or withhold toleration forthe sake of civil peace: therefore, even atheists and Roman Catholics could betolerated, if this benefited the public peace.

In chapter 6, Maria Rosa Antognazza persuasively argues that Leibnizpragmatically opposed persecution as futile and counterproductive, but histolerationist ideas were based on solid epistemological grounds. In fact, hisconviction that beliefs are not voluntary, along with his Christian commitmentto natural law and to the duty of reciprocal love, led him to rule out the coercionor punishment of those who held sincere beliefs. To Leibniz, persuasion was theonly permissible method to bring the errant back into the fold.

Chapter 7 by Petter Korkman explains that the Huguenot intellectual JeanBarbeyrac established a set of connections between the three main senses oftoleration ‘as a privilege or concession, as a right to freedom of religion, andas a virtuous attitude conducive to a better and more open society’ (p. 166). Inso doing, Barbeyrac endorsed the natural law view of the state as a secular bodywhich has no religious competence: thus, his advocacy of wide toleration movedbeyond the theological constraints that characterized the works of other naturallaw theorists.

In chapter 8, Knud Haakonssen shows that Francis Hutcheson’s support oftoleration originated in his conservative natural law theory, which informedthe exercise of natural rights. This means that, on the one hand, Hutchesonrecognized ‘rights of conscience’ and, on the other, he subsumed these rightsto a moral pedagogy, designed to ensure that they were exercised to pursue thecommon good.

In the postface that concludes the volume, John Dunn highlights that all theauthors covered in this book attempted to assess the specific duties that naturallaw ‘imposed, or the entitlements that it conferred, upon the holders of authorityin particular settings in church or state’ (p. 206). Thus, natural law theoriesof toleration, although essentially rooted in theological world-views, played a


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significant role in distinguishing and defining the respective purviews of politicalauthority and religious organizations in the Age of Enlightenment.

This volume has reassessed natural law theory as a specific conceptual modelin tolerationist discourses in the early Enlightenment. The essays in this bookprovide the reader with thorough and compelling examinations of the theoreticalfoundations, the main tenets, the varied implications and the various limits ofnatural law theory in relation to toleration. Thus, this volume is a useful toolfor all those interested in continuing research on this topic – for instance, byexploring the long-term effects of natural law theories of toleration, given that thenatural law approach also characterized various currents of thought (e.g. deism,contractualism, early liberal thought, etc.) in the eighteenth century. Moreover,this book offers food for thought to those interested in investigating differentconcepts of toleration in early modern Europe – not only the ideas of naturallaw theorists, but also, for instance, the views on toleration entailed by Socinianand Arminian theologies, Spinoza’s political theory and Bayle’s scepticism. Inconclusion, this excellent collection of essays accurately reconsiders the natureand significance of the relation between natural law and toleration in the earlyEnlightenment. It also provides new stimuli for further research on this subjectand, in general, on the various aspects and nuances of tolerationist thought inthe Age of Enlightenment, the understanding of which is essential to appreciatethe controversial relationship between the Enlightenment and religion.American University in Bulgaria DIEGO LUCCI

Rebellious Prussians: Urban Political Culture under Frederick the Great and hisSuccessors. By Florian Schui. Oxford University Press. 2013. x + 221pp. £67.00.

The debate about ‘absolutism’ versus autonomous ‘civic society’ still motivateshistorians’ research. Florian Schui’s book links it to a relatively neglectedsubject: the urban culture of a state usually associated with a noble-dominatedcountryside and its military culture. The arguments for urban growth andeconomic development in Brandenburg–Prussia presented here are not new:following the structuralist approach of Theda Skocpol, Schui confirms thesuccess of state-building, the rise of Berlin and the influence of mercantilism,and underpins it all with the influential voices of Kant, Sußmilch, Humboldt,Busching, Nicolai, Gedike and others. These writers are meant to give testimonyof the strength of urban progress and innovation. The author’s attempt todemonstrate the ‘subversive’ side of civic society amidst this discourse soundspromising, yet it ultimately fails, mainly due to the absence of research into therealities of urban life in the Hohenzollern territories.

Instead we are being presented with perceptions and impressions byintellectuals, cameralists and travellers to Prussia rather than the vox populi.Frequent use of the passivemode (ideas ‘were conceptualized’, ‘were seen as’) andgeneric citations such as ‘contemporaries believed’, ‘readers were told’, etc., makeurban attitudes hard to pin down. For that, hard work in the archives would havebeen needed. Such work would also have revealed that the province of Prussia –with its rather different political culture of a strong-willed and rebellious nobility,used to Polish sovereignty until the mid-seventeenth century – differed greatly



from Brandenburg, which again differed from Pomerania, Cleves or Magdeburgand other Hohenzollern territories of the Holy Roman Empire (until 1806) thatsuffered more under the long-term impact of the Thirty Years War than Prussiaitself. The cities of Konigsberg, Stettin and Cleves laboured under very differentconditions. The author is consciously (and laudably) trying to avoid a Berlin-centric perspective, but at the same time treats the ‘Prussian state’ as a unity,unable to avoid the pitfalls of ‘institutional history’ that he insists he wants tochallenge. Several works in the field (Meier, Schultz, Vetter, Friedrich, Schwieger,Engel, Peters, Prove,Wunder, J. Nipperdey, etc.) not used in this study could havehelped with this task.

Occasional comparisons with France and Britain appeal to a broaderreadership, but the most obvious comparative case studies – other cities in theEmpire, the Swedish example with close links to Prussia during the NorthernWars, and Poland, with a similar agrarian structure, do not feature. The impactof the partitions of Poland and Prussia’s conquest of one of Poland’s richest cities,Danzig, are not even mentioned. The excise tax (Akzise) is presented as the ‘mostup to date of its kind in Europe’, yet no measure is given for such a statement.Traditionally not exclusively a sales tax, but also levelled on production, it existedin most central European towns (e.g. under the name of ‘propinacja’ in Polishtowns), even private ones. It was resented by townspeople everywhere. What wasmodified over time was the way it was collected as the bureaucratic apparatus(still very small in eighteenth-century Prussia) expanded. The claim that the excisehad the broad support of the urban population would have been more credibleif examples from the archives had backed it up, rather than quotes from officialpublications written by civil servants themselves.

The focus on printed materials leads to interesting contradictions betweenevidence and argument. If the Brandenburg–Prussian public sphere expanded– and there are well-established indicators, such as reading societies, publicdiscourse about sexual and economic morality, the discussion over populationgrowth, the debate on the Prussian hymnal, etc. – did this go hand in hand with ashift to greater ‘private initiative’? This seems to be the author’s main thesis, butit is relativized at every step: ‘the new rules were less localised and more uniform. . . regulations and taxation interfered with many aspects of economic life’(pp. 31–2). If special interest was weakened in the name of a more overbearingofficial apparatus, how could it lead to greater pursuit of private (special) interest?

The first section on state-building is followed by chapters on religion, attitudesto sex, legitimacy and infanticide, as well as education. This contains a goodoverview of historiography on Pietism and praise for the Wolffian tradition(without mentioning that Wolff was expelled from Halle by Frederick WilliamI), but no examples of what a Pietist-induced ‘process of assimilation of religiousvalues through an individualized process’ actually means (p. 40). The argumentagainst Prussian schools merely promoting blind obedience has been madeby others, but Schui’s ‘paradoxical thesis’ that Prussian state policies ‘led toan increase in individual freedoms’ remains unproven. Even chapters entitled‘Urban navel gazing’ or ‘Taxation and it discontents’ do not lead us to the realitiesof burgher life, onlymore pronouncements by economic writers and officials.WasFrederick II’s climbdown in the conflict over the Pietist hymnal really a victoryof the public, or the result of the king’s lack of interest in religion? Statistics onemployment and cotton-manufacturing are interesting but say as little about civic


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autonomy as do subscriptions to fashion magazines or the popularity of miraclehealers. Is a choice in consumption really the sign of a newly won civic autonomy?If so, Sonderweg historians who insist that Prusso-German civic traditions areapolitical must celebrate.

This book is most useful to historians interested in the varieties of theEuropean Enlightenment and its decline, and as such it is well-written,summarizing important discourses. It traces the arguments of the intellectual,moral and social debate emanating mainly from Berlin, but it excludes a coreelement: the legal and political nature of civic autonomy that was strictly limited,and in some areas – such as women’s property rights – even curbed by the newPrussian Legal Code of 1794. Protest against Woellner’s religion edict is wellpresented, but why did Prussian citizens not gain more influence on legislationand political processes? Kant’s characterization of an ‘enlightened age’ (yet notthe ‘age of Enlightenment’) comes to mind. The idea of the Prussian Sonderweg,popularized by Hans Rosenberg and Otto Busch (who does not feature in thebibliography), no longer holds sway among historians. We always knew thatordinary people liable to heavy taxation have the tendency to rebel. We also knewthat the experiment of the Regie failed. Its repressive measures created riotingand a black market, but must this also be a sign of heightened civic autonomy?Humboldt’s call for limiting the state left no immediate impact in his country.How far would Prussian urbanites really go to assert their political will? WilliamHagen’s masterly work on the Stavenow estates has shown the complex interplayof rebellion and participation among the rural population through his archivalexploits. An opportunity to repeat such an analysis for the cities, unfortunately,has been missed.University of Aberdeen KARIN FRIEDRICH

A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the InformationState. By John C. Rule and Ben S. Trotter.McGill Queen’sUniversity Press. 2014.xvii + 829pp. $49.95/£35.00.

This is an enormous book, and not just in its physical size. With clarity andwith affection, in his introduction, Ben Trotter demonstrates the strengths ofempirical research – detailed, interconnected – exemplified bymaterial assembledover decades by his late mentor and colleague, John C. Rule, who died inJanuary 2013. So while the end result is a book of over 800 pages, the overallmessage is summarized succinctly: while the study of a political concept suchas ‘absolutism’ can be analysed and dismissed, bureaucracy is real; this is notpolitical science, but true-life structure (pp. 3–4). This sort of statement is alsoquite appropriate for an early modern statesman such as the subject of this book,Jean-Baptiste Colbert, marquis de Torcy, who would certainly have read anddigested the words ofMachiavelli in describing the business of governing as ‘real’and based on ‘practical experience’, as opposed to those Humanist dreamerswho invented government systems that did not really exist (The Prince, ch. 15).This book therefore explores, in abundant detail, the structures and functionalityof the ministry of foreign affairs in the second half of the reign of Louis XIV,arguing that control of this ‘world of paper’, that is, a huge repository of books,



correspondence,memoranda and legal documents, provided theFrench kingwitha means to govern the state more effectively than ever before. But further, Torcy’scontrol of this vast information network was not done simply for the good ofthe state – the progressive, modernist notion – but for the solidification of hisown family’s hold on power. So whereas Jacob Soll’s innovative book on a quitesimilar topic (The Information Master, 2009), which focuses on Torcy’s uncle,Colbert, effectively demonstrates that ‘knowledge is power’, this collaborativeeffort by Rule and Trotter helps situate this ideamore closely within early modernsensibilities, where dynastic interests (in this case, the Colbert clan) outweighloftier notions of raison d’etat. This is not to say that these ideas are incompatible,and indeed, when the Colbert clan is finally ousted from power during theRegency, the system they created for administering French foreign affairs remainsin place.

Chapter 1, ‘Louis XIV, Roi-Bureaucrate’, sets up the historiography of thereign and the rise of the modern state, supporting the more accepted notiontoday that many of the ‘reforms’ of the absolutist state were simply more effectiveways of accomplishing old tasks, notably, procuring financial and diplomaticpower for dynastic ends. The bibliography for this chapter and indeed theentire work is huge, and would be quite useful for graduate students beginningwork on the reign of Louis XIV, and in particular, the nexus of Versailles asthe intersection of court and government in early modern France. Chapters 2and 3 then provide biographical details for Torcy and the Colbert clan. Thesechapters explore his education and training under his powerful uncle, his father(Colbert de Croissy, foreign minister, 1679–6) and his father-in-law (Pomponne,also a previous foreign minister), and the importance of looking across formalstructural lines when examining early modern government. Merit is important inobtaining position in royal government, but did not replace family connectionsand venality, and Torcy was not only related to men who served in otheradministrative departments, but also maintained interests in those departmentshimself. His remit as secretary of state did not cover only foreign affairs, but asignificant amount of domestic affairs as well. These are explored in greater detailin later chapters, notably the postal system. And it makes sense to look at thisall together: an external spy network is enhanced when internal communicationsare monitored as well. Chapter 4 explores this mixing of Torcy’s responsibilities,foreign and domestic.

Chapters 5 and 6 are devoted to the lives and careers of the men whosupported Torcy’s administration, the senior clerks (the premiers commis) whowere themselves important players in the political and social life of Versailles. Thepoint is well made that boundaries are crossed here too as a matter of course:clerks who served in one department also often had duties and patron–clientrelationships with other departments (for example, the Blondel brothers whoworked for both Foreign Affairs and the Navy, pp. 245–6); moreover, householdand government are inextricably linked (an example is given of one of Torcy’sequerries also serving as a government courier on pp. 178–9). This is one areathat could have been explored further, as Rule and Trotter seem less comfortablediscussing the court – the section following page 200 does introduce the idea thatthe foreign ministry and the Grande Ecurie were working together to coordinatethe horses and couriers required to operate a vast internal and external spynetwork, but details are left sketchy (and indeed, the Grand Ecuyer is referred


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to as if he was merely a senior functionary, not one of the grandest aristocraticmagnates in the kingdom, Prince Louis of Lorraine, comte d’Armagnac, onwhommuch ofmy ownpreviouswork has focused). Somemay find these chapterstedious, too weighed down in detail about the individuals who made up theforeign ministry, but it is a very useful exercise in painstaking reconstruction ofpast lives and how they interacted with one another, and how they literally madethe administration function on a day-to-day basis. This section could have beenlabelled simply: ‘how it works’.

Chapters 7 to 9 then delve into different aspects of the administration of Torcy’sgovernment portfolio: finances, archives and post, censorship and propaganda,and ambassadors and ceremonial representation. Finally, chapters 10 and 11 pullall these elements together to analyse the actual formation of foreign policy anddomestic administration.Here the central idea re-emerges that Louis XIVwantedto know everything he could about his affairs, and that Torcy did everything inhis power to maintain his position of influence by controlling the flow of thisinformation to his master. He did this in fierce competition with other ministerswho had similar, rival streams of information, notably Pontchartrain (ministerfor the navy as well as the Maison du Roi) and Maintenon (the mistress andunofficial minister). One complaint that could be made about this monumentalwork is simply in the sheer amount of material presented to the reader; whilethere is an extensive index, a short summary provided at the conclusion of eachchapter would have been invaluable.

In the final assessment, Rule and Trotter’s conclusion posits that Torcy wassuccessful in building on the system he inherited from his Colbert forebearsfor controlling information (gathering, storing, accessing, understanding,distributing), but was ultimately deemed to be too successful by the RegentOrleans, who understood that if he was to stay in power once Louis XV cameof age, he would himself have to gain control over this information monopoly,and that Torcy would have to go.Manchester Metropolitan University JONATHAN SPANGLER

Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France. By Clare HaruCrowston. Duke University Press. 2013. xix + 424pp. £18.99.

As the title suggests, this study focuses on three different economic domains –credit, fashion and sex – and more particularly on the ‘expert practitioners’ ofcredit, those countless people who dealt in credit transactions. Seventeenth-century dictionary definitions of credit reveal that it held not only both aneconomic and moral dimension but also a double-edged negative and positivepossibility. It could denote a person’s reputation and to whom credit would beextended but a credit signified a vain or futile activity. During the eighteenthcentury, the term would become inextricably linked to power. The elasticity andevolution of the notion are the springboards for a well-argued investigation intohow it underpinned the Ancien Regime. And like a blemish on a painting, oncethis is pointed out, it is impossible to ignore and one is left wondering how itwas ever overlooked. The idea is painstakingly explored in literary works, officialdocuments, and in the everyday discourse of the two centuries. To her credit,



at no point does Crowston overplay her hand but rather provides a diversesampling of the promiscuity of credit to demonstrate the point to which it wasa bulwark of pre-revolutionary French society. Thus, credit is to be found inMadame de Sevigne’s correspondence possessing a purely fiscal meaning. At thesame time, she uses the lexicon of credit to express the efforts she made on behalfof the disgraced Nicolas Fouquet. In other letters still, she employs its languageto express her maternal love towards her daughter. She also resorted to the termto describe the reputation which people had merited through their good deeds.

Crowston devotes a chapter to Marie Antoinette and her well-known interestin and expenditure on sartorial matters and in whom the book’s strands –political, fiscal, credit, fashion, sexuality and female agency – all come together.As with the astute analysis of Madame de Sevigne’s letters, Crowston mines thequeen’s epistolary relations as well as the secret correspondence of her mother,Empress Maria Theresa, with the Austrian ambassador at the French courtand her daughter’s former French tutor, Abbe de Vermond, two figures who‘struggled to impart general principles of credit management to an impetuousand inattentive adolescent’ (p. 253), a pedagogical failure which would havemonumental consequences for the monarchy and for France.

In a book which makes such good capital out of Michel de Certeau and PierreBourdieu, the absence of any mention of Barthes is a surprising omission; hiswork on fashion systems would have been a welcome, and useful, inclusion.Another gapmay be found in the lack of treatment of that essential accoutrementduring the period for men and women alike: the wig. One of Crowston’s principalaims in the work is ‘to demonstrate the articulation of the socio-political creditof le monde with the merchants’ economic world of credit’ (p. 10), in other wordsthe link between the world of aristocracy and that of bourgeois tradespeople.The author is more interested in individuals than in economic theory, whichis at once the book’s strength and its weakest link. Crowston fleshes out thepreoccupations and daily endeavours of fashion merchants, who were ‘bothbeneficiaries and catalysts of the consumer revolution’ (p. 9). In charting theways in which different people during the Ancien Regime interacted with andunderstood the credit regime, Crowston shows us theway inwhich they developed‘an honest and sophisticated, if at times cynical and embittered, understanding ofthe way their society generated value’ (p. 328). The speedy and brutal dismantlingof the political system during the French Revolution is one consequence of thisand a reason for which Crowston urges us to take the conceptual constructsof credit seriously. Credit, Fashion, Sex is a creditworthy contribution to thisongoing debate.University of Kansas PAUL SCOTT

Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV. By Giora Sternberg. OxfordUniversity Press. 2014. xiii + 209pp. £60.00/$99.00.

Giora Sternberg has made an exceedingly impressive debut with his scholarlybook on status interaction in France during the reign of Louis XIV, a work whichdoes a great deal more than illuminate the details of the seemingly interminabledisputes and negotiations over status at the royal court. It gets to the very heart


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of what Sternberg calls the ‘micro-politics’ of old-regime France, and shouldleave all readers with a very strong sense of the need to take into account issuesof personal and corporate status, identity and precedence when writing anywork on the court or the ‘macro-politics’ of this period. It is sure-footed on thepersonalities involved, and on the structure of the state, and Sternberg managesto link social questions to other matters, not least the rather opaque character ofLouis XIV himself. It will be an indispensable work on the political culture foranyone researching the governmental or elite social history of France for yearsto come, and also, as he hopes, for those who will look at other states in the oldregime period.

Sternberg’s principal foci are the ceremonial disputes – involving items ofdress, serviettes, food, processions, pens, chairs, and visits – and the conventionsof correspondence and forms of address which involved members of the king’simmediate family and the wider royal house, down to and including the princesof the blood and the royal bastard lines (known as princes legitimes). Ministers,dukes and other peers, Marshals of France and other nobles have walk-on partsin Sternberg’s anthropological and ethnographic study, but in large part this isbecause Sternberg can only give us deep insights into status interaction withthe very limited sources available, most of which relate to royals. Only withcorrespondence can one cast the social net wider in a relatively easy manner, andclearly status distinctions here were expected to be stated in a written form, notleast through forms of address and styles of salutation and signing. However, thisreviewer remains doubtful (like Sternberg himself, perhaps?) that many peoplewho were below the level of courtiers really understood the complex epistolarycodes that royals and ministers were evidently well on top of. This reviewer hasseen simply too many different forms of letters, at least in terms of their layout,from different people to leading aristocrats or government ministers to think thatthe significance of the layout of letters – the use of margins and space – and ofthe employment of differently sized pieces of paper was well understood by evenmiddle-ranking officials and army officers interacting in correspondence withthe powerful of the realm. Sternberg himself acknowledges that correspondencecould sometimes be written on any paper that happened to be at hand, if nothingbetter (and more appropriate) was available.

Sternberg is working with multiple status symbols, and he is at pains to stressthat they ‘did not simply reflect a predefined social and political order [as RolandMousnier seemed to imply]; they continually defined and redefined positions andidentities’. In other words, royals and other aristocrats – and indeed judges,merchants and anyone involved in corporate life too – would advance or defendtheir status by manipulation or clear usage of various symbols. Particularlydifficult were interactions involving near-equals in status, especially when someform of serving or passing of something was involved: what was menial but stillhonourable could, if carelessly demanded or deliberately manipulated, becomehumiliating for the subservient party, with potentially serious ramificationsfor harmony and good governance. Moreover, social distinctions and theirmanifestations were not – or not only – instruments of power for Louis XIV todominate his nobility, but were actively used by nobles to maintain and upholdtheir own interests in the great chain of being. Sternberg suggests this in a numberof places, but could, perhaps, have made more of this, for it strikes at the heartof that hoary old historiographical chestnut: Versailles as a gilded cage in which



Louis XIV kept his aristocrats in a state of impotent mutual rivalry. In fact manyof these nobles played important roles in the state and were active manipulatorsof their circumstances at court as well.

Once we let go of ‘modernist’ notions of state-building, we can and should seethe political tensions, problems and concerns of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies in their own terms, for they mattered to contemporaries. Even if statusdisputes and negotiations seem trivial to people in the twenty-first century, weshould indulge our ancestors, for by doing so we might better understand howthey got us to where we are now. Naturally, though, one cannot resist askinghow important all of this really was to the fate of states and nations. To besure, Sternberg is focused primarily on the micro-politics of status negotiationand assertion, and, though he certainly shows the significance of this for someaspects of higher politics – indeed for nothing less than the succession to theFrench throne in the 1710s, and for the related rise of the royal bastards underLouis XIV – he never really defines what he means by macro-politics. In thisreviewer’s eyes this term encompasses more than just issues of ‘grand strategy’(either of individuals and families, or of the state), but could also include awhole range of issues to do with the law, the institutions of the state and theirdirection, the handling and regulation of corporate bodies, the raising of finance,the running of the armed forces, and the management of the church, not tomention other areas such as the preservation of order. While it is absolutely vitalto appreciate the political culture and social context in which ‘state politics’ tookplace, nevertheless government (for all its ongoing failings) was placed on a firmerand more regular footing under Louis XIV than his predecessors and we shouldnever lose sight of this. Sternberg would doubtless agree, for he suggests in anumber of asides that issues surrounding status interaction could have seriousramifications for the otherwise smooth functioning of government and the armedforces, as well as the court, under Louis XIV.

What Sternberg shows, largely by implication, is that the careful regulation ofstatus, particularly at the apex of society, had a significant part to play in securingand perpetuating the much greater order in the realm that Louis XIV had strivenso hard for. And he also reveals just howmuch Louis – far from seeking to divideand rule, as too many historians have crudely believed – was in fact a monarchwho aimed where he could to defuse tensions.Where it did not suit him to upholdthe status quo (as in his long campaign to elevate the status of his bastards)then he would move slowly, gradually and with some stealth towards his goals.Stability was therefore key. The king was even strongly inclined not to intervenedirectly in status disputes where to do so risked generating trouble rather thanconsensual resolution, preferring to let others act as his mouthpiece, or to donothing. Sometimes, where the issues were particularly complex or delicate, hewould let other institutions (such as the Paris Parlement) pronounce on matterssuch as ducal precedence, something very largely absent from this book but noless revealing of the monarch’s approach to governing his senior subjects. Whatemerges very clearly from this well-written book is that Louis XIV was no crudeabsolutist when it came to regulating people’s status; nor should he be seen asthe king who embedded stifling, inflexible etiquette at court. At times he wasin fact quite prepared to be very flexible on issues of protocol, either because itsuited him personally (even Louis needed some time off, more thanmost scholarsrealize); or because he felt sufficiently secure to invert the status hierarchy (in the


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way he offered the nightshirt to his grandson on the young man’s wedding night);or because he realized that at times excessively rigid adherence to protocol wouldbe downright impractical. While the king issued numerous informal and legalpronouncements on specific aspects of social status, and their manifestations, henever sought to codify status matters in a significant, sweeping manner. Some ofhis servants might have preferred it had he done so. Unsurprising to those whohave ever been guests in a house with servants, it was the king’s own officials whowere much more rigid (and offended by breaches) than Louis himself, confirminga long-held suspicion of this reviewer that in a range of ways many French courtand ministerial officials – especially those with more bureaucratic or legalisticroles – could be ‘plus royaliste que le roi’. In the end, what Louis probably wanted– and Sternberg is wise to raise this rather than pronounce definitively – was topreserve considerable freedom of manoeuvre for himself and for his successors.Status was a fluid and relative concept, as it still is, and it had an influence on, andwas influenced by, circumstances that changed. The good governance of the realmtherefore required the king not to have his hands tied too tightly by definitiverulings of his own or his predecessors’ making. It also suited many of his leadingsubjects that status issues not be regulated too tightly, for that would restrict theirability to manipulate situations to their advantage. But that, of course, is what itwas all about.University of St Andrews GUY ROWLANDS

Late Modern

The French Revolution and the Birth of Electoral Democracy. ByMelvin Edelstein.Ashgate. 2014. xv + 365pp. £80.00.

In this detailed summary of the first French national elections, the case is madefor the schooling of the French as active, voting citizens during the revolutionaryperiod. It is the culmination of several decades of research in the archives byMelvin Edelstein and as such reminds us that the legacy of the FrenchRevolutionis not just the language of rights or the concept of nationalism (and still less,the violence of the Terror), but also democracy in the sense of universal malesuffrage. For many years overshadowed by other historical concerns, particularlythe debate on the origins of the French Revolution, the electoral innovations ofthe Revolutionary period have now returned as something of a historical debate.For historians such as Lynn Hunt, Malcolm Crook and Jeff Horn, the electoralprocess constituted an important part of the creation of a new political order, inwhich citizens became involved in the national process in a series of communal,municipal and national elections, either as voters or as holders of one of the nearly1million elected positions. For others, notably PatriceGueniffey, elections – oftencorrupt, and met with apathy by a limited electorate – were a distraction fromthe real business of politics in Paris, and were often overshadowed by politicalviolence. Edelstein’s study firmly opposes this view, and in a series of case studiesattempts to demonstrate the importance of elections and the limited successes ofnascent democracy.

Elections pose a number of problems to historians, particularly on the nationalscale. Voting records may no longer exist, and where they do, pose challenges



in terms of marshalling such large amounts of data. Electoral processes wereoften complicated, and very different from the modern day ballot-box. Instead,they were public occasions, often taking place over several weeks, even months.Edelstein is adept at explaining the various processes developed, some of whichgrew out of ancien regime practices, notably the traditions of guilds. He has alsogathered perhaps themost substantial collection of data from numerous electionsand has taken the time and scholarly care to match the equivalent of electoralrolls to the social status or occupation of individual voters and candidates,allowing him to stake a series of claims about the openness of the new politicalprocess to accepting artisans and shopkeepers, as well as landowners, lawyers andmerchants, as members of the newly elected bodies.

Edelstein has arranged this sociological study chronologically, with anemphasis on the early years of the Revolution; the Directory and NapoleonicFrance are squeezed into a final chapter. Each chapter is prefaced with ahistoriographical summary, along with the different possible interpretations offindings that Edelstein is testing. Generally, Edelstein’s findings support thecontention that the Revolution ushered in an unprecedented era of democracyand managed to introduce a broad, albeit male, franchise. In the numerouselections of the period, voter turn-out continued to be relatively high, particularlywhen compared to electors in the United States or in British rotten boroughs (inwhat almost becomes a stylistic tick, we are often reminded of the shortcomingsof the British electoral process in these pages). The electoral map of Franceis repeatedly interrogated, with correlations and connections between counter-revolution and voter apathy tentatively suggested, the stronger communalbonds of rural society providing greater involvement with elections than urbanconstituencies. We learn something about the candidates for the numerouspositions on offer – many of whom were reluctant to take their posts, butfound that they had been elected anyway – and the philosophical and traditional(the guilds again) aversion to party politics and the national division that suchtraditions and ideologies promoted. Repeatedly, we learn that elections, while notto be confused with modern universal suffrage, were indeed ‘an apprenticeship indemocracy’ (p. 316).

This, then, is Edelstein’s case. But is it convincing? On one level, that of grittydetail, it is somewhat hard to tell, as the publishers (while increasing the price)have not included the full set of tables included in the French edition, althoughthere are some useful maps, tables and methodological explanations provided.Readers may not be convinced by the extent to which his chapter on the cultureof elections really investigates what we now think of as electoral culture, since atleast Lynn Hunt’s work in the 1980s, and more recently in Romain Bertrand,Jean-Louis-Briquet and Peter Pels’s collection of essays about the traditions,innovations and social meanings of the many forms of voting. The sideswipeabout ‘feminists’ (Edelstein or his editor’s quotation marks) and Olympe deGouges may strike others as odd in tone. But the depth and breadth of hisresearch and the logical responses to Gueniffey (and on occasion others, forexample, Hunt’s sense of the extent to which urban artisans were successfullyelected) provide a serious case for the importance of revolutionary-era electionsas building blocks for the first democratic nation.The British Library MATTHEW J. SHAW


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Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France: From Free Love to Algeria. ByPamela Pilbeam. Palgrave MacMillan. 2014. x + 241pp. £55.00.

The Saint-Simonians might be dismissed as spoiled rich kids who played atbeing socially concerned Romantics for a few years and wore shirts with theirnames embroidered in large letters. These, and theatrical displays such as theMenilmontant retreat, were eye-catching publicity stunts of young men fromwealthy families not yet obliged to earn their living (p. 187).

The purpose of this study is to refute such facile dismissals in order to rescuethe followers of Henri de Saint-Simon from the condescension of posterity.Professor Pilbeam’s latest book revisits, in greater depth, some material alreadypresented in previous work: French Socialists before Marx (2000), and to a lesserextent Republicanism in Nineteenth Century France (1995).

Prosper Enfantin and his erstwhile companions are treated with sharpjudiciousness, not to mention some sympathy, throughout this tome. ForProfessor Pilbeam they made notable contributions in several spheres of humanendeavour. They elaborated alternative forms of Christianity, devised morehumanitarian means of tackling poverty, and they were also staunch defendersof the dignity of women in society. Much of this will be familiar to students ofnineteenth-century France, but this book’s greatest originality lies in uncovering,for an English-speaking audience, the Saint-Simonians’ fascination with the‘Orient’ and in particular their chequered relationship with the colonizationof Algeria. This is certainly where the book’s most important contribution toscholarship is to be found.

This monograph is engagingly written, with a good eye for narrative detail,which should make this study accessible to a pretty wide audience. The openingsection deals with the ideas of the ancien regime aristocrat, entrepreneur, politicaleconomist and mystic guru the comte Henri de Saint-Simon. However the truefocus of this study lies with his young followers of the late 1820s, who were drawnmainly from the elite ecole polytechnique. They were part of that post-Napoleonicgeneration suffering from the great mal du siecle: ennui, or boredom. Highlyqualified and educated in the elite establishments forged by the Revolution andNapoleon, but too young to serve either regime, they sought their own path andrebelled against the stodgy world of the Restoration. The group was founded bythe long-haired bearded hippy Prosper Enfantin and five fellow polytechniciens.Later, they were joined by the immensely wealthy Gustave d’Eichtel and thePereire banking brothers. Men of more proto-socialist aspirations and manyadoring female admirers also came to fill their ranks. This disparate group ofyoung good-looking bright young things was united by an optimistic vision ofthe future. They hoped through a myriad of educational, banking, associationaland infrastructural projects to guide humanity towards more efficient forms ofsocial and economic organization. Their ambitions were as large as their pocketswere empty.

The group was probably at its most radical in its earliest years from 1829 to1832. They held a myriad of different beliefs, which they preached through thepublication of articles in the daily press and by sending missionaries throughoutFrance to seek converts. Their more tangible programmes of reform involvedthe creation of early versions of community centres where free education, basichealthcare and housing could be provided to the indigent. Less easy to pigeon-hole were their ideas about free-love, God’s feminine side and finally their



quest for a female Messiah. They eventually settled at Menilmontant wherethey dressed in bizarre uniforms, sang hymns and listened to an endless streamof sermons. Perhaps, inevitably, this unconventional community attracted theattention of the judicial authorities and a deeply embarrassing trial put an end totheir activities as a collective.What wasmore damaging was the schismwhich thiscreated among the membership itself. Many were already chafing under the irongrip of Enfantin and used the trial’s fallout as a good moment to part company.Most male Saint-Simonians resumed respectable, middle-class and professionallives with little difficulty. The same cannot be said of their womenfolk, whoremained tainted by their association with free love. Tragically, a significantnumber were to commit suicide.

In many ways, this could have been the end of the story. It is to ProfessorPilbeam’s credit to have discovered an interesting afterlife for this motley groupof idealists. As part of their wide range of beliefs, Enfantin’s followers had soughtto nurture international cooperation as a means of solving problems, especiallythose of an infrastructural nature, and improving the human condition. The nextphase of their decidedly eventful lives would take them toEgypt, initially in searchof a female Messiah. Although they found the Orient’s charms seductive, theysoon became convinced that their technical expertise could stimulate Egyptiandevelopment for the better and hopefully bring a new wave of progress to theLevant. They found thatMehemet-Ali’s Egyptwas rather unwelcoming to foreigneccentrics so the beards were shaved and their bizarre clothing shed for engineer’suniforms. Although ultimately their attempt to influence Egyptian governmentand society with educational reforms and infrastructural projects was a completefailure, they did make a major contribution in drumming up interest for theconstruction of the Suez Canal.

The final chapters analyse the Saint-Simonian enthusiasm for the conquestand colonization of Algeria. In particular the interesting figure of Ismayl Urbain(born Thomas) is rescued from oblivion. The son of a Frenchman and freedblack slave Urbain became very close to Gustave d’Eichtal. During the 1830s hewas appointed a correspondent for several newspapers on Algerian affairs andeventually the French army’s official Arabic translator. In 1840 he converted toIslam and married a local girl. He became one of the most influential advocatesfor a beneficent and tolerant colonization of Algeria. He eventually rose tobecome Napoleon III’s chief adviser on Algerian affairs, much to the chagrinof the settler community. The Saint-Simonians in the southern Mediterranean,as in France for that matter, did not present a united front when it came tocolonization. They differed in terms of methods, and especially the toleranceshown towards the native population. What they did share was a somewhatchauvinist vision that the world could benefit from French and western expertise.Their legacy, here as elsewhere, was mixed to say the least. This is a well-writtenand interesting book, which will prove useful to students of nineteenth-centuryproto-socialism and utopian radicalism.University of Kent AMBROGIO A. CAIANI


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By-Elections in British Politics, 1832–1914. Edited by T. G. Otte and PaulReadman. Boydell. 2013. xiv + 306pp. £75.00.

Parliamentary by-elections have tended to be studied as stand-alone eventsin particular constituencies, a colourful, but not necessarily important, featureof the political landscape of modern Britain. But as Paul Readman and T. G.Otte, skilful editors of this timely and well-considered volume on by-electionsbetween 1832 and 1914, point out in their introduction, by-elections werecentral to political culture. One-third of all parliamentary seats were subject toby-elections during the course of the 1852 parliament alone. The considerationof the neglected subject of by-elections offers a valuable opportunity, as theeditors assert, to examine the complex ‘intersection of the local and the national’(p. 8).

The collection begins with the only one of the eleven essays that is concernedexclusively with the pre-1867 electoral system. Philip Salmon’s fine essay onthese years shows that there was a significant increase both in the proportionof contested by-elections after the passage of the 1832 Reform Act, and invoter turnout at these contests. Salmon demonstrates that the by-election offereda different challenge for electors in constituencies more accustomed to dual-member contests, and the mysteries of ‘plumping’ and ‘splitting’ votes, and assuch could be disruptive to local electoral dynamics and patterns of behaviour.Levels of cross-party voting dropped in the subsequent general election in two-thirds of constituencies in which there had been a contested by-election between1835 and 1865.

If there is a dominant theme to the essays in this volume, it is in the pictureof an increasingly ‘nationalized’ and ‘modernized’ political party system, whichoffers a challenge to the emphasis on the ‘politics of place’ which has beenthe most exciting development in the recent historiography of Victorian andEdwardian politics. It is shown that Victorian by-elections became an invaluabletool for gauging the state of public opinion. Several of the contributors arguethat more professional forms of party organization generated an intense interestin, and lent urgency to, by-election contests, and the opportunity to test outnew techniques of electoral campaigning. Philip Salmon points out the growinginterest in by-election contests shown by central party managers and clubs in theyears before 1867, and concludes that by-elections played a significant role inthe rise of ‘nationally-oriented voter partisanship’ (p. 42). Kathryn Rix’s chaptercarefully demonstrates the importance of by-elections in directing central partyresources and stimulating party organization, as well as generating the occasionaltension between local associations and national hierarchies. Likewise, GordonPentland shows in his deft discussion of Scottish politics that a by-election heldat short notice could generate fierce debate about the virtues of the national‘carpetbagger’ at the expense of candidates with localist credentials. MatthewRoberts’s wide-ranging chapter highlights the quantitative analysis of by-electionresults by national politicians from the late 1870s, pioneered inevitably byWilliamGladstone, as evidence of a more uniform political culture. The most importantinterpretative essay in this collection is the excellent co-authored discussion ofhotly contested Edwardian by-elections by Paul Readman and Luke Blaxill. Aswell as demonstrating that the timing of the 1900 ‘khaki’ electionwas conditionedby by-election results since the outbreak of the Boer War, Readman and Blaxillargue that by-elections provided ‘excellent guides to future general election



results’ (p. 228).Given the compelling qualitative and statistical evidence amassedin this essay about the predictive power of Edwardian by-elections, it is difficult todisagree with their confident forecast of Unionist electoral victory in 1915, basedupon the outcome of by-elections held between 1913 and 1914, a conclusionwhich in turn challenges the persistent historiographical notion of an Edwardian‘crisis of Conservatism’.

This is not to say that local perspectives are ignored in this volume. Severalchapters focus on particular case studies. Phillips Payson O’Brien explores the1909 Bermondsey by-election, where the lesson of a Conservative victory ina bitter three-way contest may have prompted the Labour party to withdrawfrom a number of general election contests in the January 1910 election.Antony Taylor’s lively chapter examines several by-election contests between1868 and 1885 that featured an ‘independent’ (or radical) candidate, mostnotably the narrow failure of George Odger to be returned in a three-waycontest at Southwark in 1870. However, with the exception of Taylor’s insightfulintervention, most of the contributors share a top-down approach to politicsthat focuses more on national elites and developments than on popular politics,with mixed outcomes. The impact of foreign policy issues on by-elections is thefocus of separate articles by Geoffrey Hicks and T. G. Otte. In his chapter onby-elections during the Conservative administration of 1874–80, Hicks arguesthat the Government was in difficulties well before the outbreak of the EasternCrisis in 1876. Hicks contends that the Bulgarian agitation deepened but didnot create the government’s woes, although counter-evidence, such as theConservative successes at Wilton and Salford in early 1877, is rather summarilydismissed. Otte takes a wider view to show that foreign policy issues resonatedacross the period, but had become less relevant by the Edwardian era. Elsewhere,Angus Hawkins’s essay on government appointment by-elections is long onnarrative detail but short on analysis. Ian Packer’s exploration of the issue of landreform at by-elections between 1885 and 1914 shows that defeat at the Spaldingby-election in 1887 prompted progress on the SalisburyGovernment’s AllotmentsBill, although his conclusion that by-elections ‘only mattered sometimes’ (p. 225)is rather underwhelming. It is unfortunate that the richness of the local press islargely ignored by most contributors: several articles, for instance, draw almostexclusively on The Times for evidence of newspaper opinion.

Of course, one volume cannot claim to be definitive, given that there werein excess of 2,600 parliamentary by-elections held in this period. That said,Pentland’s discussion of Scottish politics also serves to highlight the absenceof considered discussion of by-elections in Wales and, above all, in Ireland.Likewise, some by-elections are over-privileged through repeated discussion bythe contributors (notably Frome and Salford in 1876, and Spalding in 1887),whilst there are some significant omissions. To give some examples: there isno discussion of the Sunderland by-election of August 1845, which saw theelection of the railway tycoon George Hudson, defeating the radical candidateColonel Perronet Thompson; nor of the election of the distiller Thomas Boordat the Greenwich by-election of 1873, which heralded the unlikely start of theConservative revival in the metropolis. There is also nomention of the November1912 by-election at Bow and Bromley, caused by the resignation of the sittingMPGeorge Lansbury so that he could seek re-election on the issue of support forwomen’s suffrage, only to be defeated by the Conservative candidate. Given the


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rightful emphasis in this volume on the opportunities that by-elections affordedto pressure groups, such as the Anti-Corn Law League in the early 1840s, orto the Temperance League, or the Edwardian Tariff Reform League, there is asurprising lack of corresponding attention to the activities of female suffragegroups, especially to the disruption campaign of the suffragettes. Indeed, it isnotable that of the dozen contributors, only one is female, suggesting that thefield of political history remains – on the face of it – a masculine space. But,overall, this collection is an important addition to the field that will undoubtedlyprompt further research into parliamentary by-elections.Royal Holloway, University of London ALEX WINDSCHEFFEL

Rugby, Football and the Working Classes in Victorian and Edwardian York. ByCharles Walter Masters. Borthwick Institute Publications. University of York.72pp. £10.00.

A Yorkshire newspaper reported in 1851 that boys attending the York Churchof England Sunday Schools picnic amused themselves by playing ‘foot-ball andother innocent games’ (p. 7). By the 1870s, having been codified by both theFootball Association and the Rugby Football Union (RFU), ‘football’ had beentaken up by the middle-class pupils at St Peter’s and Bootham schools. Yet, asCharles Masters observes, there was no evidence of ‘a huge pent-up demand onthe part of the working classes to play andwatch’ (p. 9). So how did football – firstrugby and then soccer – became so firmly embedded as a component of popularculture in late Victorian and Edwardian York?

The explanation offered here hinges on the idea of respectability. Folk football,as practised in various forms up and down the country, had a long history, butthosewho played it often found themselves on thewrong side of the law.As a formof recreation associated with disorderly behaviour it was unlikely to appeal toartisans and clerks who aspired to upward social mobility or simply wanted to bewell regarded by those among whom they lived and worked. A letter publishedby the York Herald in 1864 argued that football was unpopular in the city‘principally on account of the roughness attending it’ (p. 8). The reformed gamethat emerged in the 1860s and 1870s could still be quite rough – rugby enthusiastswere reluctant to abandon ‘hacking’ – but as football was now favoured byschools where middle-class professionals sent their sons to be educated, it nolonger affronted polite society. The moral gloss of ‘muscular Christianity’ alsohelped. Football’s credibility as an innocent pastime that could be pursuedboth vigorously and respectably was much enhanced by the involvement ofYork’s Anglican clergy and by Robert Kay, an influential Methodist layman,whose classes for working-class youths promoted character-building viaathleticism.

Church or chapel, school, workplace and pub have long been identified askey agencies in the democratization of sport. All had important parts to playin nurturing a football culture in York. Masters is careful, however, not tooverstate the role of pubs, even though clubs often used them for committeemeetings or as somewhere to get changed before and after a match. Few clubs,he notes, ‘were officially connected with public houses’, not least because



respectable working-class and lower middle-class footballers were anxiousto avoid attacks from the temperance movement (p. 34). Neighbourhood isidentified as an especially important factor in the formation of football clubs.At least a third of those playing rugby in the York and District League in themid-1890s were associated with a particular location in the city, very often witha particular street, as indicated by club names. Football’s capacity to supply ameans of expressing local identities is thus confirmed, with Masters suggestingthat neighbourhood-based recreation was alive and kicking in the 1880s and1890s once families who had come to York in the 1870s had settled in. If intenseneighbourhood localism overlapped with other identities the effect was especiallystriking. In Walmgate, for example, where large numbers of Irish immigrantshad lived since the 1840s, members of the St George’s United Football Club anda club calling itself the Irish National League used rugby in the 1880s to assertboth Catholicism and Irishness alongside their neighbourhood identity.

At the end of the nineteenth century, as even a local soccer enthusiastacknowledged, ‘York was a rugby place’ (p. 47). Even after the NorthernUnion/RFU split in 1895 the position of the York Club, which creamedoff the best of local rugby talent, seemed fairly secure, though it was threeyears before it joined the breakaway movement of Yorkshire and Lancashireclubs that embraced professionalism and, eventually, the new sport of RugbyLeague. This delay proved damaging to rugby’s prospects as it left the city’sflagship club struggling to find attractive fixtures and spectators looking forentertainment elsewhere on Saturday afternoons. Some middle-class supporterswho opposed the switch to the Northern Union became disenchanted whenit happened and simply lost interest. This opened the way for the associationgame, simultaneously experiencing a huge surge in popularity following theestablishment of the Football League in 1888: ‘York was not an island and itsinhabitants could not be left untouched by soccer’s success’ (p. 49). Havingalready gained a foothold in the city’s elementary schools – unlike rugby it couldbe played on an asphalt yard or after school in the street – it benefited from thesupport of churches and chapels looking for ways of connecting with youths whowould otherwise have been lost to organized religion. In 1900 almost half of thesoccer teams in the local junior league had religious affiliations. Critically, it wasalso encouraged by employers, especially Rowntrees, who became convinced thatsoccer was ‘amore effective instrument thanNorthernUnion rugby in the pursuitof a healthy and moral workforce’ (p. 54). Three of the firm’s directors boughtshares in York City when professional soccer was floated for the first time in 1912,an indication that the round-ball game had achieved a level of respectability atleast equal to if not greater than rugby. York was by then very much ‘a soccerplace’.

Masters traces these developments with clarity, economy and precision. Hisexploration of the developing relationship between football and respectabilityhas generated an invaluable new perspective which will benefit enormously fromfuture research in this area. This study is a model of its kind and fully merits itsplace in the Borthwick Institute’s long-running series of research papers.De Montfort University DILWYN PORTER


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Writing a Small Nation’s Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, 1850–1950.Edited by Neil Evans and Huw Pryce. Ashgate. 2013. xii + 391pp. £80.00.

Given how self-absorbed many academics are, it is surprising that historiansdo not pay more attention to the history of their own discipline. Moreover, asensitivity to student tastes means that the history of history has also lost its placeat the heart of some university degree curriculums. Yet, as this book shows, thehistory of history does matter. Derived from a collection of conference papers,its aim is to reflect on the writing of Welsh history during the lifetime of thesubject’s academic pioneer, J. E. Lloyd (1861–1947), and to set this writing ina European context, particularly of other small nations that, like Wales, existedwithin multinational states.

The book begins with chapters that outline the nature and context of historicalwriting about Wales and other nations in the period 1850 to 1950. The first is adetailed case study of J. E. Lloyd’s History of Wales from the Earliest Times tothe Edwardian Conquest (1911), the first academic study of that nation’s past. Itis followed by a collection of chapters on popular and amateur Welsh historians,the most fascinating of which was Owen Rhoscomyl who did everything fromwriting historical novels and textbooks to staging historical pageants, workingas a mercenary and spending a period of his life in the United States as RobertGlyndwr, a Welsh cowboy, outlaw and Indian fighter. He may have been at oddswith the emerging professionalization of his subject but he and his admittedly lesscolourful peers played just as significant a role in the use of history to legitimizeand even create a modern Welsh nation.

The next set of chapters looks at the emergence of an academic disciplineof Welsh history from its first stirrings in archaeology and Celtic studies tothe creation of history departments at Welsh universities. The most notabletheme within this section is the importance of understanding the influence ofinstitutions, particularly universities or archives, on how history is written anddeveloped. The next section sets this period’s Welsh historiography in context,through chapters about writings about the post-Roman period, Scotland, Irelandand medieval Catalonia. Although these early historians were often influencedby experiences outside the nations they came from and wrote about, they,like their Welsh counterparts, were still nation-builders, seeing the past assomething that needed to be tapped into to influence the sense of identity of theircompatriots. For the academic and professional historians, this attitude was notat odds with a belief in scientific history, but it often drew upon rather abstractunderstandings of race and ethnicity in order to give homogeneity to the past.Professional historians now shy away from such approaches, but the legacy oftheir predecessors is evident in how powerful such ideas of Celticness remain inpopular understandings of Welsh history today.

There is something rather traditional about this book. It is an expensivehardback, has a 51-page bibliography and contains eighteen substantive chaptersthat could all stand happily alone as journal articles and which are not broughttogether until a conclusion by Stefan Berger that deftly draws out the key themesand relates them to the wider European context. It is the kind of academic bookthat is probably in its last days as a physical entity before the economic realitiesof the digital world swallow up the viability of actually putting such projectsonto printed paper. And yet the book also touches upon very contemporarythemes. The range of reviews and discussion that J. E. Lloyd’s original book



generated (and which are discussed in ch. 3) reminds us that academic historianscommunicated with and impacted upon wide audiences long before the REFpushed us in that direction. Berger’s conclusion similarly points out that this earlygeneration of academic historian were ‘multi-taskers’: as well as writing history,they were also often active ‘as politicians, publicist and political educators’ (p.308). This was not exactly an impact agenda, but it is a reminder that the pushaway from ivory towers is simply a continuation of a culture of public intellectualsrather than some plot to control and manipulate academic research. We shouldalso take heed of the book’s evidence of how understandings of the past wererather resistant to the arguments of academics.

Berger ends the book with a warning against historiographical nationalismand a reminder of how ‘hyper-nationalism fed into war and genocide in Europe’sdark century’ (p. 311). He acknowledges how nationalism is not always likethat but argues that it is precisely because it is Janus-faced that historians andcitizens should be wary of it. Berger is not arguing against the writing of nationalhistories but pointing out the need for both nuance within them and much widermultidirectional histories. In Wales and Scotland, such arguments are timelyas both formal devolution and resentment of Westminster’s domination of theUK gather pace. It seems inevitable that the political independence of these twonations will grow, but for that process to both work and win popular legitimacythere needs to be a realization that their historical social and economic problemsare not unique. Similarly, UKIP are promoting a politics that seems to imaginesome mythical past that predated the EU and mass immigration and where therewere fewer social and economic ills. Whether or not nationalism has answers tothe problems we all face, it should look to history not for someone to blame butto realize that isolation rarely helps anyone.

Thus historians across the UK and Europe have a role to play in ensuringthat future patterns and actions of governance are based on the shared needs ofthe future and not the individual grievances of the past. Ensuring that happensmeans being aware that history is not black and white and that nations aremessy, complex entities. It means understanding the influence of institutions,infrastructures and ideologies upon both popular and academic historians. Itmeans historians realizing that engaging with the public and the culture we workand live in is not some administrative burden but the duty of our profession and acontinuation of a long tradition in itself. Our predecessors helped create nationsand now we need to remind people of their limitations.Swansea University MARTIN JOHNES

Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories. By Peter Ghosh. OxfordUniversity Press. 2014. xviii + 402pp. £30.00.

Translated into English in 1930 by Talcott Parsons, The Protestant Ethic andthe Spirit of Capitalism has long been treated as a canonical work of twentieth-century social science, and has spawned an extensive literature of commentaryupon the ‘Weber thesis’: that ‘Protestantism’, more broadly the Reformation,brought about the rise of capitalism. However, Ghosh ignores the vast bulk ofthis literature, since it represents in extenso an argument that the ‘Weber thesis’is a travesty of both the Protestant Ethic itself, and of Weber’s significance as


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a theorist of modernity. As regards the latter, Ghosh also sets his face againstthe common idea that the Protestant Ethic forms a kind of platform uponwhich Weber built an ever-more refined research programme, culminating inthe posthumous publication of Economy and Society. A corollary of this all-toocommon approach to Weber is the assumption that Weber’s work preceding theappearance of the Protestant Ethic is detached from this later writing; a line ofargument that employs the extended period of mental breakdown and recoveryfrom 1898 to 1903 to create an apparent turn towards the light in the early 1900s,consigning all previous writing to obscurity.

This book runs counter to such assumptions, commonly encountered whendiscussion turns to Max Weber and his ideas; and Ghosh simply sets theseassumptions and the arguments to which they have given rise to one side. Hisextensive footnotes barely register the usual commentary and reception history;instead, they teem with material fromWeber’s writings and correspondence. Thebook is an intellectual biography written by a historian steeped in the writingsof Max Weber, his contemporaries, and the materials he used. It is organizedaround the axis of the original version of theProtestant Ethic published in 1904/5,examining the sources and ideas that flowed into it, and the way in which thisanalysis of religiosity in a modern capitalist world can be used both to makesense of his later writings and activities, and to demonstrate their connection toneglected early writings. TheMaxWeber so presented is bothmore coherent, andmore fragmented, than hitherto depicted. As such, it is the most comprehensiveand illuminating work on Max Weber ever published.

The original two-part essay of 1904/5 first became a book in translation; and,in turn, these translations were made from the 1920 version of the essay publishedas the first substantive section of the three-volume Gesammelte Aufsatze zurReligionssoziologie, hence apparently as an introduction to a ‘comparativesociology of religions’; coincidentally setting up yet another misapprehension,that Weber was first and foremost a comparative sociologist, and of all things, acomparative sociologist of religions. And so, rather paradoxically, the ProtestantEthic became an exemplary ‘late work’ detached from the earlier writings ofwhich it was, strictly speaking, already a part. All of which suggests thatany engagement with the literature of commentary built up around thesevarious misapprehensions would lead into a web of recursive corrections andemendations that bring us no nearer to understanding whyWeber wrote this text,how it is constructed, and how this why and how sheds light on our understandingof all of Weber’s writing.

Conforming to the overall structure of the book, the text is divided intotwo parts: Part I, ‘The Genesis of The Protestant Ethic – and the History ofMax Weber, c. 1884–1905’ (pp. 3–142) and Part II, ‘The Second History of TheProtestant Ethic – and ofMaxWeber, 1905–1920’ (pp. 145–386). The 1904/5 essayforms a hinge between two unequal parts, but is not in itself present; there is nodirect exposition of the contents of the work, instead a working knowledge isassumed andGhosh talks about the construction, not the substance. The absencehere of any straightforward exposition of what The Protestant Ethic is ‘about’ isin part related to the fact that Ghosh is preparing a new English translation ofWeber’s text, out of which the book under review in fact grew, and which is inturn linked to a stream of essays and reviews written over the years and relatedto this task.



One of the questions that any engagement with The Protestant Ethic raisesis how someone who was himself not a religious man ended up taking such aninterest in religion, and how this interest might relate toWeber’s engagement with‘modernity’ – as he understood this, with ‘capitalism’. Here Ghosh argues thatthe link runs through ‘ethics’ – that in a modern world the unifying existentialframework that belief had provided had transmuted into a fragmentary set ofcodes and guidelines for individuals to observe in discrete settings – and thatthe rationalities these conveyed were fragmentary, rather than unitary. Hence,incidentally, his interest in technologies, of exactly how this process was realized,reflected in a vocabulary that emphasized the flow of process, rather than staticstructures. In addition, the fact that Weber was unreligious did not mean that hedid not appreciate the importance of Christianity, the starting date of 1884 toPart I relating to a letter he wrote to his brother in March 1884, aged 19, linkingChristianity with Kultur:

Christianity is the common bond that links us with all the peoples andpersons who stand at a stage as high as ours, for even those persons amongstus who do not claim to be, or call themselves Christians, and who wish tohave nothing to do with Christianity, have still appropriated the core ideasof Christianity and act voluntarily according to its doctrines. (p. 92)

There is a straight line from this last idea to The Protestant Ethic with itsgoverning idea of ‘life-conduct’, and which continues on, for example, into laterarguments about the ‘vocation’ of politics, and the qualities demanded of amodern politician. Ghosh’s very important book makes sense of Weber’s workas a whole, and consequently makes clear just why Weber’s work remains soimportant to us, nearly a century after his death, in making sense of the worldin which we are placed.Independent Scholar KEITH TRIBE

Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War. By Christine Hallett.Oxford University Press. 2014. xxiii + 359pp. £20.00.

Christine Hallett’s reappraisal of the contributionmade by both voluntary andprofessional nurses to the First World War comes at a particularly apt point.Caring for the wounded remains one of the tropes of women’s participationin the conflict, alongside munitions work and the Land Army. The first sixmonths of the centenary commemorations have already produced a plethoraof images of women in nurses’ uniform including the BBC’s depiction of afield hospital in northern France in the drama Crimson Fields (2014), on whichHallet was a historical adviser, and a new film of Vera Brittain’s autobiography,Testament of Youth (2015). It is therefore appropriate that this book beginswith an interrogation of some of the myths that surround the iconic imageof wartime nurses as ‘self-sacrificing heroines and romantic foils to the malecombatants’. The selectivity of popular narratives of nursing are interrogatedas Hallett points out that the middle-class young girls who, like Vera Brittain,became VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachment) are over-represented in culturalmemory. Her discussion of allied nursing in wartime includes women from acrossthe globe, including those Red Cross nurses who tended to wounded troops


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in Germany and Austria in 1914–15. Contrary to popular mythology, not allsoldiers fought on theWestern Front. Similarly this book’s coverage of nursing inRussia, Italy, Egypt, Lemnos, East Africa and Mesopotamia demonstrates thatwomen took part in a truly World War.

Meticulous research enables Hallett to offer a convincing interpretation ofnursing as skilled hard work requiring expertise, courage, stoicism and endurancein what were sometimes dangerous circumstances. Nurses’ commitment isportrayed in part as a contribution to the war effort, but is also intimatelytied up with the struggle for professional recognition of their work. Thiscampaign for registration was already in its twenty-seventh year at the outbreakof war, providing the background to tight rules and regulations that governedhospital practice in wartime. In Britain the private members bill to introducea regulatory system for nurses was finally passed in December 1919; some sawit as acknowledgement of nurses’ contribution to the war effort. Hallett alsopays attention to how experience of wartime nursing work affected individualwomen’s lives; whilst for some it was instrumental in developing new careeropportunities, for others it was not. Vera Brittain was by no means the only VADto be summoned home to domestic duties before the war was over, although herautobiography of her experience as a VAD established her as a writer. For somenurses the armistice brought little respite: men’s injuries still needed care and the1918 flu epidemic put a strain on all medical staff.

This book is at its most engaging when it quotes from the extensive researchundertaken of letters, diaries and memoirs of nurses, letting the nurses’ ownvoices emerge. The mundane and spectacular of everyday life is charted by, forexample: Sister M. E. Webster nursing on board the hospital ship GloucesterCastle in the East Mediterranean and Staff Nurse C. E. Strom who was postedto the No. 66 British General Hospital in 1917 and had to find ways of copingwith the cold at night when sleeping on the ground in her tent. Such extractsand Hallett’s accessible writing style should ensure that this book will be readnot merely by academics but also by the general public interested in the historyof nursing or of women in the First World War. It is therefore an excellentexample of some of the cross-over publications which the centenary of theFirst World War has produced and which it is to be hoped will herald a newdialogue between academic and popular history. For historians of women it isperhaps a little disappointing that the book does not engage more with some ofthe vigorous academic debate taking place about the degree to which the FirstWorld War disrupted, dislodged or challenged both gender roles and inequalitiesbetween men and women. It is nevertheless a fascinating read, able to broadenour understanding of the multiple histories of the First World War.University of Worcester MAGGIE ANDREWS

A Political Legacy of the British Empire: Power and the Parliamentary Systemin Post-Colonial India and Sri Lanka. By Harshan Kumarasingham. I. B. Tauris.2013. xiv + 297pp. £62.00.

There are numerous legacies of the British empire. For good or for ill, theBritish empire changed the world and continues to shape the world we live



in. The extensive literature of postcolonial discourse has made this case andexamined and re-examined the cultural legacy of the British empire, both onBritain and on its former colonies. However, the parliamentary dimension ofBritish decolonization remains relatively under-researched, especially concerningthe political and constitutional framework of Britain’s eastern holdings. Whileacademic attention from Kenneth Wheare and Ivor Jennings, among others, hasbeen paid to the establishment of the ‘Westminster system’ in the settler countriesof Australia, New Zealand and Canada, there has been something of a gap insystematically appreciating the legacy of the Westminster system when appliedto the political cultures of the east.

Kumarasingham addresses this omission in his excellent book, A PoliticalLegacy of the British Empire, and in doing so, has undoubtedly coined theterm ‘Eastminster’, which the author explains as a political institution which‘maintains the coreWestminster traditions and conventions’ but has been ‘alteredand adapted’ (p. viii) for Asian localities. In order to explore the evolution ofthe ‘Eastminster’ system, the book offers a comparative analysis of the systemsof governance of India and Sri Lanka because they provide ‘two connectedcomparable but different cases of the how the same Westminster system candevelop’ (p. 6). Focusing on the period shortly after independence on Indiaand Sri Lanka, the book strongly enforces the notion that the strength of theWestminster system lay in its flexibility and adaptability.

The book itself is laid out over nine chapters, three of which are devotedto the Indian experience while another three are devoted to the Sri Lankanexperience. The last two chapters offer direct comparisons and conclusions, whilethe first chapter explores the theoretical and methodological framework for thebook’s analysis. This chapter gives three theoretical frameworks which reveal justhow adaptive the Westminster system can be. The first framework concerns thecultural milieu of both India and Sir Lanka. Here, Kumarasingham highlightsthe differences between the two countries and how the Westminster system wasadapted by both countries to their own ends. The second concerns itself witheach case study’s understanding of the parliamentary system itself. This engageswith notions of delegation and checks and balances between the executive andthe legislative bodies. The final framework is derived from what James Mahoneycalled the ‘critical juncture’ or the point at which ‘it is impossible to reversedirection’ towards a different type of governmental institution, in this case theperiod surrounding independence (p. 21). For Sri Lanka, the primary issue whichforced it down its unique path was communalism, whereas India was forcedto grapple with the legacy of Partition, relations with princely states, and stateformations based on ‘ethnic and linguistic lines’ which led to a distinctive federalsystem (p. 24).

The comparison of Indian and Sri Lankan cultural backgrounds is particularlyilluminating. On the one hand, the Sir Lankan political elite seemed to adopt theBritish penchant for pomposity, such as the bestowing of ‘Imperial Honours’,presenting of ‘Sri Lankan debutants’ at Buckingham Palace and displaying the‘Union Jack next to Lion flag on public buildings’ (p. 115). On the other hand, theIndian political elite rejected such notions but rather sought to incorporate theWestminster system’s parliamentary attitudes owing to India’s ‘institutional andsocial complexities’ (p. 7). Kumarasingham is clear to point that India did betterout of its inheritance fromBritain, perhaps owing to the adoption of ‘operational


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Westminster system’. While the integration of the Westminster system appearedeasier in Sri Lanka, this was ‘deceptive’ because of Sri Lanka’s ‘plural society’ andthe elite’s ‘inability to foster theWestminster operational cultural at the executivelevel’ (p. 229).

One of the strengths of the book is that it is remarkably well written. Manyconstitutional histories can be hard going, dense tomes, but Kumarasingham’sstyle is very easy to read, which adds clarity to the complexities of the theoreticaland methodological constructs of the book. His writing further brings to lifethe actors within the time period, illuminating the infighting, feuds and alliancesbetween key players. For instance, the extent to which the executive was free from‘horizontal accountability’ in India is made clear when Mountbatten exclaimedtoNehru that ‘not evenChurchill . . . would have dared to ride roughshod over hisministers’ (p. 69), or the fact that Ivor Jennings andOliverGoonetilleke comparedthe decolonization process in Sri Lanka to a friendly ‘game of bridge’ (p. 117)illustrates howdifferent the process of gaining independencewas for each country.This helps inform the thesis and keeps it connected to drama of the situation, thesum of which makes for a fascinating read.

In addition, the book is very well researched. Kumarasingham makes gooduse of the Jennings papers, which have heretofore been relatively neglected, andthere is a broad range of sources for each case study. However, there are a coupleof minor issues with the presentation of the material. The bibliography couldhave been organized slightly better to list the archives referenced; as it stands,this information gets lost slightly in the copious footnotes. Moreover, the indexwould be improved by including conceptual entries. But these are minor quibbles.

Ultimately, this is a very important book and will have lasting effects on thestudy of decolonization. Though the brilliance of the book lies in the directcomparison of Britain’s non-settler Asian colonies, it will have broad impact byreigniting the study of the legal and constitutional legacy of imperialism.University of Cambridge A. WARREN DOCKTER

Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938. By JanekWasserman. Cornell University Press. 2014. vii + 254pp. $45.00.

In theWashHouse in theKarl-Marx-Hof, Vienna (which originally housed thebathtubs and showers of the Karl-Marx-housing project) there is a permanentexhibition to ‘Red Vienna’, which in 1919 became renowned as the first city ofover 1 million inhabitants to appoint a social democratic administration. Theexhibition heralds ‘Red Vienna’ as a unique socio-political experiment whichembraced and reformed all spheres of life – from social and health policy toeducation and housing. Yet after the war, although the achievements of the redcity were celebrated, its socialist representatives were never invited back withinAustria’s borders. As JanekWasserman, Assistant Professor of Modern Germanand Central European History at the University of Alabama, shows, the red citywas not as ‘red’ as history has painted it: instead contemporary resistance ofBlack Vienna to the socialist fortress resulted in the city being ‘a battlegroundbetween competing world views’. This was a battle which the socialists wouldultimately lose, paying the price for their ambivalence towards intellectuals and



their dearth of presence in the academic community, and for the strength of theiropponents.

Basing his analysis on scholarly associations, journals, books and reports ofgatherings, Wasserman explores the commonalities between radical Austrianconservative intellectuals in the inter-war period, positing with convincingconviction that Red Viennese cultural movements (en)countered a relativelyunified ‘Black’ bloc, whether Catholic conservative or German nationalist. Theauthor challenges the construction of the Austrian conservative intellectual fieldin the 1920s as being made up of three Lager (camps) vying for hegemony withinthe fragile First Republic, arguing instead that there were two blocs: a minoritysocio-liberal one and a hegemonic Catholic-nationalist one, with the monarchistsat one of the latter’s crucial pivots. While scholarship on Red Vienna ‘has oftenemphasized the monolithic and unchanging aspects of the milieu’, Wassermanargues for ‘the fluidity and historical contingency of this cultural field’ (p. 161).The thinking of the ‘Black’ bloc was marked by radical anti-Semitism, Germannationalism, volkisch authoritarianism, anti-Enlightenment and anti-modernistthinking, and corporatism. The seven chapters explore the similarities betweendifferent cultural organizationorganizations and across national boundaries tobuild a picture of a ‘ thriving interwar ideological landscape’ (p. 7): the emergenceof Black Vienna; the Austro-Marxist struggle for ‘Intellectual Workers’; thecircle that emerged around Othmar Spann and the intellectual competition forhegemony in Central Europe; the Verein Ernst Mach and the politicization ofViennese progressive thought; the Osterreichische Aktion and new Conservatism;the rise and fall of politically engaged Scholarship in Red Vienna, 1927–34; andfinish with the triumph of Radical Conservatism in the Austrofascist State, 1933–8. Wasserman argues strongly for the culpability of Black Viennese thinkers inpaving the way for the Corporate State and the Anschluss, contending that theyfrequently sought more radical solutions even than the Austro-fascists.

Wasserman’s thesis is convincing, although it assumes some knowledge ofthe period and actors. His thesis sits not only within Austrian scholarship,but also within intellectual histories of the right, such as Thomas Rohkramer’sanalysis A Single Communal Faith? The German Right from Conservatism toNational Socialism (2007), in which the author explored how an ideology praisinginequality and authoritarian rule could outdo its progressive opponents in theage of mass participation. Where Rohkramer explores the popular desire forthe unifying faith offered by the Right, Wasserman, however, remains with theacademic, political and social opportunities from which the intellectuals of theradical right benefited and with their national and international reach. The resultis convincing if a little dry, despite the dramatic consequences of these tensionsbetween left and right.Lancaster University CORINNA PENISTON-BIRD

The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich. By Carsten Dams and MichaelStolle. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 2014. xvi + 234pp. £18.99.

The Gestapo was one of the Third Reich’s most notorious organizations, andits reputation as a brutal tool of Nazi persecution goes well beyond academic


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experts on the topic. Given this interest, the two authors make a convincing casefor their study, The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich, by pointingout that we actually lack a concise overview on Germany’s secret police thatspeaks to a more general audience of non-experts. In fact, while works that havequestioned the alleged ‘omnipotence’ of the secret police are available in English,they have often only focused on the Gestapo’s activities within Nazi Germanyand are mainly aimed at specialists.

The book is divided into seven chapters, which roughly span the time periodfrom the early 1930s to the 1960s. In chapter 1 we are introduced to the formationof the Gestapo and its links to information-gathering and surveillance in the lastyear of theWeimar Republic. This is followed by an outline of the organizationaldevelopment of the secret police illustrating that the Gestapo quickly expandedbeyond the scope of a specialized section of the police apparatus into anindependent organization. Chapter 2 also explores the links between the Gestapoand the SS.Here the authors try to achieve toomuch in the limited space availableby also outlining the changes that affected theGestapo duringwartime – a sectionthat would have been better placed in one of the later chapters. The personnel ofthe Gestapo are discussed in chapter 3 and we get an excellent overview of thoseinvolved at the leadership level and those in the lower ranks of the organization.Whilemembers of theGestapo often had a professional background in the police,this changed in the war years when staff became younger (p. 52).

Chapters 4 and 5 should be read together as the authors explore very well howtheGestapo functioned in policing and persecuting different groups ofGermany’ssociety which theNazis had labelled as ‘enemies of the ThirdReich’. Information-gathering through informers and spies but also through denunciations and thecooperation with other National Socialist organizations characterized the workof the Gestapo in Germany. The authors rightly stress that the secret police madeselective use of the information received and that, therefore, the suggestion of aself-policing society in which everyone was informing on their neighbours doesnot hold true. The persecution of those seen as ‘state enemies’ (ch. 5) is analysedby focusing on these different groups that were targeted by the Gestapo such aspolitical opponents, German Jews, homosexual men, religious communities andthose considered as ‘social outsiders’. Interestingly, this chapter also reminds usof the different stages within Gestapo persecution and its radicalization towardsthe end of the Second World War. The persecution of foreign workers, examinedas part of the chapter, is a very good example of this development. Chapter 6continues the focus on the war but investigates first the very interesting area ofthe ‘foreign deployment’ of Gestapo officers, meaning their work in countriesNazi Germany had annexed before the outbreak of the Second World War.Often the practices and policies employed there were repeated in the occupationof western and eastern Europe. The chapter also explores the different typesof occupation policy across Nazi-occupied Europe as well as Africa and, in sodoing, provides a good overview of the Gestapo’s various role(s) in these differentcountries. It becomes clear that the Gestapo was a key player – though not theonly one – in the extermination policies that were carried out in all countriesoccupied by the National Socialist Party and its allies. The last chapter of thebook focuses on what happened to the Gestapo after 1945. By and large, wesee how former members of the Gestapo smoothly reintegrated into East andWest German society. The belated and reluctant efforts to try members of the



Gestapo mirrored the slowness in putting perpetrators involved in Nazi crime ontrial more generally. While some Gestapo officers deliberately kept a low profile,many others – so we learn in this insightful chapter – quickly joined public lifeagain.

This book is a translation from the German original and, unfortunately,one of its shortcomings is aspects of the translation and its use of language.The very literal translation of German terms as, for example, ‘night and fogmissions’ (p. 140), a German way of suggesting that activities are carried outin great secrecy, or the word ‘fellow traveller factory’ (Mitlauferfabrik, p. 163)are not just irritating, but incomprehensible for an English-speaking readership.Furthermore, there is a surprisingly uncritical use of language present inthe book. Phrases like ‘the implementation of Jewish policy’ (p. 102), whenprobably a more suitable formulation would have been ‘the implementationof anti-Jewish policy’, or writing about ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’ instead of morenuanced formulations as ‘German Jews’ and ‘gentile Germans’ suggest that thisarea would have deserved more attention.

Regardless of these critical points, this study is a very good introduction to thedifferent activities the Gestapo were involved in during the Nazi years. It providesa rich overview of areas that are less familiar to English readers as well as tohistory students. Chapters 6 and 7 especially, in which the Gestapo’s role as partof Nazi occupation policy is examined and the fruitless efforts to put Gestapoofficers on trial after 1945 are explored, offer insights into areas that are largelyunknown to the wider public. It is a great benefit of Carsten Dams and MichaelStolle’s book that it explores the Gestapo’s development throughout the ThirdReich and illustrates how persecution policies employed within Germany wereexpanded, implemented and radicalized throughout the Second World War.University of Essex NADINE ROSSOL

Inside Concentration Camps: Social Life at the Extremes. By Maja Suderland.Translated by Jessica Spengler. Polity Press. 2013. xiii + 336pp. £17.99.

Ever since they had been established by the Nazi regime, the concentrationcamps have provoked intellectual interpretation. Investigating the perplexingnature of these sites of terror, the question arises of what life inside the campswas like. Did it resemble life outside the barbed wire or were inmates dwellingin an otherworldly realm of unbound violence, in a univers concentrationnaire asDavidRousset, the Frenchwriter and survivor ofNeuengamme andBuchenwald,termed it in 1946? Hannah Arendt, who had made the ‘utterly incredible andinconceivable’ reality of the camps the subject of an essay published in 1948in the Partisan Review, reached the conclusion that: ‘There are no parallels tothe life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion anddistract attention from what is essential.’ For her study of social life in the Naziconcentration camps, Maja Suderland adopts a different view expressed alsoin the 1940s by another scholar and survivor. Paul Martin Neurath had beendeported to Dachau from his home in Vienna in April 1938. He was held in campdetention for just over a year and saved his life by escaping to the United States.In May 1943, he submitted his PhD dissertation on Social Life in the German


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Concentration Camps Dachau and Buchenwald to the Department of Sociology atColumbia University. In this work, which was published only posthumously in2005, Neurath observes that prisoners lived in a ‘society’, which was comparableto the communal life of human beings outside the barbed wire: ‘The differencebetween the two societies, that outside and that inside the camps, seems . . . oneof rules of behaviour rather than basic concepts.’

Following up on this observation, Suderland sets out to validate Neurath’sclaim by exploring ‘[w]hat ideas can be considered “basic concepts” of society,and which measures were necessary in the Nazi concentration camps to expressthese ideas in a way appropriate to the situation’ (pp. 7–8). In doing so, Suderlandopts for a method by which she analyses a number of highly reflective accounts ofcamp survivors that have long become classics of Holocaust literature. To identifythe ‘basic concepts’ of society she focuses mainly on the testimonies of PrimoLevi, Tadeusz Borowski, Charlotte Delbo, Ruth Kluger, Eugen Kogon, LeonSzalet and Robert Antelme, and evaluates these writings with the help of a set ofsociological theories elaborated in great detail in the first half of the book (pp. 39–111). At the centre of this theoretical groundwork Suderland puts Pierre Bourdieuand his concepts of habitus, social space and social libido. Bourdieu’s insistenceon the dual existence of society in both structures and individuals allows her tounderstand the concentration camps as outposts of the social space, in which thesurrounding society’s schemes of perception, appreciation and action continuedto have an effect on inmates’ lives albeit in a distorted way (pp. 109–10). Conceptsof masculinity, for example, that usually demand the display of power, strength,virility and aggression were adapted to the camps’ oppressive reality. Insteadof hitting back at their tormentors, prisoners developed alternative strategies todefend their male honour (pp. 207–8).

In addition to gender-based differentiations, Suderland finds that prisoners’strategies of self-assertion aimed at setting themselves apart from others also interms of class, ‘ethnic’ affiliation and caste – a concept that she borrows fromMax Weber, according to whom ‘caste’ describes ways of thinking and actingbased on socially potent categories of purity and impurity (pp. 90–3). The act ofcategorizing others structured the social relationships between the prisoners ina way similar to how it had previously shaped their social practices outside thecamps. Anti-Semitism, anti-Ziganism and homophobia were prevalent amonglarge parts of the camp population and influenced prisoners’ attitudes towardsfellow inmates classified as Jews, ‘Gypsies’ or homosexuals (pp. 164–88). Colour-coded triangles given out to mark the inmates thus also functioned as socialsignifiers that matched existing stereotypes. This urge of the prisoners to makesocial distinctions, an urge that Bourdieu terms ‘social libido’, represents forSuderland ‘the last thread of continuity with the prisoners’ former lives’ (p. 239).It is a necessary mechanism to determine one’s position in the social space. Andthis social position together with human dignity, individuality and the abilityto use one’s reason emerge as the ‘basic concepts’ of society which prisonersstrove to realize in the extreme situation of the concentration camps (pp. 258–60). In summary, Suderland affirms Neurath’s observation and concludes that‘[t]he social space of the concentration camp was not a counterworld, as it isoften depicted, but was . . . more of a distorted reflection of the normal socialspace outside the camps’ (p. 163).



Suderland’s work is the work of a sociologist and it seems to speak firstand foremost to readers from her own discipline. For long, this discipline haddifficulties in approaching National Socialism and the Holocaust. In 1989,Zygmunt Bauman’s studyModernity and the Holocaust broke new ground. Fouryears later, Wolfgang Sofsky published his sociology of the concentration campas The Order of Terror. Both works have made important contributions toresearch. They have inspired historians of the concentration camps, but alsotriggered their criticism for describing a complex and dynamic historical realityin a static and ideal type-fashion. As if Suderland, whose work is heavily theory-driven, was anticipating historians’ scepticism and their distrust of sociologists’generalizations, she includes a lengthy paragraph on the troubled relationshipbetween the two disciplines and strives to appease their ‘smoldering animosity’(p. 49).

To historians, Suderland’s findings on the complexity of social life in theconcentration camps are indeed less original than she presents them. Readersfrom this discipline will hardly find ‘our view of the world has been shaken’(p. 164). Her claim that in the scholarly literature ‘prisoners are often depictedas a roughly distinguished mass of people subject to forms of differentiationimposed by the Nazis’ does not hold true for historical research. Already in1978 Falk Pingel conducted a comprehensive pioneering study of the livingrealities of the different groups of inmates (Haftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft). Hisobservation that the social dynamics between them were fuelled by inmates’so-called ‘pre-concentrationary’ characteristics, that is, by behaviours, tacticsand beliefs adopted prior to imprisonment, is remarkably close to Suderland’sfindings and one would have expected her to devote more attention to Pingel’swork than only one passing reference in the whole book.

Historians would have also wished for a more nuanced analysis of the ‘socialspace’ outside the camp. Suderland turns to ‘the society of the “Third Reich”’to probe the continuity of the basic concepts. But was this racist ‘people’scommunity’ really the frame of reference for all prisoners, especially during thewar years when inmates from German-speaking countries were in the minority?Suderland draws her source material overwhelmingly from this historical periodwhen the camps had become international spaces and nationality was a decisivefactor not only for survival but also for the inmates’ strategies of self-assertion.Being not German and thus not having to defend oneself against the stigma ofbeing excluded from theVolksgemeinschaft allowed for methods of ‘othering’ likethe one that Polish-Jewish prisoner Leon Szalet resorted to when he denouncedthe German ‘national character’ as being one of ‘inhuman cruelty’.

With her attempt to bridge the disciplinary divide, Sunderland’s bookencourages research to bring together the wealth of empirical data generated byhistorians of the camps with analytical approaches apt to illuminate the biggerpicture of these unsettling histories. Interestingly, sociologists, at the time, foundNeurath’s study of the prisoner society unscientific and lackingmethodology. Theauthor himself saw his dual role of both scholar and survivor as a dilemma and,disappointed by the critical reception, he abandoned the social study of Naziterror and made his name in academia as a statistician. Suderland is to be praisedfor her rehabilitation of Neurath and for the late recognition of his work.The Hebrew University of Jerusalem KIMWUENSCHMANN


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The Crisis of Genocide: Volume 1: Devastation: The European Rimlands 1912–1938. By Mark Levene. Oxford University Press. 2013. xxviii + 545pp. £85.00.The Crisis of Genocide: Volume 2: Annihilation: The European Rimlands 1939–1953. By Mark Levene. Oxford University Press. 2013. xiii + 535pp. £85.00.

Mark Levene, Reader at the University of Southampton, belongs to themost distinguished authors publishing comprehensive volumes on the historyof genocide and genocidal violence in the modern World. After two tomes onGenocide in the Age of the Nation State (both published in 2005 by I. B. Tauris),Levene ends the series on a high note in the final volumes that analyse cases ofmass inter-ethnic violence in the European space between 1912 and 1953. Levenepresents a highly readable and original, even provocative, discussion of Europeanand Near Eastern genocides in the Age of Catastrophe (Eric Hobsbawm). Theauthor is to be commended for producing volumes that will undoubtedly findtheir place among standard books on the subject.

Levene uses a specific spatial and temporal focus, going across the conventionalgeographic and chronological boundaries. It has indeed recently becomefashionable to present new approaches and terminologies in the analysis ofmodern European history. Instead of Timothy Snyder’s rather limited Bloodlands– as he terms the land between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1933–45 – Levene’s approach comes closer to the approach employed by BenjaminLieberman in his Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of ModernEurope (2006). Levene starts his analysis shortly before the outbreak of theFirst World War, in 1912, when the countries in the Balkans plunged intothe first major conflict and mass ethnic cleansing in a prelude to the meatgrinder unleashed two years later. The final push to destroy the ‘sick man ofthe Bosphorus’ – the Ottoman empire – unleashed nationalist violence in theconquered territories inhabited by the hopelessly mixed populations. Leveneconcludes the story after the death of Stalin in March 1953, which stoppedwhat threatened to be the second Holocaust, now exclusively against the SovietJewry. There were no immediate cases of genocidal violence in the ‘expurgatedrimlands’ after 1953, which however does not mean that the genocidal potentialentirely disappeared, as the situation in the 1990s was to show. Levene’s attemptto present a longer-term perspective on mass violence in Europe is not entirelynovel. For example, Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth recently identifiedfive ‘waves’ of political (not necessarily genocidal) violence in twentieth-centuryEurope (Political Violence in the Twentieth-Century Europe, 2011). The timeperiod analysed by Levene would cover approximately the second and third‘waves’ of their proposed scheme.

Also the territories that Levene identifies for the purpose of his study requirefurther explanation. For Levene, ‘rimlands’ (or ‘European semi-periphery’sexposed rim’) was the territory that lay at the edge of the western and centralparts of Europe, ‘and through which powerful actors (those who “rule” and“command”) would have to pass to subjugate and control an Asian “heartland”’(vol. 1, p. 6). He deals with three, sometimes vaguely defined territories (‘ “hot”core, with cooler, outer layers, which at critical moments seem to be drawnby the core’s heat’): the Balkans, excluding Greece, but including westernAnatolia; a Caucasus–Black Sea–easternAnatolia zone; and ‘the Lands Between’– stretching from the Baltic countries, across Poland, Belorussia and Ukraine,to Crimea (a territory more or less corresponding with Snyder’s Bloodlands).



These were the territories where the political interests of the ancient, yet frail,empires intersected in the first decades of the twentieth century. Here the birth ofnew states after 1914–18 and the efforts of the temporarily weakened powers toreclaim their former territories created a vicious spiral of mass violence.

Levene emphasizes that the genocides committed during the period in Europeand near Europe ‘clearly were not all the same in terms of scope, scale, orimmediate causation’. He lists fourteen cases of genocide (nine of them partof the Holocaust) and twelve partial genocides (which could be – based on theUN definition (‘in whole or part’) – recognized as genocides). This howeverbegs the question of terminology. Some readers would argue that such inflationof cases of inter-ethnic violence considered as ‘genocides’ could lead to thedevaluation of the term. When we start dividing the instances of mass ethnicviolence into separate categories, based on the intentions of the perpetratorsand the actual execution of the crimes, it does not mean that we are creating ahierarchy of human suffering. For the purpose of learning from history, as well asanalysing the origins of genocidal violence, it seems appropriate to differentiatebetween ethnic cleansing, semi-genocidal violence (or partial genocide, if weaccept the term) and clear cases of genocide. Genocides usually develop fromattempts to remove unwanted minorities from the territory (‘ethnic cleansing’),but it does not mean that all cases of ethnic cleansing necessarily develop intogenocide.

A significant part of both volumes is devoted to the history of the Holocaust,as crimes committed against the European Jews by Nazi Germany and theirallies. Levene, in contrast to some of the most eminent Holocaust historians, forexample Yehuda Bauer or Dan Michman, belongs to the authors who reject thecategorization of the Holocaust as ‘unprecedented’, ‘unique’ or ‘singular’. Hiscareful analysis of genocidal violence throughout history documents commontraits in the origins, escalation and execution of all genocides. For the purposeof categorization, Levene thus concludes that the Holocaust, in the sense of theextermination campaign against the Jews, was genocide par excellence; a ‘trulyepoch-making act of genocide’ (vol. 1, p. 2); and ‘at the extreme end of the“Richter scale” . . . more thoroughgoing and more gargantuan than anythingelse comparable’ (vol. I, p. 367). To reject the categorization of the Holocaust asa ‘singular’ event does not necessarily mean to marginalize the crimes committedby Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the SecondWorld War, but ratherto contextualize themwithin the events of mass and genocidal violence in history.It was ‘part and parcel, albeit in its most crystalline form, of a specific phaseof European toxicity, the highest, most lethal dosage of which were limited toparticular, if repeated moments – mostly, though not exclusively, in the contextof wider war – and across particular, if also shifting, zones’ (vol. 1, p. 3). Levene’sconclusions thus provide a viable option of how to look at the events in the firsthalf of the twentieth century. Without any effort to marginalize the other casesof genocidal violence in the region, it is possible to accept the argument that forideological reasons, due to its magnitude and extremity (not just share numbers),and the determination on the side of the perpetrators, the Holocaust was themostextreme case of genocide in the ‘rimlands’ between 1912 and 1953.

There was one major attempt in inter-war Europe to stymie outbursts ofinterethnic violence, the so-called minorities treaties (vol. 1, p. 27). During theParis Peace Conference, the winning parties, realizing the danger stemming


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from the disintegration of the old empires (previously sanctioned by the samepoliticians), introduced this international mechanism to protect ethnic andreligious minorities in the ‘New Europe’. If taken seriously and fully enforced,the treaties could preclude the rise of mass violence in the region. In a way,the minority treaties – never really respected by most of the new states – werean attempt to solve the quandary faced by the decision-makers in Paris, whenthey quickly realized that the delineation of the new states strictly according toethnic boundaries was a pointless exercise (25–30 million people lived as ethnicminorities in the new states). Nevertheless, shortly after the minorities treatieswere signed, the Lausanne treaty of 1923, brokered by the same powers, executedpopulation exchange (transfers) between Greece and Turkey as a solution tothe minorities problems, and arguably also as a way to preclude new cases ofethnic violence in the ‘rimlands’. It appears as if physical separation of diverseethnic groups (often accompanied by tens of thousands of casualties) – fullyenforced after the Second World War in east-central Europe – became thepreferred solution also among the politicians who otherwise promised to respectliberal democratic ideals and values (such as Czechoslovak president EdvardBenes).

These two comprehensive volumes do not make for an easy read. Levenefocuses on the period, which in its first half is often considered as the epoch whenliberal democracy, as a political system, entered vast territories in continentalEurope. It is also, however, very well known that the turn to authoritarian,traditionalist, but in particular fascist regimes soon followed suit. These booksagain remind us how relatively novel and frail democracy was in Europe inthe first half of the twentieth century, but also that democratic regimes are notsafeguards against politically motivated inter-ethnic violence. It is debatable howfar the end of genocidal and sub-genocidal violence in the European ‘rimlands’can be ascribed to the fall of Nazi Germany (labelled by Levene as ‘anti-system2’) and the death of the Soviet totalitarian dictator in 1953 (‘anti-system 1’). Wecould also easily argue that the successful population transfers in east-centralEurope and the establishment of totalitarian, yet not genocidal, regimes in theSoviet satellites prevented any outburst of mass violence in Europe until 1989.Weneed to remember Peter Lagrou’s comment that ‘[t]he years 1945–1960 stand outas an exceptional period of frightening ethnic homogeneity in European history’(Pieter Lagrou, ‘Return to a vanishedworld: European societies and the remnantsof the Jewish Communities, 1945–1947’, in David Bankier (ed.), The Jews AreComing Back (2005), p. 23).

The fall of communism and the revival of nationalist fervour in the region,leading to the death pits of Srebrenica, again showed that although the countriesin the ‘rimlands’ owed their independence to the liberal ideology of Wilsonian(but also Bolshevik) national self-determination, it was in fact this support fornationalistic tendencies that contributed to the genocidal violence. Concurrently,the largely unsuccessful integration of migrants from all over the world in themajority western and central European societies threatens to create the potentialfor inter-ethnic conflicts in the future. One probably just needs to hope that theperiod of genocidal violence, aptly analysed by Levene, has disappeared in thedark European past.University of New South Wales JAN LANICEK



A Matter of Intelligence: MI5 and the Surveillance of Anti-Nazi Refugees, 1933–50. By Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove. Manchester University Press. 2014.256pp. £70.00.

Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove examine the British Security Service’ssurveillance of refugees from Germany in the era of Adolf Hitler and the earlyCold War. The Security Service, commonly known as MI5, often focused oncommunist infiltration during this period, but it was also concerned about Nazisympathizers, Nazi-linked organizations and German-speaking charities. UsingMI5’s newly released files (supplemented with secondary sources), the authors‘trace the course of MI5 surveillance of anti-Nazi refugees from 1933 to 1950’by ‘investigating when – and why – this particular aspect of its operations beganand what rationale, if any, it was based on’ (p. 2). The overwhelming majorityof refugees were Jewish, but others were communists and pacifists. Brinsonand Dove conclude that ‘there is no evidence’ of anti-Semitic prejudice shapingMI5’s surveillance, but find ‘instances of routine anti-Semitism’ in the documents(p. 237). By highlighting an important focus left out of MI5’s official history, thebook traces key MI5 staff, informants and espionage in Britain surrounding theSecond World War.

The book has three substantive sections that centre on the prelude to thewar, wartime and the start of the Cold War. The first part looks at the originsof MI5 and its ‘military ethos’ in the early history, which argues that 1931was a ‘turning point’ for the expansion of security efforts. Originally startedto counter German espionage prior to the First World War, MI5 worked withGerman authorities after the war with its anti-communism efforts. FollowingHitler taking power, a MI5 memorandum explained that staff should ‘look afterFascism in the same way as they look after communism’, which included focusingon the British Union of Fascists and Nazi Germany’s foreign organization,Auslandorganisation (p. 44). Nevertheless, MI5 continued tracking domestic andforeign communists, such as Jurgen Kuczynski and Edith Tudor-Hart, which‘remained its primary focus at least up to 1935 and arguably until early 1939’(p. 79). Following the 1938 Munich Agreement, more refugees arrived in Britainand the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact prompted MI5 to recommendinterning communists.

The second section examines the expansion of MI5’s operations, includinglooking at informants’ motivations and important German-speakingorganizations. The Security Service was involved in drawing up lists forlarge-scale internment, but the authors describe MI5’s role as a ‘sorry episode’with the files suggesting ‘MI5’s political judgement was wrong, its advice togovernment frequently mistaken and its attitude unbending’ (p. 112). In thecase of monitoring organizations, such as the ‘successful’ charity AustrianCentre, it showed how the British public was supportive of the refugees eventhough the authorities remained suspicious. In fact, ‘the Britons who went outof their way to assist’ refugees were thought by MI5 to be ‘naıve at best andat worst unpatriotic’ (p. 182). The authors then turn to exploring the refugeeinformants, who were rarely paid and did not avoid internment, but ofteninformed authorities due to personal grudges.

In the final section, the book reviews the start of the Cold War with MI5’sresponsibilities for clearing scientists to work on atomic research and Soviet spieswho obtained sensitive information. Two main case studies were Klaus Fuchs, a


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German scientist who was caught leaking atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, andEngelbert Broda, an Austrian scientist who ‘got away’. The authors explain howthe spies successfully passed on information, and why one was arrested and theother was not. They concluded: ‘MI5 largely failed to prioritise or even to identifythose few cases which constituted a genuine security threat’, showing ‘leniency’ towomen and inaction of particularMI5 staff (p. 234). Additionally, thoughmost ofthe refugees were Jewish and several MI5 targets were Jewish, anti-Semitism wasnot a basis for policy even though popular anti-Semitism of the time appeared inthe Security Service files.

A Matter of Intelligence contains unique insight into a well-studied era bygiving attention to previously unavailable documents from a range of archivesin Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom and theUnited States. Brinson and Dove point to further fields of study, including theties between British politics and culture to the intelligence community. As theynote, only a fraction of MI5 files are released and even the ones that are publicsometimes contain significant redactions, which demands further study as moreinformation and documents become available. The book does not have a singlenarrative or one argument, but its twenty-one chapters examine key figures ororganizations that played important roles involving MI5’s operations. Even so,the chapters have smooth transitions that build fromone another in chronologicalorder. Scholars interested in domestic affairs during the Second World War,intelligence history and transnational history will find this book an informativeand well-researched volume.Stony Brook University RYAN SHAFFER

Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. By Camilla Schofield.Cambridge University Press. 2013. xii + 233pp. £65.00.

Like practitioners of New Imperial History, Camilla Schofield believes thatBritain was profoundly shaped by the empire, and that this has not beensufficiently recognized in histories of politics since 1945. The result is adensely argued biographical study that places Enoch Powell in a ‘postcolonial’framework. Scholarly interest in the political life of Powell has increased in recentyears, and this study is likely to provoke further interest and reaction. Rootedin cultural history, it challenges some of the early work on Powell, by politicalscientists and journalists, as well as sizeable biographies in the 1990s by PatrickCosgrave and Simon Heffer. It builds on the insights of Paul Gilroy, Bill Schwarzand the late Stuart Hall, and adopts the generational approach to Conservativepolitics found in the work of Simon Ball and Richard Carr.

Schofield’s book is focused yet nuanced. Powell might have had supporterson the far right, but he was no fascist, for he did not share the former’s faithin the power of the state and disliked Nazism even before the Second WorldWar. The demise of the empire, of which Powell was once an aspiring proconsul,deepened his ‘Tory’ conception of national identity. He identified Britishness withBritain’s venerable institutions, as well as the collective experience of British menfighting in wars. This attitude served to deny the right of New Commonwealthimmigrants to live and work in Britain, though his refutation of empire did



not extend to rejecting also its racist assumptions and practices. Powell believedthat Britain should be a great power, but his profound belief in the sovereigntyof Westminster found expression in disdain for both the United States andthe European Economic Community, thereby ignoring Britain’s centuries-oldpractice of operating within coalitions of nations. Powell criticized the myth ofempire, for promoting the belief amongst the working class that it would bringabout their prosperity. Yet he believed in the necessity ofmyth to national identity,and encouraged the myth that the welfare state was a reward for the Britishpeople’s sacrifice in the Second World War. As Schofield highlights, Powell’sservice in Egypt and India meant that he had no experience of the ‘People’s War’.If this prevented him from recognizing the Beveridge report as a resolution ofthe social and economic tensions of the inter-war years, it is remarkable that hepromoted the idea that the British stood alone against Nazi Germany. Indeed,Powell further disavowed the right of New Commonwealth immigrants to Britishcitizenship by promoting another myth, that the empire had been nobly sacrificedin order to defeat Nazism.

These myths in turn allowed Powell to depict the British people as victimsof an establishment that prioritized obligations to former imperial subjectsover its duty to protect the interests of the working class. This found areceptive audience amongst a generation dislocated by the social, economic andcultural upheavals of the 1960s. Schofield utilizes their correspondence to Powell,especially following his ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, to demonstrate theresonance of the myths he promoted, though it is not always clear if supportersfollowed Powell’s convoluted intellectual reasoning, or its application to othercontroversial questions such as Europe and Northern Ireland. Powell opposedrace relations legislation as a matter of liberty, but what could the public makeof his disinclination to condemn racism, and his own belief that skin colourindicated an immutable marker that set Britain apart from the peoples that hadlong been subject to British rule?

Examining Powell’s ‘revolt’ through the lens of postcolonialism is provocativeand often persuasive. Schofield challenges Peter Brooke’s suggestion that Powellwas primarily concerned with the importation of communalism to Britain, andthat this brings coherence to his views in the 1940s, before he rejected the empire,and those expressed in 1968. But in dismissing this interpretation as a ‘curioushistorical intervention’ (p. 72) that seeks to reveal Powell as a liberal, Schofieldmisses an opportunity to engage with Brooke’s actual contention, that Powell’sviews on communalism drew on the supposed liberalism professed by nineteenth-century proconsuls. Nor was Powell the first to present reactionary opinions inthe clothing of ostensibly progressive language. Diehard Conservatives in the1930s employed it to oppose the 1935 India Act; they were inconsistent andunconvincing, but to highlight their effort is not to endorse it. In readily acceptingthe centrality of Englishness to Powell’s British nationalism, Schofield diminishesthe value of properly examining how he interacted with the non-English identitiesof the United Kingdom. Powell took his Welsh ancestry sufficiently seriouslyto develop a scholarly knowledge of its ancient language and culture, a highlyunusual project for a committed Englishman, and something that surely deservesas much attention as speculation on Powell’s youthful love for another man. Hisviews on Northern Ireland were, as Schofield argues, bound up with his widerconcerns about the radical left and anarchy, but the all too short section on


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Ulster politics overstates Powell’s isolation within unionism, a movement whichhad already shattered into a number of competing factions. Moreover, if Powell’srole as the MP for Wolverhampton is central to Schofield’s wider argument, anopportunity was surely missed in not contrasting this with his constituency workin the equally distinctive context of South Down.

These observations aside, Schofield has written an admirable study of anunusually complex politician. Enoch Powell and the Making of PostcolonialBritain provides historians with a welcome counterpoint to the celebratoryEnochat 100 (2014), edited by Greville Howard, and will no doubt be a regular point ofreference in forthcoming works on contemporary British history.University of Worcester N. C. FLEMING

Muslims and Jews in France: AHistory of Conflict. ByMaud S.Mandel.PrincetonUniversity Press. 2014. x + 253pp. $35.00/£24.95.

After her significant contribution to our understanding of how Jews andArmenians (re)constructed their communities in France after genocide (In theAftermath of Genocide, 2003), Maud Mandel has turned to an equally relevant,yet more polemic study of Jews and Muslims in contemporary France. Theoutbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 led to an increase in violent attacksagainst Jews in France, committed primarily by members of the extreme rightand disenfranchised youth of Muslim origin (see Wieviorka, La tentation anti-Semite, 2005). This transposition of the Middle Eastern conflict abroad hasprovoked debate within French society and has inflamed the press on both sidesof the Atlantic. Since 2006, France has witnessed an escalation in the violence ofanti-Semitic crimes, while more recent events in Paris, in which pro-Palestinianprotesters stormed two central synagogues, demonstrate that Jews and theirreligious institutions mistakenly remain, in the eyes of some, symbols of Israelidomination. Therefore, the time could not be better to analyse Jewish–Muslimrelations in historical perspective and to question how the Israeli–Palestinianconflict has come to play such a central role in French society.

Mandel deftly navigates this minefield through the prism of comparativehistory. Indeed, the author is less concerned by the multiple intersection pointsshared by these two religious minorities in the French public sphere (and thereare quite a few) as she is by the notion of conflict between these two groups:conflict which may be real or imagined, the discourses surrounding it, and thefunctions it has played for Jews, Muslims and the French state. This focus onconflict, beginning in 1948 and concluding in 2000, explains the title of Mandel’sbook, in which she seeks to ‘underscore the way global dynamics, both in theMiddle East and in French North Africa, came together with national andeven local factors to shape Muslim–Jewish relations in postcolonial France’(p. 3).

Mandel’s study opens in Marseilles in 1948, a place she returns to regularlyto ground her larger findings in a rich urban setting with one of France’s largestMuslim and Jewish populations. This refreshing break from Parisian-centrichistorical writing is relevant due to the particular geographical and demographiclandscape ofMarseilles. The case ofMarseilles, at least in 1948, allows the author



to argue that the potential for, and predictions of, conflict were greater than theconflict itself; indeed, according toMandel, Jewish–Muslim conflict inMarseilleswas ‘quite limited and focused on specific, highly charged sites – the port . . .,the cinemas in immigrant neighbourhoods where newsreels relayed informationfrom the war zone; and [transit] camps where Jewish and Muslim migrantscohabitated’ (pp. 22–3). With departures for Palestine and Algeria, Marseilles’sport serves as a key space where tensions simmered when Muslim dockworkersprotested against Jewish immigration to Palestine. Mandel makes the importantpoint that these tensions did not come to a head due to the war in the MiddleEast, but due to the riots in the Moroccan towns of Oujda and Djerada in June1948, in which forty-two Jews were murdered. The riots themselves were largelysparked by Jewish migration to Palestine, which ‘allowed Moroccan nationalsto use the anti-Zionist criticism as a way to forward their anti-French agendas’(p. 28).

Colonial France and its violent decolonization process thus served as theprism through which Jews, Muslims and the French state interpreted and actedon the events of the Middle East. Already a central theme in chapter 1, chapters2 and 3 build on this framework to establish one of Mandel’s central arguments:Jewish–Muslim relations in France cannot be understood without a thoroughgrasp of each group’s respective history in the French republic and with theFrench state. Indeed, chapter 2, on ‘constructing the North African Jew’, seeksto unpack this category, showing its triumvirate origin in the French colonialadministration, Jewish international organizations and indigenous nationalistmovements, which through word and action compressed a diverse Jewishpopulation with deep-seated attachments to their respective home countries intoa collective group, de-emphasizing their belonging in independent North Africa.For Jewish international organizations, actively dealing with the aftermath ofNazi persecutions, North African violence aimed at France and affecting (andat times targeting) its Jewish populations took on larger meaning, makingemigration a central ‘Jewish political strategy’ (p. 40) in North Africa. SuchJewish migrations, coupled with nationalist rhetoric, made staying put seemimpossible to many Jews.

The complexity of Muslim–Jewish relations comes to the fore in chapter 3,which focuses on the ‘impact of decolonization on Muslim–Jewish life’ inmetropolitan France. Indeed, undeniable inequalities in the colonial status ofJews and Muslims (at least in the Algerian case) led to asymmetric settlementpatterns for North African migrants in Metropolitan France, even if sharedurban spaces and origins kindled friendly relations. Citizenship remains a majorexplicative factor in this process. Algerian Jews had obtained full citizenshipthrough the Decret Cremieux in 1870, only to see it revoked in 1940 and thenreinstated in 1943. The legal status of Muslims took an entirely different path:the law of 20 September 1947 granted Algerian ‘Muslim subjects’ greater rightsand in November 1958, these Muslims became citizens with full rights. However,their newly granted citizenship was revoked with Algerian independence in1962, whereas Jews maintained their French citizenship. Recent research hasdemonstrated the extensive repatriation efforts of the French government for itsown citizens (see, for example, Scioldo-Zurcher, Devenir Metropolitain, 2010),which largely excludedMuslims. In the tense setting of the 1950s and early 1960s,Muslims in France were struggling for work, housing and papers. During these


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years, the Palestinian cause did not gather much support; the defining theme ofJewish–Muslim relations in France was not centred in the Middle East, but inNorth Africa.

If one considers these first three chapters altogether, we see that Mandel hasfirmly argued that differing relationships with the French state and access to theresources of the French republic influenced, and continue to inform, Jewish–Muslim relations. Take, for example, the right to organize into associationsand provide self-help. Mandel points out multiple times how the centuries-longtradition of private Jewish philanthropy in France can be contrasted with thepaucity ofMuslim associative life inmetropolitanFrance in the decades followingthe Second World War (pp. 72–4). Indeed, until the Mitterrand era, foreignerswere subject to special requirements when organizing associations (if they werenot altogether banned). As a primarily foreign group, Muslims, and Algerians inparticular, were the targets of police repression; any organizing was thus suspect.The ability to provide self-help has deep-seated implications in the trajectories ofMuslim and Jewish immigrants and can also explain a certain resentment thatis still felt today among certain Muslims, who compare their lot with the Jewswho arrived at the same historical juncture. It also creates an asymmetry in thesources available to historians. Indeed, during and after the Second World War,Jewish organizations developed a historical consciousness that translates todayinto an abundance of archival records. Mandel is fully aware of this asymmetryand exercises great caution with her sources (p. 59). Nonetheless, one must notethat primary sources from Muslim organizations are rare and often, for the pre-1968 period, Mandel discerns the situation of Muslims from police reports andthe press. The shift that occurs in 1968 changes this situation: Muslim actorsgenerate more primary sources as they gain political traction in French society.

Indeed, if the historiography of the Jews of France has shown that the Six-Day War of 1967 represents a turning point in Jews’ willingness to organizepolitically as Jews and also helped to unify French Muslims, Mandel countersin the second half of this book that it was in fact the monumental shifts withinFrench society in 1968 (and not the events of theMiddle East in 1967) that placedthe Israeli–Palestine question at the heart of French Jewish–Muslim relations.Nevertheless, the mobilizations of 1967 were not insignificant. In chapter 4,Mandel keenly analyses the functions of the Six-Day War for Jews, Muslimsand actors of the French state. For example, for the Amicale des Algeriens enFrance, an Algerian Muslim social welfare organization, the Palestinian causewas a means of uniting Algerians in France; for Jews, the conflict also allowedfor unprecedented communal unity; for French politicians, such as the socialistmayor of Marseilles, Gaston Defferre (a supporter of Zionist organizations sincethe immediate post-war period), taking a pro-Israel stance in 1967 was ameans ofdistinguishing himself from his Gaullist opponents and attracting Jewish voters.AsMandel points out, such posturing around the Israeli–Palestinian conflict tellshow ‘the story of two polarized ethno-religious political units hardened as newpolitical actors’ (p. 81).

As previously noted, Mandel’s chapter 5 introduces a new argument to thehistoriography by placing heightened importance on the events of 1968 in thetransformation of Jewish–Muslim relations. Evoking the June 1968 riots inBelleville, which, for a two-day period transformed this working-class, multi-ethnic Parisian neighbourhood into a site of violence, turning Jews and Muslims



against each other, Mandel explains that such violence was the result of a‘combustible combination of leftist radicalism, massive strikes, postcolonialpolitics and Middle Eastern tensions’ (p. 104). As new alliances among radicalsmoved the Palestinian cause to a more central place in French society, Frenchuniversities, as ‘hotbeds of French radical culture’ (p. 101), became a key arena forJewish–Muslim conflict. At the same time, however, radical leftist groups broughttogether Jews and Muslims in new ways: many members of the extreme left wereJewish, and while this identity did not translate into a ‘Jewish agenda’ (p. 107), ithad informed their leftist ideals. They thus worked closely with Muslim students,now more politicized, who did not hesitate to defend the Palestinian cause astheir own. Finally, external factors also played a role: Palestinian nationalists,looking for new forms of support after the 1967 losses, turned to France; Arafat’sFatah sent a representative to Paris in 1969 who focused on ‘challenging Israel’shold on French sympathies’ (p. 105) by working closely with universities andleft-wing radicals, and establishing a French newspaper. If Fatah was seeking ameans of influencing French foreign policy, leftist radicals, Mandel points out,embraced the Palestinian cause for both ideological and pragmatic reasons, as ameans of obtaining the political support of Muslim workers. Pragmatism alsoinformed Fatah, which, to garner support in the mainstream French politicalestablishment, slowly distanced itself from the extreme left. Mandel is carefulnot to overestimate these transformations for Muslims in France: most Muslimworkers ‘displayed little interest in the Palestinian cause, despite the propagandatargeting them’ (p. 111). Nonetheless, Jewish–Muslim relations had now fusedwith the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and when Israeli and Palestinian commandoattacks targetedFrench sites in the early 1970s,Mandel observes that ‘distinctionsbetween the “here” and the “there” were breaking down’ (p. 118), a fact madeeven more clear during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

In her final chapter, Mandel analyses the ‘Birth and death of the anti-racistcoalition’ in the 1980s, during the decade of Mitterrand, the Second-GenerationMuslim Beur movement and the rise of the extreme right. This moment in Frenchpolitical history lent new recognition tominority groups, while fear of the extremeright provided a push factor towards activism, as did the rise in actual hate crimes(twenty-six Muslims were killed in racist incidents from 1980 to 1994 (p. 128);likewise, the bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in 1980 was one of severalmajor acts of anti-Semitism during this period). The question remained whetherminority groups would fight for their own rights (particularism) or establish amulti-ethnic collective platform (labelled by the Socialists as ‘pluriculturalism’in opposition to the anglophone notion of ‘multiculturalism’). Mandel argues inthis chapter that pluricultural approaches, which had initially brought Jews andMuslims together, glossed over important differences between these groups, andthus gave way to a more particularistic stance, based on ‘dialogue’ between Jewsand Muslims. She develops this argument by tracing the collaboration betweenSOS Racisme (created in 1984 by young leaders in the Socialist party) and themajor French Jewish student group, the Union des Etudiants Juifs de France(UEJF). With its strong pluricultural approach, Jewish–Muslim solidarity heldan important place in SOS Racisme’s agenda. Yet while SOS Racisme activistshad declared that it could not solve the problems of the Middle East on the‘banks of the Seine’ (p. 136), its archives show that the organization cultivatedimportant tensions due to the Middle East. Tensions simmered after the first


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Intifada in 1987 and came to a head with the first Gulf War in 1991, leading to ahighly public split between the Jewish student group and SOS Racisme. Mandelsees this moment, coupled with disputes over French secularism (during theHeadscarf affair) and racism versus anti-Semitism (after the Carpentras cemeterydesecration), as the end of pluriculturalism, and the victory of particularism . . .,giving way to Jewish–Muslim dialogue as a new (and the only) political strategy.France Plus, established in 1985, the first Franco-Maghrebin organization tosupport the Palestinian cause and recognize the existence of Israel, thus hadslowly become a privileged interlocutor of the UEJF. This final chapter raisesimportant questions about the anti-racist struggle in France that merit futureresearch: to what extent did particularist dialogue coexist with pluriculturalistefforts? Who were the members of SOS Racisme (were they Jewish, Muslim, orneither?), and how has its membership base changed over time? What about theLICRA and the MRAP, two anti-racist organizations with ‘Jewish’ origins andtheir relationshipswithMuslimorganizations? Finally, one can ask towhat extentparticularism had (only) negative effects: did its embrace of particularism enddialogue, or did it allow for more honesty and deeper alliances? Current eventsanswer this question with pessimism, yet Mandel identifies in this chapter a newarea of historical study to be explored, and hasmade a first step in contextualizingtoday’s anti-racist actors.

To conclude, Muslims and Jews in France is an extremely important bookwhich will open new paths in scholarship on the Middle Eastern conflict andJewish–Muslim relations in France.Mandel’s contribution suggests that Jews andMuslims have managed to coexist for decades without considerable violence andin light of a highly volatile Middle East. The tensions and derapages in the 1948–2000 period pale in comparison to today’s violence, suggesting that somethinghas shifted in French society. Refusing oversimplification, Mandel’s book isnecessarily dense and her argument complex. Advanced students and scholarsof modern and contemporary France, Jewish studies and Muslim studies, willwelcome this contribution to the historiography.Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 LAURA HOBSON FAURE

Poland’sWar onRadio Free Europe, 1950–1989. By PawełMachcewicz.Translatedby Maya Latynski. Cold War International History Project. Stanford UniversityPress. 2015. xiv + 421pp. $65.00.

Established during the early years of the ColdWar as a means of underminingthe Soviet Union’s control over eastern Europe, Radio Free Europe providedan important alternative source of information for those living behind the IronCurtain. Previous studies such as Arch Puddington’s Broadcasting Freedom:The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (2000) andA. Ross Johnson’s Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years andBeyond (2010) have examined the broadcaster’s internal workings and changingrelationshipwith theCentral IntelligenceAgency, aswell as its response to easternbloc uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. By comparison the study of theeastern bloc’s response toRadioFree Europe has been limited.With the exceptionofColdWar Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (2010),



edited by A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, it has not been subject toresearch and analysis in English. PawełMachcewicz’sPoland’sWar on Radio FreeEurope, 1950–1989 represents a major breakthrough in this field.

Machcewicz’s second work to appear in an expanded English-language editionfollowing Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956 (2009), Poland’s War on Radio FreeEurope makes a significant contribution to the history of three interrelatedareas: Radio Free Europe, the Cold War and communism in Poland. Drawingon extensive multi-archival research as well as over twenty personal interviews,Machcewicz’s work is as much an analysis of the struggle of the Polish authoritiesagainst their own citizens as it is of their struggle against Radio Free Europe.It details not only the methods directed against the station, but also those usedagainst Polish citizens associated with it. The cases of Andrzej Czechowicz andthe recently deceased Władysław Bartoszewski provide the most high-profileexamples of such methods.

Recruited as an agent shortly after being employed by Radio Free Europe inMunich in 1965, Czechowicz provided information on employees and internalconflicts at the station to the Polish authorities. His return to Poland in 1971and his subsequent unveiling as an agent formed part of a major propagandacampaign against Radio Free Europe orchestrated by Poland’s propaganda andsecurity services. By contrast Bartoszewski, a historian and veteran of Poland’sSecond World War resistance movement, as well as a future post-communistforeign minister, passed information concerning internal developments in Polandto Radio Free Europe via a number of channels, including the Austrian CulturalInstitute in Warsaw. Accidentally detected during the mid-1960s as a result ofan ongoing security service investigation, Bartoszewski (whose security servicecode names included ‘Satan’) and his associates found themselves subject toextensive surveillance and investigation. Following the arrest and interrogationof a number of his associates in September 1970, Bartoszewski was subject tointense harassment, including the use of anonymous letters to discredit him,the withdrawal of his books from sale and the excision of ‘his name fromall publications, even footnotes’ by the censor (p. 171). Although charged inDecember 1970, Bartoszewski never faced trial as a result of a leadership changein the Party. He remained subject to security service attention until the end ofcommunism.

While the activities of the security services including the use of methods of‘disintegration’ and ‘disinformation’ illustrated by the Bartoszewski case are anincreasingly common feature of the Polish-language literature on communism,this is the first major account to appear in English. As such it makes a much-needed contribution to the English-language literature on both communism andRadio Free Europe. In presenting a comprehensive analysis of the efforts of thePolishUnitedWorkers’ Party to counteract Radio Free Europe’s influence duringthe Cold War, Machcewicz also provides an original account of the workingsof the communist state in Poland and of its relationship to the broader ColdWar context. This allows for a far more complex understanding of these areasthan previously available. Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe makes a majorcontribution not only to the history of Radio Free Europe therefore, but alsoto that of the Cold War and communist-era Poland.University of East Anglia GRAHAM HARRIS


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The Americas

The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. Edited by JohnErnest. Oxford Handbooks of Literature. Oxford University Press. 2014. xiv +472pp. £105.00.

The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative edited by JohnErnest represents an impressive collection of essays written by leading scholarsof slavery in the United States. The collection contains twenty-five individualchapters, separated into six parts including ‘Historical Practices’; ‘LayeredTestimonies’; ‘Textual Bindings’; ‘Experience and Authority’; ‘Environmentsand Migrations’; and ‘Echoes and Traces’, which makes it easier to navigate.As Ernest notes in the introductory chapter, the central theme directing theHandbook is ‘that slavery both cannot and must be represented, and that the taskof addressing this vast world of concerns takes one beyond the usual bordersthat distinguish between south and north, slave and free, black and white’ (p. 10).Moving beyond familiar understandings of book-length narratives such as thoseof Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb andHarriet Jacobs, theHandbook introducesthe reader to new conceptual ways of reading such sources while also consideringand exploring slave testimony that is less well known or has traditionallybeen defined as lying outside the strict literary definitions of the classic slavenarrative.

For historians of American slavery there are several recognizable names in thiscollection writing about their own specialisms in the context of slave testimony:MitchKachun explores ‘SlaveNarratives andHistoricalMemory’,Marie JenkinsSchwartz reflects on ‘The WPA Narratives as Historical Sources’, Jon MichaelVlach discusses the ‘Landscape of Slave Narratives’, Brenda E. Stevenson’sanalyses ‘Family and Community in the Slave Narratives’, and Marcus Woodsexamines ‘Slave Narratives and Visual Cultures’. Given their expertise it wouldseem out of place to have such a comprehensive volume exclude these leadingscholars. These particular essays serve aswonderful background reading for thoseless familiar with the many different forms of slave testimony originating fromslavery in the United States and as introductory reading for students who areinterested in the major themes of the slave narratives in their many forms.

For existing scholars of American slavery, however, there are several significantadditions to the Handbook which will introduce new themes, ideas and sourcesinto both teaching and research. Jeannine Marie DeLombard’s contributionconcerning ‘Slave Narratives and U.S Legal History’ successfully merges thedisciplinary boundaries of history, legal studies and literature to produce aconvincing argument concerning the ways in which the ‘classic antebellum slavenarrative joined over a century of black life-writing in tracing the impress ofAmerican law on the African American self,’ most particularly ‘with its sustainedcritique of the “American slave code” ’ (p. 68). Elizabeth Regosin’s chapter, ‘Lostin theArchives: The PensionBureauFiles’, makes a compelling argument that theCivil War pension files of some 100,000 former enslaved men and women shouldbe included in the larger body of slave narratives, although they are currentlyconsidered as falling outside this collection of sourcematerials.While the pensionbureau files offer a different understanding of the self, from both a first-person(as claimant) and third-person (as witness) perspective, it is no less valid and, asRegosin argues, provides a ‘multiplicity of perspectives of the life of the claimant



and those around him or her’ (p. 120). Teresa A. Goddu provides a wonderfulessay concerning the slave narrative as material artefact in ‘The Slave Narrativeas Material Text’, delving again into interdisciplinary waters, this time of bookhistory and print culture studies (p. 149), while Kimberly K. Smith provides aquite remarkable analysis of the slave narratives and environmental criticism, ‘notan obvious subject for ecocritical investigation’ (p. 315), as she herself remarks,in the penultimate part of The Handbook.

The last section of Ernest’s edited collection rightly concerns the ‘Echoes andTraces’ of the African American slave narrative. Beginning with the soundscape(or the echoes) of the narratives, Daphne A. Brook’s recounts the life and timesof ‘classical musician, trans-Atlantic celebrity and bondsman Thomas “BlindTom” Wiggins who was, himself, a kind of “ear” to slave culture’ (p. 392).The Handbook then closes with Jocelyn K. Moody’s analysis of ‘The Truth ofSlave Narratives’, positioning writings by two free northern black people inthe post-emancipation era in order to illustrate the concept of postmemory orgenerational traumas, so relevant to so many of the types of slave narratives inthe collection. This last chapter by Moody points to the goal of the collection,laid out in the Introduction, of ‘promot [ing] scholarship that will continue thework of recovering the testimony of the enslaved while also developing innovativemethods for attending to that body of testimony creatively and thoughtfully’(p. 11).

There are so many good things about this book, including its contributors,its analysis, and structure. Ernest must be congratulated for compiling such acollection of stellar essays written by leading academics in the field of AfricanAmerican slavery. Although the cost of the Handbook may leave it housedon library shelves to be borrowed rather than in the personal collections ofacademics or students, this collection promises to provide the basis of futurediscussions on the slave narratives and directions for further research for wellinto the next decade.University of East Anglia REBECCA J. FRASER

William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography andDocumentary History. By Gaston Espinosa. Duke University Press. 2014. xxii +416pp. £17.99.

Harvey Cox, the pre-eminent religion scholar at Harvard University, catapultsthis biography of William J. Seymour, the ignored founder of the internationalspread of Pentecostalism, to the frontline of Christian historiography, in thecompany of church reformers St Paul, Augustine, Luther and Calvin. Thissuggestion works brilliantly, as it turns the reading of this book into anintellectual adventure. Instead of ploughing through another biography of acolourful religious entrepreneur, this issue makes one wonder whether theauthor succeeds in persuading the reader that Seymour should be crownedas the founding father of worldwide Pentecostalism. Author Gaston Espinosa,Associate Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Claremont McKennaCollege in California, is a specialist on Latino Pentecostals in America and wellequipped for this task.


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In order to assess the validity of the conclusion of this book, one may begin toexamine the second part first before reading the 150-page biography of Seymour.The 250 pages of documents by and on Seymour include sermons, doctrinalstatements, letters, newspaper articles, testimonies, and critical reports. It isquite clear that these sources will not acquire the same status as St Augustine’sConfessions or Calvin’s Institutes, but they do provide the necessary evidence tocheck Espinosa’s claim of Seymour as the central source of this innovative (andthe fastest-growing) global branch of Christianity. Thousands of denominationsserving hundreds of millions of Pentecostal believers justify this promotion.These documents revive the fervour of the early years of the Pentecostal revivalfrom 1906–9. In those years sanctified believers discovered the Holy Spirit, whichenergized them to disregard man-made (racial, class and gender) blockades forfellowship and unity during the revival at Azusa Street in Los Angeles. Moreover,this revival triggered a quick and impressive global missionary impulse. Contraryto the expectation of later readers, Seymour did not promote speaking in tonguesas the sign of baptism by the Holy Spirit. He indicated charity as the keycredential among the many new and spectacular manifestations of the Spirit.This is important for understanding his relative obscurity, and provides a clearstandard to evaluate his own life.

Compared to the listed church reformers, Seymour was hardly educated.In fact, he found traditional learning a hazard. His calls for cleansing thechurch from dead forms and liberating it from the captivating burden oftradition explains that his writings will not be classics for meditation, but his lifemight.

William Joseph Seymour was born in Centerville, Louisiana in 1870. Hisparents were liberated slaves, who before becoming Baptists attended a RomanCatholic Church. In his twenties he fled to the north, was influenced by radicalHoliness preachers, who advocated racial equality, and decided to enter theministry. During his travels in Texas, he met Charles Fox Parham, who taughta group of disciples how to speak in tongues and practise healing as resultsfrom baptism with the Spirit. But Seymour experienced racial prejudice fromwhite ministerial colleagues in Texas, and he moved to California. There hisprayer meeting developed into a city-wide revival concentrated at the AzusaStreet mission. The goal (spreading the gospel as part of the end of times) andthe means (speaking in tongues) made it easy to internationalize the movement.Most attendees of the revival came from other denominations, among themmany seasoned missionaries who brought the practices to all corners of theworld.

The publication of the monthly Apostolic Faith was crucial for spreadingthe news and is in fact the main argument for identifying Los Angeles as thestrategic centre for global Pentecostalism over and against the many other placeswhere spiritualmanifestations took place. Thismonthlywas themain educationalinstrument for building an interpretative and organizational framework againstwhich all other groups could position themselves, either as co-workers or ascompetitors. In this second category belonged his erstwhile mentor Parham, whofelt scandalized by the interracial community and tried to oust Seymour, butalso former co-workers, such as Clara Lum, who was disappointed by Seymour’smarriage in 1909. She took the magazine and its subscription list to Portland,Oregon, effectively moving the attention away from Azusa and Seymour. This



move, in addition to his sudden death in 1922, explains the neglect of Seymourin the movement’s historiography.

Espinosa lists many arguments to build Seymour’s central position as theframer of a balanced doctrine, resister of racial oppression, exporter of liberatingmessages and guardian against fanaticism. Seymour was fully aware of thedifficulty of checking conflicting claims of divine revelation. These forces provedstrong and marginalized Seymour’s leading role, but also proved immenselyattractive for oppressed peoples around the globe.

It was the combination of the simultaneous occurrence of similar religiousphenomena of spiritual empowerment of non-whites, women and different classesthat convinced many of the power of the liberation from racial oppression.Especially the international scene and the communication structure of themagazine at Azusa put the American experience at the heart of the Pentecostalrevival. Seymour gave it a balanced interpretation and channelled the leadershiptensions towards stability. Espinosa’s detailed and careful analysis of Seymour’srole in the internal and external dynamics of the early Pentecostal movementexplains much about its crucial decisions, and the contemporary strengths andweaknesses of this branch ofChristianity.He succeeds in restoring his protagonistto the position of the father of modern Pentecostalism.Whether he belongs in thepantheon of church reformers was not Seymour’s concern, so perhaps it shouldnot be ours either.Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg HANS KRABBENDAM

Whistle Stop: How 31,000 Miles of Train Travel, 352 Speeches and a LittleMidwest Gumption Saved the Presidency of Harry Truman. By Philip White.University Press of New England. ForeEdge. 2014. 314pp. $29.95/£22.00.

Spoiler alert: Harry Truman won the 1948 presidential election. Yet formuch of Philip White’s pacy and gripping Whistle Stop, it is hard to believethat the Missourian former senator, the politician little known on the nationalstage who had acceded to the presidency on Roosevelt’s death in 1945, couldpossibly withstand the challenge of the urbane Republican lawyer, ThomasDewey.

White offers the story of a scrapper: an underdog politician prepared to fighthard and, when needs be, dirty, to win an election that the pollsters had calledfor his opponent months before any voters cast their ballot. And White’s greattalent in delivering this political battle is his art as a storyteller. Certainly there issufficient detail to impress the scholar and add to the increasing volume of workaround Truman’s 1948 battle, but what makes this book stand out is the way heuses the devices of Truman’s two major train campaigns across the United Statesto bring pace and movement to what is essentially a campaign diary.

The 1948 election remains a turning point in the machinery of fighting USelections. By 1952 when Eisenhower fought Adlai Stevenson for theWhiteHouse,the plane had replaced the train and TV advertising had taken the place of muchface-to-face campaigning. But four years previously, Truman rode the rails for thelast time on his whistle-stop tours – two forays to theMidwest andWestern statesto connect directly with voters in Democrat states and swing states in the hope


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of quelling unrest in his own party and, somehow, cutting back the double-digitlead the pollsters gave to his Republican opponent.

White structures his work around three key events: the first summer traincampaign – at a time when Truman could not even guarantee he would be theDemocratic Party nominee for the presidential race; the Democrat Conventionin a stiflingly hot Philadelphia; and the autumn ‘fall’ campaign tour during whichTruman slowly recovered lost ground. In terms of sheer drama – a necessity foran effective narrative history – the Philadelphia convention stands tall at theheart of the piece. Battling the forces of Henry Wallace on the left and StromThurmond and the conservative Dixiecrats of the south on the right, Truman’spolitical instinct and a strong team of very bright advisers, enabled him to carrythe day – and on the first ballot.

White pays particular attention to the emergence of civil rights as a coreplatform plank of the Democrats – an essential underpinning for the laterDemocrat successes of Kennedy, Johnson and, to a lesser extent, Carter. Hemakes good use of Hubert Humphrey’s platform speech easing to what he calls‘its defining line’ when Humphrey states: ‘The time has now arrived in Americafor the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walkforthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights’ (p. 87). This highlights oneof the most important aspects of this work: the shared responsibility for successthat brings forward an array of interesting characters in the campaign. Thisincludes Humphrey, together with vice-presidential nominee Alban Barkley andClark Clifford who masterminded Truman’s populist left-of-centre campaign.The supporting cast to this picaresque tale includes the arch-conservative RobertTaft, who led the Republican ‘Do-Nothing’ 80th Congress; Tom Dewey himself,and such acolytes who would emerge in Eisenhower’s administration as HerbBrownell and Jim Hagerty. Throughout his journey, Truman makes great play ofnot attacking his opponent directly (until right at the end of the campaign), buttakes continued issue with Congress on its inability to act and pass legislation onsuch issues as housing and the economy.

While the train campaigns provide the movement and energy for White’sstorytelling, one key aspect of the campaign he is at pains to convey is the roleof Truman’s specialist advisers in providing him with the inside knowledge toaddress local crowds at every tiny ‘whistle stop’ with ammunition that would stirthem to vote for Harry. This DNC Research Division, led by William L. Batt Jr,provides the template for every subsequent presidential campaign research office.While White is at pains to detail their diligence and obvious success, it is the leastengaging aspect of the book. These characters were so ‘back-office’ as to remainmarginal and largely two-dimensional throughout the piece.

Not so Harry. White’s writing soars when he is describing Truman’s railjourney from state to state in the seventeen-car Ferdinand Magellan. Trumanis up before the dawn, retires in the wee small hours and makes speech afterspeech anywhere he can draw any semblance of a crowd. Dewey, by contrast,travels little, speaks less often and actually says almost nothing of note. Whiteis meticulous in describing the routines of both the June ‘inspection’ tourand the full-blown autumn campaign tour. He describes the cheek-by-jowlexistence of the press cohort travelling with the president and the rather moreluxurious conditions enjoyed by Harry, wife Bess and daughter Margaret. Whatis highlighted is Truman’s immense work ethic and willingness to fight hard



both to emerge from the long shadow of Roosevelt, and to overcome seeminglyimpossible odds to defeat the Republican Dewey–Warren ‘dream team’. Thenarrative is interspersed with excerpts from key speeches and analysis on theimpact of Truman’s energy and rhetoric ‘forthright, unpretentious and terriblysincere’ (p. 24) in slowly turning around Dewey’s lead in the polls. Harry strikesout west – and studiously avoids the south, in the knowledge that his new-liberalleaning does not cut the mustard in Dixie. Election night is almost an anti-climaxbut as the result is finally known Truman is back on the Ferdinand Magellan,close to home in Kansas City, Missouri. ‘Stand by me’, White quotes, ‘becauseI’ve got the biggest job in the world now’ (p. 240).

Appealing to US political history scholars and general US history enthusiasts,White has taken the campaign diary in a new direction and fulfils his briefhighly effectively. As a new US presidential election campaign hoves into view,candidates would do well to take an example from Harry: pure belief; boundlessenergy; localization and direct voter engagement.University of Reading MARK SHANAHAN

Name, Rank and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs At Home andAbroad. By Charles S. Young. Oxford University Press. 2014. xi + 241pp.£23.99/$35.00.

To call Korea a ‘police action’ does not do justice to the courage and sacrificemade by thousands of Americans in the first undeclared and limited militaryconfrontation of the ColdWar. To call it a war is more fitting. But after consultingCharles Young’s Name, Rank and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWsat Home and Abroad, readers might rightly ask if there was more than one warbeing fought. His meticulously researched work suggests there were multipleconflicts. The war to save South Korea after its invasion in 1950 by the North,the UN’s attempted conquest of North Korea after Pyongyang’s forces had beenpushed back the following year, and the war of words before both sides agreed toan armistice in 1953 are common knowledge. But, argues Young, there was more,although most of it seems to have been fought on American soil. There was thewar to keep Americans supporting the struggle; the campaign to justify greaterpeacetime defence spending; and the all-important contest to win control of thedebate about prisoners of war. The POW issue forms the arc of Young’s work,and his findings are bound to rekindle debate about what has been dismissed as‘The Forgotten War’.

Young’s investigation indicates that as the war descended into stalemate in1951, Washington used the POW issue as a pawn to win concessions at thebargaining table. His findings suggest this was part of a plan by the US todiscredit its enemies by inducing North Korean and Chinese prisoners to rejectcommunism and defect. The ‘voluntary repatriation’, as prisoner exchange wascalled at the time, was nothing of the sort, claims Young, who recounts in detailthe not so subtle efforts by American and UN agents to infiltrate POW camps,instigate a campaign of violence and intimidation against committed communistprisoners, and terrorize others into renouncing their right of return. It was tobe, he says, quoting historian Rosemary Foot, ‘a substitute for victory’ (p. 65).


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If Washington could present a human balance sheet showing just how manyChinese and North Korean troops were willing to forsake kith and kin to avoidreturning to communist rule, it might vindicate the US effort in Korea, galvanizeAmericans to stay the course as the Cold War unfolded, and add colour to awar described by David Halberstam as ‘a puzzling, gray, very distant conflict’(p. 176).

However, Young says, boosting the numbers took time. According to hiscalculations that meant an additional eighteen months of captivity for Americanprisoners, an extension of their ordeal which he says received no officialexplanation. And during that time some of them collaborated with the enemyand, in the worst-case scenario, nearly two dozen renounced the United Statesand defected. In a response to an apparent reversal of fortune, Young’s inquiryreveals that US officials rejected any accusations that it was the result of theirmachinations gone awry, and instead opened a new front of the war as a possiblediversion. This time Washington pointed to invaders coming ashore in the formof repatriated American prisoners. Young provides a statistical sampling of theappraisal of their conduct upon their return: that one in seven assisted the enemy,that on the whole they didn’t resist enough or escape enough, and that theirminds were bent to the Chinese will (p. 80). The cold welcome these cold warriorsreceivedwas ‘amplified by news events, Hollywoodmovies, and planted stories . . .generated by the Pentagon’ (p. 4). For readers unaware of what Korean POWswent through, Young provides ample details. There was talk of rank reductions,dishonourable discharges, courts martial and even jail time; anything to fudgethe evidence. But when the government pushed the tribunals issue too far, it‘generated a public backlash powerful enough to stop courts-martial in theirtracks’ (p. 4). Now officials shifted to a new enemy; communist brainwashing,or, in the words of one scientist, menticide, or mind murder (p. 136). How couldthis have happened? Young argues that US officials trotted out several theories:soft post-Second World War military discipline, a permissive society, womenin general and moms, with their tendency to coddle, in particular (p. 156).According to Young, ‘masculine standards were eroding’, and moms throughtheir weakness became a target for the cold warriors, who had to restrain theirsentimentality and their baleful influence on men (p. 151). The end result of thismodern-day inquisition, he argues, was a tougher code of conduct for Americansoldiers while in captivity. It would consist of nothing more than name, rank,serial number and date of birth, and a commitment to evade answering furtherquestions or make oral or written statements ‘disloyal to my country’ (p. 160).The new directive went into effect in 1955 and, reports Young, the nation snappedto attention. Defence budgets skyrocketed, internal vigilance did likewise, andthe campaign to promote mental toughness, physical fitness and masculinitybecame institutionalized. But along with all that, Young concludes, came animplicit message. All Americans are involved in this new era of limited war; noone knows how long it might last, how much it might cost, or what tactics mighthave to be used in order to win. The only institution which seemed to have all theanswers, surmised Young, was the US government which, in the end would stopat nothing to remind Americans of that seemingly unimpeachable fact, even if itmeant holding other Americans hostage to prove it.DeVry University JOHN MORELLO



Failing Our Veterans: The G.I. Bill and the VietnamGeneration. ByMark Boulton.New York University Press. 2014. xii + 273pp. $49.00/£34.00.

Concentrating on educational benefits, Failing Our Veterans compares theCongressionally mandated benefits that VietnamWar-era veterans received withthose that earlier generations of veterans, particularly those who served in theSecond World War, had enjoyed. In short, Boulton demonstrates that ‘thebenefits offered by the Vietnam-era bills were lower than those offered by the 1944G.I. Bill, not only in terms of dollar amounts but also in terms of the quality ofeducation they provided’ (p. 9).

Boulton begins by taking a long view of the purposes of veterans’ benefitsfrom the time of the Revolutionary War onward. He explains, ‘At different times,veterans’ benefits have been used as a simple reward for service, an inducementto enlist, a readjustment tool to ease the transition back to civilian life, amedium for veterans to make up educational or vocational time lost from civilianlife, or a means to stimulate the economy’ (p. 20). Turning to the twentiethcentury, the book describes the purposes and benefit levels of the Second WorldWar-era ‘G.I. Bill of Rights’, offers a detailed account of the debates betweenproponents of higher and lower benefit levels for veterans, and examines thepolitical underpinnings of their views.

There were essentially two intersecting debates: first, there were differencesbetween supporters of the New Deal and other federally funded socialprogrammes, on one side, and fiscal conservatives and advocates of limitedgovernment, on the other. The lines of argument about veterans’ educationalbenefits intersected with debates about the proper role of government inregulating the economy and providing services to citizens. Second, there wasdisagreement about whether benefits should be given to veterans at large orwhether they should be given preferentially to those who had disproportionatelysuffered or had their lives disrupted as a result of military service, whetherbecause they had served in combat, been wounded or been disabled. Here,political outcomes were affected not just by the political predilectionsof legislators but by the programmes and lobbying power of veterans’organizations.

The two principal protagonists in debates about veterans’ benefits were twoTexas politicians: Representative Olin ‘Tiger’ Teague, a Second World Warveteran who had been badly wounded and ended the war a highly decoratedofficer, and Senator Ralph W. Yarborough, also a decorated veteran of the war.Bourne’s biographical sketches of the two politicians help to animate the dramaof legislative debates. Apart from being elected as Democrats, the two had fewother similarities: Yarborough was a liberal Democrat who had supported theNew Deal and later President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programmes andwho had a perennial affinity for the oppressed and underrepresented; Teagueembraced the conservative views of the Democratic Party’s southern contingent,adhered to states’ rights and advocated fiscal conservatism. He occupied animportant position as chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee onVeterans’ Affairs from 1955 to 1972. As the result of an agreement with the SenateFinance Affairs Committee, all consequential veterans’ benefits legislation wasacted on first in the House, giving Teague a position from which he could blockmeasures of which he disapproved.


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During the Johnson administration, Congress passed several bills gearedto providing educational benefits for veterans of the Vietnam War, but thebenefit levels had not kept up with the rising costs of education. Criticism of theadequacy of educational benefits rose during the presidency of Richard Nixon.Ultimately, the level of veterans’ educational benefits increased in the 1970s.Vietnam veterans used education benefits at a considerably higher rate than hadtheir predecessors who served in the Second World War or the Korean War. TheVietnam veterans’ higher rate of participation in tertiary education has to beset against the background, though, of the increasing proportion of members oftheir generation who attended college and university. Much debated though thestatistics were in what Boulton terms ‘wildly contradictory claims’ (p. 142), thepreponderance of evidence showed that Vietnam veterans’ educational benefitsnever reached the level of those enjoyed by veterans who had served in the middledecades of the century. This economic reality constrained the educational choicesthat Vietnam veterans made, particularly if they were in an area where tuitionand other costs were high: they tended to be restricted to going to lower-tierschools with lower fees, or to supplementing their G.I. benefits from othersources.

Boulton examines the experiences of specific groups of Vietnam veterans. Inthe 1970s the media reported on numerous problems Vietnam veterans suffered,including high rates of unemployment, drug addiction and psychologicalproblems. Economic difficulties affected African Americans with the greatestseverity. Because African Americans suffered disproportionate rates of ‘badpaper’, or less-than-honourable discharges, they were also barred from or facedobstacles in receiving veterans’ benefits. Female veterans enjoyed the sameeducational benefits as men did, but tended to use them later in life, apparentlybecause of maternity-related career breaks.

Boulton places the discussion of educational benefits in the wider contextof the readjustment problems Vietnam veterans experienced, including thetensions between Vietnam veterans and the membership of mainstream veteransorganizations, the Vietnam veterans’ comparatively low rate of engagement inelective office, and the results of several studies evidencing veterans’ attitude totheir service and their fellow citizens’ opinions of the veterans. He makes useof a large number of collections of primary materials, and weighs the evidenceresponsibly. As he argues early on, the lack of academic attention to VietnamWar-era provision of educational benefits means that ‘this vital aspect of theirhomecoming experience has been subsumed beneath more sensational storiesof homelessness, suicide rates, drug abuse, and psychological disorders’ (p. 12).In this sense, Failing Our Veterans makes a valuable contribution to knowledgeabout the Vietnam veterans’ experience – particularly useful for researchers whospecialize in Vietnam veterans, education policy and veterans’ readjustment– providing a context for an understanding of the relevant debates abouteducational benefits, and showing their connectedness to the broader history oftheir times.Lancaster University PATRICK HAGOPIAN



Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War andLost the Cold War. By Peter Mandler. Yale University Press. 2013. xv + 366pp.£30.00.

Return from the Natives examines fourteen crucial years in the career ofMargaret Mead, during which she enlisted anthropology in the war againstfascism and the battle for a peaceful post-war order. But it also offers so muchmore. Peter Mandler provides a collective biography of Mead and her circle,especially her close friends and lovers Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict andGeoffrey Gorer. He brilliantly analyses the ironies and contradictions entailedin their application of cultural relativism to international relations. Return fromthe Natives is beautifully written and sometimes funny. For example, Mandlerwrites of Gorer gaining ‘access to the corridors of power, or at least the corridorsleading to the corridors of power’ (p. 135). This is the rare academic book that,despite its dense analysis, can serve as an enjoyable companion on a transatlanticflight.

Mandler argues that Mead ‘won’ the Second World War: the war enhancedthe prestige and influence of her anthropological work on ‘national character’.Mead and her circle helped the war effort by ‘culture cracking’: painting broad-brush psychological portraits of different countries. Culture cracking bolsteredcommunication among allies. Mead especially sought to boost Americanunderstanding of the British and vice versa. She even offered practical advice onsuch questions as relations between American servicemen and British women:‘The American boys need to learn how to slow down; the English girls need tolearn how to deflect American boys who don’t’ (p. 111). Mead’s associates alsoapplied culture cracking to undermine enemy morale. By proving the usefulnessof anthropology during the Second World War, Mead and her circle helped wina new audience for the basic insight of cultural anthropology that other peoplesare not ‘just like us’ and helped advance their fundamental goal of reducing USethnocentrism.

Mead lost the Cold War. In the late 1940s, she hoped to shape a peacefulmultilateralist international order based on mutual understanding and respectfor cultural difference. Such a perspective held little influence among Americanpolicymakers by the early 1950s as Cold War divisions froze. That Mead tookfunds from the US military sullied her reputation among other anthropologists.Yet, Mandler concludes that Mead did not lose her moral principles. Hercommitment to respecting cultural difference made her work unsuitable for theAmerican national security state, which had little desire to understand enemyculture in relativist terms and preferred an ideology of ‘democratic universalism’that suggested that all peoples would be better off emulating theAmericanmodel.

Mead also lost the Vietnam War: ‘The post-Vietnam generation of academicsdrew a straight line from the involvement of Mead and her generation in the waragainst fascism, through their alleged implication in dirty tricks and skulduggeryduring the Cold War, directly to complicity with the Vietnam War’ (p. xiii). AsMandler demonstrates,Mead was hardly an ardent cold warrior. By revealing themoral complexity of Mead and her circle, he makes a significant contribution torecent efforts by David Engerman, Joy Rhode and others to craft more nuancedunderstandings of Cold War social science. Increasingly, scholars join Mandlerin recognizing the importance of scholars such as Mead ‘whose intellectualsympathies were not . . . so closely aligned with the power elite and whose


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professional ambitions were never so easily seduced by grants from governmentagencies and like-minded foundations’ (p. xiv).

Like any successful intellectual history, Return from the Natives both stepsinside its protagonists’ heads to capture how their ideas developed and stepsoutside their heads to assess their ideas’ strengths and weaknesses. Culturecracking betrayed the usual limitations of cultural relativism – its bias in favourof cultural coherence, endurance of cultural tradition, and cultural difference(at one point Mead asserted that Americans and British were as different fromone another as they were from Balinese). However, when practised on large,technologically advanced nations at a distance, without the benefit of fieldwork,cultural cracking was often speculative at best. Gorer, for example, infamouslybased an entire analysis of Russian culture on the fact that Russians excessivelyswaddled infants. (In other instances, as in Benedict’s famous study of theJapanese, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, culture cracking could be muchmore nuanced.) Without gainsaying the intellectual limitations of nationalcharacter studies or the political perils of enlisting them in power politics,Mandler eschews the easy critique that social scientists should avoid makingbroad generalizations about societies and avoid any involvement with the state.Not only does Mandler put the limitations of national character studies incontext, inevitably rushed as they were by international crises, he clearly admiresthe intellectual and political ambition of his protagonists. Had cultural relativistsbeen more influential in the Cold War, they would have provided a usefulbalance to the hubris of modernization theory and the overreach of Americancultural imperialism.

If Mandler’s book has any fault, it is in dating Mead’s relationship topower politics from the onset of the Second World War. In accepting outdatednotions of pre-Second World War American ‘isolationism’ and downplayinganthropology’s relationship to imperialism, Mandler portrays Mead as ‘workingnot in a post-Vietnam world, at a period when the US was arguably taking toomuch interest in other people’s business, but in a . . . world where it was arguablytaking too little interest’ (p. 290). One wonders whether the residents of theUS ‘protectorate’ of American Samoa, among whom Mead did her pioneeringresearch in the 1920s, would accept the notion that the United States took‘too little interest’ in them. To be sure, Mead’s cultural relativism underminedimperialism by emphasizing the equal cultural value of less technologicallyadvanced peoples. But Mead also betrayed a characteristic naivety aboutpower relations that marked her later wartime engagements in which she oftenoverlooked imperialism (for example, in her analysis of British society). Mead’sengagement with – and frequent blindness to – imperialism could have benefitedfrom the same subtle and incisive attention that Mandler superbly applies to herother efforts to influence international relations.Trinity College Dublin DANIEL GEARY

TheUnited States, Italy and theOrigins of theColdWar:Waging PoliticalWarfare,1945–1950. By Kaeten Mistry. Cambridge University Press. 2014. xiii + 296pp.£65.00/$99.00

There is much to praise in this fine study of American policymaking towardsItaly in the early years of the Cold War. Kaeten Mistry has mined effectively theC© 2016 The Author. History C© 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd


relevant archival sources in both the United States and Italy and demonstrates animpressive command of the substantial secondary literature in both Italian andEnglish. Mistry builds notably upon the work of scholars like James E. Miller,John Lamberton Harper andMario Del Pero to reveal the evolving place of Italyin American foreign policy as the Cold War developed. He also emphasizes thebroader consequences of the perception of success of the American interventionduring the crucial and much-discussed 1948 Italian elections. According toMistry this perception helped prompt US officials such as George F. Kennan toadopt political warfare as an important element in fighting the Cold War.

A crucial aspect of Mistry’s work is his important clarification thatdevelopments in Italy were not simply dependent on decisions made inWashington, D.C. The Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi emergesstrongly from this work as the decisive player in Italy’s immediate post-warhistory. He was assuredly ‘the pivotal local interlocutor for the United States’ (p.4) throughout the period, but he was no malleable ally waiting upon Americaninstruction. Rather he pursued his own chosen course and made crucial decisions– such as forcing the communists from his coalition government in 1947 – inaccord with his own political judgement. Mistry argues persuasively that thesuccess of De Gasperi’s Christian Democrats in defeating Palmiro Togliatti’scommunists in the 1948 elections owed much more to his own endeavours andthose of other local and non-state actors than it did to the covert assistance ofthe Truman administration. The United States played but a supporting role.

Mistry is very good in describing key stages in policymaking and thecontributions of American officials. He establishes that Italy was hardly anAmerican priority in 1945–6, but its importance grew as America’s broader post-war plans developed in a rather ad hoc way. He clarifies the importance of theMarshall Plan for Italy in facilitating its ‘reintegration into Europe’ (p. 84) andconfirming the country’s place among western nations. US Ambassador JamesDunn’s good judgment is highlighted. Mistry also notes the skill of John D.Hickerson of the Office of European Affairs in the State Department in bestingGeorge Kennan and securing the acceptance of Italy as a founding signatory onthe North Atlantic Treaty. Membership in this military alliance confirmed Italy’snew status as ‘a core member of the western world’ and completed the rockyjourney the country had travelled from ‘the nadir of fascism’ (p. 174).

Mistry’s final chapter is devoted to exploring the expanded political warfarecampaign pursued after 1948 in which the United States sought to replicate itssupposed success in Italy in nations behind the Iron Curtain. Drawing mainly onsecondary sources, Mistry reveals the failures involved in many of these covertendeavours. His focus on these failures, however, detracts from what must beconsidered an important accomplishment for American foreign policy in thepost-war period. Italy, through the efforts of DeGasperi and various other actorsand with the undoubted benefit of American economic and political assistance,was launched effectively on a non-communist path. One can only imagine thedamage that would have been done not only to Italy, but also to western effortsin Europe if Stalin’s disciple Togliatti had come to power in 1948. Mistry isright to clarify to whom the credit should go for preventing that potentiallydisastrous result, but he could emphasize more vigorously the significance of anon-communist Italy emerging during these crucial post-war years.University of Notre Dame WILSON D. MISCAMBLE


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The Nixon Tapes 1971–1972. By Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter. HoughtonMifflin Harcourt. 2014. xxiii + 784pp. $35.00.

By their transcription and editing of some of the 3,700 hours of PresidentNixon’s taped presidential conversations from 1971 and 1972 into a book ofsome 750 pages, Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter have done great service notonly to the academic community but to all for whom the thirty-seventh presidentremains a figure of compelling interest in twentieth-century American history.The editors’ service has three dimensions: first, in the scale of the task that they setthemselves and have convincingly executed; second, in the care with which theyhave decided what to include and what to exclude; and third, in setting RichardNixon’s presidency in an appropriately fuller context than the distorting lens ofWatergate permits.

The period under examination in the book links the second and the third ofthese tasks: whilst Watergate makes its appearance in these tapes from June 1972onwards, the transcripts printed here mostly concern foreign policy in general,and policy towards Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China in particular. Scholarsof those three topics will find the fruits of Brinkley’s andNichter’s labours not justinvaluable but essential. Overlying all three problems is the topic to which Nixondevoted more time and energy than any other in his first term: to retain the officethat he had narrowly won in 1968. That retentive drive was all-encompassing.Each of his legislative proposals about economic, education or civil rights policy,and each move toward Vietnam, the Soviet Union or China, he made with a viewto deepening his existing electoral support and, if at all possible, extending it.The Nixon Tapes 1971–1972 shows Nixon’s electoral mind at work on all thesetopics, as it does his and Kissinger’s exploitation of the linkage between them toAmerican (and Nixon’s) advantage.

The transcripts begin in February 1971 with Alexander Butterfield (deputyassistant to the president) explaining to the technophobic Nixon how the newrecording system worked. They end in December 1972, seven months beforeAlexander Haig ordered the dismantling of the system following Butterfield’saffirmative response to Republican Counsel Fred Thomson’s transformativequestion during a July 1973 hearing of the Senate Select Committee onPresidential Campaign Activities, ‘Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of theinstallation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?’.

With scarcely an exception, the transcripts confirm evidence from primarywritten records, oral histories and interviews with Nixon’s associates andformer members of his administration that Richard Nixon was a politician ofintense resolve, tenacity and self-belief. It confirms him, too, as a politician oftemperamental complexity who in key respects remained a puzzle to his closestpolitical aides. (This point is brilliantly made by Alexander Butterfield and JohnPrice in their presentation at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, in 2014and available at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/richard-nixon-s-reputation-40-years-after-watergate.)

Lacking much by way of ideological anchorage, Nixon’s political reputationlay in his mastery of surprise, and single-minded pursuit of political office and thepower that might flow from it, as the opening to China shows. Nixon conductedhis presidency as an extension of his campaigning, playing to his self-image as onewho fought bravely against the odds and (howsoever ironically) a corrupt politicalestablishment, and to his matchless strength of identifying those who would



prove of greatest use to him as enemies. The transcripts give rich illustrations ofthese traits, especially in Nixon’s conduct of foreign policy. They illustrate, too, alesson that he never forgot: that of the elemental political importance of voters’perceptions of political realities, and in consequence, of the supreme importanceof winning the battle of those perceptions. The transcripts confirm, too, Nixon’sformidable capacity to ruthlessly alter the political agenda, and if necessary toabandon, reorder and reframe it. It is often forgotten now that, although littleliked, he was until 1973 a President who won the reluctant respect not only offellow politicians in Washington but of leaders abroad – and of Leonid Brezhnevand Zhao Enlai in particular.

Nixon summarized his presidential purpose as ‘the two great issues . . . [of]peace and prosperity’. Much as there is in these transcripts about peace and war,there is little new here (nor, to the best of my knowledge, in the vast quantityof tapes yet to be transcribed) about prosperity, inflation, unemployment, orthe disastrous price and wage policies that Nixon embraced in August 1971. Asdomestic policy did not engage him, so economic policy bored him – except in sofar as his direction both strengthened his own voting coalition and underminedhis actual and putative opponents, which, in 1971–2, it did to spectacular effect.But it was to his orchestration of strategic relationships with China and Russia,whilst succeeding politically in presenting defeat in Vietnam as peace of a kind,that Nixon devoted most of his first term in office. McGovern had no answerto the president’s transformative political successes either at home in mattersof economic policy or abroad in strategic direction. Yet within three monthsof taking the oath of office in January 1973, Richard Nixon’s presidency beganits disastrous collapse, all of it recorded on tape until Alexander Haig orderedthe taping machinery’s removal. We are in debt to Douglas Brinkley and LukeNichter for brilliantly illuminating this astonishing period in the history of theUnited States.Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford NIGEL BOWES

The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracyin Nineteenth-Century Latin America. By James E. Sanders. Duke UniversityPress. 2014. xi + 339pp. £25.95.

While notions of political and democratic innovation are not often associatedwith Latin America, in this gracefully written book James E. Sanders positsthat Spanish America once stood at the fore of modernity in the Atlanticworld. Rather than looking east towards the Old World to mimic discoursesof modernization, nineteenth-century Latin American letrados (‘the region’smost eminent and influential political thinkers’) perceived themselves at thevanguard in the creation of modernity (p. 11). Though Europe may have seemedcultured and civilized from the perspective of many Latin Americans, it was LatinAmerica, their own patria across the Atlantic Ocean, that the letrados believedrepresented ‘the future because it had adopted republicanism and democracywhile Europe, under the boots of monarchs and aristocrats, dwelled in the past’(p. 5). In the mid-nineteenth century modernization was defined by republicanpolitics, something Latin Americans, in the aftermath of the Age of Revolution,felt they had played an instrumental role in fashioning.


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Most of Sanders’s sources come from newspapers published between the1840s and 1870s; however, archival research from Colombia, Mexico andUruguay complement these published materials. Through a sedulous readingof newspapers from across Spanish America, Sanders provides numerous richexamples of educated Americans’ opinions with respect to the continent’sposition vis-a-vis their European counterparts. If the majority of Sanders’snewspapers would have been read by affluent Americans, what of the opinionsof the general populace that remained illiterate? Although this is arguablythe weakest part of Sanders’s study, he does nevertheless seek to uncover theperceptions of those he terms the subaltern. Occupying a large part of Sanders’swork, the subaltern’s voice comes to the fore through the individual petitionsof black enslaved women and indigenous illiterate villagers to the Mexicanemperor Iturbide. Moreover, Sanders’s arguments about American soldiers aremost compelling; chapter 1 explores the expedition of Giuseppe Garibaldi tothe Americas and his army in which men of varied race and social backgroundsfought alongside one another.

For Sanders, the international civil war in Uruguay (1839–51) represents astarting point to analyse the aspirations which stood behind local and immigrantsoldiers’ support of American republicanism. The revolution represented awatershed in America’s place in history and on the Atlantic map: in contrast toAmerica being ‘the student of European civilization, waiting for enlightenmentand progress to wash up on the shores of Montevideo from France or England’,the soldiers of the Garibaldi revolution demonstrated to the Old World ‘how tosecure political progress by fomenting the type of revolution that already hadsucceeded in theNewWorld’ (p. 38).Moving from the 1830s and culminating fourdecades later, The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation,and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America goes on to provide thereader with multiple examples of Spanish American nations following Uruguay’slead and adopting Republican politics.

Spanish America’s zenith of modernity would not last: indeed, Sanders arguesthat by the last quarter of the nineteenth century these formerly innovativenations were once again compelled to hang on the coat-tails of western Europe.Shifting from defining modernity as one of republican politics, a new phase ofmodernity was emerging that was characterized by industry. Sanders contendsfurthermore that this transition exacerbated racial relations in Spanish America.Although Sanders does not devote an entire chapter to the subject of race in theNew World colonies, he does demonstrate that during the decades of politicalmodernity these nations, incorporating nineteenth-century French revolutionaryprinciples of labour, were much more racially tolerant than they would soonbecome. As he writes, ‘The Europe to which Latin America turned for lessonsin modernity was certainly not that of the 1848 French Revolution; instead, itwas increasingly militaristic and racist and had renewed imperial ambitions’ (p.183).

Sanders’s work takes its place alongside Jorge Canizares-Esguerra’smasterpiece for the colonial period, How to Write the History of the NewWorld: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-CenturyAtlantic World, with both studies representing a growing tendency amongscholars of the Atlantic world to look in more detail at people’s thoughtsand actions west of the Atlantic Ocean. While The Vanguard of the Atlantic



World speaks most directly to scholars of intellectual and political history,students interested in racial relations would benefit greatly from this book.Throughout, Sanders writes in a lucid and engaging style. Without a doubt,Sanders successfully demonstrates the importance of Latin American politicalthought for the nineteenth century and beyond.Rice University RACHAEL L. PASIEROWSKA

Mestizo Genomics: RaceMixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America. Edited byPeterWade,Carlos Lopez Beltran,EduardoRestrepo andRicardo Ventura Santos.Duke University Press. 2014. xii + 304pp. $25.95.

Fetishized as molecular clocks chronicling the blighted histories of indigenouspopulations, represented as violated subalterns branded with the (s)exploitationof colonization, and deployed as valuable agents advancing complex nation-building agendas, mestizo/as (Spanish for ‘mixed’) have historically entereddiscourse as an anomaly, an absent presence. Mestizo Genomics: RaceMixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America boldly wades into thisconceptual quicksand, generating comparative discussions of racial andcultural mixture – mestizaje – in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, spacesthat have traditionally rejected notions of race in a move towards officialmulticulturalism, to contemplate the ways in which the transnational flow ofgenetic science (re)produces and challenges existing taxonomies of race andnation. Interdisciplinary and collaborative, this collection blends (strategicallychosen) laboratory-based ethnographic research, fuelled by site-specific casestudies, with historical, anthropological, political and postmodern discourses,speaking to experts and non-experts alike. Arranged into seven easily digestiblechapters, the breadth and scope of the book is nevertheless impressive. Fromthe microscopic hub of the human genome, entire histories emerge, narrativesare generated, and diverse forms of human contact are imagined with skill andsensitivity.

This volume is differentiated from similar studies in the field through asuccinct, thoughtful and balanced consideration of mestizaje as not merely agendered paradigm of (ambiguously rendered) race and nation, but as a potentialsite for the galvanization of a new brand of scientific inquiry sensitive to thecoalitions constructed between racialized communities rather than intent ondistilling mestizo/as to the sum of their relative ethnic strains. Furthermore,the contributors to this volume step back and consider the torrid, oftenexploitative, intimacies attending ‘ancestral contributions’ to the human genome,painstakingly walking (and blurring) the imagined but nevertheless precariousline between science and culture. Of particular note is PeterWade’s thorough andthought-provoking concluding analysis. He does not shy away fromasking the bigquestions contouring this collection: is genetic science suturing race and biologyin ways that reproduce and renaturalize essentialist, even racist, paradigms?How may the study of human diversity iterated in genomics perforate reifiedand supposedly ‘natural’ categories in order to interact with the (specificallyLatin American) state as a globalized vector of power and citizenship? Andhow do existing studies bolster and privilege Euro-American perspectives?


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Contemplating the volume as a whole, this generous concluding chapter providesa much-needed anchor, drawing diverse streams of conversation together toreflect on the complex intersections of race, nation and science studies.

Mestizo Genomics consciously, and vociferously, enters into a burgeoningdialogue that seeks to unpack the gendered valences of race, nation and sciencein the mapping of movement in and disease prevalence among Latin Americanpopulations. Butwhile the authors are keen to explore theways inwhich genomicscan ‘operate to biologize and naturalize commonsense and vague ideas aboutrace, while also multiplying the diverse meanings of race’ (p. 3), they do notexpend the same diligence questioning how genomics reinscribes ‘commonsenseand vague’ conceptions of sex and gender. In the introduction, for example,gender is approached as a hitherto overlooked instigator of racial mixture andnation-building (as they present in gene science), falling beyond or betweenthe intersections of these seemingly composite processes. ‘There is very little[literature] that examines how intersections of gender and race/nation operatein genomic research on human diversity’ (p. 11), the editors claim (note theemphasis on gender rather than anatomical sex), only immediately to divertthe conversation to the role Y chromosome DNA plays in estimating ancestralcontributions to the human genome. But having a male Y chromosome is notthe same thing as being male. Sex does not necessarily determine gender. Andgender resonates differently as it moves through time and across space(s). Ina text fearlessly situated in relation to the rich, knotty unfolding of criticalrace discourse it is disconcerting to see terms such as ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ usedinterchangeably, with no consideration of the decades of field-shaping discourseworking to probe and explode this (historically constructed, socially mandated)conflation.

Nevertheless, this collection is vibrant and exciting, throwing up (withoutclosing down) a finessed repertoire of compelling debates that tantalizewith irresistible conceptual nuggets primed for future inquiry. In chapter 6,‘Laboratory Life of the Mexican Mestizo’, Vivette Garcıa Deister engageswith the Mexican Genome Diversity Project (MGDP) in order to gauge theproblematic ‘material reconfiguration’ (p. 161) of Mexican mestizos from bloodto bytes, from ‘substances’ contained in test tubes to information interred inelectronic repositories such as clouds, up for grabs in an era of globalizationand bio-piracy. This reveals that molecular technologies can and will reorientateancestry (historically centred on blood as a biological marker of racializedkinship) away from hetero-reproductive family units and towards imaged geneticcommunities (a nod to Benedict Anderson’s imaged national communities)mapped through data collection. As Wade asserts, ‘the relation is no longerbetween people, but between numbers’ (p. 221), a stark frontier that thisvolume explores and questions. Oscillating between discourses of blood anddiscourses of technology, Mestizo Genomics shines much-needed light on thewaysmestizaje has developed and proliferated across conceptual, geopolitical andacademic borders. This kind of heuristic analysis looks set to enhance and extenddiscussions of mestizaje in the twenty-first century, in the academy and beyond.King’s College London VICTORIA CARROLL


Documents

Review: Robert the Bruce: King of Scots, by Michael Penman