Review of Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, at pp. 90-1 (and of D. Boucher, et al., Philosophy,...

Reviews and Short Notices

General

Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. Edited by Niall Ferguson.Picador. 1997. x � 548pp. £20.00.Dr Ferguson has created a real thriller, almost rivalling Taggart. I partic-

ularly remembered the series where the severed bodies which kept turning upwith elaborately prepared e�ect turned out to be the work of an axe-wieldingtrumpeter (the lapidary words of Superintendent McVitie, referring to the latestvictim, come readily to mind : `He didnae get home in one piece'). In thetelevision series the rapid succession of shocks and horrors sweep one throughto the chilling surprises of the denouement: only then does one re¯ect on themany gaps and inconsistencies, on how much has been left unexplained. So it iswith Virtual History. It is not clear whether the book is a ®nal, frenzieddismemberment of the (I would have thought) already comatose body ofhistorical determinism, or a rite of puri®cation opening the way to a profes-sional world in which no work will be acceptable unless all counterfactualalternatives have been thoroughly considered. Ferguson sets down the rules forcounterfactual history: alternative outcomes may be explored only if there isevidence in the primary sources that contemporaries actually expected thesealternative outcomes. His contributors generally don't follow the rules ± itwould, after all, be di�cult to do so if, say, you're dealing with the propositionthat JFK wasn't assassinated, the rather distant basis for an interesting chapterby Diane Kunz, which, however, is almost entirely based on secondary sources.In any case, is an assassination the same order of event as the outbreak of civilwar (no civil war, no Cromwell, is the proposition discussed by John Adamson)or a movement for national independence (J. C. D. Clark discusses `What ifthere had been no American Revolution?')? At least one contributor ±Jonathan Haslam, in a useful piece on the possibility (or, as he reckons,impossibility) of the cold war having been avoided ± is openly sceptical aboutthe whole counterfactual operation. Alvin Jackson suggests that even if Irishhome rule had been enacted in 1912, outcomes in the embattled isle would havebeen broadly the same. Some contributors have their own special agendas ± notleast Ferguson himself, discussing `What if Britain had ``stood aside'' in August1914?' He has a kind of grin-and-bear-it obsession with Germany's `inevitable'dominance of Europe. He fails to see that those social historians who haveexamined the unintended social consequences of the war (at whom he aims aquick ¯ick of the axe) share his own `chaos' or `stochastic' theories of history: infact, it's obvious he hasn't read them. Still, this is a very useful chapter, as is

*c The Historical Association 1998. Published byBlackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UKand 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Mark Almond's `1989 without Gorbachev: what if communism had notcollapsed?' (actually about why the collapse, though, he argues, far frominevitable, actually came to pass). Too few editors of such collections see theneed for a summing-up chapter. Instead of pulling things together, Fergusono�ers a deeply unconvincing essay in `Virtual History, 1946±1996', whose badtaste falls well short of Superintendent McVitie's dark humour: Ìn a televisiondebate with Nixon before his impeachment, a haggard Kennedy made hisbitterness clear. `Ìf I had been shot dead back in 1963'', he exclaimed, `Ì wouldbe a saint today.'' ' Shame, because Ferguson's introduction is really ratherbrilliant: not a single determinist gets home in one piece. Of course, Fergusonignores those of us who have already made the case that historians should looktowards the sciences rather than literature, and should give due weight toconvergence, contingency and `chaos'. But, all gaps noted, this is a book to bestudied by everyone interested in history.Open University ARTHUR MARWICK

On `What is History?' From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White. By KeithJenkins. Routledge. 1995. 200pp. £11.99 (pb).History as Re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood's Idea of History. By William H.Dray. Oxford University Press. 1996. xii � 347pp. £40.00.According to Keith Jenkins nothing written by E. H. Carr, even less anything

by Geo�rey Elton, provides an adequate introduction to current debate aboutthe nature of history. These men's thought is said to encapsulate the values ofmodernity, that is to say the largely discredited attempt to build aworld based onreason, science and technology. Today, Jenkins argues, we are in a phase oftransition from this state to something more ¯uid which he calls postmodernity.Under the circumstances students should not be reading anachronistic texts suchas What is History? or The Practice of History, but grappling with the com-plexities and uncertainties posed by Richard Rorty and Hayden White. Beingmore speci®c, Jenkins argues that Carr and Elton were mistaken to conceive ofhistory as ever rooted in fact and objective knowledge. They were misguided toimply that source work, no matter how diligently pursued, can give historiansanything approaching direct access to the past and true explanations of it. Theywere wrong to view the historical process as directional. All of this was just too`certaintist'. By contrast, Jenkins emphasizes that historians deal with afragmentary historical record and try to develop understanding from this, notfrom the totality of the past per se. He tries to balance the importance of what therecord says with the conceptual structures historians impose upon it as theyresearch and write. So while an historian might produce a narrative study, anhistorical actor need not have functioned according to actual rules of narrative.In this light we can begin to understand Hayden White's contention that historyis à verbal artifact, a narrative prose discourse, the content of which is as muchinvented ± or as much imagined ± as found' (p. 19). Faced with so muchuncertainty, the question of the historical process having an overall direction ishardly meaningful. More important is to ask whose interests are being served bythe construction of any given historical interpretation.On `What is History?' is structured around ®ve main chapters, one addressing

the nature of history directly, the others discussing individually the historians

*c The Historical Association 1998

88 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

named in the title. Without doubt Jenkins should be applauded for repackagingthe central questions raised by especially the post-modernists in an interestingand accessible way. Well-motivated students should appreciate his e�orts. ButOn `What is History?' is argued with such tenacity, consistency and convictionthat it really is something more than a textbook. It amounts to a challenge toprofessional historians reared on old `modernist' traditions to dare to explorealternative ways of thinking. With the paperback so competitively priced, fewshould resist it.More than three times as expensive, almost twice the length and more

`traditional' in tone than Jenkins's book, History as Re-enactment provides acritique of the work of just one man. William Dray's stated aim is to o�er a step`towards the systematic critical examination of Collingwood's whole philosophyof history' (p. 5). At the heart of the matter lies Collingwood's notion thathistorical explanation calls for the rethinking (or re-enactment) of an historicalagent's mental processes as he or she decided upon a given course of action. Ineight separate chapters Dray explores the nature of historical re-enactment in itsown right and its relationship to historical laws, rationality and emotion,physical and social history, historical imagination, ideas in history and relativ-ism. Dray holds a fearsome spotlight on Collingwood's intellectual career andexposes without mercy his numerous apparent inconsistencies and plainmisconceptions; but still this is a sympathetic study. As Dray puts it, he isdealing with the one man whose philosophy of history is `pre-eminently worthtrying to rethink' (p. 326). Anyone should be impressed by the humanisticqualities which pervade Collingwood's work as well as the fact that this authortook seriously the possibility of human agency as the ®nal determinant ofaction. Without doubt Dray's sustained and astute analysis of the fundamentalissues at stake here deserves widespread recognition.University of Bradford MARTYN HOUSDEN

Philosophy, History and Civilization: Interdisciplinary Essays on R. G. Colling-wood. Edited by David Boucher, James Connelly and Tariq Modood. Universityof Wales Press. 1995. xviii � 388pp. £35.00.Historians have rarely felt the need to consult philosophers of history about

the nature of their own professional practice; but the work of R. G. Colling-wood has been a notable exception in this respect, perhaps because Colling-wood himself was not just a philosopher but also a distinguished historian andarchaeologist. The essays in this volume certainly do justice to the amazingbreadth of Collingwood's own interests, including philosophy, aesthetics,religion, metaphysics and education. A number of articles emphasize Colling-wood's debt to Italian thought, including that of de Ruggiero. However, readersofHistory will probably be most interested in B. A. Haddock's discussion of thein¯uence of Vico on the attempted rapprochement of history and philosophywhich Collingwood himself saw as the key to his intellectual career; in R. Peters'sessay on the in¯uence of Croce and Gentile's thought on Collingwood ine�ecting this rapprochement; and in L. Pompa's critical engagement withCollingwood's work which explores the epistemological bases of historicalknowledge. Particularly fascinating are M. Browning's analysis of Colling-wood's work as an attempted codi®cation of existing historical practice and of


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the virtues of his selective, problem-based approach to archaeological excava-tion, and I. Hodder's demonstration that Collingwood's failure to observe hisown methodological strictures in the interpretation of his excavations led to hisbeing ignored by a generation of archaeologists. According to Hodder,Collingwood's thought is currently enjoying a renaissance of interest amongarchaeologists; it is to be hoped that the publication of this excellent and wide-ranging volume hard on the heels of the revised edition of Collingwood's Idea ofHistory by J. van der Dussen (Clarendon Press, 1992) will have a similar e�ectamong historians.University of Manchester S. H. RIGBY

Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. By Robert Berkhofer, Jr.Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. 1995. xiv � 326pp. £25.00.As the study of literary texts is taken over by `theory', historians are increas-

ingly being forced to ask how post-modernist and post-structuralist approachesmight change their own characteristic ways of interpreting sources/texts fromthe past and of producing their own texts. Beyond the Great Story presents therise of theory as a challenge to `traditional history' and calls for historians toabandon their stance of objectivity and to seek instead to do justice to theplurality of socially located viewpoints of which multiculturalist theory hasmade us aware. In addition to such `contextualism', i.e. the recognition ofhistory as socially interested discourse, Professor Berkhofer calls for an aware-ness of `textualism', of how the language we use is not merely a neutral tool ofrepresentation or transparent medium of expression but is itself an act of powerexercised over the work's readers. Historians should thus adopt new forms ofwriting, ones which foreground the nature of their texts as socially loaded andpolitically motivated acts of rhetorical persuasion. Berkhofer is aware that thediverse theories he calls upon may be mutually contradictory, but continues tosee them as useful in the project of `discrediting traditional historical practice'(p. 263).Historians certainly do need to be aware of their own rhetorical strategies:

this review itself was written within particular generic conventions and from avested professional position. Nevertheless, despite the impressive learning whichhas gone into this book, one wonders if many professional historians will seeBerkhofer's arguments as reasons to abandon `traditional history'. After all,most of us would accept that, like all historical writing, scienti®c thought is theproduct of a particular society (contextualism) and that scienti®c treatises adoptparticular rhetorical strategies to persuade us of their case (textualism). Yet, formost of us, this fact does not `discredit' `traditional science' (although it may dofor Berkhofer himself; see p. 9), as Berkhofer sees it as discrediting `traditionalhistory'. Secondly, for many readers, Berkhofer will seem to be tilting atwindmills. Far from being crass empiricists who believe that `facts speak forthemselves' (p. 206), most historians are committed epistemologically to littlemore than a belief that the real world exists, that we can make conjectures aboutit, and that we have good reasons (other than political prejudice) for provi-sionally accepting some conjectures rather than others. Similarly, whileBerkhofer sees traditional historical writing as characterized by a belief in thepossibility of `objectivity' in terms of some neutral, subjective state of mind



(p. 139), most historians I encounter would readily accept that `biased' mindsarmed with particular theoretical searchlights can illuminate some new area ofthe historical landscape. The objectivity of the historical discipline, like allothers, lies in the public testability of its claims: objectivity is not a subjectivestate of mind. Furthermore, even when one agrees with Berkhofer, his ideas arerather less innovative than he himself would have us believe. To give just oneexample, he rightly insists that all `facts' are themselves ìnterpretive constructs';but, far from this point being unappreciated in the profession (pp. 53, 70), it is acommonly held view, one which many of us have shared since reading E. H.Carr's primer of historical method, What is History? (1961). At one point,Berkhofer himself acknowledges this (p. 64), but he fails to take on board theimplications of this point for his own characterization of orthodox historio-graphy. Finally, in rejecting the historian's traditional òbsession' with factsabout, for instance, the Holocaust, Berkhofer says that he does not mean toèndorse the so-called revisionist denial of the acknowledged horrible facts'(p. 49). But I can see nothing in Berkhofer's own theory which allows him tospeak with such certainty about the past, given his acceptance of the `culturaland political arbitrariness' of all historical writing (p. 228). It is to Berkhofer'scredit that he himself is more than aware that post-structuralist relativism leadsto these paradoxes (e.g. pp. 51, 209, 223, 234); but such an awareness makes itall the more disappointing that he has no solution to such paradoxes oralternatives to them. All we are o�ered in their place is rhetorical questions (e.g.pp. 76, 241±2, 259) and pious good hopes, as when the book concludes that wemust `seek a construction of the past that would provide a ®rm foundation tobound (constrain) the free play of interpretations while remaining sensitive tothe problems of representation and textualization' (p. 267) ± which is wheremost of us came in.University of Manchester S. H. RIGBY

Nature and Society in Historical Context. Edited by MikulaÂ sÏ Teich, Roy Porterand Bo Gustafsson. Cambridge University Press. 1997. xv � 404pp. £50.00 (hb),£18.95 (pb).The twenty-one essays in this collection explore reciprocal links between

conceptions of nature and society, from the ancient Greek kosmos to the latetwentieth-century ècology'. The unifying theme is the ìnterpenetration of thesocial, human and natural'. However, what may encompass `nature' variesaccording to context, from Greek philosophers' conceptualizations of time tocontemporaries' perceptions of prevailing social relations as part of the God-given `natural order of things', including madness in the medieval world. Someof the contributors re¯ect on how the changing scale and character of humanactivities have a�ected the natural environment. Grove studies environmentallegislation that was aimed at conserving the forests of St Vincent. Strohmeiernotes the environmental damage caused by American economic expansion.BorgstroÈ m provides a sceptical critique of modern development theories. Acharacteristic theme in a number of schools of thought before the industrialrevolution, including earth theory and physiocracy, was the limits placed upondevelopment by primitive farming or soil fertility. However, Scha�er andHerlitz detect towards the end of the early modern period older notions of


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nature as an evil, chaotic or uncontrollable force, giving way to its conception asa bounteous resource awaiting enlightened human management. Von Engel-hardt notes the eventual victory of `positivistic science over Romantic science'.Complexity and paradox, however, not linearity, are dominant elements in thishistory of ideas. Jaritz and Winiwarter discern in the laws of the Renaissancevillage attempts to manage streams and woods as economic resources. ButRadkau ®nds that, much later, Germanic nature-worship ideologies made littlecontribution to sustainable forestry. The volume is a salutary corrective to atendency in some environmental history to posit a simplistic opposition betweenthe harmful impact of urbanizing or industrializing man and some earlier, ruralidyll characterized by a harmonious balance between humanity and nature(see Porter's chapter). Gustafsson, though, does maintain that technologicaland economic progress only temporarily stretches the limits placed upon humanactivity set by nature. The `biophysical environment is ®nite', and humanity ispart of nature. Consequently, con¯icts have occurred, including recently suchpotential catastrophes as ozone depletion. These scholarly essays exhibit greatvariety in method, topic, setting and period. Particularly in view of thescrupulous referencing of sources, this diversity is one of the volume's strengthsin providing the reader with the means of pursuing many areas of specialinterest.Manchester Metropolitan University JOHN HASSAN

Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville asHistorian Reappraised. By Harvey Mitchell. Cambridge University Press. 1996.xii � 290pp. £35.00/$54.95.Harvey Mitchell's volume is intended as `an attempt to consider and to

support Tocqueville's claim in the last decade of his life that it was principally asa historian that he wanted to be remembered'. In so doing Mitchell tries to bringout an underlying unity in Tocqueville's work by eschewing what he calls`chronological conventions' and beginning his study with a treatment of theSouvenirs and then moving back in time to consider the Essai of 1836 andDemocracy in America, before ®nally considering Tocqueville's last major work,L'Ancien ReÂgime et la ReÂvolution. Along the way Mitchell shows well howTocqueville adopted di�erent approaches (narrative, structural, comparative) tosuit his particular purposes at the time of writing. Ultimately, however, Mitchellargues that Tocqueville's work as a whole can be conceived as a long debate onthe relative roles in the historical process of choice and structure, of chance andnecessity, of particularities and general laws. Tocqueville did not attempt toresolve these dichotomies but, through ideas such as `the fatal circle' (®rstenunciated at the close of Democracy in America), attempted to remain true towhat Mitchell refers to as `his conviction that human beings can make their ownhistory, though not in conditions of their own choosing'. This notion of thepotential for human freedom was central to Tocqueville's vision and Mitchellshows well how Tocqueville's perception of the fragility and contingency ofpolitical liberty informs much of his work, and, further, how it explains hisambiguity towards egalitarian ideas and his hostility to socialism. There are oneor two problems with this volume, however. The prose style occasionally driftstowards opacity, hindering ease of comprehension ± the passages on Rousseau's



impact on Tocqueville are a case in point. More generally, one must also ask howlegitimate it is to look at the various works of a political thinker, written atdi�erent times for di�erent reasons and for di�erent audiences, and to extractfrom them (or perhaps impose upon them) a coherence that may be somewhatarti®cial. The dangers of this type of exegesis have, of course, been pointed outby writers such as Quentin Skinner, but Mitchell does not really address thepoint. These criticisms aside, Mitchell has provided a stimulating study ofTocqueville which will be of interest not only to Tocqueville students but also tohistorians of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, to politicalscientists interested in the general phenomenon of revolution and to students ofthe philosophy of history.University of Manchester STEPHEN M. LEE

E. P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions. By Bryan D. Palmer. Verso. 1994.xiii � 201pp. £34.95 (hb), £11.95 (pb).As Bryan Palmer acknowledges, this volume is `not a biography' but à

memoir and a homage', written soon after E. P. Thompson's death in 1993 andbased in part on knowledge of Thompson acquired during a twenty-yearfriendship. It is also a partisan and committed work, dedicated ìn an age ofnationalist tragedies and the politics of di�erence/identity . . . to all inter-nationalists who continue to hold high the banner of humanity'. This portentousand self-congratulatory tone is maintained throughout, with Thompson held upas an example to `those interested in and committed to the integrity of the pastand the humane possibilities of a socialist future'. This desire to portrayThompson as an exemplar is, ironically, an instance of the kind of condescen-sion of which Thompson himself complained ± but of which he was also oftenguilty. In his famous programmatic statement at the beginning of his seminalThe Making of the English Working Class, Thompson proclaimed that hispurpose was `to rescue' his subjects `from the enormous condescension ofposterity'; but in so doing he constantly ran the risk of replacing condescensionthrough dismissal with condescension through sentimentality ± that form ofpatronizing celebration so common to Romantics like Thompson. Similarly,what we are o�ered by Palmer is a sentimentalized Thompson: the inspirationalteacher; the fearless polemicist; the tireless activist; the saviour of the world fromnuclear annihilation. Sadly, what is lost in this discussion is what will survivelongest from Thompson's career: his work as an historian. Long after thetheological in®ghting in British Marxism or the spat with the Althusserians orhis role as professional òbjector' are forgotten, people will still read and beinspired by The Making of the English Working Class; but Palmer, for noobvious reason, treats it brie¯y and super®cially. Instead we get far too much ofThompson's indi�erent poetry and an inexplicably lengthy disquisition on theliterary and political career of his father, E. J. Thompson. Moreover, Palmer isfar too close to his subject, and the critical distance which would have allowedhim to o�er a more rounded account of Thompson's career as both historianand activist is not established. Palmer attempts to sidestep such criticism byacknowledging that his account of Thompson is `likely to be dismissed . . . as``hagiographic'' ', but this is not real defence, for what he has in fact produced isthe life of a revolutionary saint, presented to us for our edi®cation. Not


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particularly valuable, then, as a study of Thompson and his work, perhaps thisbook is best seen as yet another specimen of that enduring twentieth-centurywild goose chase: the search for socialist humanism. Participants in that search,or historians of it, might ®nd something of value in this work. Those wishing forinsights into E. P. Thompson's career as an historian and his massive impact onthe study of plebeian culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Englandmight be advised to look elsewhere.University of Manchester STEPHEN M. LEE

Colonization: A Global History. By Marc Ferro. Routledge. 1997. xiii � 402pp.£55.00 (hb), £16.99 (pb).Possibly platitudes and grand sententious remarks read better in French.

Whatever the reason, Histoire des colonisations (Paris, 1994) by Ferro appearsmore weighty than this translation, which seems rambling and self-indulgent.Con®dence is shaken by errors. Some, such as Louisbourg falling in 1788 ratherthan 1758, are presumably typos. But what is the reader to make of `the rivals ofPortugal, the royal princes of Spain, avenged Alcazarquivir [1578] at the battleof Lepanto [1571], before capturing Portugal itself' or `Great Britain sent . . .Mac Cartway to Peking (1797)'; in fact Macartney reached China in 1793 andreturned home in 1794. Aside from such obvious factual errors, there are alsoquestionable assessments: `Up till then [1763] the [British] Empire had beensmall, relatively homogeneous, very English, Protestant, and centred on trade.'So much for Ireland, the West Indies or the diversity of British North America.Ferro is strongest on European colonization in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, and takes a particular (indeed, disproportionate) interest in France inAlgeria and Indochina. He is also worth reading on the response to coloniza-tion, not least the multifaceted cultural reaction of the colonized. Yet this workcannot be readily recommended. Too many of the judgements are suspect, whilethe totally inadequate treatment of colonization prior to 1500 leads to doubtabout the intellectual agenda of Ferro's study. The economics and ecology ofcolonization are generally ignored, and, while criticizing Eurocentrism, Ferroadopts a very Eurocentric perspective. He is also unreliable on ideological andcultural factors: theories of race were not `con®ned to a few' prior to the earlymodern period. A review of this book in The Times served as the basis for ascathing attack on current British academic publishing by Felipe FernaÂ ndez-Armesto. Though some of his points were not without weight, it is dangerous togeneralize from Ferro's book. It stands as an example of a particular way ofapproaching grand issues, and is not a fair basis for a judgement on British orFrench academic scholarship.University of Exeter JEREMY BLACK

Dialogues across Civilizations: Sketches in World History from the Chinese andEuropean Experiences. By Roxann Prazniak. Westview. 1996. xii � 212pp.£48.50 (hb), £9.95 (pb).This is an ambitious book which illustrates both the potential and the

problems of cross-societal studies. Its rationale is that `an interactive juxta-positioning of one cultural sphere with another' will illuminate their di�erent



historical pathways and expose the assets and liabilities of various patterns ofsocial evolution. Prazniak divides the study into three themes: society and theindividual, social change and con¯ict, and history and cosmology, in each casejuxtaposing individuals to illustrate the theme. Thus Socrates and Kong Zi(Confucius) represent the contrast between the European concern for individualfreedom and the Chinese emphasis on the community, while the life and worksof Ban Zhao and Christine de Pisan, although separated by 1,200 years, providea re¯ection on gender relations. Prazniak abandons personalities to compare theurban and commercial development of Paris and Hangzhou, the capitals ofLouis IX and of the Southern Song. Hangzhou was four times as populous asParis and its markets, sanitation and transportation far outclassed those of itsFrench counterpart. However, according to Prazniak, French merchantsdisplayed a spirit of adventure and a social group consciousness which o�ereda potential challenge to the political status quo. This contrasted with thebureaucratic controls of China, and the sophisticated amenities of Hangzhouwhich relieved the merchants of causes against which to protest. On the otherhand, the comparison between popular protest and rural activism in Europeand China, as represented by Thomas MuÈ ntzer, leader of the Anabaptistsduring the Peasants' War, and Hong Xiuquan, leader of the Taiping rebellion,reveals strong a�nities. Both men were born in conditions of rural hardship andchange, both fused Christian ideals with popular folk beliefs, and both soughtto correct economic injustices by building alternative political, social andeconomic orders inspired by millenarian religious beliefs. In later chapters of thebook Prazniak provides stimulating comparisons between Bismarck and SunZhongshan (Sun Yat-sen), Huiyuan and St Augustine, Zhu Xi and ThomasAquinas, and ®nally between Claude Monet and the modern Chinese artist QiBaishi. Some of the comparisons are forced and some of the claims arequestionable, but this is nevertheless an intriguing book. It had its origin in aseries of seminars for American students and it o�ers a breadth of outlookwhich is rarely attempted in this country. It compares apples and oranges,occasionally not entirely convincingly but sometimes with notable perception.University of Hudders®eld J. A. G. ROBERTS

Megalopolis: The Giant City in History. Edited by Theo Barker and AnthonySutcli�e. St Martin's. 1993. xi � 213pp. £40.00.This work presents a collection of papers on the theme of the megalopolis in

history from the 1990 International Historical Congress. Anthony Sutcli�eargues in the introduction that the giant city, or megalopolis, is a subject worthyof historical study for a number of reasons, perhaps most intriguingly itsubiquity and persistence. Consequently, the papers included in this collectioncover a worldwide geographical range and an immense time-span. Although thefourteen works in this volume are not grouped according to themes, a break-down of the topics covered into broad chronological categories is possible.H. W. Plekt's paper on ancient Rome questions whether its designation as aparasite on the empire is accurate; Ge Jianxion's paper concludes that thedensely populated areas of ancient China were not megalopolises, despite theirsize. Theo Barker's piece is the only one which falls approximately into the earlymodern period; it details London's peculiar rise to megalopolis status in


GENERAL 95

Europe. Late nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century history is repre-sented by a number of papers. Josef Konvitz's piece singles out the role of portsin the di�usion of innovations which he argues aided the growth of themegalopolis. Max Engman discusses St Petersburg in his paper, whereinhe concludes that it does not deserve to be labelled a megalopolis, despite itssize and importance. The impact of Moscow on Russia's developmentthrough its metropolitan in¯uence on the Russian hinterland is discussed inYA. E. Vodarsky's contribution to the topic of Russian megalopolises. GerhardBrunn questions assumptions about Berlin's pre-eminent role in late nineteenth-century and pre-Second World War Germany. Malcolm Falkus concludes thatcheap labour was a key factor in raising Bangkok to megalopolis status in thetwentieth century. Urban sprawl in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sydney islinked to a�uence and government public transit policies in Lionel Frost's essayon Paci®c Rim Anglo-Saxon cities. The remaining essays could be looselygrouped under the heading of cultural investigations of the megalopolis, ratherthan by chronology. Helen Meller examines how Patrick Geddes and LewisMumford used the concept of megalopolis, and Nicolau Sevcenko examines thepoet Blaise Cendrars' relationship to SaÄ o Paulo in the 1920s. D. J. Olsen's shortpaper discusses the paucity of historical treatments of culture in cities. RobertFishman's concluding piece in the collection points to the drastically diminishedimportance of the metropolis in the production of culture in the twentiethcentury. Assessed as a whole, this collection presents a variety of cursoryinterpretations of the nature of the megalopolis and its impact on society;special mention should be made of its inclusion of cases outside western Europe.As many of the pieces are quite short, this collection would best serve as anexample of the variation possible in the study of topics in urban history.University of Guelph GEOFFREY KERSLAKE

Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. By William H.McNeill. Harvard University Press. 1996. viii � 198pp. £13.95.`The thesis of this little book is simplicity itself. Moving our muscles

rhythmically and giving voice consolidate group solidarity by altering humanfeelings. This, I believe, is well attested by experience, though little discussed byany learned discipline.' Thus Professor McNeill, whose prime evidence is hisown basic training as a draftee in the US Army in 1941. `The di�used exaltationinduced by drill has no apparent external stimulus. Instead, marching becamean end in itself. Moving briskly and keeping in time was enough to make us feelgood about ourselves, satis®ed to be moving together.' McNeill strives quixotic-ally to give `muscular bonding' independent priority in patterns of historicalcausation. The outcome is fascinating but inconclusive. There is no doubt thathe deals with important questions. What holds armies together in battle? Whatis the source of the sense of community within which children down the ageshave been socialized? But this survey of dance and drill from the beginnings ofhuman prehistory to the last years of the second Christian millennium isnecessarily speculative ± in the eighteenth-century mode of Smith and Millar,where reason says, `though we may have no direct evidence, so it must havebeen' ± and a circular argument is set up. Professor McNeill found drillexalting. This, he infers, is the common human reaction. So long as humans



have existed, `muscular bonding' must have been important. Therefore it is anintegral, immutable human disposition, perverted by the Nuremberg rallies,which we must accommodate in future social structures, benignly if possible.Dancing on the Internet? Well, we have callisthenics on television . . . Yet it issurely a fact that solitary jogging or swimming, and competitive running,produce in the most individualized context the physical symptom of `di�usedexaltation' on which McNeill's argument centres. Dancing face to face withneighbours is not really an activity very similar to drilling with fellow mercenarysoldiers or other raw draftees. Neither much resembles the deliberate excursionsinto public trance of shamans and dervishes, crowd wobbles at revivalistmeetings or Mexican Waves by football supporters. Music, even withoutcommunal singing, has potent e�ects to which McNeill alludes too little. Just asone can have euphoria derived from exercise without bonding, music can bondwithout group muscular e�ort. And McNeill virtually ignores a topic which hasrecently been well explored: the collective use in every culture, including militarysubcultures, of alcohol and mind-altering drugs. In the rave, where dancersare fuelled by vodka and Ecstasy, muscularity, surely, is submerged underconsciousness transformed by substances swallowed.McNeill tries to draw together very disparate human activities ± disciplined

tribal conclaves and anarchic carnival, chiliastic sectarian religion and square-bashing under the RSM. He discusses the behaviour of chimpanzees at lengthand deduces that, prior to speech, dancing de®ned human di�erence from othercreatures. The muscular rituals of hunters facilitated the e�cient co-operationwhich secured human expansion over the earth. Huge facts in recorded history,according to McNeill, derived from drill ± not just the rise to dominance ofEuropean soldiery in India and the expansion of China to its present-dayborders, both in the eighteenth century, but also the bonding among citizenwarriors which generated ideas of democracy and liberty in ancient Greece.From the dances of Hebrew prophets, in which Saul and David immersedthemselves, McNeill, by just acceptable hops, traces Jewish and Christianconcepts of good government, justice and piety. On his ramble through time hepoints to many interesting matters, and if they don't all con®rm that dance anddrill are the keys to most history, they do, as he hopes, challenge us to furtherthought.Edinburgh ANGUS CALDER

Using Computers in History: A Practical Guide. By M. J. Lewis and RogerLloyd-Jones. Routledge. 1996. xiii � 248pp. £45.00 (hb), £14.99 (pb).The authors intend this book to be used both as an aid to the instruction of

historical computing and as a personal guide to historical researchers. It is awelcome addition to the literature on a subject that is certainly not overwhelmedby useful texts, even though history and computing has been taught as acomponent of university courses for some time. Historians generally needencouragement to make use of the research tools provided by the computer andso a book such as this has an important function to serve. It attempts to cover arange of topics from basic computer operations such as `using the mouse'through to complex tasks such as the manipulation of spreadsheets anddatabases. In common with any book concerned with computers, it su�ers from


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the advances being made by software companies. The text rightly usesMicrosoft software products as its exemplars but does not refer to the currentoperating system of Windows 95. However, the authors cannot be held to blamefor the advances made by software ®rms and the basic principles provided willno doubt remain useful for the next few years. Throughout the text the reader isadvised to learn by doing, as the authors believe that this is a `highly educativeprocess'. The appendix to the book contains data sets that readers are encour-aged to use in the construction of their own spreadsheets and databases. One isgiven the historical background to the data provided as well as being advised onsuggested further reading on the topic. The authors make excellent use ofscreendumps to illustrate their instructions and this, together with a thoroughglossary of terminology, makes the book extremely user-friendly. One minorcriticism of this method of learning is that the data sets used are taken from thenineteenth and twentieth centuries and I feel it would have been valuable toencourage other historians by including a wider range of examples. The bookalso makes no reference to the ®ne work done by the Information TechnologyTraining Initiative. The ITTI has produced a manual, written speci®cally toadvise academics on the use of databases, which includes a handy disk contain-ing databases that have been used in academic research and instructs the readerby working through these examples. This aside, the authors provide a highlycommendable text for use in computer workshops and succeed in illustratingthe bene®t to historians of the use of computers as an aid to their research.University of Reading ADRIAN BELL

Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe. Edited by Marguerita DõÂ az-Andreuand Timothy Champion. University College London Press. 1996. vi � 314pp.£45.00.In the fourteen chapters of this volume, ®fteen authors, singly and in com-

bination, tackle (exclusively in English) the complex interplays betweennationalist agendas and individual states, demonstrating the many ways inwhich the past has been manipulated, whether by individual popularizers ofarchaeological results or by the politically engaged. The time frame focuses onthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries and case studies extend from the Atlanticrim (e.g. Portugal and Ireland) eastwards to Poland, Russia and Slovenia. Aselements of a pioneering collection, the papers are perhaps inevitably uneven intheir coverage and emphases. Principal themes include the use of archaeologicalinformation in con®guring national identities, more especially in relation toearly documentary evidence and historical linguistics; the development, applica-tion and functions of legislation to protect selected components of culturalheritage; and the institutionalization of archaeological bodies, includingmuseums, within state apparatuses. Given the tortuous course of state forma-tion and disruptions in the eastern part of the continent in particular, other keycomponents include the use of archaeological data as partial justi®cation forterritorial claims and counter-claims during the last 200 years, and theemployment of archaeological information in discourses to keep alive, justify orfacilitate the re-emergence of formerly subjugated states: on these latter aspects,essays on Slovenia (SlapsÏ iak and NovakovicÂ ), Poland (Raczkowski) and Ireland(Co�ey) are insightful. Among the most successfully synthetic chapters are



those for countries where, for better or for worse, state involvement inarchaeological research has been relatively heavy-handed, and where politicalcircumstances have engendered at least an internal critique of its impact throughsuccessive phases: France (Schnapp), Italy (Guidi) and Russia/Soviet Union(Schnirelman) provide illuminating contrasts. Other valuable studies are moreclosely focused, for example on the treatment of Islamic archaeology in Spain(DõÂ az-Andreu) or on the uses of the past in nineteenth-century Denmark(Stig Sorensen), where the development of archaeological research wasprecociously undertaken alongside the reformulation of the state. Champion'sstudy highlights the peculiarities of the English/British case ± alone among thesuccessful nation-states in the absence, for example, of a museum of nationalantiquities. For the social, cultural and political historian, the volume includes awealth of sometimes disparate information to set alongside other discourses onthe creation and maintenance of national identities in Europe. Although thereare intermittent acknowledgements that, in some cases, the manipulation ofarchaeological data played a very subordinate role in nationalist discourses, theauthors are understandably partisan and concerned for the `defenceless past'. Insum, this is a useful and generally readable tour d'horizon, which, in forging avolume from papers originally composed in a range of languages, would havebene®ted from slightly ®rmer editorial control.University of Edinburgh IAN RALSTON

Western Political Thought: A Bibliographical Guide to Post-War Research.Compiled by Robert Eccleshall and Michael Kenny. Manchester UniversityPress. 1995. xiv � 342pp. £45.00.This is a useful contribution to the series of select bibliographies in history

and related disciplines produced by Manchester University Press under thegeneral editorship of R. C. Richardson. The literature on the history of politicalthought is now enormous and this volume provides a reasonably comprehensiveguide to work that has appeared since 1945. The volume is aimed at teachersand students of political thought as well as researchers and specialists. All will®nd it a useful starting place for their enquiries, but it should not be regarded asa complete guide. The book is divided into eight sections: the ®rst looks at somegeneral themes (methodology, historical spans, gender, contractarianism, etc.);the rest are chronological sections covering the ancient world, the middle ages,early modern Europe, and then the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. Each section lists general works ®rst, followed by works ongeographical areas and speci®c thinkers. Many of the more important workslisted are brie¯y annotated to give some information on their contents andvalue, and there is a useful index of authors. The bibliography is restrictedgeographically to Europe and North America and, unfortunately, to workspublished in English (which slants the bibliography to work on British politicalthought). It does not list editions of works on the major thinkers (e.g. the PeterLaslett edition of Locke's Two Treatises) or works by present-day politicalthinkers such as John Rawls (though many studies of his work are listed).Finally, there is nothing on the history of political ideologies, such as con-servatism, liberalism, etc. Within these limits, however, this book does o�er avery useful introduction to many of the classic political thinkers in the western


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tradition, to the political and intellectual context within which they operated,and to some of the best work of modern scholars. Over 6,000 sources are listedranging from 191 on the ancient world to 1,550 on the nineteenth century. Thereare 174 works on Plato, 187 on Hobbes, 233 on Rousseau, 187 on Hegel, 486 onMarx, 135 on Gramsci and 184 on Rawls. As to authors, Alan Ryan has 20 ofhis works listed, Bhikhu Parekh has 26, John Pocock has 27, John Gray has 33and Quentin Skinner has 38. These ®gures are probably a fairly accuratere¯ection of the leading political theorists being studied and the leading modernscholars studying them in the English-speaking world. It is when one turns tominor political thinkers or to the intellectual context that the weaknesses of thisguide appear. Within my own ®eld, there is virtually nothing on Joseph Priestleyand nothing at all on John Cartwright or William Cobbett; the section on theScottish Enlightenment ignores several seminal articles by Nicholas Phillipson;the few references to Bolingbroke and Thomas Spence omit some of the bestwork on them; all the useful work published in the journal Enlightenment andDissent has been ignored; and there are 28 items on the contemporary Britishreaction to the French Revolution but nothing at all on the wider debate inFrance and elsewhere on the political thought of the Revolution.University of Edinburgh H. T. DICKINSON

Pioneer Children on the Journey West. By Emmy E. Werner. Westview. 1995.xiii � 202pp. £16.50.Children and the Politics of Culture. Edited by Sharon Stephens. PrincetonUniversity Press. 1995. viii � 366pp. £42.00 (hb), £13.95 (pb).Two very di�erent books, but with an underlying question in common: how

do children cope with adversity? Emmy Werner, a developmental psychologist,is an optimist. She sees the stories which she has collected of pioneer childrenbetween the 1840s and the 1860s as `a remarkable testimony to the resiliency ofthe human spirit'. The book is straightforward in structure, aiming to let thechildren, or the adults who were with them, tell their stories in their own, oftenmoving, words. One in ®ve of the young people whom Werner studies died ontheir journey west, ®fteen of them in the Donner party; survival depended partlyon strong support systems in mothers, siblings, extended families, fellowpioneers and Native Americans, and partly on the children's own resources andinnate cheerfulness. By contrast, the anthropologists whom Sharon Stephensgathered together to consider what it might mean in the contemporary world toenable a child, in the words of the United Nations Convention on the Rights ofthe Child, `to enjoy his or her own culture', can only with di�culty conceal theirpessimism. Stephens in her substantial introduction, starting inevitably withPhilippe ArieÁ s, explores how western concepts of childhood and of the rightswhich are associated with it can be of dubious advantage to children in theglobalized economy of `late capitalism'. Such is the contemporary sense of loss,cleverly portrayed by Marilyn Ivy in an essay juxtaposing American advertise-ments for lost children and the self-help literature on the necessity for adults to®nd the child within themselves, that Stephens wonders whether `we are nowwitnessing a profound restructuring of the child within the context of a move-ment from state to global capitalism, modernity to postmodernity'. Childrenwho belong to minority cultural groups ± British Sikhs, for example, or children



of the Turkish migrant diaspora in Germany ± are torn between two cultures,and often made to feel inferior. State policies in Asia force children intointensely competitive educational systems or, in children's ®ction, aim to mouldthem into ways of thinking which serve the interests of the state. Only in SouthAfrica, where under apartheid black children arguably faced di�culties on a parwith those confronting Werner's pioneers, do children seem able to be agentsmore than victims, though in one contributor's view it is at the cost of the loss ofchildhood. If there is anything to relieve the gloom it lies in the possibility thatchildhood, and by implication adulthood, may be restructured around thenotion of `deep play', the imaginative exploration of di�erent cultural worlds.But the rather odd message of the two books taken together seems to be thatchildren could cope better with the environmental challenges of a winter in theRockies in the mid-nineteenth century than with the pressures of life in theglobalized economy of the late twentieth century.University of Kent at Canterbury HUGH CUNNINGHAM

The Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Biography. Edited by Angus Stevenson. OxfordUniversity Press. 1997. ix � 437pp. £6.99 (pb).The ®rst edition of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Biography is intended to

provide a handy, inexpensive reference work o�ering concise entries on some4,350 individuals arranged in an A±Z format. These are based on the OxfordEnglish Reference Dictionary (1995), updated as required, although in addition,about 500 new biographies have been written. As the introduction notes,selection in a work of this type is far from easy and any choice is likely to becontroversial. Like other works of this type, this shows an excessive concernwith contemporary ®gures, especially from the worlds of sport, ®lm and popularculture, in all of which fame is often short-lived. People asked to name the 4,350individuals most appropriate for inclusion might not rush to include JodieFoster and Damon Hill, but they are both here. The clue is provided by thecover, on which pictures of Foster and Hill join those of Mao Tse Tung andElizabeth I in advertising the book, while the blurb on the back assures us thatCantona, Gibson (Mel), Graf and Tarantino are all included and also adds thename of Kurt Cobain. I had forgotten who he was, although the entry remindedme that he was a successful ®gure in the `grunge' band Nirvana, who committedsuicide despite such triumphs as the single `Smells like Teen Spirit'. Anothercuriosity of selection is provided by the appendices. They include the rulers ofEngland and the UK, the prime ministers of Britain, Canada, Australia andNew Zealand and the presidents of the USA, but there is no room forinformation about China, the USSR, France or Germany. This is an amusingbook to read. It would also be instructive to compare it with similar worksproduced a half-century hence.University of Exeter JEREMY BLACK

The Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Edited by Robin Cohen. CambridgeUniversity Press. 1995. xxi � 570pp. £75.00/$125.00.The study of migration is currently one of the most thriving ®elds of research

for historians as well as for political and social scientists. Cohen's survey


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therefore comes as a welcome addition to the ever-growing body of literature onthe topic. In ninety-®ve contributions, leading international scholars fromdi�erent disciplines cover a wide range of issues centred on migration. In ®fteenchapters they discuss questions of international and intercontinental migrationpatterns, ¯ights of refugees, undocumented immigration and asylum-seekers.The majority of the contributions deal with nineteenth- and twentieth-centurymigration (chapters 4±14), while the ®rst three chapters present a generaloverview on European movements between 1500 and 1850. Chapter 15 o�ers aninteresting introduction to current issues and problems such as globalurbanization, contract labour migration and `brain drain'. The volume isrefreshingly international in perspective. Although the well-trodden ground ofEuropean and American migration is widely covered, Africa, Asia and Oceania,Latin and Central America and the Middle East are dealt with in separatesections. Some aspects which, so far, have not attracted much academic interest,such as the move of gypsies from eastern to western Europe and the repatriationof Soviet citizens at the end of the Second World War, add new dimensions tothe study of migration. Tables, graphs and illustrations are well-chosen addi-tions to the text. Each section provides the reader with a list of references forfurther reading. Here, however, the editor could have asked for greater con-gruence among the various contributions. While some authors clearly have triedto collect the latest scholarship on the topic, others just quote the books theyhave used for their speci®c articles. A concise bibliography including the mostimportant contributions to the subject would have been helpful. Cohen hasconvincingly outlined the editorial decisions and selection criteria underlyingthe composition of the work and each chapter starts with a brief introduction tothe speci®c topic. However, a section on the state of the art, on recent researchagendas and changing patterns of methodology and approach would have beenuseful, especially since this volume is intended as a reference tool for scholarsand students from various backgrounds. Despite these shortcomings, the bookis an admirable achievement which deserves a wide readership.London School of Economics RAINGARD ESSER

European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives. Edited by Dirk Hoerder andLeslie Page Moch. Northeastern University Press. 1996. vi � 329pp. £45.00(hb), £17.00 (pb).This collection of essays attempts to cover new ground in migration history.

As outlined in Moch's introduction, the authors ± experts in the ®eld ± try toexpand the framework for migration studies in three distinct areas. First,migration is placed within both a long-term and a global perspective; second,migration is seen as a collective process, in¯uenced by home conditions as wellas changing information and norms about moving, rather than as anindividually motivated decision based on traditional push±pull factors; third,gender is introduced as an important, but still largely neglected factor inunderstanding migration and acculturation processes. The ten essays, three ofwhich have been previously published, focus on the period of mass migrationbetween Europe and the Americas from c.1840 to 1914. The book is dividedinto three parts. Part one addresses overarching questions of migration systems.It opens with Hoerder's article on `Migration in the Atlantic Economies', which



o�ers a thorough overview of migration since the thirteenth century basedon global socio-economic developments. This section also includes DonnaGabaccia's survey of women's growing participation in the migration process.Despite the ambitious task set out in the introduction, her article remains theonly contribution which deals with questions of gender. Moch's article on therelationship between human mobility and the rural economy opens part two ofthe book, which is concerned with the preconditions and the process of `LeavingHome'. Case studies on nineteenth-century Germany and Poland furtherilluminate the complexities of emigration and economic and political changes inthe home countries. The third part of the book deals with the immigrants attheir places of destination. The most interesting article in this section isHoerder's suggestive essay on acculturation patterns, which covers issues suchas expectations and voyage experience as well as the structure of the destinationeconomy, society and political system. Two comparative studies on eastEuropean Jews in New York, London and Paris and on Italian immigrants inBuenos Aires and New York are illuminating examples in showing the import-ance of the pre-migration characteristics of the newcomers in determining thedegree of integration into the new environment. However, these contributionsare more descriptive than analytical and whet the appetite for more in-depthreading. All the essays emphasize the complementary nature of macro andmicro perspectives in the migration process. The book is a useful introductionfor newcomers in migration history, addressing important issues. The selectbibliography contains suggestions for further reading that are of interest to bothhistorians and social scientists.London School of Economics RAINGARD ESSER

Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe. Edited by David Cesarani andMary Fulbrook. Routledge. 1996. x � 225pp. £12.99 (pb).This collection of essays explores complex issues of nationality, citizenship

and migration in the context of apparently contradictory forces of socialchange. On the one hand, globalization is thought to have led to decreasingcontrol by national governments over their economies, communications haveundergone a technological revolution and some aspects of culture are trulyinternational. Movement of peoples across national borders continues. On theother hand, ethnic nationalities have revived, right-wing racism is increasingand more virulent expressions of national jingoism have been resurrected. Thisbook is a mixed bag, the individual constituent essays of which do not alwaysrelate well together: for example, the case studies of France, Germany, Italy andGreat Britain do not discuss comparable phenomena. However, this in partre¯ects the disarray and inconsistency in the issues under discussion. Citizenshiplaws, having developed di�erently in di�erent countries, have not been madeconsistent across Europe. Patrick Weil's example of two hypothetical Turkishbrothers illustrates the point well. One moves to Frankfurt and the other toParis. If a child born to the Parisian brother moves to live with his uncle inFrankfurt, after the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, theoretically he would be able tovote in elections in Frankfurt, even if he were unable to speak German or knewlittle of the city or its culture. However, his cousin, having been brought up inFrankfurt and speaking German, would not necessarily be able to vote. The


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French cousin would be able to vote by virtue of his French citizenship, whilethe `German' cousin could be denied the vote because gaining Germancitizenship would entail losing his Turkish nationality. Concepts of nationalityare not congruent with citizenship, and citizenship is not congruent withcategories of immigrants. The collection provides a valuable contribution to anexploration of the underlying meanings of these changes. Elspeth Guild'simportant overview, Patrick Weil's illuminating discussion of the muddle oflaws and David Cesarani's typically pertinent contribution on the relationshipbetween nationality and immigration through British history are worthy ofparticular notice. Terminology has always been a problem in discussions ofmigration, race and ethnicity, and is so in this volume. The term `ethnic' is notused consistently throughout the essays. However, understanding of the variousnational contexts will become increasingly important in discussions of theEuropean Union's apparent determination to construct a racialized `fortressEurope', for despite the complete inconsistency in constructions of nationalidentities, citizenship and immigration laws, the EU has shown the ability tounite in its project to keep non-Europeans from entering. The likelihood ofsuccess in this project is small.De Montfort University, Leicester LORNA CHESSUM

Hunger in History: Food Shortage, Poverty, and Deprivation. General editorLucile F. Newman. Blackwell. 1995. xi � 429pp. £14.99 (pb).`The history of hunger is for the most part unwritten. The hungry rarely write

history, and historians are rarely hungry.' These comments by Sara Millmanand Robert Kates in the opening chapter to Hunger in History introduce thefascinating debate that follows in the remaining fourteen papers by a variety ofarchaeologists, demographers, economists, geographers and historians, theoutcome of a year-long interdisciplinary seminar series. The series was convenedby the World Hunger programme at Brown University to investigate thecontribution of historical studies to improving understanding of famine today,by studying the causes and consequences of hunger throughout recordedhistory. The opening chapter summarizes the major theoretical debates abouthunger as cause and consequence, and the main part of the book presents aseries of general debates and speci®c case studies addressing these issues overincreasingly shorter time frames, from prehistoric millennia to recent decades.The two papers in part II, `Hunger in Prehistoric Societies', concentrate on therole of hunger in the transition to farming some 12,000 years ago, which severalscholars, including Cohen (the author of paper 3), have argued can best beunderstood as a response to demographic pressure, while others prefer to seeit as a response to changing environments, or social intensi®cation, or (asMatthews et al., paper 2), as a mixture of factors. Part III, `Hunger in ComplexSocieties', contains four papers concerned with famine in early state societies,for example the relationship between agricultural intensi®cation and stateformation in Mesopotamia (Newman et al.), responses to food crises in theGreco-Roman (Garnsey) and early Chinese (Yates) civilizations, and thepotential role of famine in the collapse of the Maya state (Turner). The threepapers in part IV, `Hunger in the Emerging World System', address hunger overthe past 500 years through issues associated with the emergence of the modern



nation-state, colonialism and industrialization, at the general theoretical level(Crossgrove et al.), in eighteenth-century Europe (Post) and in Bern inSwitzerland in 1850 (P®ster), emphasizing on the one hand the social under-pinnings of famine and on the other the capacity of human societies to developcoping strategies. Part V, `Hunger in the Recent Past', with essays on the globalfood system (Millman et al.; Sen), feeding China's millions (Riskin) and worldnutritional problems (Scrimshaw), illustrates the problems that have arisen andwhich will continue to arise, despite the world's theoretical capacity to feeditself, when nation-states are meant to be self-su�cient but are in reality lockedinto global economic systems beyond their control. The concluding chapter(Kates and Millman), `On Ending Hunger: The Lessons of History', reiteratesthe point made by Sen (p. 374) that `hunger and famine have to be seen aseconomic phenomena in the broadest sense ± including production, distribu-tion and utilization of food ± and not just as re¯ections of problems of foodproduction as such.' The lessons of history described with force and clarity inthis excellent set of papers emphasize repeatedly the social underpinnings ofhunger. They also reinforce the rising arguments in present-day developmentprogrammes for empowering local people in decision-making about agriculturalchange, rather than continuing with the traditional top-down programmes offood aid and technology transfer that have failed so predictably, and with suchdisastrous consequences for the world's most vulnerable and marginalizedpeoples.University of Leicester GRAEME BARKER

Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine and Storytelling. By Julia Epstein.Routledge. 1995. x � 275pp. £45.00 (hb), £14.99 (pb).The title of this wide-ranging series of essays on the cultural roots of modern

`biomedicine' derives from an 1847 essay by Rudolf Virchow on scienti®cmedicine. Virchow argued that diseases were not autonomous organisms, butthat `they represent only the course of physiological phenomena under alteredconditions'. This perspective allows the author to develop some alternativeviews of disease other than those based on simple processes of infection. Theauthor is concerned to probe historical perceptions of `altered conditions'. Thevolume traces the development of the case history from the emergence of anorganized scienti®c form of case-recording during the seventeenth century, andthe ambiguities of Samuel Johnson's apparently convulsive condition in theeighteenth. A comparison of representations of disease over a period ofcenturies makes a fascinating narrative. The author then goes on to investigatesexual ambiguity, birth abnormalities and AIDS. The emphasis is on theframeworks of medical epistemology. There is an interesting survey of herma-phroditism across the centuries, and of how the anatomically ambiguousindividual has been perceived as subversive and threatening. The medicalizationof sexual ambiguities is seen as a long-term process occurring from the sixteenthto the nineteenth century, the histories of individual cases often ending in theirbeing put to death or suicide. In eighteenth-century debate, abnormalities inthe womb are ascribed to the mental activity of a pregnant woman. Finally,re¯ections are o�ered on the implications of AIDS for the cultural critique of


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the human body, and on the historical roots of the rhetoric of blame, pollutionand stigma. Overall, this is a thought-provoking set of essays.Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, PAUL WEINDLINGUniversity of Oxford

Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and What We Don't Knowabout Cancer. By Robert Proctor. Basic Books. 1995. ix � 368pp. $25.00.Given that cancer is both one of the most dreaded and also the most highly

researched diseases, an historical perspective on cancer in the United Statessince the 1970s is to be welcomed. The idea of cancer as a disease of civilizationprovides the opportunity for examining some older theories of cancer. Therefollows a lively consideration of two environmentalists, William Hueper of theNational Cancer Institute who suggested industrial causes for cancers, andRachel Carson who warned about the chemical e�ects of pollutants. Theapproach is then thematic, covering in turn environment, genetics, tobacco,asbestos, pesticides, etc. The book takes a cue from Samual Epstein's ThePolitics of Cancer by arguing that far more could be done to prevent and controlcancer. The problems lie with lobbyists and the politics of modern medicalresearch; the author argues that the research has lacked concrete results. Overallthe writing is lucid and pithy. This is a brave attempt to tackle the recent politicsof a major health problem.Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, PAUL WEINDLINGUniversity of Oxford

On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. By Donald Kagan.Hutchinson. 1995. xiv � 606pp. £25.00.Donald Kagan's book represents the distillation of a course on `The Origins

of War' which he has taught at Yale for the past twenty-®ve years. It comes torest in the shadowy areas between history, morality and political science, spicedwith hefty doses of speculation. His thesis is developed through the investigationof the origins of just four wars ± the Peloponnesian War, the Second PunicWar, the First World War and the Second World War ± and one close-runthing ± the Cuban Missile Crisis. These ®ve episodes were chosen, apparently,because they involve a mix of historical periods and types of state. There mustalso be the suspicion that this selection supports the author's thesis. A moreaccurate title might have been `The Origins of Some Carefully Chosen Wars'.The study of these ®ve crises, based on rather thin lists of secondary authorities,presents nothing new to the historian. Such importance as the work possesseslies in its conclusions. A rather tendentious book emerges, ponti®cating aboutthose famous `lessons of history'. War, says Kagan, is the normal condition ofmankind, peace the exception: a dubious assertion which can only follow fromlooking at a global picture of wars in progress rather than at the history ofindividual states. Essentially, wars result from the quest for power, theperceptions of power and fear of power, but are caused by the mishandling ofimmediate crises. The Cuban Missile Crisis did not lead to war because of thecrisis management of Kennedy and Khrushchev, despite the subversive e�ortsof Generals Le May and Power. The `lesson of history' is that the preservationof peace is a great deal more di�cult for both states and the international



community than the descent into war. International systems, such as theadmired Congress of Vienna, have to be continuously updated and amended asthe situations and conditions of states alter. States thus have to work at peaceand co-operation, committing money, resources, diplomacy and even, onoccasion, violence. This begins to sound like an appeal to the members of theUnited Nations to pay their overdue subscriptions. Naturally, the book endswith a broad hint that world peace can only be preserved under the leadership ofthe United States.University of Leeds JOHN CHILDS

The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern War. Edited by Charles Townshend.Oxford University Press. 1997. xii � 354pp. £25.00.In a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated collection of essays Charles

Townshend has fully developed his thesis that modern war is the product ofadministrative, technical and ideological changes. The evolution of modern waris reviewed in the ®rst part of the volume. The so-called `military revolution' iscritically examined in chapters by John Childs and Jeremy Black, and theconcept of `a nation in arms' is reviewed both in the period of the French warsby Alan Forrest and in the nineteenth century by David French, who doubtsthat any late nineteenth-century European army constituted a nation in arms.Douglas Porch provides a splendid account of imperial warfare as the dynamicof imperial expansion, noting that guerrilla warfare was the most dreaded formof operation for a regular army. John Bourne claims that the blow to Europeanself-con®dence was one of the most important legacies of the Great War, whileRichard Overy provides a graphic account of how German forces underwent agradual process of `de-modernization' during the Second World War. Town-shend concludes by assessing the development of the `people's war', arguingthat this may become the pattern for warfare in the twenty-®rst century. Theelements of modern war are analysed in the second part, including a perceptiveaccount of modern combat by Richard Holmes, laced with many appositequotations, and a revisionist account of strategic bombing by Overy, arguingthat it contained the German war e�ort and caused demoralization, if only byproducing apathy, fear and despair and not revolution as desired. Thealternatives to war, including the advantages and disadvantages of economicsanctions, are systematically examined by Adam Roberts. He concludes thatsanctions are seldom su�cient for collective action to work. Finally, Martin vanCreveld provides a provocative overview on modern war, asserting that nuclearproliferation has invariably produced peace and not war; that all counter-insurgencies have failed; and that limited wars have not produced any newtactical doctrine. Whether this is a convincing summation is another matter:nuclear peace is not exactly analogous to peace; the fate that befell Che Guevaraor the Tupamaros guerrillas or the rebels in Dhofar hardly equates with success;and the sweeping triumph of the US-led coalition in the Gulf war surelyindicates that something was learned from the Vietnamese debacle. However,the volume adds considerably to our knowledge of the techniques, technology,theory, and impact of modern warfare, and these essays will no doubt stimulatefurther thought.University of Leeds EDWARD M. SPIERS


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Pirates: An Illustrated History of Privateers, Buccaneers and Pirates from theSixteenth Century to the Present. Edited by David Cordingly. Salamander. 1996.256pp. £25.00.A handsomely illustrated book with this title and a skull and crossbones on

the cover does not immediately suggest a work of scholarship. Appearances,however, can be deceptive. The contributors to this work are experts, several ofthem scholars of distinction; the text is informative, the judgements generallysound and many of the illustrations both interesting and appropriate (althoughsome are not: nineteenth-century illustrations are not good sources forseventeenth-century episodes). In `Libertalia: The Pirate's Utopia', MarcusRediker o�ers an account of pirate attitudes to authority in which he argues thatthey transformed in¯exibly harsh discipline into a looser, more libertarian wayof running a ship. As in his own book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,there may be a degree of romanticism, but Rediker o�ers a powerful defence ofpirate arrangements. John Falconer on `The Eastern Seas' and Dian Murray on`Chinese Pirates' cover spheres of piracy that generally receive insu�cientattention. Both are useful and wide-ranging pieces. Dian Murray considers thesituation from the ®fteenth century. In combination with Eric Ellen's chapter on`Piracy Today', the essays by Falconer and Murray give the impression that theimpact of the British navy in the nineteenth century has been short-lived. Piracytoday is particularly a problem in the far east. Since many pirate attacks take nolonger than ten to twenty minutes, it is impossible for even the fastest patrolvessels to come to the aid of a ship under attack. There is the added di�culty oftracking down pirate lairs, for example among the hundreds of Indonesianislands. As with earlier episodes of piracy, not least what is termed by JenniferMarx its `golden age', there is suspicion of connivance with o�cials. Thevolume could have made more of the overlap with privateering, but it is much tobe welcomed as an accessible and interesting collection.University of Exeter JEREMY BLACK

Enterprise and Labour: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Edited byPeter Mathias and John A. Davis. Blackwell. 1996. 214 pp. £40.00.This book comprises nine chapters, ®rst given as papers at a conference in

1987, and a brief introduction. P. Mathias contributes two essays on eighteenth-century Britain, one on entrepreneurs and managers, the other on labour.R. Magraw, S. Salter, T. Matsumura and P. Edwards contribute synopticsurveys of employer±labour relationships in, respectively, France from 1871 to1939, Nazi Germany, inter-war Japan, and the USA from 1920 to 1985.J. Davis's and P. Thane's chapters are also synoptic, the former focusing onentrepreneurial attitudes and economic growth in late nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Italy, the latter on women's work in Britain in the sameperiod. R. Whipp's chapter on labour relations in the pottery industry in earlytwentieth-century Britain relates this apparently narrow topic to the widerhistory of British industrial relations. All the chapters are, at the least, soundintroductions to their subjects. Davis's is, to a reviewer unfamiliar with Italianhistory, admirable ± concise and yet contributing to a number of debatesconcerning economic development. There are shared questions which thechapters variously engage according to their focus, one important one being the



role of economic rationality as against cultural in¯uences in employer andemployee strategies. Having said that, one is left asking for whom exactly thecollection is intended. The scholar who wishes to make a comparative study ofsuch matters will need to pursue them at much greater depth, the more so as themajority of the secondary references are no later than 1990 (Davis is anexception, while the chapters by Mathias are unreferenced). Therefore the mainuse must be for students, and indeed a number of the chapters would beextremely useful at that level: those by Magraw, Salter and Davis stand out fortheir value to history students in areas on which there is not much suitablematerial in English. Yet the book is far too expensive for many libraries topurchase, given that it is not central to any one area of study. One wonders if thepublishers and editors could rethink the series of which this forms a part. Thetotal returns from selling cheaper paperbacks might be less than from thepresent format, but the books can hardly be big money-makers anyway. As it is,at present we have something which is not really a specialist work, but is not asuseful as it might be to students.Cheltenham and Gloucester College of CHARLES MOREHigher Education

The Companion to British History. By Charles Arnold-Baker. Longcross. 1996.ix � 1,386pp. £48.00.Works such as these are di�cult to review. Reviewers, a justly despised group,

generally focus on errors or tell the reader how they would have done the bookthemselves, an approach that invites an obvious rejoinder. It is possibly moreinteresting to treat Charles Arnold-Baker's work as a text and to see what light itthrows on historical mentality at this juncture. Indeed, there is obvious room foran article comparing this companion with The History Today Companion toBritish History edited by Juliet Gardiner and Neil Wenborn (Collins and Brown,1995). Arnold-Baker's book contains far more material, not least because of thesmall print, but costs £23.00 more. It also ranges more widely. I did not expectto ®nd in a Companion to British History mention of Turkish campaigning inIraq in the 1630s, or to be told that Rousseau `lived fecklessly with a kitchenmaid whose ®ve bastards he abandoned'. Nevertheless, Arnold-Baker empha-sizes the global context of British history: `The bowstaves of Agincourt camefrom Italy and Prussia. Snooker was invented at Ootacamund in the hills ofSouthern India.' He is also proud of Britain: `An important test of the essentialdecency of a society is the number of its people which it kills. By this rule ofthumb the United Kingdom emerges with much credit . . . In general themurkier side of British history has been the result of ± often highly reprehens-ible ± neglect and sins of omission rather than (save at times in Ireland andChina) deliberate viciousness.' Academic historians are less charitable. Moreseriously, this is an account that re¯ects a concern with `facts' and narrativehigh-political history. It is a counterpart to Roy Strong's national history, alsopublished in 1996. Both re¯ect the continued hold of traditional conceptions ofthe past. Many readers will ®nd this approach of value. Others may be surprisedto see so little on social, economic and cultural history.University of Exeter JEREMY BLACK


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British Women's History: A Bibliographical Guide. Compiled by June Hannam,Ann Hughes and Pauline Sta�ord. Manchester University Press. 1996.xiv � 150pp. £45.00.This addition to the series of historical bibliographies under the general

editorship of R. C. Richardson is a valuable contribution to the study of Britishwomen's history as the most up-to-date guide in the ®eld. It covers literaturepublished before 1993 on the history of British and Irish women from themiddle ages to the present day, and it is directed chie¯y at university teachers,postgraduates and undergraduates. It claims to be a selective rather than acomprehensive guide to the literature, and it is therefore not directed towardsadvanced researchers, but with over 3,000 items covered by its survey, it is likelyto be of interest to these also. The ®rst two sections ± a short list of generalworks and a longer collection of methodological material, including majorprinted sources ± will be useful to historians at any stage of study. Theremaining three sections are divided chronologically into medieval (c.500±c.1500), early modern (c.1500±c.1800) and modern (c.1800 to the present),although naturally these boundaries are not rigid. Each of these chronologicalsections also begins with a subsection on general works. These are followed bysubsections on views of women, family, law, health, sexuality, work, travel andemigration, politics, social policy, prostitution, crime, witchcraft, religion,education, the arts, autobiography and biography, and women as historians. Asubstantial number of items have been given some descriptive comment,particularly where the editors have thought them to be seminal or where theyare engaged in direct debate with other items. A selection of cross-references isgiven at the end of each cross-section, but browsing through the whole guideis encouraged by the editors and indeed is well repaid. An index of authors isalso included.University of Stirling EMMAVINCENT MACLEOD

The House of Commons: Seven Hundred Years of British Tradition. Edited byRobert Smith and John S. Moore. Smith's Peerage. 1996. xx � 229pp. £16.95(pb).This volume is a collection of papers most of which were delivered at the 1994

Annual Conference of the Manorial Society of Great Britain. Though most areby academic historians, one has the feeling that the authors were constrained bya non-academic audience in preparing their chapters. In addition the bookincludes four contributions by non-academics: two by the editors, one on thelife of an MP by a sitting member, and one on parliament and the press by thejournalist Edward Pearce. This makes the volume a distinctly ill-assortedcollection. Broadly, the chapters by D. A. Carpenter (Magna Carta to 1307),Simon Payling (the later middle ages), Jennifer Loach (1528±1603) and KevinSharpe (1603±60) focus on the evolution of the Commons' role in the grantingof taxation and its emergence as a political force. Then the book changes itstheme and focus quite sharply, so that the chapters by W. A. Speck (1660±1634), Jeremy Black (1734±1832) and Valerie Cromwell (1832±84) areconcerned with corruption, representation, in¯uence and the expansion of thefranchise. The volume then tails o� alarmingly. The chapter by Michael Fry on



Ùniversal Su�rage: The Modern House' scarcely focuses on the Commons atall but becomes a general political history of Britain and the empire up to 1914.Thus the important question of why and to what extent the Commons hasdeclined during the twentieth century has been neglected. Students of constitu-tional history ± if there are any ± will ®nd some of the earlier chapters usefulsummaries, particularly that by Professor Sharpe which o�ers a searching andwide-ranging historiographical discussion.University of Newcastle upon Tyne MARTIN PUGH

The History of English Law: Centenary Essays on `Pollock and Maitland'. Editedby John Hudson. (Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 89.) OxfordUniversity Press. 1996. xii � 288pp. £19.95.The symposium held in Cambridge in 1995 to gauge the standing after a

hundred years of The History of English Law before the Time of Edward Iquickly turned into an evaluation of F. W. Maitland as an historian, and abibliography of Maitland's writings by Mark Philpott is appended to the tenessays printed here. Handling the chapter on the Anglo-Saxons, the only part ofthe work credited to Pollock, Patrick Wormald has to bring in Domesday Bookand Beyond to argue that Maitland was led by suspicion of `pure Germanarchaism' to underestimate the power of the Old English state. John Hudsonlikewise ®nds that Maitland underestimated the importance of the Anglo-Norman period and the regulation of feudal lordship in the development ofEnglish law, though he was right to see the invention of the forms of action inHenry II's reign as the great leap forward. In a paper which gives somepreliminary ®ndings of a current project to construct a database of Henry II'sacta, J. C. Holt remarks on how few writs Maitland had on which to base hisànecdotal' account of the Henrician innovations. Maitland made `the Age ofBracton' central to the History, but Paul Brand uses the work of S. E. Thorneand J. L. Barton and his own knowledge of the plea-rolls to show that `Bracton'was written too early for it to have been the work of Bracton the judge, and thatit is not a reliable guide to legal practice at any point in time. Stephen D. Whitesees Maitland relying on a `national' legal history, narrowly conceived as thetracing of the rules applied in the courts, to attack Maine's fashionable view,based on a comparison between di�erent systems, of an original pre-eminenceof family and kinship ties. Henry Summerson ®nds Maitland à genius with aninadequate database' in his treatment of criminal law; he remained blind to theworld outside his case material and in particular to the initiative of the localcommunity in law enforcement. In a typically even-handed appraisal of `thelearned laws in Pollock and Maitland', R. H. Helmholz shows that Maitland'sknowledge of the ius commune was derived mainly from secondary sources andcoloured by the belief that English law had to survive a battle against areception of Roman law (won only just before the History's terminal date); inhis famous demolition of Stubbs he was in fact mistaken in representing papaldecretals as `binding statutes' in England or anywhere else. George Garnettargues that the notion of `the Crown' had nothing to do with Maitland's`continuous life of the state' but was required when the post-Conquest kingscame to exercise lordship over undying ecclesiastical corporations. Discussing


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Maitland's treatment of women, Jews, serfs and heretics, Paul Hyams ®nds himnot over-sympathetic to minorities, nor sensitive to the power of class or to thelaw as an instrument of oppression. All these essays acknowledge how muchMaitland got right, and they make their own contribution to the history ofEnglish law. But the intellectual sting of the volume is in S. F. C. Milsom's ®nalre¯ections, where he asks why historians still treat Maitland's writings asorthodoxy: as a `lawyer-historian' he was concerned not so much withestablishing facts as with tracing the `shifting assumptions, analyses, percep-tions' in people's heads, though in truth he was too inclined to read back intothe middle ages timeless principles of property law. It is a good question, thoughit makes those of us who are not lawyers but perforce use court records and areinterested in changing perceptions as well as `the institutional hedgerows of thelaw' wonder what we are doing. Was Maitland himself still a `legal historian'when he wrote about Domesday Book or parliamentary memoranda orproduced those editions of manorial court rolls which have inspired more than ahundred years of social history?University of Liverpool ALAN HARDING

British Economic and Social History: A Bibliographical Guide, Third Edition.Compiled by R. C. Richardson and W. H. Chaloner. Manchester UniversityPress. 1996. xv � 271pp. £45.00.Representing years of bibliographical research, this latest edition will be of

great use in research libraries worldwide. Clearly, the editors have gone to greatlengths to expand the scope of previous editions by adding entries dealing withnew scholarship in the ®elds of women's and family history, criminal and legalhistory, as well as many works dealing with popular culture and recreation.The inclusion of these topics not only indicates the tide of change in historicalwriting over the last few decades, but serves to buttress the unrivalled collec-tion of secondary sources in British economic and social history alreadycompiled here. This volume, much like earlier editions of this publication, hasalso provided researchers with an indispensable source of citations frommaterials dealing with commerce, ®nance and industrial development.Typically, a citation's title provides a solid basis for further inquiry, but anno-tated entries are provided where necessary, and when a given work is regardedas de®nitive in its ®eld. Every major area of historical scholarship is repre-sented here, from general historiographical works to specialist tracts in militaryhistory, public health, the legislative process and industrial archaeology. Theattention paid to local and regional historical sources is also remarkable for itsscope and breadth. The net result for this latest edition is a more compre-hensive and holistic view of British society and the economic relationships andfunctions practised therein. In addition, scholars will ®nd a considerableexpansion in the number of entries dealing with Ireland, Scotland and Wales,both as individual social and economic units and in terms of their relationshipto the United Kingdom as a whole. In short, this publication will be ofincalculable worth to both students and professional historians for decades tocome.University of Wisconsin-Madison THOMAS P. MALONEY



The Kings and Queens: An Irreverent Cartoon History of the British Monarchy.By Kenneth Baker. Thames & Hudson. 1996. 192pp. £15.95.Like its predecessor, The Prime Ministers (1995), The Kings and Queens

claims to be an ìrreverent history in cartoons': but the irreverence is in thecaricatures rather than in Baker's approach to either institution, which isblandly supportive. Scholarship and irreverence are by no means incompatible.Unfortunately, as in The Prime Ministers, Baker uses these prints to illustrate aseries of banalities; his commentary on this rich source material is at bestpedestrian. This distinctive genre of primary printed evidence will repay, but hasyet largely failed to be paid, the sort of serious attention to its visual and textualcodes which will realize its potential as historical evidence. It will be objectedthat these are not `serious' histories. But the historian will expect the historicalcontexualization even of an ìrreverent' history to rise above an elementary level.In their pictorial content ± the range of prints and drawings reproduced, albeitmany on too small a scale to do them justice, is good ± Mr Baker's books do thelayman or newcomer to this material a service. As complacently ìrreverent'histories, they do this material no favours at all.University of St Andrews EIRWEN NICHOLSON

Maps of the Mediterranean Regions Published in British Parliamentary Papers1801±1921. By Susan Gole. Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation. 1996. 429pp.£C50.00.The inexpensive production of exact copies of maps by lithography ensured

that cartographic use and literacy increased in the nineteenth century. SusanGole's handsome volume re¯ects this with its publication of 330 maps from theParliamentary Papers. The maps are reproduced in geographical order. Mapsconsidered important in their depiction of the Mediterranean, although cover-ing a wider area, come ®rst, followed by maps of the islands within the sea itself,with those to the west taken ®rst. The countries along the Mediterranean littoralare then taken in a circular order. Each section begins with a brief andsomewhat weak historical background note on the area depicted. Each mapis accompanied by notes. The maps vary greatly. For example, one devotedto consular buildings in Constantinople is followed by another on theTrebizond±Sinope region; another produced to locate the murder of twoBritish o�cials near Marathon in 1870 is followed by a series of maps on theTurko-Greek frontier. Some readers might have welcomed a detailed discussionof British maps of the Mediterranean or of the use of maps in parliamentarydiscussions, or of rising carto-literacy. Others will be fascinated by the variety ofthe maps on o�er.University of Exeter JEREMY BLACK

The Oxford Dictionary of Local and Family History. By David Hey. OxfordUniversity Press. 1997. vi � 297pp. £5.99 (pb).This does not seek to be a complete in-depth guide to the subject, but rather

serves as a useful paperback handbook. The Dictionary provides de®nitions ofmost of the technical terms that a local and family historian is likely toencounter. It also o�ers brief guidance on the whereabouts of records, their use


GENERAL 113

and their interpretation. It includes various lists ± regnal years, prime ministers,major saints' days, weights and measures, and the addresses of record o�ces ±and has a bibliography of the most important publications in the subject,arranged by topic. A lengthy appendix, `A Guide to the Records for the FamilyHistorian', o�ers a detailed practical guide covering the whole of British historyand all the British Isles. This book is a worthy companion to Hey's OxfordCompanion to Local and Family History (1996).University of Exeter JEREMY BLACK

Topographical Writers in South-West England. Edited by Mark Brayshay.University of Exeter Press. 1996. xii � 200pp. £12.95 (pb).There are already important books on the work of English antiquarian and

topographical writers, including the ®ne studies by D. C. Douglas, StuartPiggott, Jack Simmons and Graham Parry, as well as the compendious EnglishCounty Histories, edited by C. R. J. Currie and C. P. Lewis. What, then, has thisnew, nicely produced and helpfully priced book from Exeter to o�er? Theanswer is: a great deal, which deserves attention. First, as the editor points out,it provides much more extensive treatment of the south-western counties andtheir writers than the earlier works present. Secondly, some of the authors inDr Brayshay's collection have taken themes which cross county boundaries.Thirdly, even the writers who appear here and in the Currie and Lewis collectionhave introduced new material and di�erent approaches.The book comprises seven chapters, including an interesting overview of

topographical writing in the south-west by the editor. John Chancellor coura-geously examines how John Leland acquired his knowledge of the west countryand assesses the historical value of his writings on the area. There are fourchapters by the scholarly, academic heavyweights of the region. Joyce Youingspresents a delightful chapter on early topographers of Devon and Cornwall ±not just Richard Carew and John Hooker, but also the less familiar ThomasWestcote, Tristram Risdon and William Pole. Similar local expertise is demon-strated in Robert Dunning's examination of the historical writers of Somerset.Joseph Bettey contributes a wide-ranging survey of the early topographers andtravellers in Dorset. Malcolm Todd moves beyond the conventional frameworkof counties to trace the development of an interest in antiquities in the landscapethrough the work of Richard Colt Hoare and Samuel Lyons, `who raisedtopographical study to a new plane', one unmatched in Europe. Finally, SarahWilmot considers how agricultural improvers like WilliamMarshall contributedto the study of regional topography. The value of this informative and absorb-ing book is enhanced by the list (compiled by Ian Maxted and the editor) ofworks on the topography of the region, a contribution which ®ttingly concludesa volume which deserves a readership far beyond the west country.University of Leeds G. C. F. FORSTER

The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, Volume V: Religion andIdentity. Edited by Patrick O'Sullivan. Leicester University Press. 1996.x � 262pp. £39.95.This book is the ®fth of six volumes in Patrick O'Sullivan's ambitious

series. It represents, O'Sullivan writes, a study of `the place of religion in the



development of changing migrant identities'. In exploring this relationship thevolume draws on contributions from scholars spread widely across the Irishdiaspora: three chapters deal with aspects of Irish Catholicism in Australia, twowith dimensions of the Irish presence in the United States, others with the Irishin Scotland, Wales and England. Additional chapters deal with northernProtestant experiences of emigration and the songs and hymns of Irishmigration. Though the contributions vary in quality and insight, several providestimulating reading for scholars of the Irish experience abroad. In particular,James White McAuley's wide-ranging study of Protestant emigration from thenorth, which ventures from eighteenth-century migrations through to currentemigration trends, provides a timely reminder of the importance of Protestantmigration in studies of the Irish abroad. His work highlights well the complex-ities of migrant identity among a group too often overlooked or marginalized instudies of the diaspora. Also valuable is James P. Cantrell's study of the Irish inthe American South, which focuses on the novels of Ellen Glasgow andMargaret Mitchell. Cantrell's contribution emphasizes the lack of scholarlyattention devoted to the Irish in the South and poses new challenges forhistorians of the Irish in the United States. Two other chapters focus on theIrish involvement in religious orders, including Barry Coldrey's frank accountof discipline in Christian Brothers' schools. Almost inevitably in a volume suchas this, a tension exists between the central organizing theme and the sheerdiversity of the contributions. Such is the case in this collection, where somechapters quite explicitly explore the nexus between religion and identity, while inothers analysis is rather more opaque. Wide di�erences exist, too, in thedisciplinary approaches adopted by the various authors of this volume: history,sociology and literary criticism are all represented. This is, of course, no badthing, and O'Sullivan is correct when he argues in the introduction that acomprehensive understanding of di�erences in Irish Catholic and Protestantexperiences of migration and identity is best achieved through an inter-disciplinary approach. Overall, this volume will be of considerable value toscholars of the Irish abroad, even if for those resident in more distant outreachesof the Irish diaspora with weaker currencies the volumes in this series will berather too expensive to purchase.University of Auckland MALCOLM CAMPBELL

A Military History of Ireland. Edited by T. Bartlett and K. Je�rey. CambridgeUniversity Press. 1996. xxv � 565pp. £40.00.`For where there are Irish there's bound to be ®ghting,/And when there's no

®ghting, it's Ireland no more!' These words of Kipling, in his 1918 verses inpraise of the Irish Guards, have an ugly resonance for all who hope for an Irishfuture free of guns and armed struggle. Yet they belong to a tradition ofmilitarism tightly woven into the tangled skein of Ireland's history. Kipling wasa passionate opponent of Irish home rule, yet his celebration of Irish militaryvirtues could be shared by political opponents like John Redmond. `The Irishpeople have been endowed in a distinguished degree,' Redmond wrote in a 1914recruiting lea¯et, `with a genuine military spirit, a national genius and gift forwar which produces born soldiers and commanders and which is the veryreverse of the brute appetite for slaughter.' His last few words read like an


GENERAL 115

equivocation to justify a stereotype which both unionists and nationalists werepressing into the service of their respective causes in a turbulent era of theirisland's history. This is certainly the view of Professor D. Fitzpatrick in anoutstanding contribution to a superb collection of essays edited by ProfessorT. Bartlett and Dr K. Je�rey in which they have brought together an extra-ordinary range of scholarship, along with wonderfully vivid visual material thatwill illuminate for a long time to come our understanding of the role of war andmilitary service in Irish experience. Professor Fitzpatrick's chapter has to covernot just the paramilitary prelude to the 1916 rising, but the war of independenceand civil war which followed it, a tall order for any contributor, yet the insightshe o�ers are all valuable. Both the new Free State and its six-county neigh-bour to the north, he argues, had strong militarist elements within them, butwere slow in defeating violent opposition and in neutralizing private armies.`Militarism, so recklessly disseminated, lingered on as an unpurged poison,' heconcludes, and the virus lingers still. Both the IRA and loyalist organizationslike the UDA and UVF still ape the ranks and unit structure of the British armyas well as borrowing freely from a mythic and heroic Irish and Ulster past. Oneof Belfast's most striking recent loyalist murals features Cuchulainin, `ancientdefender of Ulster from Irish attacks', alongside a paramilitary ®gure with anassault ri¯e. It features as an illustration in the editors' introductory chapter andthey could have ¯anked it with the similar imagery of some Republican andIRA murals. Early Irish warfare, its heroes and legends, may be up for grabs bytoday's paramilitaries but it has been the focus of some splendid work wellrepresented in this book. So too are topics like the `Nine Years War' of 1594±1603 against the Tudor military presence in Ireland, though we are advised tothink of it more as a struggle con®ned within the 1598±1601 period whereanything approximating to nationwide revolt is concerned. Other chapters takeus into the seventeenth-century `Wars of the Three Kingdoms' and ofWilliamitereconquest, but always with the clan, class and territorial structure of militaryorganization and recruitment carefully delineated.Two outstanding chapters by Dr Sean Connolly and by Professor Bartlett

take us through the way the role of the crown forces in Ireland changed. In thepost-Williamite period they functioned ostensibly as a counter-invasion force onwhich the Hanoverian regime could draw at will for its foreign and colonialwars. As popular disa�ection grew, especially over the agrarian question, and asolder forms of social control began to unravel in the insurrectionary decade ofthe 1790s, troops and their o�cers were drawn increasingly and uneasily intothe front line of law enforcement. Their unease was not lessened by the need tooperate alongside sometimes blatantly sectarian local yeomanry and militiaunits, nor by growing recruitment of Irishmen themselves as both the lure of,and opportunity for, service in European armies began to dwindle. Some of thedoubts voiced by British units and their o�cers in the period of mid-nineteenth-century famine and land war, tellingly quoted by Dr Virginia Crossman in herchapter, bear more than a passing relationship to the reactions of uncompre-hending Rhine Army troops ¯own in to Belfast and deployed on the Falls Roadin 1969 and 1970.The army's role in Northern Ireland's troubles has been widely analysed and

chronicled, so it is unfair to blame Professor Bartlett and Dr Je�rey for thecompressed treatment it gets here. Other topics, too, like the role of Eire's army



in the Second World War, or `the Emergency' as it still tends to be called byIrish historians, and of the thousands of volunteers, Catholic and Protestantfrom both sides of the border, who served in that con¯ict, merit more space thanthey are allowed. This is, however, no re¯ection on editors who have cast theirnet widely to bring us such a stimulating and stylish collection as this. They havedone so also with an impartiality perhaps implanted and sustained in them byknowledge of their forebears, to whom the book is dedicated and who servedvariously in the IRA as well as the Irish, British and Canadian armies.Napier University, Edinburgh IAN S. WOOD

Explorations in Law and History. Edited by W. N. Osborough. Irish AcademicPress/Irish Legal History Society. 1995. xiv � 191pp. £24.95.Five of the six papers in this second volume of Irish Legal History Society

Discourses, which covers the period 1988±1994, are concerned with the historyof the Irish courts and legal establishment. Paul Brand argues that judicial o�cein medieval Ireland never became a monopoly of professional lawyers, but wasoften an unattractive episode in an administrative career determined bypatronage in London. Two papers by A. R. Hart on the king's serjeants-at-lawshow that in Ireland this legal elite could not avoid being party men. AudleyMervyn was a soldier who fought for Charles I, resisted the spread ofpresbyterianism to Londonderry and was rewarded at the Restoration with theprime serjeanty, although in 1641±3 he had disclaimed a legal education whenhe made a spirited defence of the rights of the Irish courts and parliament. In1661 he was chosen speaker of the Irish House of Commons. Colum Kennytraces the search for alternative accommodation for the Irish courts, which in1584 were meeting in Dublin Castle in a hall over an ammunition store.Consideration had already been given to the former Dominican house acrossthe Li�ey, the site to which the judges would ®nally move at the end of theeighteenth century, but from 1608 to 1796 the citizens of Dublin succeeded inkeeping the Four Courts within the walled town in a building they helped to payfor by Christ Church cathedral. Kenny also follows the career of WilliamPlunket, attorney-general of Ireland in two administrations, who was denied thechancellorship of Ireland by George IV's refusal to accept a man favourable toCatholic emancipation when Canning wished to appoint him in 1827. Incompensation Plunket was then made master of the rolls in England, butretreated before the resentment of the English bar, with its `inveterate feeling ofsuperiority to Irish lawyers'. Although he eventually became chancellor ofIreland in 1830, his experience contrasts with that of English lawyers who usedthe woolsack in Dublin as a stepping-stone to the chancellorship of England.Apart from the others stands the paper in which W. D. H. Sellar highlightscontrasts in the development of the substantive law of marriage in Scotland andEngland, Scots law recognizing `irregular' marriages, in a sense to the presentday, and allowing divorce to fairly humble people quite early, but also longmaintaining draconian penalties for incest, which was not made a crime inEngland until 1908. It may be suggested that the di�erence in Scotland was theability of the post-Reformation Kirk to get its discipline translated into statutelaw so quickly.University of Liverpool ALAN HARDING


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Review of Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, at pp. 90-1 (and of D. Boucher, et al., Philosophy,...

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Transcript of Review of Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, at pp. 90-1 (and of D. Boucher, et al., Philosophy,...