Review of Bengal in Global Concept History

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Robert Travers , Christian J. Koot , Roquinaldo A. Ferreira ,

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Kenneth J. Andrien , James Krippner , John Tutino , Davarian

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L. Baldwin , Linda Heidenreich , Daniel Soyer , Paul Slack

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, Elizabeth T. Hurren , Susannah Ottaway , Marcus Daniel

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Julia Brggemann , Yosuke Nirei , Ulrike Whr , Evelyn S.

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Rawski & Laura E. Nym Mayhall

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Paul Slack , Elizabeth T. Hurren , Susannah Ottaway , Marcus Daniel , Julia Brggemann , Yosuke
Nirei , Ulrike Whr , Evelyn S. Rawski & Laura E. Nym Mayhall (2009) Reviews, Social History, 34:4,
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Social History Vol. 34 No. 4 November 2009
Reviews
Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History. Culturalism in the Age of Capital
(2008), ix 284 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, $55.00, paperback $22.00).
This riveting book poses serious methodological challenges to the field of history in general, as
well as being a major contribution to the discrete fields of south Asian history, global history
and intellectual history. Readers be warned: this is a difficult and uncompromising work,
argued with unremitting rigour, but also with great clarity of thought.
Sartori proposes that, to understand the consistency and globalizing reach of the modern
culture concept, conventional historical emphases on contingency, on instrumentalized speech
acts, or on discrete discursive formations will prove inadequate. Instead, Sartori revives
Raymond Williamss sense of the priority of the culture concept over its particular lexical
instances and of its referential function over hermeneutic or contingent features. The modern
culture concept, Sartori insists, consistently denotes the fundamental underdeterminedness
of human subjectivity the freedom of subjectivity from determinations of objective necessity
(21). Understanding the widespread intelligibility of this concept requires in turn a sufficiently
capacious notion of the socio-historical context of modernity.
Sartori identifies this determining context in the abstract structures of social interdependence that characterize modern capitalist society (22). Drawing on Moishe Postones
reinterpretation of Marxs critical theory,1 Sartori argues that modern practices of abstract
social mediation (48) continuously recreate the problem of subjective agency as an acute and
repetitive preoccupation. The antinomy of subjectivity and objectivity (reflecting the uneasy
relation between labour as a concrete act, and total labour as an abstract and uniform measure
of value) becomes the fundamental ground of concept formation. Culture, whether in
Matthew Arnolds England or in Bankimchandra Chatterjees Bengal, denoted a consistent yet
ultimately insufficient response to a crisis of subjectivity provoked by apparently objective
forms of social determination unleashed within the sphere of capitalist circulation.
Pushing back against both the culturalist and discursive hegemony in the humanistic
disciplines (231) and the disaggregative wisdom of contemporary intellectual history
identified here as Foucauldian or Skinnerian (67), Sartori seeks to pursue a more socially
grounded history of concepts rooted in practice. His search for a sufficiently global sociohistorical grounding for the culture concept perhaps inevitably leads to a highly abstract,
schematic rending of modernity. He proposes that in capitalist society, the individual subject
1
Moishe Postone, Time, Labour and Social
Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marxs Critical
Theory (Cambridge, 1996).
Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online

http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/03071020903257075
484
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vol. 34 : no. 4
can assume two very broad but quite distinct ways of construing the significance of practical
activity: a liberal one centred on the private interests of individuals in civil society, and a
culturalist one in which practical activity constitutes the very subject of the social whole (50
1). Sensitive to the varied social forms of capitalist reproduction in different places, Sartori
suggests how the centrality of the peasant household to commodity production in Bengal
opened up two ways of conceiving rural society: as a society of (male) individuals engaged in
exchange or as a space existing below the surface of a superimposed domain of exchange and
organized by principles different from those of the sphere of circulation (59).
Sartori is fully aware that his methods risk accusations of homogenization or totalization and
that his reading of culturalism as a moment of social reproduction (233) within capital may
seem overly mechanistic. But he is willing to run these risks in pursuit of an explanatory
framework able to comprehend the systematic effects of global modernity and the evident
linkages between seemingly quite different life-worlds. He leaves open the possibility of
different levels of analysis in intellectual history, not excluding the constitutive effects of
discourse. He suggests, however, that his own project of reconstructing the historical
constitution of the conditions of possibility for the power of specific discursive repertoires
must be logically prior (16).
Sartoris own rhetorical practice consistently works from the abstract to the particular; that
is, in a series of superb readings of major Bengali thinkers, he prioritizes the essential coherence
of a set of abstract premises underlying their thought over either intellectual biography or the
particular circumstances or media of expression. Rammohun Roy appears then as the
embodiment of the first, liberal answer to the problem of agency and autonomy; and
Bankimchandra in his later formulation of Hinduism as culture as the avatar of the
culturalist alternative. The pivotal Chapter 4 offers a remarkable account of Bankims Hindu
culturalism not as nativist particularism, but as a new mode of subjectivist universalism focused
on anushilan (or culture as objectifying practice). The turn from individual self-interest to
culture is seen to follow the emergence of the westernized Bengali babu as a figure of satire,
which itself reflected the growing subordination of Calcutta and indigenous entrepreneurship
by European capital after the financial crisis of 18478.
Sartoris bravura handling of diverse sources successfully juxtaposes Bankims culturalist
Hinduism with both Sir John Seeleys idea of a national church and also Comtean sociology
as a remedy to the atomism of private interest. Comparing Tantric and Vaishnavite monism
with German idealism goes to show not the strands of influence or derivation running from
Europe to Asia or vice versa, but the common predicament of diverse thinkers within a global
structure of transnational exchange. Thus, the spread of global capitalism worked to
de-Europeanize the concepts that constitute now global thought forms of modernity (47).
It is especially hard to do justice to such a rich and complex work in a short review. Suffice
to say that this book deserves to be read and debated very widely. One issue for future debate is
the notion of conditions of possibility for a concept, sometimes also rendered as conditions of
plausibility or intelligibility. Sartoris highly abstract sense of general practice in modern
capitalism may leave open the question of how conditions of possibility become actualized, or
when one among a range of plausible or intelligible lines of thought becomes dominant.
Readers may also wonder about the historical significance of forms of thought in which the
kinds of conceptual coherence that Sartori deliberately prioritizes is less evident. Does the
reproduction of a relatively consistent concept across space necessarily require the same or
November 2009
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485
even similar conditions of plausibility in each place? Is the notion of underdeterminedness

denoted by culture exclusively modern, as Sartori argues, or are there transhistorical as well as
translingual terms of equivalence?
Sartoris final chapter considers the reification, rarification, and radicalization of the culture
concept in twentieth-century Bengal. The perceived failure of the Swadeshi movements
culturalist project of national political economy (exemplified most clearly in the writings of
Aurobindo Ghose) fractured Bengali culture into aestheticized and increasingly communalized
fragments. Whether he is discussing emergent stereotypes of the selfish Muslim peasant or the
growth of Bengali communism, Sartoris range of view is breathtaking right to the end of this
brilliantly achieved account of the meanings of global modernity in Bengal.
Robert Travers
Cornell University
2009, Robert Travers
Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitanism in an Age of Expansion,

15601660 (2008), ix 381 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 18.99/
$35.00).
In this important book investigating the origins of the British Empire, Alison Games steers
readers away from the icons of British global power, the Royal Exchange, the decks of Royal
Navy warships, and the cane fields of Barbados and Jamaica, and transports them instead to the
trading stations of the Levant, the Indian Ocean and Japan. Likewise our companions are not
the courtiers, Privy Counsellors or elite merchants of London but rather the trading company
factors, private soldiers, clergy and governors who laboured in far-flung places. Hoping to
reshape how scholars understand British imperial development in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Game stresses that it was these globetrotters who wove the web of
empire by collecting information, acquiring new ways of trading and, above all, learning to
adapt and to learn from the examples of rivals and predecessors (10). In short
cosmopolitanism defined English relations with the world during the critical century
spanning the coronation of Elizabeth and the Restoration (10). For Games, then, early English
expansion outside Europe was contingent, improvisational and adaptable, not powerful,
centralized and coercive as it would be in later centuries. In making this claim Games joins a
number of scholars, both those writing about the British Atlantic and those looking at British
colonization in the Indian and Pacific basins,1 who have emphasized the weakness of imperial
institutions and the way that places and people far from Europe defined how the English
experienced the world and the empire (11).
Individuals are central to Gamess argument and thus her approach is prosopographic,
focusing on career biographies told through correspondence and published writings. Some of
these accounts are familiar, such as her recounting of the influence that John Smiths time as a
1
See, for example, the essays in David Lambert

and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the British
Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, 2006) and Kathleen Wilson
(ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and

Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 16601840 (New
York, 2004).
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soldier, adventurer and slave in the Ottoman Empire had on his pursuit of trade and diplomacy
with the Powhatan in Virginia. Others, such as her study of Thomas Roe, are less so. Born to
an influential London family and educated at Oxford, Roe spent most of his life criss-crossing
the globe in service of the crown, individual patrons, trading companies and his own private
interests. An adventurer in Guyana, an investor in the East Indian and Virginia companies and
a trade ambassador in India and the Ottoman Empire, Roe learned to adapt varying English
aims to different diplomatic and cultural contexts, transporting lessons and strategies from one
ocean to another to advance English interests. As Roe almost always operated from a position
of weakness, his willingness to accumulate more powerful foreign concerns proved central to
his success, a lesson critical for a weak state like England to succeed abroad.
In her focus on the Levant and East India companies, Games covers familiar ground, but in a
way that focuses on underlying cultural strategies to emphasize that the great trading
companies of this period whose imports stocked the shops in the Royal Exchange in London
were dependent on global merchants who travelled to the East and inserted themselves in
foreign communities (83). Not a ground-breaking conclusion, perhaps, but one that is key to
Gamess argument. These men, and their travels, remind us that empire was not created by
inanimate forces, but was made by the adaptable and improvisational decisions of individuals
and the distinctive commercial culture they developed one that was neither English nor
foreign but an accommodation (83).
While Roe found success almost everywhere he went, borrowing lessons learned in
previous postings to shape new situations, the lessons of accommodation did not always work.
In Virginia, for example, English colonists deployed strategies garnered from experiences in
the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean including the use of sexual alliances and cultural
assimilation when confronted by the power of the Powhatan. Here, though, they found that
the terrain ultimately proved too different and the challenges of adaptation too severe to
recreate the conditions that sustained trade elsewhere (120). It was only after these attempts
failed that the English developed a new kind of plantation-based empire, one that resembled
not Mediterranean models but those of the Spanish. Placing Virginia in this worldwide frame,
as Karen Kupperman and others have recently done, enables Games to show that English
struggles in the Chesapeake were not a product of bravado and ignorance, but rather of their
own cosmopolitanism.2
As much as The Web of Empire is about the impact of non-western endeavours particularly
those in the eastern Mediterranean on English colonization in the Atlantic, equally important
to Gamess argument is tracing how Atlantic experiences also influenced efforts elsewhere. For
decades many English merchants hoped to establish a colony in Madagascar to advance trade in
the Indian Ocean, but when their plans finally came to fruition in the 1640s their initial goals
had been transformed by English success in the Atlantic. Taking those permanent settlements
as their model, two successive groups of colonists eschewed establishing modest trading
stations and instead attempted to seize land aggressively for provision grounds. Unlike in the
Americas, however, the military power of the Malagasy, a dense forest, and a disease
environment inhospitable to outsiders doomed these combative attempts at colonization.
Karen Kupperman, The Jamestown Project

(Cambridge, MA, 2007) and Peter Mancall (ed.),
The Atlantic World and Virginia, 15501624 (Chapel

Hill, 2007).
November 2009
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487
Success in the Atlantic, colonists realized, was not always transportable; trade factories and
accommodation, rather than landed settlements, still mattered more elsewhere.
The major obstacle for a work that aims to offer an interpretation of the origins of an empire
based on individual experiences is that, unlike scholarship that traces the rise of a financial
system, shipbuilding technology or planting techniques, Gamess markers cannot be measured
by interest rates, numbers of ships or hogsheads of tobacco; rather, her argument is cultural.
And here, more fully incorporating evidence from objects such as the curiosity cabinets, prints
and maps she mentions but does not explore would have enabled her to show the extent to
which experiences in distant places shaped both the cultural imagination and the process of
building an empire. On the whole, though, Games succeeds admirably in demonstrating that
English cultural understanding of new places forged before 1660 were central to making
empire possible.
Christian J. Koot
Towson University, Maryland
2009, Christian J. Koot
Ulbe Bosma, Juan Giusti-Cordero and G. Roger Knight (eds), Sugarlandia Revisited:
Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 18001940 (2007), 240 (Berghahn Books,
New York, $75.00).
The introduction of sugar is one of the key watersheds of the Portuguese colonization of
Brazil. Sugar cultivation provided the economic basis that led to the permanent settlement of
Portuguese colonists in the territory in the 1540s and was responsible for the institutionalization of indigenous and African slavery in Brazil. As Stuart Schwartz has brilliantly
demonstrated in several articles and books, sugar brought wealth to the planters in the
north-east of the colony in the early seventeenth century. In the first century and a half of
Portuguese colonization, the vast majority of the slaves brought to the colony toiled primarily
on sugar plantations. Brazil was the primary destination for slaves in the Americas and most of
the slaves taken there came from another Portuguese colony Angola. The tight connection
that sugar engendered between Africa and Brazil is reflected in a seventeenth-century saying:
Whoever says sugar says Brazil and whoever says Brazil says Angola.
Brazilian prominence in sugar production had serious ramifications for the geopolitics of
European colonial powers and their relationship with the Americas and Africa. It was largely
because of sugar that the Dutch invaded and occupied Brazil from 1630 to 1654. The
expulsion of the Dutch from the colony led to the spread of sugar cultivation to the Caribbean.
This development, in turn, reverberated across the Atlantic and deeply affected Africa as
Europeans began making inroads into the slave trade to guarantee the supply of labour to the
sugar-producing colonies in the Americas. The pre-eminence of sugar in the Atlantic would
only be overshadowed by the rise of gold mining also in Brazil in the late seventeenth
century. But, even then, the crop would remain economically important in Brazil and key to
the economy of the Caribbean.
Given such a tight connection between Brazilian history and sugar production, the absence
of a chapter on Brazil in the book organized by Ulbe Bosma, Juan Giusti-Cordero and G.
Roger Knight is somewhat perplexing. It might be argued that such a chapter would fall
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vol. 34 : no. 4
outside the chronological focus of the book, which deals primarily with the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, but the fact is that Brazilian sugar production was not restricted to the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, the country is still the largest producer of sugar
worldwide.
In Sugarlandia Revisited, very ambitious arguments are articulated in the introduction. The
authors correctly claim that too much attention has been given to plantation as an essentially
archaic locus of mono-production to the detriment of analyses of social relations engendered
by sugar production. They pursue a logical extension of the argument by debunking the
conventional wisdom that equates plantations with technological backwardness. It was not
only slaves who could learn new techniques; Sugarlandia was also conducive to technological
innovation. Arguing for a comparative, indeed global, analysis of sugar production the authors
state that the scholarship on this subject will not much advance further until such a
comparative perspective gains foothold. They also argue that most of social relations produced
by colonialism in and out of the context of sugar production were enmeshed in hybridity a
somewhat contentious claim as the close connection between hybridity and more hierarchical
forms of colonialism, fully demonstrated in the chapter by Barcia, was also present at early
phases of colonialism.
The problem is that the book falls short of the goals set in the introduction. For example,
although the authors establish comparative history as the main frame of analysis of the work,
most of the chapters deal in reality with Dutch Indonesia and only three chapters centre on the
Caribbean. Seriously undermining the original premise of the work, only one of the chapters is
framed in comparative terms. The book is at its best when labour force and peasant resistance
are discussed in the chapter authored by Sri Margana. A truly comprehensive, even if
sometimes circuitous, analysis takes the reader into the heart of the different types of labour
regimes in Java. However, even here there is no attempt whatsoever to establish any
comparative framework. The chapter by Manuel Barcia argues that David Eltiss mega-project
about the quantitative dimensions of the slave trade underestimates the number of slaves
brought to Cuba between 1790 and 1820. This statement is not accurate. Indeed, Barcias
analysis would have been strengthened had he taken advantage of the online version of the
Slave Trade Dataset.
Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, Sugarlandia Revisited is a major contribution to
the history of sugar production and colonial studies.
Roquinaldo A. Ferreira
University of Virginia
2009, Roquinaldo A. Ferreira
Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru and
its Long Aftermath (2008), xiii 260 (Duke University Press, Durham, $79.95,
paperback $22.95).
Charles F. Walker has written a carefully researched and well-written account of a ruinous
earthquake that struck the Pacific coast of South America in 1746. The quake devastated the
vice-regal capital of Lima; it was followed by a massive tsunami that obliterated its port city,
Callao, killing virtually all of the inhabitants. Walkers book complements a 2001 study of this
November 2009
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489
earthquake/tsunami by Pablo Emilio Perez-Mallaina Bueno, which provides a largely political

narrative of the disaster and subsequent reconstruction of Lima.1 Walker, however, uses the
earthquake/tsunami to examine the complex social, religious and ethnic fault lines of the
capital city. Shaky Colonialism offers insights into popular understandings of race, ethnicity,
gender and Baroque religiosity in Lima during the early Bourbon Reform period.
According to Walker, most religious Limenos believed that the natural disaster that had
befallen Lima was Gods punishment for the immorality of the citys population. As a result,
efforts to rebuild Lima led to contentious struggles over how to reform the citys social life and
morals. Amid the horror and chaos, some religious mystics predicted further divine
punishment, such as additional earthquakes or fire, which only caused panic and unrest in the
devastated city. The physical reconstruction of Lima also prompted squabbles between colonial
authorities and local elites over how to rebuild the citys houses. Residents favoured traditional
ornate Baroque facades and multi-storey dwellings, while crown officials unsuccessfully
advocated wider streets and simpler, one-storey structures more likely to withstand another
quake. The Peruvian viceroy, Josef Manso de Velasco (later named the Conde de Superunda)
used the rebuilding of the city as the occasion to curb Baroque religiosity by restricting the
wealth of the regular orders and limiting the numbers of clergy living in the city. Moreover,
both clerical and state leaders tried to reform Limas morals by prohibiting the suggestive dress
and behaviour of the citys veiled women (tapadas). Finally, Walker examines how social and
ethnic tensions in the city led to an aborted indigenous rebellion in 1750, followed by a bloody
but unsuccessful uprising in Huarochir, a province that linked Lima with the rich Andean
highlands. In short, Shaky Colonialism provides not only the portrait of a city in crisis; it also
demonstrates a range of political, social, economic and religious problems endemic to Limeno
society during the first half of the eighteenth century.
The viceroy of Peru, Josef Manso de Velasco, emerges as the central figure in Shaky
Colonialism. A self-confident military man from modest hidalgo origins, Manso de Velasco was a
protege of King Ferdinand VIs most influential minister, the Marques de la Ensenada. The
viceroy took credit for rebuilding Lima and constructing the Real Felipe fortress and a new
port city further inland at Bellavista. Manso de Velasco and his political allies were the author
or source for much of the extant archival documentation sent to Spain dealing with the natural
disaster of 1746. As a result, the historical issues covered in Shaky Colonialism quite often reflect
either the hierarchical views of this strong-willed viceroy or other key historical actors even
those among Manso de Velascos enemies, who challenged his actions in Lima. The voices of
the Amerindian rebels in Lima and Huarochir, the mystics predicting doom for the city or
women accused of immorality all appear in the archival documentation largely from
the perspective of the viceroy and Limeno elites.
Shaky Colonialism is a fascinating and forcefully argued book that fills a major gap in the
scholarly literature on the early Bourbon period in the viceroyalty of Peru. By focusing on the
natural disaster of 1746, Walker presents a rich mosaic of race, ethnicity, gender, Baroque piety
and the beginnings of Enlightenment-inspired Bourbon regalism in a major urban centre
during this largely under-studied period. Despite these accomplishments, Shaky Colonialism
focuses so closely on the earthquake/tsunami and its aftermath that it sometimes fails to
1
Pablo Emilio Perez-Mallaina Bueno, Retrato de

una ciudad en crisis: La sociedad limena ante el
movimiento ssmico de 1746 (Sevilla, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas, 2001).
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Social History
vol. 34 : no. 4
connect events surrounding this natural disaster more directly to the overall reform of the
Spanish Atlantic Empire under the early Bourbons. Placing conflicts between the viceroy and
the church (especially Archbishop Barroeta and the religious orders) and between reformers,
local elites and rebellious Amerindians within the framework of Bourbon regalist policies
might have clarified the nature of political squabbles and the apparent contradictions in crown
policy during the period. These relatively modest criticisms do not detract from the substantial
contributions of Shaky Colonialism, which is an important addition to the slim number of
volumes on early eighteenth-century Peru.
Kenneth J. Andrien
Ohio State University
2009, Kenneth J. Andrien
Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World
(2004), xv 299 (Duke University Press, Durham and London, $79.95/45.28,
paperback $22.95/13.00).
Irene Silverblatt has provided us with a theoretically sophisticated and empirically sound study
of interest to anthropologists, historians and scholars of colonial literature. Modern Inquisitions is
a work of mature scholarship that successfully argues for the modern qualities of the
Inquisition in colonial Peru, especially in the areas of race-thinking and bureaucratic
procedure (5, 16). As such, it is a substantial intervention into debates concerning the nature of
empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the continuities as well as differences
between the late medieval, early modern and contemporary worlds, and the emergence and
transformation of Baroque contexts, categories and practices in the Americas. Perhaps most
provocatively, Silverblatt argues that the origins of modernity and the subterranean stream of
western history can be traced to the types of hierarchical thinking, bureaucratic procedures
and repressive measures evident in the records of the Peruvian Inquisition (4). That she does so
while simultaneously calling into question the image of the Inquisition as the opposite of
Anglo-dominated modernity indicates the subtlety of her argument, despite its extensive
reach (226). Modern Inquisitions engages with theoretical questions of the highest importance
for contemporary scholarship, while also revealing intriguing aspects of personal experience
and daily life in the early modern Andean world.
Silverblatts analysis is based on church records, evangelizing sermons and missionary guides
found in Peruvian and Spanish archives. Possibly the most compelling sentence is the final one
in the text, where Silverblatt asserts: We owe it to those who are central to our lives
including those people whose lives are crucial for our scholarship not just to recognize the
limitations of knowledge but to explore its possibilities (233). She does precisely this in the
preceding pages, developing insights that make intelligible the complexities of race thinking,
religious belief and practice, and identity construction, as well as physical repression, including
torture, in this time and place. Silverblatt, drawing upon Hannah Arendt but extending her
claims back to the era of Iberian expansion, argues that race-thinking allows us to move
beyond nineteenth-century definitions of race (predicated, as we now know, on faulty
understandings of biology) to understand the interpenetrating realities of ethnicity, caste,
November 2009
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nationalism and early modern racialism at a time when Iberia was simultaneously building a
state and an empire (17). This dynamic and contingent definition of identity construction
provides the theoretical fuel for a nuanced investigation into colonial cultural politics (115).
As Silverblatt notes, The world of the seventeenth century was a religious world, and native
Peruvians constructed an array of religious stances (26). Indeed, the unravelling of the
complexities of conversion and the multiple directions of colonial cultural flows, all in an
increasingly repressive era when authorities tried to force heterogeneous realities into
increasingly irrelevant categories of purity and authenticity, is one of the most fascinating areas
of this study. Thus, the author spends considerable time on Limas Great Jewish Conspiracy
of 16359, retelling the poignant stories of the torture and execution of the alleged hidden
Jews Dona Mencia de Luna, Manuel Henrquez and Manuel Bautista Perez. Silverblatt
convincingly demonstrates that Inquisition practices, including torture, though horrific, must
be considered an integral part of the early modern world, including nations we are most likely
to call civilized (like England, France, and Holland) (75). She also shows how the old wine of
Christian anti-Semitism and fear of Muslims on the Iberian peninsula focused for centuries
on limpieza de sangre was repackaged in the new bottle of the Iberian colonial world, where
imperial anxieties led to increasing suspicion and ultimately paranoia concerning New
Christians, but also heretical Indians, negros, mixed racial peoples, women and combinations of all of the above.
That the Peruvian Inquisition considered merchants to be increasingly suspicious in part
refers to the expanding commercial possibilities of the early modern world. The equation
of Portuguese with likely hidden Jew reveals something about migration and the
tensions of a Spanish identity in formation (60), and the magnification of these fears after
the Dutch takeover of Portuguese Brazil demonstrates the cultural politics of colonial
competition (149). Another interesting response to the colonial context came with the
complex process by which Andeans came to see themselves as Indian (193). The making of an
Indian identity out of the diverse ethnicities of the indigenous world and the spread of the
myth of the Inkas benevolence are well-known processes. Perhaps Silverblatts most
important contribution here is to remind us that swings from noble savage to murderous
savage, from shattered victim to heroic resister, from the socialist empire of the Incas to
Cuzcos totalitarian tyranny have drained the life and lessons from Indian (212). Her
example of historically specific, rigorously contextual yet theoretically informed analysis is
most welcome.
The best scholarship points towards future research agendas. Silverblatts alignment with
those who see the early Iberian presence in the Americas as colonial and as a fundamental
building block of our contemporary global world raises important comparative issues, across
time as well as in terms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Surely all empires have their
subterranean streams? How does the emergence of the West from the late fifteenth through
to the mid-twentieth century compare with earlier (Han China, the Roman and Mongol
Empires, etc.) and later (the United States-dominated global order of the mid- to late
twentieth century) imperial systems? If, as Silverblatt convincingly argues, race-thinking,
violence, the abuse of power and torture have all been constituent parts of what we define as
civilization and modernity, what then becomes the basis for opposing these practices, should
one choose to do so? Finally, as Silverblatt herself notes, In spite of the familiarities, the early
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modern world was indeed strange, and analyses with an eye toward its distinctiveness would be
a welcome complement to this study (280). We are indebted to Irene Silverblatt for bringing
us to the point where we can contemplate these issues.
James Krippner
Haverford College, Pennsylvania
2009, James Krippner
Francie R. Chassen-Lopez, From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View from the
South, Mexico 18671911 (2004), xv 608 (Penn State University Press, University
Park, PA, $85.00, paperback $30.00).
Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive
Landscapes (2004), xx 300 (Duke University Press, Durham, $79.95, paperback
$22.95).
In Mexico, the decades from the end of Maximilians imperial experiment in 1867 to the
outbreak of revolution in 1911 brought regime consolidation, export-oriented commercial
development and complex social changes. Too often, however, that era appears as a prelude to
revolution, with the regime of Porfirio Daz demonized as the dictatorial root of all problems.
The books reviewed here make significant contributions to analysing Mexicos first era of
authoritarian liberalism as a historical period with its own complex and often contradictory
characteristics. As a result, we gain new understandings of nineteenth-century history and
the revolution that followed.
The two books are similar in important ways. Both focus on the late nineteenth century,
while looking back to earlier times of contested nation-building and forward to revolution;
both focus on states in south-eastern Mexico that were subject to new and often disruptive
export development after 1880; both place provincial details in national context, building upon
regional understandings to contribute to national history. They are also very different in
thematic emphases, historiographic orientations and analytical styles.
Craibs Cartographic Mexico is better crafted as a book. It focuses clearly and persistently
on state-making and the challenge of generating maps that would allow the emerging and
long-contested national regime to know, and thus to rule more effectively, its diverse
territories. He begins with a brief analysis of post-independence cartography, emphasizing
the limits of making new maps based on accumulations of old maps. He focuses on
Porfirian efforts to use military surveyors to map the territory between the capital and the
Gulf coast, detailing the challenges of exploring rugged sections of the state of Veracruz,
then rapidly opening to coffee and vanilla export production. A key concern of the
military mapmakers and Craib was the necessity of clear surveys to the liberal policy of
privatizing community lands and the difficulty of gaining such locally grounded
knowledge, which explains in part the persistent problems and conflicts of privatization.
He concludes by revealing how parallel local knowledge remained essential to the postrevolutionary problem of reconstituting communal lands as state-granted ejidos (cooperative farms) a process that often remained dependent on pre-revolutionary maps and
surveyors.
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Craibs conclusions emphasize the challenges faced by a state seeking to map and codify
local knowledge. After decades of effort crossing rugged, sometimes impenetrable terrain,
military mapmakers barely approximated local knowledge. They produced maps that were
impositions as much as revelations. For a scholar who has spent some effort exploring
archives in search of local knowledge of nineteenth-century Mexico, reading Craib
brought a sense of comradeship. His explanation of the difficulties of the state seeking such
knowledge regularized and codified my frustrations. There was a moment when I
responded: of course, why did I not see this? But I did not see the problem so clearly
until Craib led me to a more analytical understanding of a lingering uncertainty. That is a
sign of very good history. In many ways, Craib offers a model of how to choose a
dissertation topic that is clearly focused analytically, regionally and in archival resources
and to turn it into a book that matters to our understanding of the larger trajectory
of Mexican history. His vision of the limits of the Porfirian state must inform further
analyses.
That vision acknowledges analytical limits that must also still be surmounted. Craib, like
Porfirian mapmakers, sees the state and its agents very clearly. Like them, he knows that he
cannot see the complex and contested local knowledge of socially constructed landscapes that
organized life in diverse communities and shaped their relations with the state. His work makes
it clear that the more detailed local knowledge existed, and that the regimes inability to enter
and codify its complexity limited state powers. Thus Craib demonstrates, once again, that
history must proceed as analysis of encounters between national and provincial powers and
diverse, often assertive communities. The challenge is that such communities can only be
engaged one (or a few) at a time. But if scholars are to escape the limits of seeing like a state,
we must take up the challenge of surmounting the difficulties that frustrated Porfirian
mapmakers we must seek and analyse local knowledge. For nineteenth-century Veracruz,
that process has begun in Emilio Kours deep local study of Papantla, which Craib consulted
in early dissertation form, and is now published as A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and
Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford, 2004). Reading Craib and Kour in tandem provides
a superb perspective on nineteenth-century Mexican state-making in Veracruz, with Craib
emphasizing the states inability to penetrate local communities and Kour detailing how the
state engaged diverse local groups in Papantla, provoking change that was sometimes
conflictive, and always locally mediated.
In From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca, Chassen-Lopez takes on the challenges that Porfirian
mapmakers and Craib found daunting. She has committed decades of research and analysis to
exploring the regional complexities and local communities of late nineteenth-century Oaxaca,
and to placing them in the context of internationally linked economic developments and state
and national political dynamics. She differentiates the Zapotec and Mixtec uplands, where
commercial prospects remained limited and indigenous communities held strong, from the
regions nearer the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, where coffee and other crops provided export
opportunities and change proved more disruptive. She calls the latter regions of Porfirian
development and details the ways that entrepreneurs and indigenous communities sometimes
sought parallel opportunities, and sometimes faced deep conflicts.
There is a sense of Oaxacan pride throughout. That commitment clearly drove the
deep research that marks the book. It also leads to analyses that want to take Oaxacas
great liberal leaders, Benito Juarez and Porfirio Daz, at their word as proponents of
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popular welfare, local political and economic elites as promoters of modernization for the
common good, and diverse indigenous communities as defenders of deep yet changing
traditions of community rights. Chassen-Lopez details contradictions between these many
Oaxacans, but rarely engages them analytically. Oaxacas history of limited conflict during
the nineteenth century and into the era of revolution facilitates that perspective. Ironically,
she reacts against analysts who, she believes, denigrate Oaxacan communities as lacking
revolutionary commitments. (I, for one, always found the limited mobilizations of Oaxacan
villagers after 1910 as evidence of their long and uniquely effective struggles to defend
community lands and autonomies during centuries of colonial rule and early national statemaking. Having fended off the worst expropriations and exploitations, they had good reasons
to stand back from the deadly conflicts of revolution). Yet the absence of widespread and
persistent violent conflicts allows the author to analyse power holders and communities as
engaged in constant jostling, while negotiating different but not incompatible visions of the
good.
In a work that attempts so much, there are inevitable limits. I find the survey of regional
political economy useful, but not deeply analytical. There is too much acceptance that
entrepreneurs sought progress, not primarily their own profits. There are repeated references
to a mining boom that was perhaps significant in local contex, but paled before the silver,
copper and petroleum booms elsewhere in Mexico. Chassen-Lopez eagerly debates other
scholars whom she sees as having misperceived Oaxaca and Mexico in the nineteenth century.
But too often she sets up straw analysts; too often she sees debates between scholars who also
converge; sometimes she mischaracterizes; and sometimes she offers as innovative conclusions
understandings that authors she cites have developed in earlier works (that she does not cite). If
a scholar is going to debate her colleagues, it is essential to characterize carefully and read
widely.
Still, there is far more innovation that problem here. Chassen-Lopez offers one of the first
and most penetrating investigations of the emergence of Mexicos nineteenth-century coffee
export economy, and its complex consequences for state politics and indigenous communities.
She is especially effective in exploring the histories of indigenous communities in the context
of state and national political economies. From Juchitan and its history of conflicts beginning
in the 1840s, through the complex adaptations and sporadic tumults of villagers across the state
later in the century, Chassen-Lopez combines effective readings of other scholars with her
own new research and analysis to offer a model for historians to come. Unlike her explorations
of political economy, which remain largely descriptive, in detailing Oaxacas diverse
indigenous communities she integrates new perspectives on gender, ethnicity and culture to
produce very complex understandings.
In the latter, she demonstrates that what Porfirian mapmakers found daunting, a scholar
committed to the long and hard work of engaging local documentation can accomplish with
real success. Ultimately, Chassen-Lopez has provided the more ambitious, if less neatly crafted
book. Students, scholars and others seeking a more sophisticated introduction to state-making
in nineteenth-century Mexico will read Craibs Cartographic Mexico, which will become and
long remain one of the foundational works with which scholars must engage to understand the
complex relations between state-making, political economy and local communities of diverse
cultures during the same pivotal era. Chassen-Lopezs study joins Allen Wells and Gilbert
Josephs Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatan,
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18761915 (Stanford, 1996) as a pivotal regional analysis of the Porfirian project and the
emergence of limited revolution in south-eastern Mexico.
John Tutino
Georgetown University
2009, John Tutino
Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in
American Theater and Film Before World War II (2007), 456 (University of North
Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, $65.00, paperback $22.50).
One of the most underrated social critics of our time has done it again. In Forgeries of Memory
and Meaning Cedric J. Robinson most centrally examines the fledgling media industrial sphere
of film in antebellum America as a key site in the racial production of a reconstructed national
identity, with the collapse of the slave system and the rise of free labor. In 1983, Robinsons
magnum opus Black Marxism transformed studies of capitalist social relations. He literally
changed the game with his paradigm-shifting knowledge system of racial capitalism racial
difference is a key mode through which capitalist social relations assign value to the
commodity form, produce the meaning of markets and facilitate the conduct of
accumulation.1 In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Robinson sets his sights on the prominent
paradigm of our times, the Neo-Marxist discourse theory of Michel Foucault. Foucault
defines discourse as a set of ideas and practices that, when taken together within a specific time
and place, organize the way a society defines certain truths about itself. This discursive
approach to archival data alongside his power/knowledge analytic regimes of truth offers
important insights namely, that power operates precisely in the ways society determines what
can and cannot be discussed, knowable or even imagined as possible.
Some scholars are just plain dismissive of what is now pejoratively shorthanded as the
cultural turn in historical studies. Yet power/knowledge requires honest engagement for
scholars of the African diaspora who seek to interrogate the West, with the Haitian
Revolution as perhaps one of the first historical episodes that comes to mind. The
unthinkable nature of Haitis possibility within the regimes of truth established by
Enlightenment theories of race, nation and Republican citizenship may help us understand
how power operates, but it tells us little about the world of the slaves from which power was
overturned, or what Foucault called subjugated knowledge. Therefore it is both from within
the profound pervasiveness and Beyond the Boundary of Foucaults regimes of truth where
Robinson begins to work.2
The true beauty of Forgeries of Memory and Meaning is that it tackles the mass cultural realm of
filmmaking to cut against the grain of a seemingly all-encompassing panoptical grid of power/
knowledge. In the gap between the cinematic construction of national mythmaking and the
subjugated practices of black (not to be confused with blackface) minstrelsy and race film
1
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making

of the Black Radical Tradition (London, 1983).
2
See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, An unthinkable
history in Silencing the Past: Power and the
Production of History (Boston, 1997) and C. L. R.

James, Beyond a Boundary (London, 1963).
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production, Robinson explores a world of relative chaos, thoughtful improvisation, seizedupon chances and reactionary synthesis, provisionally framed by forgeries, or what he terms
racial regimes fragmented formulations of natural history woven together by narratives of
racial knowledge.
The book is organized into five chapters with a preface. In the preface, Robinson offers an
engaging theoretical discussion to concede that Foucault in fact does account for autonomous
ways of knowing and being in the world not dependent on the approval of the established
regimes of thought. Foucault argues that power operates by burying, disguising or subjugating
this local character of criticism within a functionalist coherence or formal systemization
(81).3 Yet Robinson examines the manifestation of racial regimes of thought, expressed
through theatre and film production, to remind us that the reading of subjugated knowledge as
buried or disguised leads to a kind of Unitarianism. The coexistence of alternative,
oppositional, or simply different relations of power is not fully examined (xi). He concludes
that we must interrogate racial regimes from within their own discernible origins and
mechanisms of assembly and outside of their utility function for tracking the genealogies of
dominant regimes of truth. It is not simply the rupture between knowledge systems that is vital
to historical work, but the archeological imprint of human agency which radically alienates
the histories of racial regimes from their own claims of naturalism (xiii).
In the first chapter, Robinson unpacks the invention of the Negro by tracing the imperial logic
of Shakespearean England. The chapter ends by treading the well-covered ground of Chicagos
1893 Columbian Exposition as a modern US racial forgery of social order sutured together out
of the long shadow cast from post-Civil War chaos. The next chapter, In the year 1915, uses
Birth of a Nation to track how previously disparate financial, industrial and commercial interests
converged on the fledgling film industry. Such efforts helped to consolidate capital through
monopolies on film technology patents and investments. At the same time this culturaleconomic convergence constructed the plantation genre as a cinematic narrative of nostalgia
for the Old South, that repressed immigrant dissidence, the anarchy of American empire and
cross-racial solidarities against Jim Crow capitalism, all under the hegemony of whiteness.
Chapters three and four follow the lead of the best scholarship in black cinema studies,
finding moments of resistance or at least critique in the black minstrelsy of Broadway icons like
Bob Cole, Bert Williams and Aida Overton Walker at the turn of the twentieth century, and
in the race film productions of figures including Oscar Micheaux. What is relatively novel
about Robinsons insights here is that he routes these alternative knowledges through the black
capital and race conscious networks generated by trans-regional theatre circuits, dramatic stock
companies and inter-collegiate dramatic associations situated within the New Negro politics of
a post-migration/race riots America. The final chapter posits the legacy of the mulatto genre
that responds to New Negroes by disseminating cinematic images of black social and sexual
miscegenation (mobility) as allegories for national chaos. As film moved to sound and America
expanded its empire, the jungle film genre gained prominence, where the Tarzan series and
Trader Horn posit that for the savages dehumanizing work was freedom, forced labor the
passage to civilization (305).
3
Michel Foucault, Two lectures in Power/
Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
(New York, 1980).
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Through his notion of racial regimes Robinson confronts us with operations of power that
are not simply expressed through the Foucauldian formation of new subjects, but a power that
is possessed. Here there are identifiable actors, reactions, decisions and consequences . . . and
even systemic disruptions that require responses (as compared to momentary ruptures that
seem inevitably incorporated). But still Robinson finds substantial use-value in the power/
knowledge framework. Unlike any other work that I have read, Forgeries of Memory and
Meaning powerfully brings together a close reading of film texts and the film industry situated
within the appropriate webs of capitalist economic development, imperial encroachments and,
most importantly, the social and cultural discontents that require a cultural response a racial
forgery of natural history. We see here the continual importance of history in constructing the
present.
Perhaps the first chapter covers too wide a swath of history, from Victorian England to the
late nineteenth-century US. Theoretically we end up with less of an engagement with
regimes of truth and more of a Gramscian analysis of cultural hegemony in discursive
clothing. I see here much more a story of historic blocks, cross-racial and cross-class consent,
and dissident masses than one about the constitution of subjects, normalization or descriptions
of expressive over repressive power.4 But this does not in any way undermine my appreciation
for Robinsons desire to thematize the fact that many invoke Foucault without fully engaging with his work. It could have proven methodologically beneficial to offer a more
comprehensive mapping of the theoretical landscape deployed here. There is no question that
Forgeries of Memory and Meaning is already a classic in studies of film as a media, industry and
social experience, but it is my hope that racial regimes becomes one of the most important
methods for examining the relations of power in our post-modern times.
Davarian L. Baldwin
Trinity College
2009, Davarian L. Baldwin
Raul A. Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 18211861
(2008), xiii 297 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, $35.00).
Not since David Montejanoss Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (Austin, 1987) have
we seen such a thorough treatment of Tejano ethnic identity and race relations in a single text.
Placing Tejano society in a larger historical and transnational context, Ramos maps the many
layers of social, political and cultural forces that shaped Tejano identity and status from 1821 to
1861. Tejanos specifically Bejarenos (residents of the town of Villa de Bexar) formed their
identities in relation to indigenous peoples and Anglo immigrants, but also these larger local,
national and transnational factors. Mapping shifts in Bexareno identity, Ramos is able to
challenge Montejanos theory of a peace structure, demonstrating that any peace structure
that might have existed between Anglo immigrants and Bejarenos had collapsed long before
the USMexican War.
4
See Antonio Gramscis Selections from the Prison
Notebooks (New York, 1971) and Stuart Hall,
Notes on deconstructing the popular in Raphael
Samuel (ed.), Peoples History and Socialist Theory

(London, 1981).
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Ramos chooses the 1718 founding of the mission of San Antonio de Valero and its town,
Villa de Bexar, as his starting point. While the focus of the text is 182161, the century of
frontier living that precedes this focus is critical for establishing the context of his argument.
From 1718 to 1821, the colonists of Bexar struggled to establish a Spanish presence in the
region. With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Spanish government became concerned with
US aggression and sent more troops to the area, thus increasing the military presence in a town
already identified, in part, by its wars against indigenous peoples. Once Ramos turns his gaze
to 1821, the impact of this early colonial history becomes clear. Like other settler-colonizers on
the Spanish-Mexican frontier, Bejarenos struggled against the elements, against the central
government and against the indigenous people who had preceded them to the area. Like other
Spanish-Mexican frontier societies as well, the distance of the community from the metropol
meant that racial categories were important yet fluid people sometimes moved from mestizo
to Spanish standing in a single generation.
In discussing ethnic identity, one of Ramoss most important contributions is his complex
read of Bexarenos in relation to the indigenous peoples of Texas. Drawing on reports that
local officials sent to Mexico, he is able to map the different relationships that Spanish and then
Mexican colonists established with indigenous peoples; with some nations they traded and
made alliances, with others they made war. Indigenous nations that resisted Mexican
occupation were met with full military force and, in government reports, were depicted as
sub-human. Those who did not resist were either incorporated into the mission system or
became trade partners. To complicate the ethnic landscape of Bexar, the anti-Indian campaigns
of Anglo-Americans to the east pushed some American peoples into Texas. For example,
Cherokee peoples moved into the region and brokered treaties with Mexican government
officials.
Throughout the 1820s, then, as Anglo-Americans began to immigrate west to Texas, so did
indigenous peoples. Bexarenos welcomed both, traded with both, but acted as cultural brokers
between the Bexareno community and the Mexican government, and immigrating AngloAmericans. According to Ramos, marriages, commercial ties, and social friendships between
leading Anglos and Tejano elites allowed Tejanos to act as cultural brokers between the recent
immigrants and the nascent Mexican government (85). And so Ramos tells the familiar story
of Tejanos welcoming Anglo-Americans into Texas, but he also complicates the narrative.
He introduces stories of insurgencies, mapping federalist revolts against the Mexican centralist
government where Anglo-Americans and Tejanos fought side by side. His mapping of familial
and masonic ties, cultural brokering and political alliances makes the decision of so many
Tejanos to side with the insurrectionists of 1836 understandable.
By 1836, Ramos argues, the political, national and ethnic map of Bexar was layered and
complex. Bexarenos who allied themselves with Anglo-American insurrectionists fought for
federalism and the Mexican Constitution of 1824. For a Bexareno such as Juan Segun,
challenging the centralist government would not have made him any less of a patriot than
those who fought by the side of Santa Anna. Yet, for Tejanos, the close of the war and the
declaration of Texan independence brought with it a new government and a new identity.
Still cultural brokers, a gradual shift began to take place. Tejanos no longer brokered
relationships to gain support for immigrating Anglo-Americans; instead they brokered
relationships to garner resources for their home communities resources which the AngloAmericans now held.
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By 1842, Ramos argues, there was no peace structure. For all the cultural brokering in
which Juan Segun had engaged, he became suspect in an attempted reconquest of San
Antonio, and few Anglo-Americans came to his defence. Segun fled to Mexico.
Intermarriages continued between Anglo-Americans and Tejanas, but now served as part of
the Anglo conquest. By the 1850s, the Know-Nothing party emerged strongly in San Antonio,
winning several city council seats, including the mayors seat. Tejanos were clearly on the
defensive. In this context, Ramos argues, the affiliation of Tejanos with the Democratic party
becomes understandable, for during this time of repression it was the Democratic party that
moved to provide a voice to Tejanos. When Know-Nothings pushed through legislation
eliminating Spanish translations of new laws, Democrats founded a newspaper to print
translations. They sponsored political meetings for Tejanos, and eventually provided translators
at Democratic meetings. By the time of the Civil War the Democratic party had a strong
record of supporting the Tejanos of the greater San Antonio area.
Beyond the Alamo reminds us of the complex interactions between culture, nation and
history that shape and reshape ethnic identities. Out of context, a Tejano such as Juan Segun
siding with the insurrectionists of 1836 makes no sense. But in context, stripped of all
essentialist assumptions of what it means to be Mexican, Tejano or Bexareno, such a decision is
perfectly understandable. This is the kind of history, Ramos argues, that we all need to be
writing To understand the context and shifting ground where identity takes root requires
historians to move beyond their comfort zones and training specialties into multiple languages,
national histories, and historiographies (234). In Beyond the Alamo, Ramos does just that. His
text will be a great aid for those teaching histories of the American south-west, and a good fit
as a required text for upper division and graduate seminars in Chicana/o history and the history
of the West. Because of his challenge to Montejanos Anglos and Mexicans, it would also make a
perfect companion text for this earlier work.
Linda Heidenreich
Washington State University
2009, Linda Heidenreich
Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar
Politics (2007), xiii 278 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, $65.00,
paperback $24.95).
Joshua Zeitzs primary argument in White Ethnic New York is that ethnic and religious
differences among whites, specifically between Jews, on the one hand, and Irish and Italian
Catholics on the other, determined the political fault lines in New York into the 1970s
more than did racial differences. Moreover, he contends, the Roosevelt coalition began to
fray as early as the 1940s, well before race became a central political concern. Zeitz thus
takes issue with those historians who see the 1960s as a pivotal time in the coming apart of
the New Deal majority largely because of the creation by Jews and Catholic ethnics of a
white bloc in opposition to black demands for social equality and political power. His book
is a valuable and convincing reminder that divisions other than those now commonly
viewed as racial ones motivated political actors in New York through most of the twentieth
century.
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Zeitz makes the case that Jews and Catholics held dramatically differing worldviews based
on religious teachings, historical memory and personal experience. While New York Jews
were mainly secular and valued political dissent, intellectual freedom and individualism,
Catholics held to a religious and communitarian outlook that prized obedience to authority
(2). These divergent philosophies were born of historical experiences in the nineteenth
century, but were continually reinforced by family and school: Jews attended public school
and practised a child-centric style of parenting that encouraged children to think
independently. Catholic families and parochial schools, on the other hand, instilled respect
for authority and a sense of hierarchy in which all authority figures ultimately derived their
power from the same source (83). Zeitz certainly recognizes the importance of class in the
formation of political attitudes, but he sees religious/ethnic distinctions as primary.
As early as the 1930s, these differing worldviews had political repercussions. To put it
simply, Jews tended to be more afraid of fascism, and Catholics of communism. Thus the two
communities lined up on opposite sides of the Spanish Civil War and, later, took opposing
stances on McCarthyism. Jews tended to split their votes between the Democratic party and
two local parties the American Labor party, and the Liberal party that pushed for an
extension of the New Deal. By the 1940s, however, Catholics, suspicious of critiques of
capitalism, were beginning their move away from the Democrats toward the Republicans.
One implication of this analysis that Zeitz never quite carries through is that the New Deal
coalition never really existed at all at the local level. He does, however, point out that New
Yorks peculiar system of multi-party endorsements meant that even when they voted for the
same candidate, Catholics and Jews often voted for different parties and programmes.
Zeitz stresses the continuity of ethnic/religious political attitudes in the 1960s. Even in
relation to issues that arose to challenge old attitudes and alignments, he downplays the salience
of race. Jewish continuity was especially apparent, as Jews voted liberal well into the 1970s.
Catholics, meanwhile, continued their rightward drift. Perhaps the most important challenge
to the New Deal coalition came from the campus left, which attracted support not only from
Jewish students, but even from their parents. Most Catholics were outraged at the disregard for
authority that the New Left represented. But the rise of a small but vocal Catholic left among
students and clergy put Catholic conservatives in the ironic position of rejecting clerical
authority and disrespecting priests and nuns. Under this pressure, the cohesive Catholic
subculture began to unravel. Conflicts over such issues as rising crime, the 1968 teachers
strikes, and opposition to scatter-site public housing that others see as fundamentally racial in
nature, Zeitz takes at face value as a real concern for actually rising crime rates, a conflict over
labour rights and the wisdom of decentralization, and a middle-class worry about property
values.
There is much to debate in White Ethnic New York. Chief among debatable points is Zeitzs
tendency to downplay the depth of racism and racial discrimination in New York, both as it
informed black calls for decentralization and as it motivated white backlash politics. Indeed,
Zeitz comes close to denying that backlash existed at all. By classifying 1969 Democratic
mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino as a moderate liberal, he is able to show that liberals
(Liberal party candidate John Lindsay and Procaccino) outpolled the one conservative
candidate (Republican-Conservative John Marchi) by nearly four to one. (I have to admit that
my own scepticism about this analysis is based not only on my reading of other historians
descriptions of events, but also my memories of the mood in the largely Catholic Queens
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neighbourhood in which I grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s.) As sociologist Jonathan
Rieder showed long ago, the complexity of ethnic and racial politics was such that crime was
both a real and reasonable concern and a racist codeword.
Other objections amount to quibbles. Zeitz, for example, uses rabbis sermons as the main
body of evidence for the liberal attitudes of a group that he describes as largely secular and
unlikely to attend synagogue. In discussing the historical sources of Jewish anti-authoritarianism,
Zeitz cites the Hasidic movement of the eighteenth century but ignores the Haskalah (Jewish
Enlightenment) of the nineteenth, in reaction to whose critique of tradition the Hasidim aligned
with their erstwhile traditionalist opponents. Some might also object to his characterization of
the New Left as an infantile response to permissive Jewish parenting styles.
In any case, Zeitz does not deny that a white voting bloc eventually came into existence in
response to changing demographics and resulting political and cultural challenges. He simply
implies that this came about some time in the 1980s, perhaps with the rise of the Koch and
Giuliani coalitions. His narrative, however, leaves that story for another time.
Daniel Soyer
Fordham University, NY
2009, Daniel Soyer
Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons. Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City 15501660 (2008),
xvii 544 (Cambridge University Press, London and New York, 50.00/$99.00).
This densely documented book is a work of meticulous scholarship and striking historical imagination. Its prime sources are the records of Bridewell, describing the 40,000 or so offenders
presented to its courts in the early seventeenth century and the many other offenders
committed there between court meetings. Griffiths has supplemented these with material from
wards and parishes and a host of other City institutions in the century after 1550. From this
evidence, full of character and incident, he creates a picture of criminal behaviour and the
texture of street life, and of the mental maps and contemporary perceptions of the lost
Londons (in the plural) of his title. His treatment combines a range of historical skills, each
with its own opportunities and hazards, and the result is a work which will appeal to all
historians of crime and policing, local government and public information, and urban society
and culture.
Those interested in crime and policing should turn to the back of the book first. The
offenders and offences before the Bridewell courts are tabulated in detail and carefully mapped
in an Appendix. The numbers underline points made in the text, sometimes confirming
suggestions made by previous historians, often adding fresh material. Offences were
concentrated in the two wards of Farringdon, where the old City and the growing West
End met in a social mix presenting rich opportunities. Vagrancy continued its rise among
presented offences, replacing the sexual misdemeanours prominent in the early Elizabethan
period; and street offences of all kinds multiplied from the 1620s, underscoring Griffithss
central argument about the impact of Londons growth on the attitudes of constables,
magistrates and the public in general. Single women became more prominent, making up 40
per cent of vagrants by the 1630s, one among many indicators of the changing sex ratio of the
Citys population (69, 204, 2078). This material usefully fills the chronological gap between
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the earlier studies of Archer and of Shoemaker and Beattie, so that we now have a more or
less complete picture of petty crime in London from 1560 through to the eighteenth century.
Griffiths also has some important material on the nature of criminal processes and policing in
the early modern capital. Bridewells governors are shown to have been cautious in the use of
their summary jurisdiction, and fully conscious that their charter, with its discretionary powers,
was open to challenge. The penalties they imposed were numerous, most commonly a
whipping (sometimes used to extort a confession), often work (usually for very short periods),
sometimes transportation to the plantations (though only with the consent of the offenders).
The courts officers were never wholly reliable, and might like some alleged relations of the
governors themselves end up as offenders. But Griffiths is concerned to stress the importance
and general efficiency of public policing in this period. By 1643 there were 800 men in wards
and parishes policing the square mile of the City, and their identities, status, energy and
activities are documented in often colourful detail. By 1642 marshals and constables were
bringing 600 or more suspects to Bridewell every year. London was better policed, Griffiths
concludes, than earlier historians have supposed.
The offenders quite properly receive even fuller treatment than the police. Griffiths rehearses
their life stories, their identifying marks and nicknames, their practices and their associates. His
technique might be described as pointillist, building a coherent image from a vast multitude of
carefully arranged individual instances. He is consistently attentive to language and its uses, to the
repetition of terms like swarms to describe and communicate new senses of threat, and to the
ways in which contemporary rogue literature and other kinds of labelling sought to impose
definition and margins on shifting social realities. There are particularly successful chapters on
streets, how they looked, sounded and smelt, and on night battles, about how the same streets
appeared after dusk and curfew, how they were lit and populated (or not). These are certainly
lost Londons, which Griffiths and other recent historians are usefully illuminating.
In his conclusion Griffiths explains that his aim has been to show what London meant for
people at the time, and he achieves it at length and with ease. He allows us to imagine the
City through the emotional states or moods, now frozen in perceptions written down in
records of its citizens (437). Admirable as it is, however, that inevitably leaves some questions
open, at any rate for more empirically inclined historians. How large in reality were the
problems of petty crime and vagrancy which loomed so large in the perceptions of Bridewells
governors and officers and other contemporary Londoners? Is it relevant to point out that the
number of offenders brought to Bridewell in most years probably amounted to little more than
10 per cent of the Citys population?2 How should we balance the evidence for an unstable,
anonymous and threatening London, so amply documented in the public records used here,
against the evidence equally amply provided in this book of relatively effective policing,
well-informed parish and city officials, and the face-to-face familiarity of many urban
neighbourhoods?
Griffithss answer to that last question is deliberately ambivalent. Londoners were
resourceful as well as anxious, looking forwards as well as backwards, ready to pride
1
Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability. Social
Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991);
Robert B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment.
Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural
Middlesex c. 16601755 (Cambridge, 1991); J. M.
Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660

1750 (Oxford, 2001).
2
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, Summary justice in
early modern London, English Historical Review,
CXXI (2006), 805.
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themselves on the size of their city as well as to resent the symptoms of its rapid demographic
growth. Ambivalence; London existed as ambivalence or ambiguity (434). At the end of this
rich and enthralling book, readers are left to choose, and to think for themselves.
Paul Slack
Linacre College, Oxford
2009, Paul Slack
Keith Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales,
c. 17001950 (2006), xiv 504 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New
York, 55.00/$129.00).
In every scholars career there is one keynote publication that represents the culmination of
their archive work and mature reflection on the bigger themes in their field. This is one such
book. For over twenty years, its author has brought students of social history closer to the
experience of the labouring poor rediscovering their lost voices, makeshift economies and
poor law strategies. In the process, the importance of a sense of belonging has been a significant
and recurrent theme. In an erudite and thought-provoking introduction, the book asks how
those living on the margins of relative to absolute poverty constructed a sense of belonging in
the past and whether that same sense of belonging still resonates in local communities in the era
of globalization. How, in other words, belonging was constructed legally, by welfare
agencies, employers, social expectations, death customs and topography. Themes such as
change over time, the impact of urbanization and industrialization, cultures of xenophobia, the
changing landscape of the poor law in England and Wales, are all confronted. It is rare for an
author to have the scholarly credentials and intellectual breadth to pose questions of such
complexity about community identity across time. But, as the author points out, There is no
reason why one should not belong and communicate widely (11). The aim of the book is to
press the case for the social history of the parish . . . to underline its prominence and
continued significance for peoples lives and to inspire more historians to study it (14). By the
conclusion, stimulating answers to the monographs larger themes present a revisionist
historical perspective that beyond academic life a sense of belonging still has connectivity for
many people today. One of the strengths of this book is the way that it drills down to the local
and then stands back to bring together the mosaic of its rich research material. What emerges is
a first-rate, fascinating configuration of the parish and a sense of belonging from the human
perspective between 1700 and 1950.
The book, in more detail, shows that cultures of local xenophobia could be deeply rooted.
Likewise, settlement laws, parochial belonging and entitlement to poor relief were high
hurdles for the outsider seeking welfare assistance. Yet these cultures of exclusion created a
strong sense of belonging, too, encouraging pride of place, strong local loyalty and a firm sense
of home and belonging (160). Those communities that turned away strangers, in turn
welcomed their own. Establishing ones rightful place could be difficult, but once accepted
into a community its welfare structure was often caring, flexible and responsive for life. Today
some of those rural societies, their marriage cultures, with high endogamy patterns that
plummet dramatically from the 1880s, might seem an historico-anthropological curiosity
(201). But we are reminded that rural exodus, urban dislocation and employment mobility still
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structure our lives. Escalating house prices have shaped a new sense of belonging in households
containing adult children who for economic reasons must identify strongly with their parental
community.
Moving on to chapters 5 and 6, two of the best in the book, we are reminded of the central
role that poor relief played in the lives of the poor broadly defined and that the position of
overseer for the poor was pivotal to the operation of regional cultures of welfare provision
from the sixteenth until the twentieth centuries. This is an important finding, and one that
some historians of the nineteenth-century poor law experience have tended to underestimate.
Likewise, chapters 7 and 8 stress that the topography of parishes still speaks to us about the
importance of belonging. Surveying gravestones is by far the best example of this trend. They
continue to speak of the need to return home, to identify ones place of birth, to celebrate lives
lived in communities. For others the parish is an aesthetic experience, a place to scatter ashes or
to sit on a bench inscribed with the name of a loved one, appreciating the view they treasured.
Increasingly, there is little sense of permanent attachment, with fewer gravestones and little to
mark the spot where generations have trod. It is interesting to reflect that in the future we
might face empty landscapes uncluttered by gravestones. What, asks the author, will that say
about our sense of self and belonging?
By the conclusion, it is clear that we cannot simply abandon the term community as a tool
of social-historical analysis (501). Until the twentieth century, the parish held a prime
importance in peoples lives. It certainly dominated Welsh life and continued to structure the
English poor law system, despite unionization, until 1929. In stressing how real and
fundamental the parish community was (502), this book reminds us that community can
mean many things, often in parallel and multiple forms (503). The author finishes by
reminding us that the decline of the parish and the primacy of local belonging is a fairly recent
phenomenon in historical time (504).
This book is therefore a timely reminder of the importance of future research on the
nineteenth-century parish. It sets new standards of scholarship. For the next generation of social
historians, it asks important questions that should stimulate high quality research both inside and
beyond academic life. It is an erudite, thought-provoking and well-written work and, above all,
it demonstrates why the life-cycle of the scholar matters. Here is a book in a generation which
will be read into the future because its author is at the career stage when their ambition to reach
out to the readers sense of belonging is underpinned by extensive and first-rate archival
research. In a period of global recession it is intriguing to find an academic book that gets to the
key question in all our lives. Maybe a renewed sense of belonging the instinct that community
is important to everyone might just be around the next historical corner.
Elizabeth T. Hurren
Oxford Brookes University
2009, Elizabeth T. Hurren
Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (eds), The Family in Early Modern England (2007),
xv 244 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 55.00/$105.00).
This very valuable collection of essays has been published as a celebration of Anthony
Fletchers contributions to the field of early modern English history, and brings together a
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number of established scholars who have been influenced by his work and his mentorship over
the past several decades. Loosely structuring their chapters around a reassessment of Lawrence
Stones path-breaking but problematic The Family, Sex and Marriage,1 the authors engage with
a wide range of topics in family history, focusing primarily on England in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The editors have aimed the book to appeal to both new and advanced
scholars, and they have wholly succeeded in this goal, with a collection notable for its clear and
accessible writing.
Berry and Foyster begin the volume with a concise, lucid overview of historiographical
developments in the thirty years since Stones monograph appeared. Their introduction is
followed by three essays that utilize early modern court records to shed light on the
interactions of families and households with common, ecclesiastical and statutory law. Tim
Stretton examines the surprisingly varied and ubiquitous avenues of negotiation and
intervention open to couples with failed marriages from the Reformation to the Restoration.
Although such cases were nominally under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts, Stretton
demonstrates that a wide range of officials, institutions, neighbours and family members
intervened to mediate in troubled marriages. In the end, he concludes, The ability of the law
of marriage to bend helped to ensure that the ideology of marriage did not break (39). Bernard
Capp judges the nature, scale and success of the Godly Reformations efforts to intervene and
reshape family life in Interregnum Middlesex. Using recognizances, rather than the more
frequently exploited assize and sessions papers, Capp uncovers a flood of activity triggered by
a vigorous and sustained (54) use of the Adultery Act of 1650 by spouses, neighbours and
magistrates. Very few of these cases came to trial, and so they have been hidden from the eyes
of earlier historians, and the same could be said of the sea of recognizances produced by
legislation against alehouses and sabbath breaking. Together, these sources show the
significance of Puritan reformers efforts to intervene in family affairs, but also the limitations
of such endeavours in the face of popular ambivalence. Garthine Walker covers familiar terrain
in her examination of property offences, but she re-situates such crime within and among
households, rather than focusing on individuals. In doing so, she effectively demonstrates the
centrality of the household-family2 in both acting and defending against property crime, while
creating a very nuanced view of coverture and demonstrating, like Stretton, the flexibility of
the early modern family and eschewing simplistic views of the level or shape of patriarchy in
seventeenth-century households.
Two essays in the volume bring us into closer contact with the families of the lower orders.
John Walter makes yet another major contribution to our understanding of the early modern
crowd by focusing on the under-studied issues of the age and gender dynamics of protesters in
enclosure and food riots of the early modern period. While their youth could grant licence to
rioters, mature men could use crowd violence to alleviate their anxious masculinity, and
women manipulated existing views on gender very consciously in their participation in crowd
activity. While the lower orders in Walters essay emerge as savvy navigators of the gendered
order and the social and legal system, the autonomy of pauper families from the north
1
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage

in England 15001800 (London, 1977).
2
Most of the essays in the volume make
reference to the concept of the household-family
developed by Naomi Tadmor: The concept of

the household-family in eighteenth-century England, Past and Present, CLI (1996), 11140.
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of England appears to have been far more constrained, according to Steve Hindles analysis of
poor relief in the parish of Kirkoswald, Cumberland. Hindle meticulously unpacks a series of
pauper letters from Kirkoswald to show the ways in which pauper families were deeply
enmeshed in local credit networks, and supported by extensive networks of neighbours, rather
than kin. Like several other articles (Walker, Bailey, Foyster and Berry), Hindles essay shows
the importance of unmarried, adult children in supporting their families, but also demonstrates
that it is essential that we examine early modern families within the context of parish and
neighbourhood.
The remaining essays focus primarily on gender norms in the eighteenth-century family.
While Berry and Foyster analyse cultural perceptions and the lived experience of childlessness
among men, Ingrid Tague examines changing ideals of patriarchy in aristocratic families, and
Joanne Bailey uses matrimonial litigation to uncover contrasting ideals of fatherhood and
motherhood. All three essays help us to understand the changes that were occurring in ideals of
masculinity and femininity over the eighteenth century, without succumbing to simplistic
narratives of change, and the emergence of separate sphere ideology. Indeed, all three essays
are noteworthy for the subtlety of their argumentation (especially by Tague), and the use of
new themes and questions for family history (for example, Baileys suggestions for new
directions in the history of childhood).
A question still remains, however: do these excellent essays provide us with an alternative to
Lawrence Stones narrative of the transformation of the early modern family? Although Berry
and Foyster do their best to argue that Stones text is good to think with (8), for most of the
authors, proving Stone to have been misguided is like shooting fish in a barrel (big fish, small
barrel). Other than Berry and Foyster, Tague is the only author who analyses Stones views in
a way that is less excoriating than nuanced and sustained. While each essay makes a real
contribution to the disparate elements of family history represented here, repainting small
corners of Stones big picture of the development of the English family, they do not actually fit
together to depict a panoramic view of the changing nature of the family, sex or marriage in
early modern England. This is a genuinely valuable set of essays, revealing how very far family
history has come since Stones day, but it also points out the continued absence of a synthetic
work of family history that would allow us, at last, to replace Stones views entirely.
Susannah Ottaway
Carleton College, Minnesota
2009, Susannah Ottaway
Catherine ODonnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of
Citizenship (2008), 256 (published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, $59.95,
paperback $24.95).
Building on the work of Jurgen Habermas and a host of European historians on the public
sphere in the eighteenth century, as well as the work of American historians such as David
Waldstreicher, David Shields and William Dowling, Catherine ODonnell Kaplans book on
Federalist men of letters is a clearly written, intellectually nuanced and insightful contribution
to the growing literature on sensibility and sociability in the public life and print culture of the
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early national United States. According to Kaplan these men of letters sought to carve out a
world of conversation, wit, literature, and fellowship in the politically turbulent 1790s, and to
fashion an understanding of republican citizenship and sociability that would transcend (and
provide an antidote to) the political absolutes and bitter partisanship of the period. Inspired by
their belief in the primacy of intellectual exchange and polite sociability, these men resisted
what Kaplan calls the new tyranny of endless political relevance and responsibility that
accompanied the transformation between the state and civil society produced by the American
Revolution and the creation of a republican citizenry.
Her exploration of the writer and diarist Elihu Hubbard Smith founder of the Friendly
Club and The Medical Repository, editor of the first anthology of American poetry, and a tireless
promoter of transatlantic intellectual enquiry and exchange and her briefer discussion of the
founders of the Boston-based Monthly Anthology and the Boston Athenaeum (William Shaw
Smith, Arthur Maynard Walter and Joseph Stevens Buckminster) both support her general
argument. Smith and the Boston Anthologists regarded political conflict with a cool disdain
and established public and print forums for the dissemination of knowledge that ignored the
day-to-day clash of party politics and sought to unite men of enlightenment and good will in
the dispassionate discovery of truth. Kaplan is particularly sensitive to the philosophical and
political differences between these broadly Federalist men of letters. She carefully avoids
sweeping generalizations about Federalist beliefs and skillfully analyses their surprisingly critical
views on issues like nationalism, slavery and women. As she makes clear, these men shared a
commitment to a cosmopolitan and transatlantic republic of letters that formed a genteel
counterpart to the cosmopolitan radicalism of Thomas Paine and his supporters in the 1790s,
a cosmopolitanism that gave way in both camps to an increasingly narrow vision of American
exceptionalism and nationalism after 1800.
Kaplans book, however, is best where her overall argument is least persuasive: in her
fascinating re-examination of the editor and essayist Joseph Dennie, proprietor of the Farmers
Weekly Museum and the Port Folio. In Dennies colourful, idiosyncratic and unapologetically
partisan political prose, the practice of belles lettres and ardent Anglophilia helped constitute a
defiant culture of political engagement and dissent, skewering the facile republican
orthodoxies of American life and fashioning what Kaplan rightly describes as a Federalist
identity politics. This sense of a political community grounded in difference and conflict and
animated by the politics of personality and satire is a far cry from the polite, impersonal and
anti-partisan sociability of Smith and the Boston Anthologists. In this respect, Dennie more
closely resembles republican political opponents like the editor William Duane, as well as his
great Federalist editorial ally in the 1790s, the expatriate Englishman, William Cobbett.
(Dennie even described himself like Cobbett as an unwilling exile from the British Empire,
openly celebrating George IIIs birthday in his newspaper.) Kaplans neglect of Cobbett, who
shared Dennies enthusiasm for Edmund Burke and clearly had a major influence on his
political style, is a little odd. But, as Kaplan argues, after 1800 Dennie himself abandoned his
politically abrasive and dystopian vision of America for literary self-cultivation. Reassured by
his own commercial success, Dennie lapsed into political silence, extolling the adventurous
heroes of enterprise who were busily transforming the country. Where Cobbett took up the
cudgels for the new industrial working class in England after his return in 1800, Dennie joined
the Boston Anthologists in their celebration of middle-class commercial society, leaving to
others the difficult task of dissent. In this respect, Kaplan does her own work a disservice when
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she suggests in her conclusion that these men of letters were largely ineffective. In fact, each
in his own way contributed to an important social and political transformation: the invention
of an American middle class.
Marcus Daniel
University of Hawaii at Manoa
2009, Marcus Daniel
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (translated by Tom Lampert), The Politics of Sociability:

Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840-1918, trans. Tom Lampert (2007), 413
(University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, $70.00).
[Original German edition: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Die Politik der Geselligkeit
(2000) (Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, Gottingen).]
This excellent English translation of Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmanns prize-winning study on
German Freemasonry and civil society from the Vormarz period to the First World War
represents an important contribution to the growing literature grappling with Germanys path
to modern nationhood. Indeed, by examining the origins of Freemasonry in the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment project, the ideas, rituals and practices of the nineteenth-century
lodges, and their connection to the development of civil society, Hoffmann seeks to answer
nothing less than the question of which social and discursive practices have transformed ideas
about the social and the moral, the national and the universal, the public and the private into
objects of politics? (12). He argues that the civic virtue which underlay civil society in
Germany developed through social interaction (what he calls sociability) in associations,
specifically Masonic lodges, as members worked out the qualifications for membership, their
relationship to other organizations (including Masons in other national contexts such as France
or the United States), and the relationship of the lodges to local and national politics. He starts
from the premise that sociability was political (4) and hence that studying the moral and
political language and rituals employed by the Masons allows him to unravel some of the
tensions and ambiguities so characteristic of nineteenth-century political culture.
The monograph is based on a rich analysis of primary sources including government
documents (especially surveillance records), Masonic documents (from the lodges in Leipzig
and Breslau and the grand lodges in Berlin and Dresden) as well as Masonic pamphlets and
journals and anti-Masonic literature. Rather than writing a traditional history of ideas or an
organizational history, Hoffmann offers a nuanced cultural history of ideas, rituals and
practices which he calls a political history of culture (12) by tracing not only Masonic
ideas, but also their implementation in the lodges, and the tensions created by the lived realities
of the members. The book is organized into three main parts, each deploying a different but
complementary approach to the history of Masonic lodges (6). This strategy allows Hoffmann
to break out of a primarily chronological framework for his book and investigate different
aspects of Masonic culture more thematically.
In the first part of the work, Hoffmann explores the origins of Freemasonry in the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment project and the legacy of these ideas into the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. He shows that in the context of eighteenth-century absolutism,
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Masonic lodges created a new space removed from the state (28) where members could
experiment with fresh ideas, some of which were socially and politically explosive. For
example, Masons saw themselves as cosmopolites (not just as subjects or citizens), their ideas
transcending traditional religious and social boundaries, bringing together aristocrats and
burghers, Protestants and Catholics. And yet, lodges were exclusive spaces that limited access.
Gender was only the most obvious limiting factor. Jews also posed a tricky problem for many
Masonic lodges, which purported to avow universal and humanist ideals. Hoffmann explores
this tension between universality and exclusivity (32) by focusing on the moral-political
discourse and social practices of Masonic lodges (35) in local contexts (specifically Leipzig and
Breslau), where interconnections between civility and sociability (40) revealed themselves.
Beginning in the Vormarz period, membership in a lodge had social and professional functions
as it bestowed sociable power (42) on members who could marshal it into entrepreneurial and
political opportunities. Moreover, lodges provided their members with an all-embracing social
sphere distinct from families, a masculine world (48) which modelled civil society. And yet
the concrete social practices of Masonic lodges the exclusion of the lower classes, women,
and Jews made clear the limitations of this vision of civil society. (50) Though lodges were
important arbiters of social and political influence, the rhetoric of universality lacked
credibility (53). By the middle of the nineteenth century, lodges increasingly became
laboratories of civility (92) and engaged ideas of liberal reform as the reformist ideas of the
Burgertum gained currency throughout society as a whole. In this process of liberalization and
democratization, Hoffmann sees Masonic lodges as undoubtedly one of these invisible and
successful institutions of German civil society during the 1860s (103). In the last few decades
before the First World War, the German bourgeoisie both experienced a hegemonic status and
developed a self-image of crisis. Freemasonry embodied these juxtaposition[s] of prosperity
and pessimism, the maintenance of social power and the discourse of cultural loss (105). In a
particularly compelling part of this section, Hoffmann explores the benefits of membership, the
processes of admission, the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, and the ways in which
these boundaries were justified, exploring particularly how language was used to construct
identity and distinction (7). Moreover, he examines the intellectual worlds created by
Freemasons and their detractors and describes their increasing politicization at the end of the
nineteenth century.
The second section of the book takes seriously the language and social practices within the
lodges and explores the inner workings of lodge life (8). How did Freemasons implement
their ideas of human improvement? Lodges claimed to be schools of civic virtue (8), but what
did this mean and how was this lived? Hoffmann tackles these questions by analysing the
outward symbols of Masonry (their buildings and aesthetics), the rituals of their initiation
processes, and the power of their secrets which he reveals to be their lived reality of brotherly
love (192). He offers a nuanced analysis of the masculine world created by Masons and the
view of these secret connections by the outside world. Finally, this section ends with a detailed
analysis of the idea of Bildung, which Masons developed into a specifically civil religion and
which provided the cult of brotherhood with an intensity and mystical quality beyond
everyday life (215).
The final section of the book explores how notions of self and society as developed and
lived by German Freemasons were connected to patriotism, especially regarding the
tensions between French and German Freemasons from the FrancoPrussian War to the
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First World War. He reveals the clash that emerged between Masons universal ideas of
humanity and their increasingly nationalist rhetoric, which depended on the existence of
an other. The example of Masonic lodges, Hoffmann argues, can therefore be used to
trace the politicization of moral ideas and the simultaneous moralization of politics (both
national politics and international power politics) between the 1860s and the First World
War (248).
The book ends with an overview of Masonic history during the early twentieth century,
specifically the impact of the two world wars on the intellectual world created by Masonry,
and the rise of conspiracy myths and widespread badmouthing of Masons (285), which resulted
ultimately in a loss of legitimacy that was rooted in the fundamental ambiguity of the moralpolitical claims of Freemasons during the nineteenth century.
Julia Bruggemann
DePauw University, Indiana
2009, Julia Bruggemann
Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National
Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (2007), xi 520 (Harvard University Press, London
and Cambridge, MA, 36.95/$49.50).
Meiji Japan (18681912) was a time of unprecedented social revolution, during which the
foundations for modern Japan were laid. Despite its historical importance it has, until recently,
received scant historiographical attention. A monographic work on early Meiji history is
particularly rare, and The Age of Visions and Arguments fills a gaping hole in the Englishlanguage studies of the period. This book revisits the famed and denigrated, according to
Kim Popular Rights Movement ( Jiyu minken undo), the first large-scale modern political
movement in East Asia. The movement, in which thousands of Japanese clamoured to
participate in the political process of the emerging modern state, eventually led to the
establishment of the popularly elected national assembly, the Diet. In The Age of Visions, Kims
specific task is to tackle the long-neglected activities of parliamentarians, the supporters of
constitutional politics in the 1870s and 1880s. He also investigates the actions of Meiji state
officials, including oligarchs, without overly emphasizing the influence of the state. Kims
broad and in-depth coverage of the movement stands in contrast to previous scholarship,
which has focused on small radical segments that emerged from the movement, using violence
to defy the Meiji government. Because of such a tendency in the existing scholarship, Kim
even proposes to jettison the use of the term Popular Rights Movement.
The first chapter provides a cursory but useful introduction to the development of the
concept of public opinion (kogi yoron) in the late Tokugawa period. The following chapters
emphasize the significance of events within the government the political crises of 1873 and
1881, the decision to establish the Diet, the drafting of the Imperial Constitution as break-off
points for the evolution of the popular movement. The significance of Kims work lies in his
stress upon the importance of the parliamentarian ideology as the core of the popular and
democratic mobilization of the time, while refuting state-centred approaches to Japanese
history. Here, Kim points out the important role played by the organized intelligentsia who
often worked, directly or indirectly, for the Meiji government.
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Although the government was responsible for promoting the news media (such as
newspapers) in the first years after the Meiji Restoration (90), it nonetheless had to resort to a
series of legal measures and police work to suppress the further flourishing of popular opinion
and the expansion of the liberal movement after 1874. This fact, Kim argues, attests to the
vigour and influence that the parliamentarian activities had upon the direction of the state.
Oligarchs in the government then began to prepare their own conservative constitution to be
formally bestowed by the emperor. But, Kim maintains, the Meiji constitutional government
was very much a product of contestation and collaboration between the state and civil society,
mediated through the public sphere (258). Such a statement is notable, as it taps into the old
but important debate on modern Japans civil and political issues. Opponents of this view argue
that the constitutional movement was defeated without resort of systematic repression
because popular rights activists were prone to resort to imperial sovereignty, and thus were
trapped when the oligarchs, speaking through the Meiji emperor, appropriated the issue of
constitutional reform for the throne.1
On the whole, Kim successfully explains the scale and volume of the parliamentarian
movements while providing numerous quantifiable facts. He also discusses a variety of
constitutional drafts and petitions submitted by popular activists. However, it must be
noted that the social and political ideas that journalists and parliamentarians put forward are
not given enough attention to counter the existing scholarship. This shortcoming is tied to
Kims definition of the Meiji public sphere. He asserts that civil society in his analysis
implies minkan, not shimin shakai as it is normally translated (6). Minkan can be understood as
the public or peoples realm, which is separate from the kan (the government and
bureaucratic officialdom). Scholars have often addressed the problem of rendering minkan as
the public because in Japanese and other East Asian cultures it was often the kan that was
understood to represent publicness (ko). In this sense, Kims unique adaptation of civil
society or the public sphere needs a reconsideration in terms of its normative meaning in
English or Japanese. As it is, readers may come away with a very different understanding of
history, not grasping the problem of applying the concept of civil society to the case of
imperial Japan.
A more engaged analysis of the discourses apparent in journalism can also shed light on the
development of nationalist ideas and activities, an important product of the Popular Rights
Movement. It would have been helpful to explain the nature of early Meiji parliamentarian
nationalism instead of positing a notion like the national public sphere, which stretches
Habermass category of bourgeois society. Significantly, Kim ends his work by reminding us
of the importance that imperialism and its consciousness played in allowing the Meiji states
eventual primacy over the popular rights activists. A detailed examination of what popular
parliamentarians said about Japans external policy or expansionism in terms of national rights
(kokken), which was often discussed together with popular rights (minken), would have been a
valuable addition here.
These criticisms aside, The Age of Visions and Arguments is a significant work and
recommended for any serious reader of East Asian politics or the development of civil society
outside the West. There is a wealth of helpful information, including tables and illustrative
1
Stephen Vlastos, Opposition movement in

early Meiji, 18681885 in Marius B. Jansen (ed.),
The Emergence of Meiji Japan (Cambridge and New

York, 1995).
512
Social History
vol. 34 : no. 4
drawings, much of which was previously unavailable in English. Kim often responds
passionately to facile criticisms levelled against the past; his tussle with the generations of
Japanese scholarship is evident and commendable. Kims attempt to carry on the work of some
of the finest Japanese historians, such as Irokawa Daikichi, is evident and his overall message is
clear: any democratic or modernizing movement needs to be considered from within, in the
context of its own past. This includes the political-ethical traditions, historical consciousness,
and the concrete circumstances of the period that allowed, as well as hampered, the growth of
popular civic virtue and democracy.
Yosuke Nirei
Indiana University South Bend
2009, Yosuke Nirei
Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno (eds), Gendering Modern Japanese History (2005;
paperback 2008), xiii 607 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, $60.00,
paperback $25.00).
The aim of this impressive volume, as the editors boldly state in their introduction, is to ignite
a process of redefining master narratives in modern Japanese history by a foregrounding of
gender. More precisely, the books objective is to historicize gender construction, gender
contestations (defined as a mode of resistance that does not question gender binaries in
themselves) and, most important to the editors, gender ambiguity (described as a process that
unsettles gender binaries and unitary gendered subjectivities) in modern Japan. As their
emphasis on the latter theme suggests, the editors align their project with what they call
post-modern approaches to gender history, citing Joan Scotts conception of sexual difference
as a function of our knowledge (9) and supporting the idea that history itself is a gendered
construct. Furthermore, they place their venture in the context of studies in social history and
cultural history comprising a field that may be called critical modernity studies of Japan as
opposed to the celebratory modernization theory approach, which dominated earlier studies of
Japanese history. Finally, they see this volume to be connected to post-colonial studies, which
constitute another move towards decentring and destabilizing the unitary, gendered and
ethnicized modern subject and which, it might be added, offer a global perspective on modern
Japanese history that differs from the western-centred approach of modernization theory.
In the course of clarifying their own position, Molony and Uno recapitulate important
long-term developments and controversies in (mainly North American) womens and gender
studies as well as in the Anglophone study of Japanese history, and they present an overview of
Japans modern history from the perspective of gender, thereby helping to make this book
accessible to both students in womens and gender studies who do not know much about
Japan and to historians of Japan who are new to the field of gender. Moreover, by introducing
previous English-language scholarship on gender in modern Japanese history (mainly by way
of extensive annotations), mapping the theoretical field for future research, and bringing
together substantive research by an interdisciplinary group of established scholars, the editors
succeed in making this book an important milestone in the ongoing process of gendering
Japanese modern history. There is only one slightly disturbing tendency in the editors
approach, which is all the more conspicuous against the backdrop of their championing of
November 2009
Reviews
513
post-modern and post-colonial theories, namely, the failure to problematize the ways in
which their own perspective, as well as that of the other contributors, is informed by their own
western training. Perhaps related to this is the almost total lack of reference, in the
introduction, to developments in womens and gender history within and outside academia in
Japan, or to Japanese-language works on gender in modern Japanese history although most of
the contributions to the volume, including those by the editors, rely, at least partly, on
secondary sources published in Japanese.
The sixteen chapters of the book are grouped under five themes, and within those groups
arranged in roughly chronological order, spanning what the editors refer to as Japans long
twentieth century (3). This period is defined to include the second half of the nineteenth
century, thus defying conventional periodization, which posits the Meiji Restoration (1868) as
the watershed between early modern and modern. This programmatic move is reflected in a
re-examination in many of the chapters (for example, those by Tocco, Roden, Sato,
Pflugfelder, Driscoll, Hunter, Gordon, Molony and Uno) of the paradigm according to which
modern Japanese gender norms and gender relations are of western origin and constitute a
radical departure from early modern patterns. Also, several of the authors (for example, Tocco,
Roden, Gordon and Molony) not only question the singularity of western influence on
Japanese modernity but, in the process, deconstruct and complicate the West as well.
Furthermore, although continuities between the modern and the early modern are
highlighted, the authors take care to refrain from a narrative of uniqueness, and many of
them (for instance, Tocco, Roden, Pflugfelder, Hunter and Gordon) look at Japan from a
comparative perspective or even present it as a case-study.
Important themes of the book are elevated into section titles selfhood/culture, bodies/
sexualities, empire/war, work/economy, and theorizing but all of these are addressed well
beyond their designated sections. The focus on sexuality and the body deserves particular
mention as this is a rapidly expanding but still under-represented subject of gender studies
both in Japanese language literature and that published in other languages. Several authors
(for example, Roden, T. F. Cook, H. T. Cook and Brook) scrutinize the historical
construction of modern gendered, classed and ethnicized bodies; some (like Pflugfelder and
Driscoll) utilize the potential of discourses of deviant sexuality to undermine the image of
an evenly modernized and genderized (i.e. heterosexualized) Japan; and some (Pflugfelder,
Otsubo and Shigematsu) address the meanings ascribed to sexuality in feminist discourses,
which compete and overlap with discourses generated by the state, the media and other
actors. As is apparent from this discussion, not only is modern Japanese history reviewed
through the lens of gender: gender itself is deconstructed by a focus on its intersections with
sexuality, class (as in Roden, Sato, T. F. Cook, Brook, Hunter, Gordon, etc.), and ethnicity
(as in Brooks, H. T. Cook and Smith). The latter category surfaces, especially, in connection
with another important theme of the book, namely, that of empire/war. The often
paradoxical repercussions of empire, war and nationalism on gender are explored in depth in
chapters by Driscoll, T. F. Cook, H. T. Cook, Brook, Uno and Kano. Driscoll, H. T. Cook
and Brook give especially eye-opening accounts of how the dynamics of the periphery or
how they were portrayed affected metropolitan discourse and society. Among the many
other aspects of this volume that deserve mention is that of theory. Interestingly, three of the
four chapters (those by Molony, Kano and Shigematsu) comprising the final section, entitled
Theorizing gender are in some way concerned with feminism in Japan as a critical
514
Social History
vol. 34 : no. 4
discourse and as an ideology reflecting the political and societal conditions of its time.
This reflects the understanding promoted by this volume of the pursuit of gendering
history as analysing gender in history while, at the same time, participating in the discourse
on gender.
Finally, the editors should be congratulated for not producing just a collection of articles,
but for enabling the reader to understand this as a coherent project. They achieve this by their
comprehensive introduction and by the web of references among the chapters that link even
apparently diverse times, situations and themes in order to conceptualize recurrent aspects of
gender in modern Japanese history.
Ulrike Wohr
Hiroshima City University
2009, Ulrike Wohr
Anne Walthall (ed.), Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (2008),
xi 381 (University of California Press, Berkeley, 35.00/$60.00, paperback 14.95/
$24.95).
The fifteen essays collected in this volume were presented in 2004 by anthropologists,
archaeologists and historians at the various campuses of the University of California at a
conference on Palace women around the world. Although the papers range widely in time
and space, the primary focus is on the early modern period (15001800), and on the nonEuropean world. Anne Walthall has grouped the studies around four thematic clusters.
Three essays analyse the palace as a setting for the theatre of rule, although many more
discuss the status and place of women in palace life. Many essays outline the female pecking
order in the palace: the supreme status of the mother (above the royal wife) and the
subordinate role of queens, even in France, raises questions for future research. Four essays
treat the court as a centre for the production of goods and culture, and a final essay analysing
the failure of Louis-Philippes rule in the court of public opinion in France brings the study up
to the modern period.
Authors used a wide variety of sources. Beyond the historical chronicles, Barbara Watson
Andaya looks at palace women in early modern south-east Asia through the eyes of Europeans,
who were amazed at the large number of concubines surrounding the rulers, fascinated by
Matarams female bodyguards, and impressed by lavish royal investitures and funerals. Ja-Hyun
Kim Haboush draws upon an anonymous fictional account of a major political scandal at the
Korean Choson court to present an insider view of an affair that brought down a king.
Political cartoons attacking King Louis-Philippe and Queen Marie-Amelie give vivid point
to Jo Margadants thesis concerning the cause of the kings downfall.
The essays by anthropologists and archaeologists are primarily based on fieldwork. Much of
what we know about Aztec court life in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in Susan Evanss
study comes from Spanish accounts. Heidi Nast combines interviews with architectural and
artefactual evidence to reconstruct the pioneering role of royal concubines in indigo-dyed
cloth production in the Nigerian city-state of Kano before 1807, and Flora Kaplan based her
essay on royal women in Benin, Nigeria, on direct participant observation. Although there is
November 2009
Reviews
515
much scantier archaeological evidence about the Classic Maya period, Takeshi Inomata uses
information from excavated palaces, artefacts and mural paintings at Aguateca, Uaxactun and
Yachilan to discuss the role of women in royal courts.
Although virtually all the royal courts limited rulership to men, many permitted female
regencies when an under-age son ascended the throne. Women were secluded in Asian and
Muslim societies and, despite its Christian faith, in the Byzantine court as well. According to
Ruby Lal, the Mughal emperor Akbar modelled his harem on the household of the
Prophet. The enclosure of the Byzantine emperor, empress and offspring in separate harem
rested on a concept of the harem as sacred space, whereas in Benin, the sacredness of the
ruler (Oba) himself necessitated separating him and his wives from the rest of the world to
prevent pollution of the Oba, but also to protect the population from the terrible force of his
sacrality.
Religious commitment also shaped the dynamics of succession politics. Kathryn Ringrose
notes that Byzantine emperors were limited to three sequential marriages in their lifetime.
Coupled with the preference for bilateral descent, these regulations determined that marriage
was confined to a small circle of families; children born outside wedlock were barred from the
throne. One wonders whether the same insistence on bilateral descent may have permitted
powerful empresses (Irene, r. 797802, and Theodora, r. 84256), whose blood ensured that
they were as qualified as their male counterparts to rule.
Palace residences provide glimpses of underlying power structures. Kathryn Norbergs
observation that French queens did not reside permanently with their husbands in the
medieval period but rather on their own estates suggests that the nobles who supplied royal
wives enjoyed a power vis-a`-vis the king that had vanished by the early modern period. The
queens diminished power is reflected in ritual: the French ceased to stage coronations of
the queen in the seventeenth century. In Muscovy, as Isolde Thyret shows, Ivan IV (Ivan the
Terrible) got rid of wives by consigning them to a nunnery.
The essays in the volume also touch on historical issues of rulership. Leslie Peirce challenges
the widespread view that the female dominance at the Ottoman court, c. 15501650, was an
illegitimate exercise of power. She argues that it was instead the outcome of long-term shifts in
Ottoman policy. The abandonment by Suleiman (r. 152066) of the practice of serial
concubinage and his marriage to a favourite who was permitted to reside within the palace
upset previous practices, which had sent the sultans daughters and sons to the provinces along
with their mothers. Suleimans personal circumstances were part of larger historical trends that
continued after him. The sultans sons, formerly sent to fill provincial governorships, were
now confined to the palace and forbidden to marry. Daughters married high-ranking officials
in the capital, which became a hotbed of factional in-fighting focused on the competition for
succession. The mothers of sultans, acting as regents for under-age sons, expanded their power
and visibility as the Ottomans shifted from pursuit of imperial expansion to presenting
themselves as propagators of the faith.
Many studies touch on the recruitment, social background and functions of palace servants.
Beverly Bossler points out that during the Song dynasty (9791279) low-ranking female
entertainers twice succeeded in achieving the penultimate status of empress. The same
phenomenon occurred during the Qing dynasty (16441911), studied by Shuo Wang. Hata
Hisakos study, however, uses the letters of Fujinami, a woman who served in the shoguns
516
Social History
vol. 34 : no. 4
household in the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, to delineate the much more common
life experience of palace servants.
Evelyn S. Rawski
University of Pittsburgh
2009, Evelyn S. Rawski
Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth
Century (2007), x 357 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York,
47.50/$95.00).
Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Feminist Avant-Garde explores transatlantic
connections among British and American advanced feminists in the Edwardian period, from
roughly 1910 to 1917. Delaps book returns to a set of questions first explored by feminist
historians like Denise Riley and Nancy Cott in the 1980s, that of the interconnections
between the womens movement, suffragism and feminism. The authors transatlantic focus
and her emphasis on the complexity of the ideas underlying feminist arguments moves the
debate on Edwardian feminism into new and exciting territory. Delaps arguments in this book
are many, but the most significant the claim that collectivist and individualist strands shaped
the feminist avant garde in both Edwardian Britain and America imbues her reading of the
period with real subtlety and makes this book integral to understanding early twentiethcentury AngloAmerican feminism.
The book pivots on a set of thematic connections among British and American feminists,
connections both personal and intellectual. Delap constructs the imagined community of the
transatlantic feminist avant garde as a textual space in which periodicals are key to the
circulation of ideas. While not neglecting the institutional and personal connections through
which avant-garde feminists communicated, the emphasis throughout is on periodical culture
and the transmission of ideas through print. Central to the books arguments is the Anglo
American publication The Freewoman, founded in October 1911 by former members of the
militant suffrage society, the Womens Social and Political Union (WSPU), and edited by
Dora Marsden. The book follows the vicissitudes of The Freewoman (191112) as it becomes
The New Freewoman (191314) and, later, The Egoist (191419) as a means of charting the
development of a transnational feminist avant garde.
Delap is at pains to argue that womens suffrage was not coterminous with feminism,
although at times too much is made of this point. Dora Marsden and Teresa Billington Greig, a
former member of both the WSPU and its non-violent militant peer, the Womens Freedom
League (WFL), provide two excellent examples of suffragists who rejected suffrage for a more
broadly construed feminist agenda. And yet Delap overdraws the distinction between
suffragists and feminists in the Edwardian period, imposing a more restrictive identity on
certain female activists than they would have understood themselves as holding. At times she
identifies too strongly with Edwardian feminist critiques of the WSPU like those made by
Rebecca West conflating suffragism with that organization. One example of this will suffice.
In arguing that suffrage papers were not a place for feminist discussion, Delap cites Votes for
Women, based on circulation figures, as briefly a de facto representative of the womens
movement (45), slighting other British suffrage papers like The Vote and the level of attention
November 2009
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517
it paid to some of the very issues that Delap foregrounds as important for avant-garde feminists.
While it may be useful to subsume suffragism under the banner of the WSPU, it is not accurate
to do so.
But this is a minor quibble. Throughout, the books emphasis is on the relationship of
feminist ideas to Edwardian political culture more generally, and this is where its real
significance lies. Rather than treating feminism as a set of institutions or campaigns, Delap
treats the ideas of early twentieth-century American and British feminists within the contexts
of their respective political cultures and in conversation with each other. This allows her to
go far beyond what most treatments of this period are able to do: identifying themes common
within American and British Edwardian avant-garde feminism, Delap can then argue that the
the political and cultural discourse of feminism shared many features with that of antifeminism (50).
Delap develops this argument by focusing on three themes within AngloAmerican
avant-garde feminist discourse of the Edwardian period: a discourse of introspection, of
individualism, and of discontent with femininity (315). The first, introspection, drew upon
the budding science of psychology and the continuing appeal of spiritualism, subjects of
interest not just for feminists, but for other Edwardians and many who followed. The second,
individualism, developed from within the language of introspection, and pointed to the new
directions feminist thinking was taking: rather than looking backwards towards a liberal
understanding of the self, Edwardian feminist individualism looked inwards in an attempt to
free the individual self in a self-initiated, self-generated process of freeing ones inner resources
of personality (317). The third, a critique of conventional femininity, drew upon a tradition of
writing by women on the limitations their gender placed on their abilities to develop
intellectually and physically.
The combination of these themes in the transatlantic Edwardian avant-garde womens
movement, Delap argues, created such a distinctive element that it could marshal a
neologism, feminism (318). In this environment, women and men on both sides of the
Atlantic struggled with the relationship of feminism to the more conventionally understood
womens movement. Delap concludes that, while avant-garde feminism both shared features
with the conventional womens movement and reacted to its precepts, there was no
straightforward centre-periphery relationship between the womens movement and
feminism (319). The complexity of this argument that avant-garde feminism was a
transnational movement that simultaneously engaged with and critiqued the conventional
womens movement and important philosophical and psychological ideas of the early
twentieth century such as individualism makes this book essential reading for anyone
interested in understanding the political cultures of early twentieth-century AngloAmerica.
Laura E. Nym Mayhall
Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.
2009, Laura E. Nym Mayhall

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On: 25 April 2015, At: 12:03

Robert Travers , Christian J. Koot , Roquinaldo A. Ferreira ,

Kenneth J. Andrien , James Krippner , John Tutino , Davarian

L. Baldwin , Linda Heidenreich , Daniel Soyer , Paul Slack

, Elizabeth T. Hurren , Susannah Ottaway , Marcus Daniel

Julia Brggemann , Yosuke Nirei , Ulrike Whr , Evelyn S.

Rawski & Laura E. Nym Mayhall

Towson University , Maryland

Ohio State University ,

Haverford College , Pennsylvania

Washington State University ,

Linacre College , Oxford

Oxford Brookes University ,

Carleton College , Minnesota

University of Hawaii at Mano ,

DePauw University , Indiana

Indiana University South Bend ,

Hiroshima City University ,

Catholic University of America , Washington, D.C.

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Social History Vol. 34 No. 4 November 2009

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Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online

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even similar conditions of plausibility in each place? Is the notion of underdeterminedness

Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitanism in an Age of Expansion,

See, for example, the essays in David Lambert

(ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and

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Karen Kupperman, The Jamestown Project

The Atlantic World and Virginia, 15501624 (Chapel

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earthquake/tsunami by Pablo Emilio Perez-Mallaina Bueno, which provides a largely political

Pablo Emilio Perez-Mallaina Bueno, Retrato de

movimiento ssmico de 1746 (Sevilla, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas, 2001).

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Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making

Production of History (Boston, 1997) and C. L. R.

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Samuel (ed.), Peoples History and Socialist Theory

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Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660

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Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage

developed by Naomi Tadmor: The concept of

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