3 pages history major writing paper about U.S. history during the 20th century

Reviews and Short Notices General Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five Centuries . By Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima and Paul Warde. Princeton University Press. 2013. x + 457pp. $39.50/£27.95. This is more than just another book on how the availability of increasingly cheaper energy sources, converters and carriers has shaped our current way of life, to be added to the very good ones published by Vaclav Smil, Jean-Claude Deb ´ eir with Jean-Paul Del ´ eage and Daniel H ´ emery, Rolf Peter Sieferle, Arnulf Gr ¨ ubler, Alfred Crosby, Roger Fouquet, or Robert Ayres and Benjamin Warr, to name but a few. In my view it is, and will remain for a time, the reference book on the role of energy transitions in the long-term economic development of Europe for those coming from the standpoint of economic history. There are three main reasons for this. Firstly, the interpretation provided by Paolo Malanima, Paul Warde and Astrid Kander (following the order of their chapters) is rooted in an impressive wider scholarship of economic history and historiography.

Behind their historical narrative there lies the knowledge accumulated by several generations of economic, social and environmental historians devoted to the study of economic growth from a long-term perspective. Secondly, this book goes deeply into a more theoretical and methodological discussion on the role of energy in modern economic growth, and how to account for it. The authors claim from the outset that ‘energy is a driver of economic growth’ because ‘major innovations in the field of energy were a necessary condition for the modern world’ (p. 6). This challenges the widespread belief in mainstream economics that ‘energy consumption is simply a natural function of growth’ that requires no further explanation (p. 209). Last but not least, the historical interpretation is based on a large dataset, which includes the new long-term historical series compiled by the three authors and other collaborators, which are now available in open access at www.energyhistory.org (and for Italy in comparison to the rest of Europe at www.paolomalanima.it). The historical narrative is built around three main ideas. Firstly, energy transitions elapse through an interlinked set of some specific general-purpose macro-innovations which set in motion a wide range of micro-innovations aimed at cutting costs by increasing technical energy efficiency. During an initial phase, the strong complementarity between the diffusion of the new engines and new fuels involves a ‘market suction’ effect. This opens up a capital-deepening path that entails a biased technological change which increases power per unit of C 2016 The Authors. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 584 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES labour in the economy of those leading regions and countries which start an economic growth diverging from the rest. Later on, when the cost reduction in adopting the new technological ‘developing block’ reaches an adequate threshold (including transport freights), a number of early and late adopters come into action: the new engines and fuels are disseminated, the market widens and economic convergence begins. Throughout this second phase the already fine-tuned ‘development block’, which has in its core a new set of energy converters and sources, is widely disseminated. When it has been incorporated by most activities, sectors, regions and countries that were able to adopt it, its capacity to raise productivity and wealth becomes exhausted. Secondly, this dynamics has differed somewhat in each energy transition. These differences depended upon the specific traits of each macro-innovation and associated fuels, together with the speed of the ‘rebound’ effect of energy savings, which led to lower energy prices, which in turn allowed technical diffusion and fostered growing energy consumption. The historical process of technological adaptation and adoption also depends on differences in natural resources and factor endowments, as well as on the geographical locations of each region and country – not to mention institutions and policies, which affect the structure of incentives. All these diverse settings and paths explain the different levels and trends historically registered in energy consumption per capita, and in energy intensity per unit of GDP, either spatially among countries or across time.

Thirdly, the long-term energy dynamics of each ‘development block’ entails that economic growth has gone hand in hand with an increase in energy consumption (with all its derived environmental impacts). Yet the growth rates of energy and GDP have differed according to shifts in energy intensity, and the underlying mix of energy sources has changed. In that sense, the book ends by arguing that the current third industrial revolution based on the ICT is more knowledge-intensive and less energy-intensive than before, a trait that helps to address the global environmental challenges we are now facing. Astrid Kander does, however, point out that a transition towards more sustainable energy systems ‘will not occur from consumer demand or competition on the supply side’, and will require strong political action (p. 383). Underlying this story there is an unsolved question on energy economics: do the energy carriers and converters used by the economy have to be seen as any other input which can be substituted by others according to market relative prices, or rather are they an irreplaceable condition for economic growth? Since Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen argued in the 1970s that the economic process cannot fail to comply with the second law of thermodynamics, there has existed a sharp divide between mainstream neoclassical economics and heterodox ecological economics. Where does Power to the People stand in this debate? ‘We propose that a country embarks on modern economic growth because the cost of energy declines’ (p. 342), Kander says, and on this point the book is in accordance with the ecological economists Ayres and Warr. At the same time, it stays within the mainstream economic approach, keeping away from the view proposed by Ayres and Warr in The Economic Growth Engine (2009). As explained in appendix A, the authors prefer to adjust the neoclassical growth accounting instead of exploring more radical alternatives. In any case, what deserves to be stressed is that this book will become a touchstone from which all these contested views on energy C 2016 The Authors. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 585 economics can debate, check their different ways of accounting for long-term economic growth, and compete for a better explanation.

University of Barcelona ENRIC TELLO Medieval Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming .By Debby Banham and Rosamond Faith. Medieval History and Archaeology Series. Oxford University Press. xv + 336pp. £65.00. Farming and food production lie behind all the other events and processes that historians study: indeed, this book begins with the observation that ‘without Anglo-Saxon farming, the rest of English history would not have happened’ (p. 1). Essential activities connected with producing items for consumption (whether food, or textiles or leather) are much further removed from the daily lives of most people in modern first-world countries than they were from even the highest levels of early medieval societies. As a result, many students of the early middle ages find it difficult to appreciate, and sometimes to understand, how day-to-day aspects of farming affected and involved the people whose lives they glimpse in early medieval sources. Recent studies focusing on early medieval economies and economic life have tended to explore trade, money and towns much more than the detailed aspects of production itself, and this book therefore fills a crucial and substantial gap for students of the Anglo-Saxon past. The book is not co-authored (except for the introduction and conclusion) but comprises two parts, one by each author. Part I (chapters 2–5), by Banham, focuses on crops, livestock, and the tools and techniques used to produce them in early medieval England; Part II (chapters 6–12), by Faith, is a series of local case studies exploring how farming took place in particular kinds of landscapes.

Banham examines the types of crops farmed in early medieval England, including changing preferences for different varieties; how and when crops were farmed and produced; what was needed for growing, maintaining and storing crops, and how land and resources were organized. She then turns to livestock, identifying the types of animals kept in early medieval England; what they probably looked like and how common they were; how they were raised and kept; how they were used as live animals (e.g. for work, or for producing commodities such as milk or eggs); and the range of products (far more than just meat!) which they supplied once slaughtered. Faith’s discussion attempts to place some of this information into different kinds of landscapes (e.g. coasts and riversides, or woodland), centring mostly on very local case studies, primarily from southern England (though not exclusively; chapter 11 explores the Lincolnshire Wolds). As a result, the coverage is not as broad as might be expected from the chapter titles (or indeed from the outline of Part II given in chapter 6). However, the advantage of this approach means that firm conclusions can sometimes be drawn about those case studies, especially about how farmers in particular places exploited the surrounding landscapes in changing seasons, and related to the local markets and economy.

Taken together, the authors make a major contribution in pulling together the C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 586 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES surviving information about farming in early medieval England and examining the practicalities of how farming worked on the ground. Both authors use a range of different kinds of evidence, identifying their approach as ‘source-pluralism’ (p. 14), so that while they see themselves as historians, they are not limited to traditional kinds of written sources. An approach like this is necessary for this topic owing to the fragmentary and limited nature of the available evidence (outlined on pp. 8–14): the vast majority of surviving textual (and visual) evidence from this period is connected with elites who tended not to provide detailed information about the day-to-day business of farming. (It is worth noting too that, despite what is sometimes suggested, archaeological material also tends to centre on elites, and does not bring us as close to peasants or peasant culture as we might like.) Part I in particular offers a sensitive and rigorous examination of this range of evidence, though occasionally detail is lacking for archaeological material, where we are sometimes presented with a general description of, or conclusion from, a particular site or study, but not given any details of the actual evidence on which such a statement or conclusion is based. Frustratingly, given the heavy reliance of Part II on place-name evidence, this section offers no methodological consideration of how or why it is appropriate to use place-names as they are here. It is not always obvious whether the place- names used are early attestations, or indeed how exactly they support the claims made for them; moreover, some of the assumptions are rather outdated or limited (e.g. the idea that the place-name element - ingas always relates to an earlier folk-group, p. 155). The use of other kinds of evidence in Part II is also rather sloppy at times, e.g. on p. 154, where we are told that ‘an Old English text’ distinguishes between different kinds of land: the footnote gives a number from Sawyer’s Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Charters ( http://www.esawyer.org.uk ), but we are given no information about date or context (nor yet told that it is a charter written in both Latin and Old English). And, despite the note in the list of abbreviations which states that all charters are cited by Sawyer number, this is not in fact the case in Part II; moreover there are frequent unsupported assertions here, and an over-use of direct quotation from scholarship (though it is not even always clear to whom such quotations should be attributed, e.g. on p. 245). This is really disappointing in a book which is otherwise so excellent, and it is surprising that this was not spotted and addressed prior to publication. The book contains a good number of illustrations and figures, ranging from line-drawings of grains or tools to maps, to reproductions of manuscripts, to photos of landscapes and/or animals. Some of these are really helpful, but the usefulness of others would have been increased with the provision of a scale:

the precise uses of the loom weight depicted in Fig. 7.3a might vary significantly depending on its size (and weight, which we are also not told); many of the maps too have no scale (some also have no indication of direction) and some are simply too small to be useful (e.g. Fig. 7.4). A valuable inclusion is a glossary, though it may be rather sparse for many readers, particularly undergraduates (who often lack not only farming – but also gardening – knowledge, and may therefore be bewildered by some terms used without explanation, such as ‘tilth’). The nature of this book, which surveys the available evidence for farms and farming in early medieval England, means that it is often descriptive or narrative, though there are clear original arguments here too. More attention might perhaps C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 587 have been given to changing social structures and how they related to the practices described, and more subtle consideration of the different ethnicities involved would have been welcome, since for a substantial part of the period people whom we might think of as British or (Anglo-)Scandinavian must also be represented by the surviving ‘Anglo-Saxon’ evidence. But perhaps these are matters for a sequel, since this can hardly be all there is to be said on the subject: the reader finishes with questions and a sense of more work to come on a fascinating and important topic. The authors state that the book arose from their ‘frustration at having no reading to offer our students when we told them that farming was the most important part of the Anglo-Saxon economy’ (p. vii); as one of those students, it is a great pleasure for me to be able now to read the fruits of their labours, and to have something to offer my own students in turn. This book will be an invaluable resource for all who study the Anglo-Saxon past.

Durham University HELEN FOXHALL FORBES Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church . By Alexander Murray. Oxford University Press. 2015. xi + 206pp. £30.00. Conscience and Authority gathers together five essays, previously published elsewhere, with a new introduction by the author. (The pieces are: ‘Confession before 1215’; ‘Confession as a historical source’; ‘Counselling in medieval confession’; ‘Archbishops and mendicants in 13th-century Pisa’; ‘Excommunication and conscience’). This is a cause for celebration for several reasons. One is that the repackaging of old material is in this case hugely helpful for the reader: despite being one of the most important and interesting historians of the later medieval period, Murray has had a tendency to publish in slightly obscure byways, and some of these chapters are difficult to track down even in this internet age. Another is that the particular selection of material presented here, originally published between 1981 and 1998, coheres remarkably well, with each piece helping to illuminate its neighbours. Murray’s core concern in these pieces is the coming into being of sacramental confession as a regular, essential practice in medieval Christendom. The new introduction to the book sets out very clearly the historiographical and interpretive context. Murray does not argue that the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 introduced regular lay confession for the first time, but he does suggest that its appearance as a regular practice before that date was limited, and occurred mostly in areas where there was a ‘renowned centre of pastoral initiative’, such as Fulda or Laon. This thesis, he notes, has been challenged by early medievalist scholars, notably by Rob Meens and Sarah Hamilton. But, whilst very much respecting the points that they have made and the evidence they present, Murray submits that his main thesis still stands (a viewpoint with which I tend to agree).

It is important to note also the wider argument that Murray makes: that what allowed the ecclesiastical management of regular lay confession – with its focus on ‘inner conscience’ – to appear in this period was not some change in the nature of ‘the medieval mind’, but developments in law and society across the earlier to later Middle Ages, where the episcopate (in particular) came largely to be freed from the administration of secular justice, and as a consequence could develop a more extensive engagement with matters of conscience in the ‘private’ forum.

C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 588 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES This is an intriguing argument, and one with which other scholars have not really engaged sufficiently as yet. The earlier essays thus bear re-presentation in light of this ongoing discussion. But it is also important to note that, if regular confession was not a major feature of lay piety prior to 1215, neither did it then spring forth in an uncomplicated fashion. The other focus here, then, is on the nature of lay piety in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in particular, paying close attention to the variety of lay experience, the challenges and frustrations that faced enthusiastic post-Lateran IV reformers, and the theological, moral and very human issues involved in matters of conscience and authority. Murray was one of the earliest historians to demonstrate the ways in which preaching stories, and indeed full sermons (in the latter case, those of Archbishop Federigo Visconti of Milan), could be used in subtle ways to shed light on the laity themselves. We are given again here one of the most important anglophone attempts to grapple with la religion v ´ ecue , in which the rough surfaces of everyday life combine with learned reflection on philosophy, theology and the moral reasoning of well-intentioned clerics; and it is good to revisit this work, to learn from it again afresh. And the final reason for celebration here is the sheer pleasure of re-reading these pieces. Murray writes prose of great elegance, clarity, humanity and wit.

He gives a wonderful impression of having met and engaged with the writers who have provided his core evidence, without ever making them inappropriately ‘modern’ or pretending that he has become unproblematically ‘medieval’. And the pieces are sprinkled with little shards of idiosyncratic joy: noting that he has spent perhaps a little too much time demolishing arguments in a particular area, Murray briefly compares himself to a ‘dilatory crusader’; the final chapter (on excommunication) opens by musing on the lessons of quantum physics in regard to the only apparent solidity of matter; and other similar jeux (that nonetheless illuminate and relate to the serious core of business) enliven throughout. In short: despite the fact that these pieces are reappearances rather than fresh turns (the introduction aside), the book is an important one, and deserves to be read, both for pleasure and for continued profit.

Birkbeck, University of London JOHN H. ARNOLD The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000– 1200 . By Jehangir Yezdi Malegam. Cornell University Press. 2013. xiv + 335pp. $55.00. At the heart of this book lies a paradox. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Church pursued peace through violent upheaval. Challenging the false peace of secular society, of emperors or kings (what the late twelfth-century canon lawyer Rufinus of Sorrento described as ‘the sleep of Behemoth’), reformers instead demanded the true peace of Christ. Malegam’s study, consciously responding to Philippe Buc’s call to reinterpret medieval violence, steers a bold, sometimes over-ambitious course, glancing en route at the work of canonists, chroniclers and biblical exegetes. As in J. K. Stephen’s judgement on Wordsworth, one voice is of the deep. Another, less assured, and inclined to repetition, might have been better confined to a fifty-page article rather than a 350-page monograph. Nonetheless, for those prepared to make the journey, there are C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 589 many rewards. As Malegam points out, Gregory the Great was already aware that peace served as an invitation to war. During the Investiture Contest, with reformers seeking to replace false sacraments with true, peace itself acquired a semi-sacramental quality to be defended against those, such as Henry IV at Canossa, who offered merely empty promises and an oppressive status quo.

Not only did Hildebrand and his associates challenge ‘what they considered to be unjust, secular bonds in favour of the Church’s sacraments’, but Jerusalem, meaning ‘vision of peace’, acquired new significance as ‘the promise of a future celestial kingdom to the harmony of the angels’ (p. 62). As might have been signalled here with greater clarity, this has important implications not only for the origins of the crusade, but for the later attempts by twelfth- and thirteenth-century popes to obtain peace at home specifically to further the cause of war in the east. Likewise, the reformers’ rediscovery of Cyprian (rejecting the false peace of pagan Rome) and Tertullian (seeking penitential rebaptism through the blood of the martyrs) are highly significant, not only in terms of crusade but with respect to R. I. Moore’s thesis on the ‘origins of a persecuting society’. The bishops, originally portrayed as the type of Christ’s pacificus or ‘peace-maker’, became so heavily embroiled in the violent rhetoric of reform that the pope himself was promoted as ultimate author of concord. In all of this, Malegam offers sensitive readings of a great range of sources, from patristics to Rupert of Deutz, and from Anselm of Laon to Marsilius of Padua. Not everything here is satisfactory. The author is too fond of digression, of paradox, and of rhapsodic chains of conjecture. There are gaps in his knowledge (for example, Jane Martindale’s proofs of secular enforcement of the peace movement, Klaus van Eickels and Jenny Benham on the practicalities of peace negotiation, or Michele Maccarrone’s essential study of Novit ille and the papal claim to judge breaches of secular peace not as matters of feudal right but as sin). Words themselves need more careful handling, not least pax , here allowed to shade into a woolly sense of enlightenment, yet requiring more specific anchorage both in liturgy and in treaty-making. The Latin citations in the footnotes do not always bear out the claims made for them, especially when it comes to manuscripts rather than printed texts. There are inevitably errors: Geoffrey Babion as bishop (sic) of Bourdeaux (sic). How (and whether) to divide ‘reformers’ from ‘reactionaries’ remains problematic. The siren song of theory echoes here and there, threatening to drown out sense. Yet the good things far outweigh the bad. There are, for example, fascinating insights into the peace offered by the communal movement, originally greeted as a monstrosity, both in Italy and in France, but then transformed, by the hostility of Barbarossa, into a bulwark of papally approved ‘reform’. Against this, Malegam contrasts the attempts made by Otto of Freising to present Barbarossa himself as a prince of peace. From this same clash of ideologies, he suggests, emerged the ideas of Dante and Marsilius, reinterpreting Aristotle (and one might add, St Paul), to define the state and its secular rulers as the true guarantors of a tranquil peace far from the turbulence of a reforming priesthood. Attempting far more than the average run of first monographs, this is a thought-provoking book. By turns brilliant and infuriating, bold and disturbing, it reflects many of the qualities of its subject matter. I learned much from reading it.

University of East Anglia NICHOLAS VINCENT C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 590 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES Crusading and Pilgrimage in the Norman World . Edited by Kathryn Hurlock and Paul Oldfield. Boydell. 2015. xiii + 234pp. £60.00. The Normans have, of course, long been connected to crusading, holy war and pilgrimage throughout the medieval period. Their involvement in the First Crusade – most famously under the leadership of Bohemond and Tancred – is frequently foregrounded along with their role in other theatres of war and the so- called proto-crusades, such as the conquest of Sicily. Still whilst this link is often name-checked there is plenty of scope for more detailed studies to add greater depth to our knowledge in this area and it was for this purpose that this essay collection Crusading and Pilgrimage in the Norman World was created. The essays themselves consider a range of fascinating topics, including several concerned with aspects of Norman attitudes towards masculinity and praiseworthy/contemptible behaviour. Aird, for example, deals with notions of courage and cowardice, as presented in First Crusade narratives. He is particularly effective in recreating the emotional thought-world surrounding these values, with discussion focused on individuals such as the famous ‘traitor’ Stephen of Blois. His discussion on the role played by opprobrium (the censure of one’s fellows) in such discourses is particularly stimulating. Natasha Hodgson touches upon linked issues in her excellent piece on Norman masculinity. Here she explores the distinctive ways in which chroniclers constructed and presented the masculinity of the multiple Norman leaders who participated in the campaign.

She rejects the notion that historians should seek a single ‘ideal type of crusader’ in medieval sources, plausibly advocating the idea that there were multiple paradigms of idealized masculinity that were dependent on an individual’s status and role. The famous crusade leader Bohemond of Taranto is – perhaps predictably – a particular focus of attention in this volume, and several articles consider his conduct and objectives during the First Crusade. Murray thoughtfully explores both his behaviour and that of his contingent, observing how differently this band of South Italian Normans acted from other princely contingents. He affirms the idea that Bohemond was an opportunist, with an eye for his own advancement.

Albu touches upon related matters, discussing the Normans’ prior involvement with the Byzantine empire and the impact of this relationship on the crusade. She also considers the role played by Antioch within the crusaders’ aspirations. Crusading and Pilgrimage also contains essays centred on Norman Italy, Sicily and Iberia. Among these Drell and Oldfield discuss the role played by pilgrimage and crusading in Italy. Drell sets out to explain why so few crusaders were recruited from these regions; discussing the view that they needed both to safeguard their own position in these relatively newly conquered regions and to secure their trading relations with the Muslim world. She goes on to show that whilst only a few crusaders may have set out for the east, the area itself – particularly its urban populations – was deeply impacted by the rise in pilgrim and commercial traffic setting out for the newly established Latin east. Oldfield’s essay touches on similar themes, exploring the role of pilgrimage in the formation of the Norman polities in southern Italy and Sicily and the policies implemented by later Norman rulers, sometimes to support, sometimes to take advantage of, the travellers passing through their lands. Cumulatively, they offer many new insights into Sicily/southern Italy’s role both in Mediterranean politics and in the wider crusading movement. Villegas-Aristiz ´ abal draws readers’ C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 591 attention further west, offering a broad survey of Norman involvement in Iberia from the eleventh to early thirteenth century, focusing particularly on the transformative role played by the First Crusade in this process. Among his conclusions he argues that the Normans’ role in this area passed into decline in the early decades of the thirteenth century. Other studies in Crusading and Pilgrimage turn to the affairs north-west Europe, with several discussing the kingdom of England and the duchy of Normandy. Hurlock offers a broad survey of English and Welsh involvement in the crusades during the eleventh/early-twelfth centuries, considering how local upheavals and major events such as the Norman invasion might have impacted upon recruitment. Abram focuses more precisely on the earls of Chester, exploring the broad trajectory of their support both for devotional centres and for crusading. Interestingly, she notes the influence of Mont-Saint- Michel in stimulating crusading zeal. Spear draws our attention across the Channel to Normandy, examining the contribution made by Normandy’s regular clergy to the early crusades. Within a stimulating discussion, he sheds new light on an individual who is among the First Crusade’s more colourful, but least studied, individuals: Arnulf of Chocques.

Hicks focuses upon the miracle stories found in Norman chronicles both in their histories of the crusades and in their accounts of other events in western Europe.

She looks specifically at the role played by the landscape in these tales and she successfully demonstrates how deeper layers of meaning can be derived from an author’s presentation of the natural world in such tales. Overall, this is a lively group of essays, advancing discussion on a range of themes. Scholars interested in Bohemond of Taranto, the role played by Sicily in the crusades and the broader Anglo-Norman involvement in the crusading movement will find much to interest them. Aird and Hodgson’s material on Norman conceptions of right conduct and masculinity deserve to be singled out as major additions to more thematic strands of research. The standard is generally high across these essays, although, taken as a whole (and there are notable exceptions), their strength lies in synthesis rather than analysis.

Nottingham Trent University NICHOLAS MORTON Urban Culture in Medieval Wales . Edited by Helen Fulton. Cardiff University Press. 2012. xv + 334pp. £24.99. The Introduction by the editor Helen Fulton to this very interesting volume of essays is at pains to stress that it seeks to explore ‘manifestations of urban culture’ and should not therefore be regarded as a Welsh urban history. The various texts thereafter draw upon a range of evidence, mostly from documentary sources, although occasionally with reference to the topography and fabric of individual towns themselves. Material culture, in the form of a consideration of excavated archaeological evidence or of museum collections, is largely absent, which, as the volume sets out ‘to convey the richness and diversity of [urban] life, and our evidence for it’, is a little unfortunate. Where such evidence is used, it tends to date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Plas Mawr in Conwy being a good example. Given the general paucity of medieval urban fabric in Wales, archaeological data could have been helpful here.

C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 592 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES The largest town in fifteenth-century Wales was Cardiff with a population of 2,000 people. Fulton contrasts this with the town of Oswestry, only just into England across the border, with its 3,000 inhabitants. The 50 per cent difference is marked, but the size of Cardiff was tiny compared to the eastern English city of Norwich, which may have had up to 30,000 souls before the Black Death and even in the fifteenth century probably outnumbered Cardiff by a factor of eight or more. London’s population perhaps approached 80,000, but this total was itself eclipsed by continental cities such as Paris, Bruges or Cologne. It is a tribute to this volume, therefore, that it identifies a distinctively recognizable urban culture within the small medieval Welsh towns. Urban size may well be an irrelevance. Richard Suggett writing on townscape is not bothered by the smallness of Welsh towns. He makes the case that urban settlements in Wales were flexible institutions which ‘tended to serve larger hinterlands than their English counterparts . . . They were transformed during the sessions, markets, fairs and wakes, as the country took over the town’ (p. 54). His chapter is largely devoted to an assessment of the upstanding buildings within Welsh towns and thus necessarily only has examples from the fifteenth and (predominately) sixteenth centuries. Aberconway House of c .1420 in Conwy is the earliest surviving complete townhouse and the point is well-made that it is an entirely urban structure, combining ‘domestic and trading functions in a deliberately eye-catching jettied building’ (p. 86), thereby fulfilling the writer’s assertion that towns were essentially trading communities. However, the presentation of physical evidence for this is naturally limited by the small numbers of surviving buildings. Examples of late fifteenth-century structures are cited from Beaumaris and Wrexham – open halls behind commercial ranges – but otherwise most of the data relates to buildings of the sixteenth century and later. It is noted that these structures may well sit above the footprints of earlier examples and therefore, as observed above, it would have been helpful if this chapter had contained some references to the results of urban archaeological excavation. Most Welsh towns differed in two important ways from towns in England. The first difference concerned ethnic mix with numerous towns, notably the Edwardian boroughs in north Wales, effectively excluding Welsh burgesses, at least at the outset. The other difference was that, while towns may have been trading entities, the Edwardian boroughs at least were examples of ‘military- economic’ foundation in the terminology adopted by Matthew Frank Stevens.

His chapter usefully explores urban culture through the prisms offered by such descriptors, concluding that the society that developed within towns would vary depending upon its economic or military origins, where the town was located relative to England and other communities, how local lords had organized immigration from England, ‘and even the topography of the surrounding landscape’ (p. 154). His work is admirably supplemented by the following chapter written by Deborah Youngs on the role of women in urban society.

She summarizes the historiographical background to the subject of women in medieval Wales – pretty thin to date –but is able to make an early clear statement:

‘One unequivocal message . . . is that women, throughout their lives, were of vital importance to the late-medieval economy of Wales’ (p. 165). She supports this assertion with reference to a wide range of documentary evidence, noting that amongst the female spinners, weavers, fullers and brewers, women were employed as hod and mortar carriers at Caernarfon Castle. However, she also notes the C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 593 difficulties of access to trades that a lack of training, wealth and indeed citizenship placed in front of women. Many therefore were restricted to roles as servants and menial work. It is perhaps to be expected that a book addressing Welsh culture should contain reference to song and poetry. Such reference is overt in the chapter by Fulton on fairs, feast-days and carnival, that of Dafydd Johnston which is entitled ‘Towns in Medieval Welsh Poetry’, and that of Catherine McKenna who discusses the city of Chester in Gruffudd ap Maredudd’s poem Awdl i’r Grog o Gaer . However poetry is also cited by Dylan Foster Evans discussing castle and town, while David Klausner naturally references both poetry and music, as well as drama, when surveying entertainment and recreation in towns. His assessment suggests that Welsh urban life need not have been that parochial: the collection of musical instruments that he enumerates in the admittedly late sixteenth-century collection of Sir John Perrot ‘would have been the envy of the great professional civic bands of cities like York and Norwich’ (p. 260). Reference to poetry is also made by Llinos Beverley Smith’s essay on urban society. She explores the lexicon of poetic description, noting that for ‘the poets, the contrasts of urbanity and rusticity were truisms which underpinned much of their consciousness of towns’ (p. 20). Urban descriptors such as paement for paved streets provided ‘arresting images and metaphors’ for Welsh poets. This essay is itself arresting, with much interesting observation; the writer explores such issues as social stratification and factionalism (this latter also addressed by Spencer Dimmock writing on social conflict within towns), as well as the matters of urban provisioning, diet and health. Her sources show a commendable blending of both documentary and archaeological evidence. The volume is bookended with chapters by Ralph Griffiths on townsfolk and Peter Fleming on the Welsh diaspora in early Tudor English towns. The former seeks to characterize Welsh urban dwellers, providing a critique of the ‘myopic and partial’ view of outsiders such as Gerald of Wales who commented on the ‘lack of urbanity of Welsh people’, but noting too the later observer Ranulf Higden who, writing about 1340, mentioned the gradual adoption by the Welsh of ‘English lifestyles, living in towns and tilling their gardens and fields’ (pp. 12–13).

Fleming uses a statistical approach, analysing the tax returns of the 1524 Lay Subsidy collections from Bristol, Gloucester, Hereford and Shrewsbury, as well as the 1525 collection from Worcester. He provides useful tables of his results, amongst his conclusions being the observation that while the Welsh could be found throughout the society of these English towns, ‘they were proportionately less likely to be represented at the very upper reaches of civic life’. Indeed ‘in Bristol, they seem to have constituted more than their fair share of Redcliffe and Temple’s industrial proletariat’ (p. 290). This statement, in the penultimate paragraph of a fascinating volume, neatly foreshadows industrialization as the economic impetus behind much Welsh urban growth in the post-medieval period.

University of East Anglia BRIAN AYERS William II: The Red King . By John Gillingham. Allen Lane for Penguin Books. 2015. ix + 117pp. £10.99. C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 594 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES The series of biographies of English monarchs from which this book emanates is a real treat and this book is no exception. Gillingham brings his considerable erudition to re-evaluating the ‘Red King’, William II, who, he reminds us, acquired that nickname fifteen years after his death to differentiate him from his father, William the Conqueror. To his contemporaries, this king was William Longsword, but that we know him by his later sobriquet is our first indication of the enormous difficulty we have in trying to understand him. For as Gillingham convincingly demonstrates, whether he was killed in 1100 by accident or by design is unknowable, but what is knowable is that he was the victim of the most outrageous character assassination by the biographer of Archbishop Anselm, Eadmer of Canterbury. In writing this biography of William II, Gillingham knew that to make us see Rufus in anything other than a negative light, he would first have to destroy the testimony of that king’s harshest critic. He does so convincingly. Gillingham explains Eadmer’s purpose in writing his two works on St Anselm, which was to justify the unjustifiable: Anselm’s abandonment of his post as archbishop of Canterbury, thus leaving the English Church without its leader. This was a dereliction of duty the history of which needed to be whitewashed. As Gillingham shows, Eadmer achieved his end in part by blackening the name of Rufus. That he was successful in destroying this king’s contemporary reputation for being a humorous, convivial, courteous and well-liked king – a ‘new Julius Caesar’, in the assessment of William of Malmesbury (1085–1142) – is a testimony to the power of this 900-year-old propagandist. Gillingham does as much as he can to unveil the life of William II, but it is a difficult task. With few contemporary commentators and just 200 documents originating from his actions, this William is a difficult man to pin down. Inevitably, therefore, Gillingham has to write more about William’s actions than about his person in the hope that in his actions we may perceive something of the man. Gillingham does a fine job. The British perspective in Rufus’s life is one which is treated especially well in this book, as is the continental dimension to his life. There are good chapters on the English Church and Secular Society.

Especially important is the chapter ‘War on land and sea’ where, for the first time, an historian shows a proper appreciation of Rufus’s use of sea power. One of the advantages of getting good historians to write pithily on subjects about which they know a great deal is that it forces them to get down from the fence and tell you what they think without obfuscation (not that Gillingham has ever been guilty of that sin: one has always known what he thinks). So we are treated to crisp assessments that go to the heart of Gillingham’s view: when discussing Rufus’s sexuality, Gillingham explains to his readers that ‘the king’s body was an instrument of politics’ (p. 57) – it surely was – and we are told just why long hair was such a political hot potato in a secular court dominated by young men watched over by old bishops. It is one of the facts of medieval life that the Church hierarchy was a gerontocracy, while secular courts were generally given over to the frivolities of youth. The clash between the two cultures is clearly explained in Gillingham’s book. When he turns to Anselm, we are left in no doubt as to what Gillingham concludes: ‘He wanted to think and write theology. It was understandable, but hardly heroic’ (p. 40). There is one regrettable ‘game of thrones’ reference (p. 16). I spend far too much time explaining to my students that Game of Thrones has nothing to tell us about the Middle Ages and so finding it in the work of a great scholar has left me crestfallen. But this aside, William II is C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 595 a super introduction to the subject. It is well written and does much to rehabilitate the reputation of the Red King.

University of East Anglia STEPHEN CHURCH Authority and Resistance in the Age of Magna Carta: Proceedings of the Aberystwyth and Lampeter Conference . Edited by Janet Burton, Phillipp Schofield and Bj ¨ orn Weiler. Thirteenth Century England, XV. Boydell. 2015. xv + 206pp. £75.00. Anticipating the upcoming 800-year anniversaries of two of the most famous events of the thirteenth century, the sealing of Magna Carta and the Fourth Lateran Council, the organizers of the 2013 conference requested that contributors did not concentrate solely on the great occurrences of 1215. Instead they were asked to conceive their contributions within a broader framework of authority and resistance. Thus Magna Carta, despite featuring in the title, is barely mentioned in the volume itself, which is split into four sections focusing on secular society, on the Church, on religious orders and on imagery. Reflecting the continued dominance in British historical scholarship of traditional political approaches to thirteenth-century history, almost half of the contributions in the volume appear in the section dedicated to secular society. Peter Coss examines those who stood pledge for three defendants in the Treason Trial of 1225, thereby uncovering the various networks that bound together aristocrats. He argues that these informal networks of association were as important as formal institutions in dictating aristocratic action. The theme of aristocrats and institutions is continued in Ian Forrest’s essay, in which he argues that we should not see the development of institutions in the thirteenth century as simply change being enforced from above, but recognize that local elites collaborated with kings, lords and bishops in the development of institutions because they were mutually beneficial. Essays by Richard Cassidy on sheriffs, Fergus Oakes on the role of castles in the Barons’ War, and Melissa Julian-Jones on the possible reasons for Thomas Corbet’s support of Henry III, complete this first section. The second and third sections contain a total of five essays and bring welcome interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives to the volume. Philippa Hoskin argues that it was a belief in natural law and the necessity to return the English kingdom to a state in accordance with God’s plan that convinced four prominent bishops to throw in their lot with de Montfort after 1263. Jennifer Jahner examines the poem known as Planctus super episcopis , written in defence of the Interdict of 1208–14. By taking a nuanced interdisciplinary approach she is able to identify affinities between this verse condemnation of bishops loyal to John and criticisms found in diplomatic correspondence. Concluding the second section, John Sabapathy delivers a sophisticated exploration of the importance of prudence in the political thinking of Innocent III. By stressing that prudential actions were not confined to Innocent’s response to the events of 1215 but can be found throughout his pontificate, Sabapathy provides a welcome international flavour to a volume that, in places, feels rather insular. Essays by Helen Birkett, on the Cistercian order, and Sita Seckel, on anti-Mendicant sentiments in the works of the St Alban’s chronicler Matthew Paris and Paris theologian William of Saint-Amour, also present English history as connected to, and relevant to, C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 596 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES events and ideas across the English Channel. The volume concludes with a sole essay in the final section, in which Judith Collard discusses the illustrations found in the Historia Anglorum of Matthew Paris. Collard demonstrates that the frequency with which Matthew deploys marginal crowns, croziers, swords etc. means that, although the Historia Anglorum lacks the set-piece narrative scenes depicted in the Chronica majora , the shorter text is actually more densely illustrated. This volume showcases both the best of traditional British political history and welcome new avenues for approaching thirteenth-century England.

It also demonstrates that issues of authority and resistance were hardly confined to the momentous events of 1215.

University College London JOHANNA DALE Edward II: His Last Months and his Monument . By Jill Barlow, Richard Bryant, Carolyn Heighway, Chris Jeens and David Smith. The Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society. 2015. xvi + 148pp + 68 plates. £30.00. The tomb of King Edward II at Gloucester, long regarded as one of the great glories of English Gothic design, has acquired added notoriety in the past few decades. In 1878, a peculiar document came to light, known as the ‘Fieschi Letter’ preserved in the cartulary of the southern French bishopric of Maguelone. A series of modern commentators, most notably in recent years Ian Mortimer, have employed this letter to suggest that, far from being murdered at Berkeley Castle in September 1327 and buried in Gloucester, Edward lived on, smuggled out of England to spend at least the next decade concealed as a hermit, either in Italy or Germany. A campaign of restoration carried out at Gloucester 2007–8 serves as the springboard for this present revisiting of the evidence. Combining a detailed history and description of the tomb with an edition of excerpts from the Berkeley Castle estate records, this book serves two purposes. The first it accomplishes magnificently, offering a meticulous and lavishly illustrated record both of the architecture and setting of the tomb and of the successive campaigns of restoration that it has undergone (or perhaps more accurately ‘suffered’).

Allowed to fall into neglect after the Reformation, it was rescued in the 1730s as the result of interest taken in their supposed founder by the Fellows of Oriel College Oxford. Mysteries remain, not least the tomb’s precise date, here placed only approximately c.1335, with further alterations to its setting in the the 1350s or 60s. The authors draw attention to the designer’s use of the golden ratio and the Gloucester foot of 320 millimetres, to the possibility of French or Kentish influence, to the over-enthusiastic ’reconstruction’ of certain features in 1875, and to the only excavation of the Edward’s body thus far attempted. This was carried out in 1855, but proceeded no further than the anthropoid lead coffin in which the corpse must be assumed still to rest. And here we come to our authors’ second, sadly doomed intention. Besides recording the tomb, they hope once and for all to disprove rumours of the King’s survival. Without engaging directly with their chief adversary, Ian Mortimer, they meticulously assemble the items of account from the Berkeley estate records, here produced both in facsimile and English translation. These detail the castle’s provisioning against Queen Isabella in October 1326, Edward’s transfer from captivity at Kenilworth to Berkeley on Palm Sunday 1327 (an eerily appropriate date) and his subsequent, relatively C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 597 comfortable custody there. They record a raid upon Berkeley made in July 1327.

More mysteriously (pp. 45, 47 nos 83, 86) they include entries that could be read to imply Edward’s removal at some point from Berkeley to Corfe. Were this removal to be proved, it might chime with the otherwise improbable claim, reported in the ‘Fieschi Letter’, that Edward was secretly taken to Corfe, held there a year and then smuggled abroad from Sandwich, disguised as a hermit. The Berkeley records nonetheless suggest that even if taken to Corfe, the king’s removal there was only temporary. Of the supposed murder at Berkeley, on 21 September 1327, they are, not surprisingly, entirely silent. Even so, they do to some extent bear out the testimony of Lord Berkeley that he was absent when the deed occurred. In an appendix, David Smith republishes the ‘Fieschi Letter’, offering good reasons why it should be considered misleading propaganda. Not only does it employ a peculiar blend of Latin and French, but, for a letter supposedly written by an Italian papal notary, it shows remarkable disregard for diplomatic convention.

As Smith argues, its survival in the Maguelone archives almost certainly links it to Arnaud de Verdale, from 1339 bishop of Maguelone, but before this a diplomat employed in 1338 by Pope Benedict XII to discredit the English King Edward III in the eyes of potential German allies, most notably Ludwig IV of Bavaria. It was in the circumstances of 1338 that rumours first circulated that Edward II still lived and that an imposter appeared in Germany, William the Welshman, claiming to be the long-vanished king. Smith’s appendix, taken together with the Berkeley estate records, leaves little doubt that Edward II died at Berkeley and was buried at Gloucester. The rumours preserved in Maguelone were part of a campaign of deception targeted against Edward III. To those viewing events in evidential perspective, all of this is entirely persuasive. To those viewing them through the eye of faith, I fear, no persuasion will ever be sufficient. The conspiracists will continue to weave their theories. To this extent, the authors have laboured in vain.

Nonetheless for making available precious evidence, on both sides of the debate, they are to be heartily congratulated.

University of East Anglia NICHOLAS VINCENT The Oxford History of Poland–Lithuania ,I: The Making of the Polish–Lithuanian Union, 1385–1569 .By Robert Frost . Oxford University Press. 2015. xxiii +564pp. £85.00. This work is the newest addition to the ‘Oxford History of Early Modern Europe’ series, which already boasts notable volumes on the Netherlands by Jonathan Israel (1995), Ireland by S. J. Connolly (2007) and the Holy Roman Empire by Joachim Whaley (2011). Robert Frost, best known for his monograph on Poland and the Second Northern War (1655–60), here in over 500 pages tells the story of the political relationship between the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania – from its origins with a betrothal in 1385, to its tumultuous codification with the treaty of Lublin in 1569. Alongside the Scandinavian union of Kalmar, the union of the Spanish crowns and the English– Scottish partnership, this is one of the most celebrated examples of a legal fusing of two polities in pre-modern Europe. The Polish–Lithuanian commonwealth did not evolve into a single modern nation-state, but instead from the nineteenth century gave birth to a variety C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 598 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES of mutually hostile nationalisms – principally Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belorussian – in a process brilliantly analysed in Timothy Snyder’s book, The Reconstruction of Nations (2004). Each of those nationalisms has its own interpretation of the Polish–Lithuanian union. Polish historiography has traditionally seen it as a form of civilizing Polish paternalism; others as Polish oppression and imperialism. In this book, Robert Frost has bravely and diplomatically stepped above the fray of a topic which remains politically charged, providing an account which gives equal coverage to all the territories and groups involved. Lithuania is placed on a level footing with Poland, and Lithuanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian historiographies are fully incorporated into the story (and footnotes). The book is dedicated to four key historians of the union from each of these countries: Halecki, Sapoka, Hrushevsky and Liubavskii.

In that sense, this book is an important achievement, which can offer a sensitive, post-nationalist take on the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history of this large part of Europe. This book offers a distinctive interpretation of the union. It is possible to read the Polish–Lithuanian relationship as bumpy, stumbling from crisis to crisis, pragmatic and contingent, with the final legal union of 1569 as very far from inevitable, punctuated by serious resistance. Frost’s framing argument, however, is that Poles and Lithuanians from the outset had a grand vision of a joint state, ‘a union of peoples’, right from the 1385 treaty of Krewo: ‘each side clearly intended this to be a lasting relationship’. Frost presents as the prime movers in this process of union not so much the Jagiellonian rulers themselves (the dynastic glue which joined the two polities), but the assertive Polish and Lithuanian noble elites. It was a project involving a wider political community. This volume meticulously traces the history of the Polish–Lithuanian political relationship step by step, over two centuries. It is the first exhaustive narrative of these events in English. Frost pauses to analyse the texts of the various union accords (e.g. 1385, 1413, 1499) in some detail, offering strongly revisionist interpretations in many cases, which cut across medievalists’ readings of these documents. The volume is interspersed with brief context chapters on Poland and Lithuania: on Polish peasants, foreign policy, the development of local diets ( sejmiki ). Frost offers too a brief survey of current scholarship on early modern unions and composite monarchy. This book is a useful contribution to debates on the Polish–Lithuanian union, and it will bring those debates to a much wider audience, offering fresh perspectives for historians in central Europe to mull over. However, it is in the author’s own words ‘a political history that tells the story of the union’s making’. Oxford University Press has published this resolutely high-political, constitutional study as The Oxford History of Poland–Lithuania .Readerswho, on the basis of that title, come to this book seeking a grand, state-of-the-art overview of this polity and society will not find it. Frost warns in his preface that he cannot and will not write an histoire totale , and promises that topics such as Reformation, Renaissance, towns, culture and humanism will be covered in volume II (1569 onwards). This means that Lukowski and Zawadzki’s Concise History of Poland (2001) and the now-venerable Cambridge History of Poland (1950) will continue to function as the key overview textbooks in English on early modern Poland–Lithuania. There is a very rich current scholarship on early modern Poland–Lithuania, in English alone: the work of Magda Teter on Jewish C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 599 history, Michael Ostling on witchcraft, Jacqueline Glomski on humanism, the Europa Jagiellonica project on the art and courts of the Jagiellonian world, and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk on Poland’s links with Islamic powers, none of which fits into Frost’s account. This book is the fruit of considerable labour in many languages, and will be read with interest across central and northern Europe.

University of Oxford NATALIA NOWAKOWSKA Render unto Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries . By Tom Papademetriou. Oxford University Press. 2015. xv + 256pp. £60.00. In this work, the author sets out with a very specific purpose: to address a vacuum which has existed since the publication of Braude and Lewis’s seminal Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire , and in particular Braude’s ‘Foundation myths of the millet system’ (1982). There has been an over-reliance on these works in discussing (and dismissing) the dominant and widespread narrative of the millet system as a constant, unchanging institution or a ‘proto- nation’ which became the foundation of modern nations. In attempting to view the history of the Greek Orthodox people during the Ottoman period, the author discusses the various paradigms and – ism s through which that history was distorted, reinterpreted and crystallized, such as nationalism and oriental determinism, evident in the work of scholars such as Runciman (1968) and Papadopoullos (1952). This is an attempt to reconceptualize the role of Greek Orthodox hierarchy within the Ottoman context, moving beyond the sterile and ‘dichotomous framework’ (p. 4) of good versus evil, which often depicts the Greek Orthodox community and the Church as ‘small, conquered, oppressed, insulated . . . in Ottoman society’ (p. 7). The author does this by placing the community, and more specifically the Greek Orthodox Church, within the broader context of Ottoman administration, examining its evolving relationship with the state and with powerful Greek Orthodox lay groups. He also sets out to question the description of the Greek community as ‘uniform, unified . . . governed by the Church’ in favour of a ‘more fractured picture of the “ Greek community ” and its leaders’ (p. 12, emphasis in the original). In Part I the author moves beyond the millet paradigm by establishing its lack of validity, especially for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Chapter 1 focuses on the very myth of the millet system: Sultan Mehmed II’s purported investment of Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios – and by extension the Patriarchate – with specific rights and privileges a few months after his conquest of Constantinople.

The author exposes this foundation myth, first, by highlighting the lack of evidence supporting this widespread tradition, and second by reminding us that a (now dated) understanding of the status of non-Muslims in the Ottoman empire was based not on evidence, but on a ‘classical’ interpretation of Islamic law and zimmi (non-Muslim) status propagated by scholars such as Gibb and Bowen (1957). This chapter moves from the sixteenth-century histories and foundation myths to later examples which in themselves have served to crystallize historians’ views C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 600 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES on the millet system and create a systemic anachronism. Examples such as the work of D’Ohsson, who based his understanding of the status of zimmi son early Islamic tradition, or Papadopoullos, who projected his twentieth-century concerns with legitimizing Archbishop Makarios’ political role in Cyprus by looking at a conveniently strictly defined and ‘fixed’ Ottoman past. The author also discusses new directions, the work of scholars who sought to question the millet paradigm in favour of other approaches, such as Giese, Scheel and Kabrda in the period from the 1930s onwards, and Ursinus, Goffman, Konortas and ˙ Inalcık more recently. Chapter 2 focuses on the Ottoman methods of conquest, and in particular the tradition of istim ˆ alet , the cooperation with Church and community leaders and the accommodation of their practices in exchange for their incorporation into Ottoman administration – a process which enabled the Greek Orthodox populations – and especially their leaders – to become ‘part of the fabric of Ottoman society’ (p. 65). The author highlights the ad hoc nature of the negotiation between local ecclesiastical authorities and the Ottomans, ‘often against the wishes of the Synod’ (p. 65). He also draws attention to the financial nature of such arrangements, and offers the example of the Metropolitan of Ephesus, Matthew, and his experience with the Aydıno ˘ gulları to illustrate that money was never far from such arrangements, that it was in fact a ‘sign of loyalty and obeisance’ (p. 79). This serves to focus our attention on local and regional realities, and the need for local hierarchs to adapt pragmatically to a new modus vivendi of Turkmen or Ottoman rule (p. 80). The process by which ‘the Church was absorbed into the Ottoman fiscal administration’ (p. 101) is at the heart of this chapter, which explains the mutual nature of such arrangements and sees the relationship between Greek Orthodox Church and Ottoman state as dynamic and evolving, rather than something which Mehmed II and Gennadios Scholarios set in stone in 1454. Part II serves as the evidence which supports the need for a different, economically based analysis. Chapter 3 is a further elaboration of this relationship between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Ottoman state, by way of closely examining the role of its hierarchy in tax collection and tax farming in particular. The author provides some sporadic examples of early berat sto demonstrate the focus of the ‘arrangement’ on finances. Crucially, and this is an argument which was also expressed by Apostolopoulos (1992) (and cited in this section), the arrangement with the Ottoman state was with individual bishops and metropolitans, not with any kind of legal entity in the shape of the Church (p. 114). (This topic is also explored by Antonis Hadjikyriacou in his doctoral work, in which he coined the term ‘constructive ambiguity’ to describe the Ottoman state’s dealings with ‘quasi-institutional structures of representation’, such as hierarchs, and the negotiation of boundaries with them. See his 2011 SOAS thesis ‘Society and Economy on an Ottoman Island: Cyprus in the Eighteenth Century’, pp. 162–88, at p. 276.) This is an important counter- argument to the assumption that Mehmed II gave rights and privileges which were fixed and applied to the whole of the Greek Orthodox community throughout space and time. In the conclusion the author draws attention to the fact that clergymen ‘actively utilized the Imperial Divan to protect and confirm their administrative rights and authority’ (p. 137).

C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 601 Chapter 4 looks specifically at the Ottoman tax farming system ( iltizam ) and the role of the patriarch (and other higher clergymen) as m ¨ ultezim (tax farmer). In this chapter the author discusses the process of bidding for tax farms and the tension between the Ottoman practice of bidding for offices, and the Synodical tradition which was based on elections. The main argument here is that the Ottoman state utilized the Greek Orthodox Church as a ‘cash- rich tax farm’ (p. 176), and this chapter focuses on the process which made it so. In chapter 5 the author focuses on the competition for offices and the corruption in which higher clergymen were (or were perceived to be) involved.

Competition for offices led to a system where hierarchs’ positions were always subject to scrutiny, defamation and undermining by other individuals or power groups. The author places this work within the wider Ottoman context, and compares it to the nasihatn ˆ ame genre (advice literature for Ottoman princes), where authors such as Mustafa Ali of Gelibolu lamented the ‘slippery slope’ on which the Ottoman state was caught, having abandoned the ‘old ways’ (pp. 183–4). In this chapter we are offered, as an example of power play, influence and direct involvement of the elite in the appointment of officials, the case of the Kantakouzenos family, which used its influence in the Ottoman state to influence patriarchal appointments (pp. 200–3). The book concludes with chapter 6, where the author summarizes the key points by citing impressive statistics on the frequency with which patriarchs were replaced: every two to three years on average (p. 214). This enables the author to question the degree of authority patriarchs had, when their terms were very short and constantly under threat, within a constant state of flux as a result of ongoing power struggles. However, the author again reiterates the pragmatic reasons for the Greek Orthodox hierarchs’ involvement with the Ottoman state on a financial basis. Tom Papademetriou’s work here is excellent, and offers a much-needed fresh perspective to a tired old topic. He draws from an impressive wealth of sources, from Ottoman and Greek documentation, to European reports and travel accounts, with erudition and meticulousness, which inspires and convinces the reader. In going beyond Benjamin Braude’s dismissal of the millet system as a lens through which we see the Greek Orthodox Church in the early Ottoman period, he has identified and analysed the hierarchs’ fiscal activities in great detail. This is without doubt a valuable contribution to Ottoman social and economic history, and presents the history of the Greek Orthodox people within it not as ‘oppressed’, but as dynamic and active components of society. As such, it will make an essential text for students and teachers of Ottoman history – the reviewer will most definitely enrich his reading list with it. One area where the reviewer would like to see more covered is the difference between the centre and the ‘periphery’ in this period, where examples from the Balkans and elsewhere were juxtaposed with the history of the patriarchs.

University of Birmingham MARIOS HADJIANASTASIS C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 602 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES Early Modern John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources .Edited by Elizabeth Goldring ,Fa i t h E a l e s , Elizabeth Clarke and Jayne Elisabeth Archer. 5 vols. Oxford University Press. 2014. 4,064pp. £505.00. The original version of The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth , published by John Nichols in two editions between 1788 and 1823, has been a gold mine for generations of historians of Elizabethan court culture and politics: a voluminous, baggy, miscellaneous compilation of documents and commentary, often only loosely related to its ostensible subject. Its contents are immensely varied. There are detailed accounts of the major, well-known civic, academic and private entertainments of the reign, letters between major and minor courtiers, descriptions of royal residences, accounts of the royal household, extracts from chronicles and diaries etc., etc. The contents are irresistible, but they are also problematic. Nichols was never comprehensive or systematic in any way at all. His volumes contain plenty of very niche material, but inevitably a great deal is left out. Much of the content can be found elsewhere. The chronological coverage is often wildly uneven. The material on Elizabeth’s week-long visit to Oxford in 1566, for example, covers 206 pages in this edition; the section on 1575 contains 101 pages on the Queen’s entertainment by the earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle and a further 117 on those at Woodstock a month later. The whole of the year 1567, by contrast, detains the reader for precisely twenty words of text. A new edition of Nichols thus presents a challenge to any editor. This new edition, begun in 2000, has been compiled by a team based at Warwick and with over forty other scholars having contributed editorial expertise to particular sections. This is far from being simply a reprint: it is, as the title accurately states, an edition of Nichols’s sources, largely omitting his commentary and preface: taking the meat off the carcass of the Progresses and attaching it to a new skeleton. In principle, the venerable tradition of republishing hard-to-find volumes has been rather overtaken by the fact that one can now download full, searchable versions of all sorts of things from the likes of Google Books or the Internet Archive, something that has clearly arisen since this project began. What incentive, then, does the reader with £505 burning a hole in his pocket have to invest in this miscellaneous body of texts chosen by an antiquarian in the reign of George III, rather than (say) ten historical monographs? Undoubtedly the editing is extremely impressive and thorough. The editorial method has been to edit anew all of the sources printed by Nichols from the originals, or from the best available copy-text; they are thus significantly more authoritative than those provided in the original version. Furthermore, some of the texts which Nichols truncated for one reason or another have been restored to completion. This is a significant service to scholarship, providing much more detailed and complete accounts of certain events. A good example is the 1581 ‘Tournament of Callophisus’ (III, pp. 40–56), edited by Gabriel Heaton. Although only a relatively small proportion of the material has benefited from such close attention, an immense amount of painstaking editing work has undoubtedly been carried out on all of the texts. There are very copious notes, which are considerable more accurate than Nichols’s. The scholarly apparatus is C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 603 also impressive, particularly a thorough index which any student of Elizabethan court life will find useful. The notes do sometimes verge on the excessive; it is surprising, for example, that the fact that a frankly not-very-interesting letter from the queen to the sheriff of Lancashire happened to be dated from the royal house of Oatlands calls forth a footnote listing ( inter alia ) the construction of a coal house there in 1581–2. Similarly, the seventy-three pages of mini-biographies and lists of office-holders may well be regarded as unnecessary in an age when scholars automatically turn to the internet for such matters. Nevertheless, on the whole, the advantages of such close attention to the texts comfortably outweigh the drawbacks. Additionally, it is undoubtedly a handsome set of volumes, excellently produced, with high-quality paper, print and binding, and copious maps and illustrations both in colour and in black-and-white. There are a small number of more substantive cavils. Readers should also note that this edition omits some elements of Nichols’s original work. For example, Nichols included multiple New Years Gift rolls in his work, and they are a useful insight into the queen’s relationship with her courtiers, but whereas Nichols provided both lists of gifts received by the queen and gifts given by her, this edition presents only the former. Furthermore (and perhaps this is inevitable), there remain errors in the fine detail of the work, and mistakes introduced by Nichols himself have not always been picked up. Vol. II, pp. 191–2, for example, reproduces Nichols’s mentions of Sir Christopher Hatton’s trip to Spa in 1574 which are simply wrong: this occurred in 1573. Nichols gave an itinerary for the 1579 progress which can easily be shown to be both internally contradictory and completely wrong, but it is reproduced here without comment (III, pp. 23–4). It is perhaps unfair to single out relatively minor points such as this, yet readers should know whether or not they can trust the accuracy of the contents. Nevertheless, this is overall both an impressive and a useful work. The editors have deftly managed to deal with the many problems of re-editing this complex, multi-layered work into a coherent form, and deserve great praise for managing such a large and complex project. The result will be useful to scholars for many years.

The Open University NEIL YOUNGER The Global City: On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon . Edited by Annemarie Jordan Gschwend and K. J. P. Lowe. Paul Holberton Publishing. 2015. 296pp. £40.00. Even the most worldly-wise European looked on Lisbon as just a dot on the map until the later fifteenth century. While early Portuguese advances around Africa and into the Atlantic attracted some attention, it was Vasco da Gama’s successful voyage to India and back in 1497–9 that brought both the kingdom and its capital into broader view. It did not take long for Lisbon to become Renaissance Europe’s most global city, even if it soon relinquished that distinction to a succession of metropolises in northern Europe, whose long-term advantages included stronger capital markets and firmer links to industry and long-distance trade in commodities. Becoming a global city involved, first, drawing on the resources – human, economic and cultural – of peoples and places from around the world. The C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 604 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES Portuguese empire soon oversaw an impressive amount of mobility and exchange within a circuit that linked both sides of the Atlantic with key trading centres around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. It then made this success visible through the presence and display in Lisbon of a broad range of foreign, even exotic, people and objects. This took the form of the largest number of black African slaves and freedmen, as well as the presence of the greatest quantity (and arguably quality) of Indian, Chinese and Japanese objects and works of art in any European city of the era. This excellent and splendidly illustrated book documents and explores these distinctions by focusing on two anonymous panels – originally a single painting – depicting one of the most famous streets in sixteenth-century Lisbon. The Rua Nova dos mercadores, or ‘New Street of the Merchants’, was originally laid out in the late thirteenth century. Royal decrees mandating various reforms beginning in the 1480s facilitated its emergence as a vibrant commercial centre near the city’s waterfront. (Alas, it no longer exists, thanks to the devastating earthquake of 1755 and the thorough restructuring of the neighbourhood that followed.) Bringing to bear a wide range of documents – especially notarial inventories and descriptions by contemporary travellers – the authors carefully identify the street’s inhabitants and the belongings in their houses. The results of this social history from below (and within) are impressive. Especially striking is just how mixed a city Lisbon was. As early as 1451 one visitor had noted that its ‘very varied population’ included not only Christians, Muslims and Jews, but also ‘black Africans, moors and wild men from the Canary Islands’ (p. 58). While Christianity soon became the only faith tolerated in Portugal, Lisbon’s black population continued to grow, and by the mid-sixteenth century may have accounted for one-fifth of the city’s inhabitants. Africans, moreover, figured prominently in contemporary images such as the ones studied in this book, wherein they are portrayed as carrying out a wide range of tasks (note the depiction of a black man on horseback as a knight of the Order of Santiago in a painting from the 1570s, p. 72). The rest of the volume documents in detail the wide range of goods Lisbon received from its trading posts in West Africa, the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. (While the chronological focus on the sixteenth century largely precludes the arrival of significant amounts of objects from its American possessions, there is a brief but engaging chapter on a recently deceased turkey that appears in the painting – one of the many interesting details explored in this literally wide- ranging book.) The authors focus above all on luxury items and objets d’art , ranging from sculptures in rock crystal and ivory to Muslim lacquered shields, along with small furniture, fans, jewellery and porcelain. Many of these were acquired for resale in the rest of Europe by the numerous foreign merchants who lived on or frequented the Rua Nova. Yet the inventories also reveal extensive local ownership of such items. Far from being limited to the court and the extremely wealthy, it extended further down the social scale and well into the middle classes, who used these goods in their daily lives instead of keeping them under wraps in private collections. Readers will not only appreciate the lavish illustrations, but will also have the chance to glimpse a series of works the vast majority of which now belong to private collections. The book closes with a particularly interesting chapter on the acquisition in 1866 of the Rua Nova C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 605 paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and their subsequent migration to their present location in Kelmscott House. Reading this book was an enjoyable as well as enlightening experience. The authors and especially the singularly energetic co-editors, who between the two of them wrote half the text, deserve warm thanks – and a large readership – for bringing to broader attention a unique period in the history of a fascinating city about which surprisingly little has been published in English.

Universidad Aut ´ onoma, Madrid JAMES S. AMELANG The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Progress in Seventeenth- Century England . By Paul Slack. Oxford University Press. 2015. xii + 321pp. £35.00. This book, at the apogee of his very distinguished career, is the most ambitious Paul Slack has written. Its conceptualization and massively detailed content deserve the highest praise. His decision to claim in his title that this is a seventeenth-century story seems a little strange, given that the last 90 pages of 321 in all are about the period from 1690 to 1730. We know Slack as one of the most eminent historians of the seventeenth century; he won his spurs with the impact of plague in that period; his Ford Lectures made him first think about ‘improvement’, a word that appears in the title of their published version. He knew long ago that that had no neat 1700 ending. ‘Aspirations towards material progress, along with the conviction that it was an indispensable foundation for intellectual and moral progress, were fully formed by 1740’, Slack writes in this Preface. Quite so. The starting point had to be how England was discovered by topographers, cartographers and the writers of ‘chorographies’ like that of William Lambarde.

Slack’s account closely matches Alexander Walsham’s recent, deeply pondered, story of the reformation of the landscape. He is on well-tilled ground in his account of William Cecil’s handling of the notion of ‘reformation of the commonwealth’. He makes it clear who the begetters of ‘improvement’, as it was developed by Hartlib’s circle and Francis Bacon, were known to be. Slack is then very good indeed, one might say magisterial or definitive, on belief and confidence in information and on material, which often means scientific, progress.

Baconianism of course is at the very heart of his story. Hence Slack can claim in his title that his book is about something new being ‘invented’. ‘Improvement’ summarizes a huge new intellectual world; he displays mastery of much of it.

The economic thought of the period is intricately explained in four chronological chapters, successively 1570–1640, 1640–70, 1670–90 and 1690–1730. Much of course relies on others, like Mark Greengrass for instance, who revealed the riches of the Hartlib papers at Sheffield University. But it is all assimilated, astonishingly well documented and presented in limpid prose. Slack’s Preface is confession time: he accepts that he has neglected the theme of ‘self-improvement’ and that this was what Bacon, Hartlib and Locke, three of his key figures, were ‘at least as interested in as material improvement’. It is in his treatment of the idea of happiness that we see where the edge comes into his primarily economic world. There is a bridge here which it is too far for him C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 606 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES to cross. Consider his index entries on ‘happiness’: he clusters entries under the ‘common aspiration’ for happiness, how it was debated and ‘the evolution of the concept’. So, when we consult the relevant pages, it is apparent that happiness is very much under his lens. Towards the end of the book he speaks of ‘a concept of national happiness’ which ‘continued to have resonance’. He is concerned to show how an unacceptable ‘spectre of luxury’ was gradually disarmed. Some principles about personal behaviour, whether it be economic or social, he remarks, were generally inherited, yet at the same time ‘were being diluted as the religious foundations on which they rested slowly changed’. He implies that a new secular ideology of happiness was being created. The word creeps into one chapter heading, with the fifth called ‘Wealth and happiness 1670–1690’, yet Slack never tackles the concept quite fully and head on, nor is it the centrepiece of his story. It is quite clear that thinking about happiness was at the core of the intellectual and cultural history of the period: it flowed from people’s behaviour to, and contact with, each other. Moral handbooks like Richard Allestree’s Art of Contentment (1675) were ‘more widely read than any tract on commerce’, Slack notes decisively. He comments that Allestree’s more famous The Gentleman’s Calling (1660) was shelved with works beside his key writers Perry, Munn and Locke, by a Lancashire wool-dealer and small farmer. He also notes that a Kendal tradesman saw Allestree’s works as essential reading in 1716. Such works, including the celebrated The Lady’s Calling , were socially hegemonic, because they dealt with behaviour on its new gendered foundation in Restoration England. This is an issue he omits. Yet there is a critical connection here. Mutual worldly happiness for all men and women became a field open for examination because the problem of womankind was being finally solved from 1660 onwards, by the group of conduct- book writers led by the bishop Richard Allestree. Women were no longer simply deceitful, voracious, untrustworthy, the weaker sex. Allestree, on the contrary, shows them ready to be taken into partnership, as the junior partners of course.

The most striking finding of my own extensive study of the upbringing of young girls in 1660 to 1800 is that it was all about their ‘improvement’. The word occurs again and again. It was taken for granted that young men had long been ready for improvement. This was what the Renaissance notion of civility, so well explored over a long time period by Anna Bryson, was about.

Improvement of girls, as a crucial intent by middle- and upper-class parents, came later. It was created by living with polished London relatives, by boarding schools, by the provincial round of assemblies and balls, where female politeness was paraded. So Slack’s book, outwardly all one long continuous story, actually has a decisive shift of gender mentality at the very centre of its account, which must surely affect his argument. Material improvement, he shows, was a single 150-year story; the shift in gender ideology which opened that material improvement to the other half of humankind distinguishes the last ninety years of the period 1600– 1750 from its first sixty. This caveat aside, Slack’s magnum opus crowns a career in the field of early modern economic history of quite exceptional achievement.

Moreton-in-Marsh ANTHONY FLETCHER C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 607 Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail .By Marcus Rediker. Beacon Press. 2014. xii + 241pp. $26.95. ‘Deep sea sailors made possible a profound transformation: the rise of colonialism, capitalism, and our own vexed modernity’ (p. 1), Marcus Rediker begins on the first page of Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail , his latest addition to the history from below of the early modern Atlantic. As explained in the acknowledgements, this book is a survey and synthesis of Rediker’s ‘thirty-odd years of scholarship’, yet in addition to being a testament to a productive career it also makes an innovative historiographical contribution. Rediker places his work on the social history of the Atlantic in dialogue with the historiographical changes prompted by the rise of transnational and world history. Perhaps with the importance of the transnational turn in mind, in the first pages of the book he defines the ‘motley crews’ identified in the book’s title as ‘multi-ethnic’. He returns to this theme again at the end of the book to describe the way in which African American and pan-African cultures were forged at sea when a multi-ethnic mass of Africans was assembled (p. 122). Rediker also gives two more meanings for the term ‘motley crew’: firstly, an ‘organized gang of workers, a squad of people performing similar tasks or performing different tasks contributing to a single goal’, and secondly, ‘a social-political formation of the eighteenth-century port city’, an ‘urban mob’ or ‘revolutionary crowd’ (p. 91). These definitions illustrate the scope of the book, which aims to represent a wide range of underclasses and the roles that they have played in shaping not only maritime history but also the history of social, intellectual and political change on land. Methodologically Rediker acknowledges the debt of his approach to maritime history to both Eric Hobsbawm and Michael Foucault, fathers of social and spatial histories. He cites Foucault’s definition of the ship as ‘a floating piece of space’ (p. 3). Maintaining this Foucauldian influence, he describes the transoceanic ship as a site of ‘deep dialectic of discipline and resistance’ (p. 121).

Rediker also tries to use his contextual focus on the sea as a way to navigate away from the ‘terracentric’ perspective of traditional histories permeating the ‘deep structure of Western thought’ (p. 2). Given the historiographical slant of the book, one of its shortcomings is its lack of engagement with the developments, not only of transnational and world history, but of global history. Rediker acknowledges in his prologue that ‘histories of “great men” and national glory by sea have, over the past generation, been challenged by chronicles of common sailors and their many struggles’, and that ‘within the more recent rise of transnational and world history the sailor has begun to move from the margins – his customary position in national histories – to a more central position as one whose labors not only connected, but made possible, a new world’ (p. 2).

Rediker has certainly made an important contribution to this endeavour, yet his silence on how his contributions relate to the way in which global history has also been transforming the landscapes of history and the ‘deep structures of Western thought’ is intriguing. Each chapter covers the study of a different group of the underclasses that played such an important, but often overlooked, role in the history of the early modern Atlantic: sailors, political outlaws, pirates, revolutionaries and slaves. It provides readers with a snapshot of the different strands of history that developed in the Atlantic: the history of labour regimes and literature, of capitalism and C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 608 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES culture, of revolution and class struggle, of slavery and the battle for liberty, and of poverty and the quest for dignity. Rediker migrates between the historical biographies of individuals and the meta-narratives of national politics and global economy. One of the book’s important contributions lies in the way it integrates intellectual and social history. Outlaws of the Atlantic not only charts the way in which the maritime underclasses were vectors of global communication but also the way in which they created knowledge and culture and brought about social change. In particular, Rediker shows the way in which storytelling has played a role in both social and intellectual history. Chapter 1, ‘The sailor’s yarn’, depicts how the physical labour of picking the yarn of the ships’ ropes was woven together with the spinning of yarns about nautical life. Rediker notes that these stories both socialized workers and transmitted the practical knowledge developed by communities of deep-sea sailors. Significantly, Rediker notes that it was deep- sea sailors who witnessed and experienced the world and that their stories were an important source of knowledge for the elites (p. 23). In the final chapter he describes how the events and stories at sea fuelled the rise of literature about the sea on land, and he indicates how the fictions and mythologies developed at sea constitute an important strand of intellectual history. The ownership, development and use of different forms of knowledge are an important theme in Rediker’s book, and at the core of its significance. Rediker writes that ‘seaman occupied a strategic position in the global division of labor, which in turn gave them access to, and control of, certain kinds of knowledge, information, and ideas’ (p. 28). When describing rebellions on slave ships, Rediker reminds us that ‘uprisings required knowledge of the ship’ (p. 133), and that ‘slaves needed three specific kinds of knowledge about Europeans and their technologies’, to escape their chains, to use firearms and to sail the ship (p. 134).

This focus on the role of knowledge in the insurrections of the underclasses suggests that Rediker’s approach is not only indebted to Hobsbawm, but also to Antonio Gramsci. In this study Rediker gives us a new way to think, not just about the relationship with social and intellectual history, but also about the history of political thought. He describes the importance and use of concepts of justice and freedom to pirates, fugitives and slaves, and he explains the ‘hydrarchy’ of the sailors, ‘a tradition of self-organization of seafaring people from below’ (p. 92). Rediker concludes this book by observing that history ‘is all a question of perspective – more specifically, a question of who has power to impose perspective in the interpretation of history’ (p. 176). Rediker’s book shows that telling the history of the Atlantic from the perspective of the poor and dispossessed does not just fill a gap left by the histories of nations and their elite actors, but leads to a questioning of the very fabric of those narratives.

European University Institute JULIA MCCLURE Britain and the Seventy Years War, 1744–1815: Enlightenment, Revolution and Empire . By Anthony Page. Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. xiv + 282pp. £21.99. War formed the backdrop to Britain’s long eighteenth century. Some historians have described it as a ‘second hundred years war’, but given that C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 609 there was a remarkable period of peace between 1713 and 1739, it makes more sense to divide these wars into two phases. Anthony Page’s new book focuses on what he terms the ‘Seventy Years War’, an almost-continuous series of conflicts between Britain and (mostly) France, which started with the shambolic response to the Jacobite rebellion and culminated in the triumph of Waterloo, paving the way for a century of imperial dominance under the Pax Britannica. From the perspective of a Victorian Whig historian, this rise to international pre- eminence seemed linear and inevitable, but Page reminds us that it did not appear this way to people living through the eighteenth century. France was Europe’s leading military power, with immense resources and a population three times that of Britain. The danger of a French invasion recurred throughout the period and on several occasions came very close to happening. If the Duke of Wellington famously described the battle of Waterloo as ‘a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw’, Page suggests that the same could be said of the whole Seventy Years War (p. 59). With this in mind, Page offers a novel perspective on the period. On the one hand, this is a military and imperial history. After a gallop through the wars themselves, he examines the nature of the state and the armed forces that made success in war possible. He nuances John Brewer’s familiar narrative of the ‘fiscal-military state’ by emphasizing the fundamental role of the navy in Britain’s military strategy, imperial power and industrial base. This was instead a ‘fiscal-naval state’, in which a large, permanent and expensive navy contrasted with an army that was kept to a minimum in peacetime and expanded to full strength only when required (the reason why Britain’s wars tended to get off to a slow start). This is not just a conventional military history, however, since Page offers an excellent introduction to the social and cultural history of the military – something that is a notable growth area in the historiography of the period – and tells us much about the lives of ordinary redcoats and ratings. The second half of the book thinks about the wider cultural, political and religious contexts of these wars. This is not a history of ‘war and society’ that just focuses on wartime civil society, since Page makes it clear that the influence was two-way. War had an all-pervasive influence on domestic culture, but it was also fundamentally informed by its political and intellectual context. Britain could only pay for, recruit, locate and deploy its combatants in a way that was acceptable to its political system and its public sphere. It is currently fashionable in cultural studies of the century to emphasize that Britons encountered war vicariously through newspapers, plays, letters and songs, but Page is clear about the extent to which people had a more direct experience of military service. As just one example, many of the great historians of the age served in the military, including William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, David Hume and Edward Gibbon (p. 167). Given the focus on war, this is necessarily an international account of British history. Whereas British Studies in the USA tends to emphasize a transatlantic imperial narrative, this is notably more global than that. Page is based at the University of Tasmania and believes that British history should ‘be done in an Australian accent’ (p. x). Australia appears more often than you might expect in these pages – the conclusion begins by noting that its first steam engine arrived just as Wellington was preparing to face Napoleon in 1815 – but the overall effect is to reorient Britain’s story from the northern and western hemispheres to encompass the south and the east. As we embark on ‘The Asian Century’, C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 610 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES Page’s accessible new book makes a striking claim for the continued relevance of Georgian Britain.

University of Northampton MATTHEW M CCORMACK Freedom’s Price: Serfdom, Subjection, & Reform in Prussia, 1648–1848 .By S. A. Eddie . Oxford University Press. 2013. xx + 356pp. £68.00. S. A. Eddie’s book is about the abolition of serfdom and the demise of the feudal system in Prussia in the early nineteenth century. There is a strong historiographical tradition arguing that the end of serfdom in Prussia ultimately led to worse economic conditions for the liberated peasants. In this narrative the reforms benefited mainly the feudal elite. Eddie criticizes this view and describes a revisionist scenario in which peasants played a more active role in shaping the developments. The outcomes were also more mixed than claimed by earlier historians with many peasants benefiting more from the change than their formers lords: ‘most peasant farms remained with their previous tenants [but] by 1855 fully 45 per cent of the noble Ritterg ¨ uter were in hand of non- noble capitalists’ (p. 330). Far from it being a triumph of the traditional nobility, the big winner in the endgame of Prussian feudalism was ‘ arriviste capital, both bourgeois and peasant’ (p. 330). The other winners of the reform were the reformers themselves. In the wake of the crushing defeat against Napoleon their aim was to equip Prussia with more modern institutions that would enable the country to maintain its position as a great power. A status had been acquired only recently and that had always been precarious. As Eddie points out, the reformers were successful in their attempts to reshape the agrarian economy. By reorganizing the legal and economic structure of this sector they improved productivity and eliminated the most important barriers to growth. The abolition of serfdom has been criticized in the past for not living up to humanist ideals professed by many enlightened reformers championing individual liberty. However, this criticism perhaps overlooked the fact that the ideal of individual liberty was as much rooted in high-minded ideals as it was in the increasingly widespread notion that individualism was that could be harnessed for socio-economic progress. To contemporary reformers, individual liberty was as much a means to economic efficiency as it was a value in itself. The study does an excellent job at bringing out the complexity of the reform process and the fact that all parties involved including the peasants were able to make their wishes heard and their power felt. Even clearer is another aspect:

no matter what the individual interests and intentions were, the outcome of the reforms cannot be grasped by asking which group of individuals benefited.

The reforms created a new way of doing business in the countryside and it also created a new social group that benefited. This group may have been made up of individuals who formerly belonged to the established ranks of traditional society, but they quickly went on to form a new class of their own while the old social groups withered away. Eddie’s findings shed new light on Prussian history because they further undermine the notion that Prussian society remained firmly in the grip of old C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 611 elites denying it the kind of transition to bourgeois rule that became the hallmark of modernity across the west. A number of studies have now shown how similar the Prussian developments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were to those in other parts of Europe. If Germany took a Sonderweg towards dictatorship and genocide in the twentieth century, the roots of this development can certainly not be found in a scenario of arrested development in the early modern period. The 1930s and 1940s are better decades to study to understand the path to authoritarian rule and genocide than the depths of Prussian history. Beyond the contribution to Prussian history, the theoretical framework of the book raises interesting questions. Eddie’s conclusions have a distinctly Marxist ring about them. ‘Freedom’s Price’ describes a development in which peasants and nobles were locked into a struggle that ultimately none of them won but that instead brought about a new economic and social order complete with a new dominant class of ‘ arriviste capitalists’. This is all the more surprising since ostensibly the study is not based on the theories of the German classics, but on those of the more fashionable American economist-historian Douglass North. Since the 1970s North and other ‘New Institutionalists’ have tried to develop the kind of sophisticated analytical framework tying together economic and historical developments that were previously the preserve of Marxist scholars; except that North’s paradigm is free of such incendiary categories as ‘class’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘revolution’. Instead, we find economic agents who are engaged in market-mediated contractual relations, exchanging goods and services. These stable systems are pushed towards change not by Hegel’s Geist or Marx’s technological changes but rather by their joint efforts to lower transactions costs. Applied to the Prussian case this means that serfdom is to be seen as a ‘mutually beneficial contract . . . in which the population agreed to subject themselves to a higher authority in return for greater protection’. Moreover, these contractual arrangements echoed ‘the contemporary emergence of the contemporaneous emergence of the theory of the social contract’ (p. 329). The notion that, in the wake of the Thirty Years War, Hobbes-reading Prussian peasants and nobles met each other as equals to negotiate a series of contracts that would then form the basis of Prussia’s feudal system must seem absurd to anyone familiar with the historical reality of the time. Starting from a flawed conception of the feudal system the institutionalist explanation of the system’s demise remains equally weak. To make their model work institutionalists were forced to pin prices on things that did not have a market price (freedom) and assume that contemporaries were attempting to minimize transaction costs. This is a bold assumption considering that even most people living today, who are much more used to thinking in modern mathematical and economic categories, find it hard to define or quantify these types of costs.

Indeed, for these reasons and others many economists doubt that transaction costs are a useful concept even for the analysis of today’s economies. For historians the risk is that the eagerness to apply a sophisticated, but unhistorical, theoretical framework leads to a distortion of the historical facts. Thorough source-work saved Freedom’s Choice from this fate and led the study to uncover important results. For anyone prepared to ignore the buzzwords borrowed from North, the book makes for useful reading.

University of St Gallen FLORIAN SCHUI C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 612 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command . By David Lemmings. Palgrave Macmillan. 2011. x +280pp. £19.99. This work bridges an important gap between two eras of English political and social history. In seventeenth-century England, the law was in general collaborative, communal, consensual and, to a remarkably large extent, ‘common’. Functions such as social welfare and public order that would now be seen as administrative were mediated through legal forums such as local quarter sessions and county assizes, in which a wide cross-section of English society often found ways to participate. Mark Goldie has highlighted the ‘unacknowledged republic’ of office-holders, while Steve Hindle, Michael Braddick and their successors have shown how these legal structures could be accommodated into local political and social arrangements. By the early nineteenth century this had changed, and David Eastwood and others have shown how local government had become increasingly formalized by this period, exercised by a few elite professionals and reducing popular participation to a set of clearly defined spaces.

The relationship between the law, government and society had therefore shifted in the eighteenth century, and it is this shift that Lemmings addresses. Reacting against the teleological triumphalism of the Webbs and their landmark study of English local government, much of the work by Paul Langford and others has been concerned to stress the very substantial continuities that ran through the eighteenth century while these changes were in train. Lemmings examines the other side of this coin, restoring a focus on areas where this relationship does indeed seem to have shifted. One chapter examines the local experience of administration, using a case study of Cheshire county government in this period to argue that local government became more formalized and less participatory during this period, as magistrates used the leeway allowed to them by parliamentary legislation to cut through local rights, in the interests of efficiency. Two further chapters identify similar developments in civil and criminal litigation, as the old participatory common law was squeezed between an increasingly rationalized body of legal precedent, on the one hand, and the immense summary authority granted to new tribunals such as the courts of request (in effect small-claims courts), on the other, which were set up specifically to overcome the growing inaccessibility of the common law. The growing numbers of stipendiary or professional magistrates in large urban areas, combined with a shift away from private to public prosecutions in criminal cases, exacerbated the growing disconnection between the state and English society. Finally, Lemmings points to the increased importance of parliament and its ‘imperial legislation’ as a source of both written law and the autonomous administrative spaces where officials were able to exercise their summary authority. All this leads convincingly to his conclusion that the period saw declining popular participation in the government, while the removal of common law rights in key areas resulted in the law becoming ‘privatized as well as particularized’. Lemmings therefore supplies a valuable corrective to more optimistic accounts of change in this period, although his study is not without its own limitations.

While acknowledging the complexity and diversity of individual experiences in this period, he contrasts the abuses of the summary process with the participatory justice of the common law. Yet discretionary authority could still cut both ways, and Lemmings perhaps understates work by Peter King, Joanna Innes and others C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 613 highlighting how actors in this system could find informal ways to inject a note of equity, and temper the rigour of the process. Given the rise in this period of new structures offering forms of civic or communal activity at a local level – turnpike trustees, paving and lighting commissioners, Volunteer regiments, friendly societies, or early trade unions or combinations – it may be the case that this apparent decline was actually more of a transmutation, as an increasingly diverse society found new areas for participation and agency, though more work is probably needed. Ultimately the developments that Lemmings describes are perhaps not the full picture, but they are undoubtedly an important part of it, and for that reason this work deserves the wide audience it will undoubtedly find.

University of Oxford AARON GRAHAM Corruption, Party and Government in Britain, 1702–1713 . By Aaron Graham. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford University Press. 2015. xv + 305pp. £65.00. The Glorious Revolution drew Britain fully into the mainstream of European interstate rivalry, most obviously in its participation in the Nine Years War (1688–97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13). Britain’s army and navy were highly active in these wars, playing a key role in two major alliances which were able, just, to contain France. It has long been recognized that the effort involved in this was so large that major changes were required in how resources were mobilized and organized. In the last half-century, the traditional emphasis on military history has been enriched by new attention being given to state formation, especially the means by which money was raised to fund the war effort. Two major studies have been especially important. In 1967 Dickson argued that there was a ‘financial revolution’ after 1688, centring on the institution and evolution of the permanent funded national debt. In 1989, Brewer argued that no less critical was a contemporaneous transformation in the ability of central government to raise taxes, both for current expenditure and to repay war debts.

What neither Dickson nor Brewer was much interested in was how the money raised actually got, so to speak, to the front line. Some historians have touched upon that before, notably D. W. Jones, but Aaron Graham is the first to study the topic in a concerted manner. The focus of Corruption, Party and Government in Britain, 1702–1713 is upon the operation of the Pay Office, the body responsible for distributing funds from London to theatres of war as varied as Spain, the Low Countries and Germany.

Particular attention is paid to the role of leading figures in the Pay Office, most notably James Brydges (duke of Chandos from 1719), and of the connections they forged across Europe with financiers and suppliers. Proceeding chronologically, Graham attends carefully to key relationships and moments of strain, making quite plain the importance of the office to the conduct of the war. As befits a book of the thesis, this rests on an impressively detailed research base – not least of Brydges’s papers at the Huntingdon Library in California. Throughout Graham shows an impressive grasp of his characters and their work. In the main Graham puts great store in setting out what happened: plenty of matters of fact are set out for the reader. But Graham is keen to make larger points about the nature of state formation in Britain at the time. An impressive first C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 614 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES chapter provides a cogent historiographical overview of ‘British fiscal-military states, 1660–1830’. As this suggests, the books tends more to look forward from 1714 than back from 1702. And as the title of the book suggests, more general points are made in relation to the importance of ‘corruption’ and party to state formation particularly. For the first of these, Graham makes clear the dangers of applying anachronistic ideas to an era when patronage was an important means by which offices were filled and salaries and, no less importantly, expenses were rarely well defined. For the last, attention is paid throughout the book to the significance of the ebb and flow of this major ‘age of party’ not only to the policies pursued, but to comings and goings of officeholders. The greatest strength of this book is in its attention to detail and the thoroughness of the narrative. A more thematic or quantitative approach might have made the broader arguments more prominent and important, but Graham has certainly filled an important gap with great care and skill.

University College London JULIAN HOPPIT Atheism and Deism Revalued: Heterodox Religious Identities in Britain , 1650–1800 . Edited by Wayne Hudson ,Diego Lucci and Jeffrey R. Wigglesworth. Ashgate. 2014. xxvi + 266pp. £70.00. This is an exasperating book. For a work which is hardly coy about its claims to ‘state-of-the-art’ revisionism (p. 6), the lack of historiographical nous and methodological reflexivity is as perplexing as it is inexcusable. Fourteen chapters, including notes, cover just 245 pages. Most offerings are under-researched, inward-looking sketches that pick at the edges of stereotypical topics. A few promising contributions do run counter to this trend; but, overall, this book should be read with caution. Building upon their own individual monographs (2008–9), the editors work within the field of the History of Philosophy in an effort to deliver early modern ‘atheism’ and ‘deism’ from anachronistic definitions and the teleology of ‘secularization’. Whilst mindful of historical context, conceptual variance, non- linear historical change, and ‘the religious turn’ in the relevant historiography, Atheism and Deism Revalued does not work with a particularly credible interpretative method, or set of methods. The editors are certainly wedded to maintaining ‘atheism’ and ‘deism’ as evaluative categories for understanding ideas articulated by past philosophers; but here there is a risk that evaluative and descriptive content collapse in on each other to present both a misleading account of the character, development and significance of ‘atheism’ and ‘deism’, and a barrier to more sophisticated, historically sensitive, studies of heterodox thought.

The book is organized in such a way as to re-evaluate a group of ‘historical figures most associated with “atheism” and “deism”’ by complicating the notion that they ‘were atheists or deists in a straightforward sense’ and drawing attention to ‘the plurality and flexibility of religious identities’ (dust jacket). However, this schema is unduly limited by, if not contradictory to, the book’s primary aim of reasserting the value of the history of ‘atheism’ and ‘deism’. Rather than seeking to re-examine the intellectual output of freethinkers in context in any serious way, most contributors implicitly take the ‘atheism’ or ‘deism’ of their chosen historical character as a given and merely flesh out this assumption with some C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 615 useful detail. The result is a relatively confused and confusing book that is at odds not only with much of the current historiography but also with itself. Jeffrey Collins is keen to show how polemical context caused Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) inadvertently to play a role in ‘publicizing the potential link between his own materialism and atheism’ (p. 39); but Collins does little here to demonstrate that he has really got to grips with the complexities of understanding either seventeenth-century polemic or the reception of Hobbes’s heterodoxy.

Luisa Simonutti suggests that the deistical position of John Toland (1670–1722) was a reflection of wider, evolving avant-garde trends in seventeenth-century biblical criticism: a point which is neither original nor particularly insightful. Ian Leask seeks to affirm and subtly revise pre-existing claims about John Toland’s ‘Spinozism’ by arguing for the ‘convergence’ of ideas in Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious and Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise ; however, his approach to both intertextual analysis and Toland’s reception of Spinoza could certainly be questioned. James Herrick ignores recent advances in the historiography of both early modern blasphemy and ridicule, to present the now trite argument that prosecutions for blasphemy invariably hinged on the manner, rather than the matter, of offence. Diego Lucci offers two chapters, both of which unwisely try to reconstruct the ideas of eighteenth-century philosophers through little more than a descriptive summary of a few printed primary sources. One should, therefore, be cautious of joining Lucci in celebrating William Wollaston (1659–1724) as a freethinker whose notion of natural religion was a product of his pioneering Christian Hebraism. Lucci’s attempt to explore how Henry Dodwell the younger’s Christianity Not Founded on Argument (1741) was critical of rational theology and yet also a ‘parody of Christian fideism’ is undermined by his anachronistic recourse to the nineteenth-century concept of ‘fideism’ (p. 211). Jeffrey Wigelsworth provides two chapters that demonstrate, respectively, how the rationalistic account of religious toleration by Matthew Tindal (d. 1733) and the rationalistic critique of miracles by Thomas Chubb (1679–1747) and Thomas Morgan (d. 1743) were both premised upon an intellectual reverence for the perfection of God, His fashioning of the Creation, and His maintenance of the Laws of Nature. Whilst this intervention can be welcomed, Wigelsworth’s account is fairly descriptive and unfathomably ignores Charles Taylor’s ‘providential deism’ thesis and Jane Shaw’s Miracles in Enlightenment England (2006) to present a rather stereotypical view of early eighteenth-century ‘deism’ and ‘deists’. Keith Yandell deftly argues that David Hume (1711–76) had no religious views on the basis that he did not think there were any, save for superstitious ones, to be had.

Yet, in assessing Hume’s ‘atheism’ it is a moot point how much credence should be given to Yandell’s ahistorical analytical philosophy set against Paul Russell’s epic The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise (2008). There are a few rays of light. It is pleasing to see more of Giovanni Tarantino’s erudite work on Anthony Collins (1676–1729) written in English. Tarantino does a valiant job of showing how Collins appropriated Cicero in support of his own polemic of unbelief. Tomaso Cavallo should be congratulated for not only producing an illuminating, well-contextualized study of the ‘Christian freethinker’ Alberto Radicati (1698–1737), who was resident in London from 1726 to 1734, but for bringing Radicati’s intellectual biography to the attention of an English-reading audience. The chapter by Charlotte Roberts sparkles.

Sophisticated, judicious and genuinely revisionist, Roberts’s piece invites her C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 616 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES readers to understand the religious persona of Edward Gibbon (1737–94) in a way that he himself might have recognized: whereby religious identity was inherently heterogeneous, even relativistic, and where there was no meaningful distinction between public and private, outer and inner, belief. If only Roberts had honed her argument and set her sights on critiquing the characterization of Gibbon’s religious outlook in John Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion: Volume Five (2010).

University of Leicester DAVID MANNING Other British Voices: Women, Poetry, and Religion ,1766–1840 . By Timothy Whelan . Palgrave Macmillan. 2015. xiii + 265 pp. £55.00. Timothy Whelan brings to this volume a formidable reputation as editor and interpreter of English female authors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, having presided over the eight-volume edition of Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720–1840 published by Pickering and Chatto in 2011. Here, he focuses on four female poets and uses these case studies to illustrate his chosen themes of friendship, sociability and collaborative literary endeavour. By the ‘other’, Whelan means a type of author different from what he regards as ‘one monolithic “female voice”’ identified by some feminist historians, and different also from the Romantic notion of the isolated, semi-alienated and rebellious writer at odds with the conventions of society. The four poets whose work forms the substance of his study, Mary Steele (1753–1813), Mary Scott (1751–93), Jane Attwater (1753–1843) and Elizabeth Coltman (1761–1838), belonged to active and enduring literary circles, mainly but not exclusively in the western counties of England, based on female friendships and the circulation in manuscript form of drafts for comment, illumination and improvement. Whelan argues convincingly that each of these women has been underestimated by historians because much of their work was never published and some pieces that did find their way into print appeared under pseudonyms and have not been properly attributed. Moreover a high proportion of their manuscripts have not survived the ravages of time and the indifference of some of their descendants. He draws on several rare manuscript collections, some of them recently discovered, or rediscovered, such as the Steele Collection and the Attwater papers, housed respectively at Regents Park College, Oxford, and the Bodleian Library, and he pays a deserved tribute to the pioneering endeavours of the late Dr Marjorie Reeves in bringing about the preservation of these documents. Whelan acknowledges that his chosen authors represented only ‘a narrow segment of eighteenth-century society’; through their economic independence, education and relatively late marriages (when the average age of marriage for men and for women was falling) they could afford to ‘rise above domesticity’.

But they also reflected the intellectual creativity of nonconformity, in particular that of evangelical Calvinism (Mary Scott’s subsequent Unitarianism, evident in her poem Messiah , is an exception), as seen in Elizabeth Coltman’s The Warning and in the odes and epistles of Mary Steele. Their prime motivation – indeed inspiration – for writing was the pursuit and exposition of what they believed to be plain Christian truths, derived from scripture, and owing much to the seventeenth-century Puritan tradition exemplified by Anne Bradstreet. Whelan’s C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 617 treatment of his subjects is highly sympathetic, even admiring, and there is the occasional slip; for example, the Feathers Tavern Petition of 1772 (p. 93) was designed to free Anglican clergymen and undergraduates, not nonconformists, from the requirement to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England. Moreover, given the importance attached here to female ‘manuscript culture’ and the enhancement of our understanding of its historical importance through recent discoveries, this reader was surprised that no citation is given to the important work of Gina Luria Walker, whose detection of the letters of Mary Hays ranks as one of the most significant historical finds of recent years. But we have cause to thank Professor Whelan for bringing to the attention of historians a wider range of primary sources, including many still in manuscript, for the religious nonconformity of this period than was previously available.

University of Kent G. M. DITCHFIELD Late Modern Politics Personi ed: Portraiture, Caricature and Visual Culture in Britain, c.1830– 80 . By Henry Miller. Manchester University Press. 2015. xii + 242pp. £70.00. Today’s politicians are routinely charged with being the most image-conscious and media-obsessed personalities ever to have sat in the British parliament.

However, as Henry Miller’s impressive new study illustrates (in more ways than one), it was the Victorians who turned political image-making into an art form. Buoyed by changes in artistic techniques and methods of production, which served to increase the economy and availability of individual likenesses, every self-respecting mid-Victorian MP with even the modicum of ambition found it increasingly likely that he would see his face (as well as his name) reproduced in print. These changes, epitomized in the emergence of image-rich titles like the Illustrated London News , chimed in perfectly with the new-found supremacy of parliament, in the five decades of ‘parliamentary government’ (1830–80) which separated the age of government by royal favour from that of government by fully fledged national political parties. Miller has an enviably rich and interesting subject before him and, whilst individual chapters have something of the flavour of related case studies about them, they build into a satisfying and interesting whole. With a wide range of media upon which to draw, including caricatures, physical artefacts, engravings, cartes de visite , photographs and cartoons, Miller crafts a sparing, economical survey of these riches, charting the rise to prominence of the political image. Although the book’s final chapters, on the late-flowering of images of Palmerston and on the representation of Gladstone and Disraeli, might have benefited from a slightly longer and deeper treatment, considering the dominance of these personalities in the period after 1850, historians will appreciate the generous amount of attention devoted to the earlier period. Many of the most original insights emerge in Miller’s central chapters, which describe the mixed economy within which visual political culture operated between the 1830s and 1850s. These decades witnessed a decline in the prominence of single-sheet caricatures (and caricature magazines), but were well before the point when photo-mechanical and photo-chemical methods of C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 618 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES reproduction allowed for the quick, efficient and prolific circulation of images by organized political parties. Miller shows how entrepreneurial publishers like Henry Thomas Ryall and John Saunders found commercial advantage in circulating images of the leading political players of the 1830s and 1840s.

Portrait series issued in individual parts such as Ryall’s Portraits and Memoirs of Eminent Conservative Statesmen (1836–46) and Saunders’s Portraits and Memoirs of Eminent Living Political Reformers (1837–40) offered relatively cheap and accessible images of some of the more prominent representatives of the new post- Reform Act parties. This process was, by its nature, selective and exclusive; on the whole, only the more ‘saleable’ or recognizable figures were included in these illustrated political pantheons. At the same time, large commissioned political portraits – latter-day ‘history paintings’ which took contemporary events such as the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832 or the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 as their subject matter – could be equally prone to editing and external pressure. Miller shows how Sir George Hayter’s justly acclaimed and famous picture of ‘The House of Commons, 1833’, which took a decade to complete, relied on the artist charging MPs ‘for the privilege of sitting and appearing in the painting’ (p. 119). By contrast, Benjamin Robert Haydon’s portrait of ‘The Reform Banquet’ fell prey to a succession of practical difficulties and personal objections; when it finally appeared, it garnered a host of critical reviews.

Haydon’s subsequent political group portrait of the Anti-Slavery Convention was equally problematic – the portrait did not commemorate an end-point or a battle won like the Reform pictures and was misleading in suggesting a body united in personnel and policy, which was far from the case. Miller is also illuminating on the subject of radical visual culture. Building on the seminal work of Malcolm Chase, regarding the Chartist portraits published in The Northern Star , Miller adds to the ongoing revival of interest in radical satirists of the 1830s such as Charles Jameson Grant, who worked in a more insidious, politically edgy style than politer contemporary satirists such as John Doyle (‘H.B.’). With the rise of wood-engraved portraits in letterpress, during the mid-Victorian period, aspiring working-class political organizations and trade unions sought to publish portraits of their leading lights in journals such as The Bee-Hive . This process was no less exclusionary, in that it privileged the leaders of these movements over their followers and displayed an evident gender bias towards men. Likewise, as with historical group portraits and portrait series of leading party members, portraits of radical politicians helped to perpetuate a sense of unity, respectability and readiness for office, belying the differences in ideology, tactics and personnel which sat underneath the exterior image. Conversely, for those already returned as MPs, various options for visual self-promotion were available. Commissioning a portrait from a serviceable ‘middle-ranking’ (p. 162) painter like John Partridge was not beyond the realms of possibility, given that he charged in the region of £100–300, depending on portrait size. There were also testimonial and commemorative portraits commissioned by local political supporters and, for the particularly noteworthy, the posthumous embalming of the image through busts and statues. With the rise of cartes de visite ,fromthelate 1850s, every MP had it within his reach to present a visual calling card, whilst the House of Commons Library began to commission albums of photographs of MPs for the long-term documentation of its history.

C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 619 As Miller concludes, the proliferation of political images in this period was one way of ‘making sense of politics in an era in which party labels were often loose and continually reshaped’ (p. 232). In illuminating a path through the visual politics of this period, the book offers a useful bridge between art-historical and historical studies on this period. It is to be warmly welcomed and recommended.

University of Nottingham RICHARD A. GAUNT Newspapers and Newsmakers: The Dublin Nationalist Press in the Mid-Nineteenth Century . By Ann Andrews. Liverpool University Press. 2014. ix + 286pp. £75.00. In this excellent book, Ann Andrews examines how the Dublin newspapers strove to transcend parochialism in their efforts to affect change while also paying explicit attention to the role of individual newspapers in forming public opinion. The four chapters explore interlocking themes: the unifying nature of the Dublin press with particular attention paid to 1843 and the power of repeal; the destructive conflict that existed between Young Ireland and the Irish Confederation (1844–8); the resilience of nationalism and ideology. Drawing upon underused sources, Andrews succeeds in showing the power that the Dublin press had over the wider nationalist movement in Ireland as it appealed to every class in Irish society. They benefited from increased literacy and the utilization of reading rooms where newspapers were read aloud, with The Nation being the most influential medium to spread the gospel of nationalism prior to the Famine. In chapter 1, Andrews draws important attention to the role that women played in the Repeal movement, with some acting as Repeal wardens. More people now had access to O’Connell’s words because of the press, which helped to foster a sense of solidarity for those not attending mass meetings. Critiques of the conditions of the lower classes were an important element of the cause as they embraced ‘the poor man’s question’ (p. 46). Andrews stresses the consistency of the Repeal message as the cultural elements of the press, literature and poetry were essential in keeping it alive. Ballads were seen to be a threat to stability in the country as the authorities feared the subversive language in them.

Such was the influence of the newspaper that a plethora of mostly unsuitable and unsolicited contributions was received because Repeal was seen to be a great panacea for all ills as it became a formidable machine to inspire future generations. Chapter 2 explores the various schisms that were emerging under O’Connell’s leadership. It was beginning to be undermined as a result of a series of confrontations between Young Irelanders and O’Connellites in the Repeal movement. While there had been a respectful subservience to O’Connell for a long time, the effectiveness of the writers in The Nation intensified the divisions. Sectarian tensions emerged once the Catholic clergy asserted themselves. This was manifested through remarks made by Thomas Davis that were offensive to Catholicism, and the clergy became hostile to William Smith O’Brien.

Because Smith O’Brien was a landowner, he was generally welcomed aboard the nationalist train, and because of his secularist outlook he was more attuned to The Nation ’s sense of nationalism. C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 620 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES The devastation of the Famine saw John Mitchell emerge as a splenetic polemical writer with The Nation . Such was his vitriol that he had to establish his own newspaper, the United Irishman , which meant that he was less restrained in his arguments. His hatred of landlords left a lasting legacy as a three-way split in the movement emerged. Charges of sedition did not halt Mitchell nor did they stop his vitriol since the Treason-Felony Act of 1848 was an effort to mute him.

Following the eventual suppression of the United Irishman , a series of short-lived newspapers emerged that all contained inflammatory rhetoric. The Irish Tribune took up the cause left by the United Irishman as Mitchell’s hubris led him to believe that he could save the nation. Chapter 3 examines the post-1848 fragmentation of the nationalist movement. The Nation reasserted itself as a strictly constitutional nationalist organ, which limited its effectiveness in the eyes of many. By paying attention to tenant- right, as this was something that affected all farmers, it hoped to overcome the vexed problem of religion. Physical force nationalism emerged as an evocative voice that also espoused cultural and political nationalism. Romantic nationalists had utterly failed to understand the impact that draconian laws had on rural life. James Fintan Lalor and Thomas Clarke Luby were two architects of the shift towards physical force, turning attention to the nefarious aristocratic landlordism as the problem befalling the nation. In this chapter, Andrews brings much-welcomed attention to the Irish Democratic Association, an almost forgotten element of the Irish nationalist oeuvre. It had hoped to include Ulster Protestants in its efforts to convert the masses to democratic principles, it had a solid base thereafter to affect change, and its clarion call of unity of creed was Mitchellite in its language. Its longer-term legacy was in its efforts to involve the lower classes in the later Land League of the 1870s and 1880s, and it received praise from British Chartist publications because of its appeal to the working classes. Chapter 4 highlights the shrewdness of Fenians in using the language of liberty through the pages of the Irish People as it played a role in furthering the cause of Irish nationalism. There was a renewed confidence amongst Irish nationalists in the 1860s as they openly wrote about disloyalty. While literacy rates kept increasing, the tradition of communal reading was still widespread, with the Irish People distributing numerous free copies of the newspaper in order to ensure a widespread audience. This ensured that the readership transcended class, with quality journalism being paramount. The writers for the Irish People were generally products of a lower middle-class upbringing. They supported the ideas of revolutionary nationalists and were based in urban areas which were more conducive to the spread of radical ideas. While the land question lent itself easily to Fenian sentiments, the Fenians were primarily interested in a political revolution. This caused tensions much later when neo-Fenians of the west, such as Matt Harris, decided to focus on the social malaise in the more impoverished parts of Galway and Mayo, which attracted the chagrin of the likes of Charles Kickham in the 1870s. While the Irish People was suppressed in 1865, its legacy lived on in subsequent newspapers that were now springing up across the country. They were uncompromising in their determination that Ireland would become independent. This book has reminded us of the profound importance of the press in nineteenth-century Ireland. Increased literacy and the removal of the ‘tax on C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 621 knowledge’ were vital in the growth of newspapers. The Nation acted as a model for others as weekly newspapers were more suited to a lower-class readership, with readings and discussions taking place after Sunday mass. The political awareness and thirst for knowledge of the lower classes can be glossed over by historians. Andrews has done us a service by redressing this imbalance in a fine and thoughtful book.

Dublin BRIAN CASEY Sport and Ireland: A History .By Paul Rouse. Oxford University Press. 2015. xiv + 375pp. £30.00. One of the most important functions of the historian is to demythologize the past. Paul Rouse reminds us here that the history of Irish sport has long been plagued by mythmakers. At times ‘inventing the past’ has become almost a sport in itself, whether it has involved seeking the origins of hurling in the mists of antiquity or justifying the improbable claim that chess had been invented by the Irish in 1430 BC and that the thirty-two pieces in the set were intended to represent modern Ireland’s thirty-two counties. This tendency was especially evident between the 1880s and the 1920s when, borne on a rising nationalist tide, the Gaelic Athletic Association for the Preservation and Cultivation of the National Pastimes (GAA) emerged to make its distinctive mark on Irish popular culture. It was in this critical period, a persuasively argued analysis of which lies at the heart of Rouse’s book, that ‘the modern Irish sporting world was conclusively shaped’ (p. 150). Yet the long history of pre-modern sport, recently surveyed in forensic detail in James Kelly’s Sport in Ireland 1600–1840 (2014), is also given due attention. Like Kelly, Rouse assigns primacy in this period to hunting, with horse-racing running a close second and destined to become ‘the great commercialized sport of early-nineteenth century Ireland’ (p. 103). In both these pursuits the pace was set by England, with Ireland following a few steps behind. Like its English predecessor established five years earlier, Ireland’s Jockey Club, founded in 1755, originated in a coffee shop, the fashionable setting indicative of a burgeoning associational culture which nurtured upmarket sports in both countries. Indeed, the similarities are especially striking with cockfighting, functioning simultaneously as entertainment for the gentry and also for the masses, much in evidence on both sides of the Irish Sea. The attention given to pre-modern sport is important, not least because it allows for a nuanced blurring of the boundaries separating apparently discreet phases in Ireland’s cultural and social history. Cockfighting, long outlawed, was a feature of the sporting scene in Munster as late as the 1940s. ‘The secrecy in which cocks were trained and then set against each other limited the scale and the spread of the sport’, Rouse observes, ‘but its endurance – as well as the extent of gambling on it – echoed the glories of an age when it sat at the very heart of popular culture’ (p. 287). Rouse’s comprehensive account of sport before 1880 facilitates the blurring of boundaries in other important respects. Sensitive throughout to the wider political context, sports which were in a later period labelled as being either distinctively Irish (‘Gaelic’) or English (‘foreign’) are assigned rather more complex histories. Hurling, deeply embedded in Irish popular culture by the C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 622 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES eighteenth century, was also played in England, albeit principally by expatriates, ‘a reminder that the exchange of culture between England and Ireland was not one-directional’ (p. 76). Its decline after 1800, when it lost favour with the Anglo-Irish ruling class and became primarily associated with the peasantry, created a cultural space in which cricket – often regarded as a quintessentially English game – could flourish, not least because it was deemed less likely to lead to disorder. Cricket spread rapidly, especially in the 1860s and 1870s, providing one of the cultural links attaching nineteenth-century Ireland to the British empire. A Dublin newspaper observed in 1875 that it was ‘one of the few English importations with which the most sincere “Nationalist” cannot find any cause of quarrel, and in which all ranks and classes may meet on equal terms’ (p. 121).

Ironically, the revival of hurling in the late nineteenth century under the auspices of the GAA saw this traditional Irish sport modernized, with a central governing body administering an annual inter-county (‘All-Ireland’) competition on lines that would have been readily recognized by the Football Association, the Rugby Football Union or even the Marylebone Cricket Club. This is not to deny the transformation eventually wrought by the GAA after 1884, though it was some years before it became firmly rooted, having lost momentum in the 1890s when the nationalist movement was fractured in the aftermath of Parnell’s demise. The revival of Gaelic sports helped to push cricket to the margins, but the GAA lost some ground to soccer and rugby. For nationalist zealots soccer was a ‘garrison game’ closely associated with the British army, but it was adopted with enthusiasm, expanding across Ireland from a solid base established in and around Belfast, where socio-economic conditions were similar to those found in the industrial towns and cities of Scotland and the English north-west where it was already popular. In 1906, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, twenty-nine soccer pitches were available but only two for Gaelic games, as clear an indication as any of public demand. At the same time, rugby was ‘consolidating the sense that it was the game of the middle classes’ (p. 215), the game’s more plebeian following in Limerick proving the exception to this rule.

There were, as Rouse affirms, good reasons for the expansion and transformation of sport which began at the end of the nineteenth century. Urbanization, railways, newspapers, surplus disposable income and shorter working hours – each played a part in this complex process and what happened in Ireland was in many ways simply a replication of simultaneous developments elsewhere in Britain, Europe and the United States. The intervention of the GAA at this critical juncture, however, ensured that Irish sport, as it emerged from the crucible of modernization, retained some distinctively Gaelic features. One of the strengths of Rouse’s book is that he reminds us so often that those who engage with sport do so primarily because they enjoy it. This may seem a very obvious point, but it is often overlooked by sports historians, perhaps because they take it for granted. Yet the broader context of politics, religion, class, gender and national identity has also to be considered. ‘What was apparent in this new sporting world’, Rouse observes, ‘was that love of sport, in itself, did not adequately explain why certain people played certain games in certain places’ (p. 242). Explaining this requires skilful negotiation of the ideological battleground that constitutes the history of Irish sport in the twentieth century.

In particular, it is important to acknowledge the relationship between the GAA and Irish nationalism while at the same time avoiding simplistic clich ´ es, and here C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 623 Rouse proves especially adept. Thus he notes ‘that many GAA members fought and died for the British Empire in the fields of Flanders and the trenches of the Somme’ (p. 230) and that the Association was quick to deny allegations linking it to the Irish Volunteers and the Easter Rising. The 302 individual GAA members who took up arms in 1916 did constitute a significant proportion – around 15–20 per cent – of the force which took on the British in Dublin, but ‘very many more GAA men did not fight and . . . very many of those who did fight were not GAA men’ (p. 232). Arguably, the event which, more than any other, sealed the link between the Gaelic sport and the armed struggle for Irish independence was the indiscriminate attack by police auxiliaries at Croke Park in November 1920, which killed thirteen spectators and the Tipperary footballer Michael Hogan, after whom a stand in the modern stadium has been named. ‘Croker’ was now sacred ground and sport was thereafter deeply politicized, not least because of the GAA’s understandable anxiety post-independence to appear on the side of the angels when the history of Ireland’s great patriotic war came to be written. Given that almost a hundred years have passed, Rouse might have allocated more space than he does here to the history of sport north and south of the border that has divided Ireland since 1922, not least because partition brought with it a new layer of complexity, impacting on particular sports in different ways. As Mike Cronin noted when reviewing this book for the Irish Times (7 November 2015), sport became an Irish obsession in this period, ‘a force that binds socially diverse groups of people so that they become, albeit for the length of the match, a single, unified force’. Rouse is well aware of sport’s potency in this respect, encapsulating it neatly in his account of the enthusiasm generated by the Republic of Ireland’s soccer team at Italia 90. Managed by Jack Charlton, a quintessentially English hero, the squad composed of Irish-born players and some with Irish family connections who had grown up in England and Scotland. Yet Charlton’s team ‘inspired a popular devotion that was unprecedented’ (p. 307). At the same time attachment to particular sports, or even to a particular soccer club, could also function as an indicator of the particular community to which someone belonged, especially in Northern Ireland. Reflecting on some victims of ‘The Troubles’ in the 1980s, Rouse observes sensibly that ‘men were not shot because of the sports they played, rather those sporting affiliations were clear badges of their identity and upbringing’ (p. 304). Such tragedies, buried hastily in the shallow graveyard of Ireland’s recent past, underline the huge significance of the task Rouse has undertaken here. At one point, having effectively demolished the myths surrounding the building of ‘Hill 16’ at Croke Park, Rouse acknowledges that they are remarkably persistent: history is often ‘overwhelmed by the power of men in pubs telling stories’ (p. 277). Supplying alternative narratives that are based on assiduous archival research is important. Rouse has given them something to think about as they reach for the next pint.

De Montfort University DILWYN PORTER Merchant Seamen’s Health, 1860–1960: Medicine, Technology, Shipowners and the State in Britain . By Tim Carter. Boydell. 2014. xviii + 216pp. £75.00. ‘A ship on the open sea has the solitary advantage of being surrounded by air free from terrestrial emanations’, a medical work asserted in the late nineteenth C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 624 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES century. ‘In all other respects it is placed under unfavourable circumstances, for it combines the drawbacks of inadequate crew space, of ventilation liable to frequent interruption, of a moist atmosphere acting on vegetable matters subject to decomposition.’ The seafaring life was thus ‘exposed to great and continuous fatigue ...and to the evils of a monotonous existence’. And though better situated, a ship in port was ‘often exposed to the most deleterious emanations from low swampy lands and rich alluvial soils’. Cited by Captain William Romeril, sanitary inspector for the Port of London, in his Sanitation in the British Merchant Marine (1898), this passage is also quoted in Carter’s book (p. 50). As such, it neatly captures the distinctive challenges to merchant seamen’s health during the ten decades under investigation in this study. This work is a social history of health reform and reformers relevant to the British merchant service during a period characterised first by the rise of steam at sea, second by the advent of two global conflicts, and finally by the fall from pre-eminence of the British fleet in the eras of air travel, containerisation and flags of convenience. The dedication, however, points to a strongly moral perspective shaping the narrative. ‘To the many thousands of seafarers who unnecessarily lost their health and lives, not because of ignorance, but as a result of indifference and neglect by government, shipowners and the medical profession’, it runs. ‘Seamen suffered from delays in adapting [sic] good current practice in disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment that was the norm ashore’ (p. v). Thus the book is ‘in part the story of workers whose health was harmed by the conditions under which they worked and lived’ while also being about ‘the effects of changing maritime technology on the risks to those at sea’ (p. 4). At the same time, the author recognises that the seamen’s voice ‘is rarely found in the historical record’. At least until the formation of officers’ associations and ratings’ trade unions later in the period, this dearth of sources means that ‘most of the chapters . . . deal with external perceptions: by doctors, shipowners and government officials concerned with managing health and injury in seamen’ (pp. 20–22). This reviewer was surprised to find that the author does not include any in-depth case-studies of shipping companies. Instead, we encounter allusions to unnamed powerful ‘shipping interest[s]’ issuing veiled threats against maritime regulators to collude with the position of shipowners (p. 4). Specific case studies would have provided both credible evidence for or against these unattributed assertions and a clearer understanding of the range of merchant service practices. Of all the major British liner companies, for example, Cunard alone is mentioned, and that only briefly (pp. 105, 113). Indeed, especially in the nineteenth century, many shipowners were far from being remote financiers or aristocrats but instead arose themselves from comparatively humble seafaring origins (for example, the Runcimans and the Robinsons in the north-east). A major problem with Carter’s narrative is that it judges its heroes and villains from present-day moral perspectives. This narrative equates moral good with progress and places its faith in scientific realism and medical rationality. Thus on the one hand the ‘evidence-based rationale of public health [that] grew out of the imperative to control epidemics . . . was largely successful’. But on the other hand contemporary ‘moral scruples inhibited the development of rational responses to the health effects of “debauchery”, whether alcoholic or venereal, until much later’ (pp. 4, 24). Implicit in this judgment is that the historical actors involved lacked foresight and were even misguided, ignorant or irrational C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 625 beings that allowed their moral values to obscure the necessary actions. As a methodological tenet, indeed, faith in progress can deliver some odd historical ramifications. For example, Norwegian shipowners doubtless saw themselves as more progressive than their British counterparts when they replaced traditional salted with processed food. But it was found later that increased cases of beriberi among Scandinavian seamen were linked to a destruction of nutritional components in the tinned food (p. 99). Taken as a historical survey, the book will nevertheless provide a useful starting point for future scholars working in a relatively uncultivated field. The shortcomings lie in its lack of engagement with the sorts of methodological perspectives offered in recent years by modern practitioners of the history of science, technology and medicine as well as maritime history. Many of these studies follow a spatial turn that provides well developed insights into matters of geography, architecture and institutions. Incorporating some of these insights would have opened up questions of social and political agendas among maritime medical reformers and institutions, raised deeper questions of different shipboard practices and established a strong framework of geographies of medical knowledge.

University of Kent CROSBIE SMITH The Art of the Possible: Politics and Governance in Modern British History, 1885–1997: Essays in Memory of Duncan Tanner .Edited by Chris Williams and Andrew Edwards. Manchester University Press. 2015. xiii + 254pp. £75.00. In one of the last book reviews he wrote Duncan Tanner stressed the need for political historians to defend and explain their approaches given the vagaries of academic fashions: ‘Political parties have a significant impact on people’s daily lives, and understanding those parties’ development and motives (and their myths and cultures) is hardly unimportant’ (review of Andrew Thorpe, Parties at War: Political Organization in Second World War Britain (2009), English Historical Review , 125 (2010), pp. 1575–7). This memorial volume highlights the continued vitality of British political history and the influence of Duncan Tanner’s work in the fields of Labour history, devolution and Welsh identity, and public politics. As Chris Williams notes in his introduction, Tanner’s work eschewed ideologically driven readings of political history, focusing instead on the changing ‘social purchase’ of political ideas over time and how politicians develop support bases by rooting their appeals in the experience of everyday life (p. 6). The essays assembled here take a similar approach, exploring issues such as the development of myths relating to party activism during the Second World War (Thorpe), competing languages of class politics in the 1960s (Lawrence), and Labour’s evolving relationship with Welsh devolution (Edwards and Wiliam). This volume’s essays can be roughly divided into four themes: political language and the changing role of the state, the shifting identity of the Labour movement in England, the politics of Welsh devolution, and the role of popular media in shaping public understandings of the political left. Peter Clarke explores changing understandings of ‘common sense’ in British economic policy since Gladstone, emphasizing that the Second World War and the stagflation of the 1970s turned ideas of economic common sense on their heads. As Clarke C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 626 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES argues, it is important to understand how economic orthodoxy was expressed in ‘common sense terms’ during the first half of the twentieth century due to the lack of Treasury civil servants with degrees in economics (p. 22). Like Clarke, Andrew Thorpe stresses the importance of the Second World War in reshaping understandings of ‘conventional wisdoms’ in British politics. However, while the Conservatives were tarred by the failure of appeasement, they were able to develop a myth around the idea that they had closed virtually their whole party organization for the broader national interest during the war (in contrast to Labour). The myth grew after 1945 and helped the party unite under Churchill’s leadership thereafter (pp. 130–1). Several essays analyse facets of the Labour movement in England and Wales, highlighting the patchwork of local political identities which existed in the twentieth century, much as Tanner did in his Political Change and the Labour Party 1900–1918 (1990). David Howell focuses on the differences in the political culture of neighbouring communities in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, with very dissimilar workplace politics. Jon Lawrence explores the relationship between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ political languages, as analysed in Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s sociological studies of Luton, through an analysis of the Luton by-election of 1963. The focus on class promoted by Labour in Luton clashed with national efforts to promote a ‘classless’ appeal, and there was a similar clash between Luton workers’ understandings of class and the theoretical approaches developed by Goldthorpe and Lockwood. Duncan Tanner’s last project focused on the politics of devolution and he made important contributions to The Labour Party in Wales 1900–2000 (2000), so it comes as no surprise that the analysis of Welsh politics is one of the strongest aspects of this book. Matthew Cragoe explores Conservative attempts to nurture ‘local patriotism’ in Wales, with the establishment of a Minister for Welsh Affairs in 1951. Andrew Edwards discusses the variety of Welsh and British identities which existed within the Labour party in Wales during the mid-twentieth century. However, as he notes, the expression of the former was hampered by the centralized approach to planning favoured under Wilson (p. 157). And finally, Mari Elin Wiliam explores Labour’s changing attitudes towards Welsh devolution after 1979. The Art of the Possible also includes two innovative essays reflecting on the role of popular media in shaping understandings of Labour politics. Building on themes he explores in A State of Play (2014), Steven Fielding considers the value of fiction for understanding the relationship between ‘middle opinion’ and the left. Chris Williams’s chapter explores how Labour was depicted in newspaper cartoons during the early twentieth century, focusing on the career of J. M. Staniforth at the We s t e r n M a i l and News of the World and his growing apprehension at the threat of Labour after 1914. As is to be expected of a volume based on a conference which took place in 2012, aspects of the contributions collected in this volume will be familiar from other articles or books produced by the authors. Nonetheless, as the preceding survey indicates, this is a rich and varied volume, which indicates the continued health of twentieth-century political history in Britain and offers a fitting reflection of the influence of Duncan Tanner on its writing.

University of Exeter DAVID THACKERAY C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 627 Science, Race Relations and Resistance: Britain, 1870–1914 . By Douglas Lorimer. Manchester University Press. 2013. xi + 344pp. £80.00. Recent works on nineteenth-century British anthropology have provided an increasingly nuanced portrait of how theories of racial difference were conceptualised in an era of imperial expansion. Douglas Lorimer has written extensively in this area, and in his new book, Science, Race Relations and Resistance, he directs his focus on the gap between words and action, examining how ideas about race shifted over the course of the century in response to the practicalities of managing an empire. Arguing that the historiography on this topic has focused unduly on scientific approaches to race, he instead evaluates sources addressing the quotidian challenges of racial coexistence, or ‘race relations’. In the opening chapters, Lorimer introduces two competing models of race management – assimilation and separate development – and proceeds to chart their fortunes through subsequent sections dealing with scientific racism, the rhetoric of race relations, and the efforts of anti-racist campaigners to confront the prejudicial consensus of inequality. The assimilationist model, favoured by humanitarians and missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century, assumed that non-white subjects of the empire would eventually integrate into British culture as full citizens, equal under the rule of law. Supporters of separate development, by contrast, held that non-Europeans could never fully civilise, and would only thrive as subordinates with inferior status and separate rights. Lorimer shows how the initial optimism of the assimilationists gave way to the hardened cynicism of the separation advocates, bolstered by biological theories of inequality. Despite Lorimer’s contention that technical studies of race had limited influence in shaping popular perspectives of native peoples, he credits the turn-of-the-century dominance of separation theory to the growing authority of racial science. The final section, on ‘resistance’, deliberately complicates this picture, revealing that a plurality of views on race coexisted even as discriminatory practices were legally codified in the colonies (South Africa being a prime example). Lorimer here presents the views of anti-racist activists such as Catherine Impey and Celestine Edwards, highlighting their arguments against injustice even while admitting their peripheral position in debates on indigenous peoples’ rights. A great strength of Science, Race Relations and Resistance is its refusal to generalize or simplify British ideas about race in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through systematic analyses of a wide variety of sources, from popular science works, to humanitarian journals, to writings by scholars and administrators interested in the ‘colour question’, Lorimer shows that there was always a multiplicity of views about how best to manage race relations.

He also pays careful attention to chronology, showing how the assimilationists prospered in the aftermath of the abolition movement, but lost support later in the nineteenth century when attempting to draw attention to abusive labour practices in the colonies. Instead, the tension arising from this mistreatment provided fuel for the separatists, who increasingly pointed to seeming inability of many non-whites to conform to European expectations. The influence of scientific racism, too, is shown to have varied over this period, moving from the fringes to the mainstream as post-Darwinian anthropology justified imperial rule in evolutionary language. Lorimer rightly directs attention away from the usual, unrepresentative villains of Victorian racism – belligerent polygenists C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 628 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES such as Robert Knox and James Hunt – and towards lesser known, but once popular, writers such as John G. Wood and Augustus H. Keane. Works on race intended for the general public varied widely in intent; some presenting foreign peoples as irredeemably savage, others as childlike and ameliorable. Most authors, Lorimer contends, were dismissive of indigenous cultures one way or another; even those who purported to champion native peoples generally believed their status could only be assured through an adoption of British values. The few voices of resistance presented in the final section are notable in part for their exceptionality in an age dominated by a desire to subdue racial tensions across the empire without sacrificing British power or profits. That they were drowned out by advocates of eternal inequality seems inevitable, but Lorimer shows that this position did not, at least, go completely unchallenged. Lorimer does an exemplary job throughout the book of resurrecting overlooked writers on race, and describing how imperial priorities shaped their views. However, amidst this parade of personalities the readership is generally absent, raising the question of how Victorians situated such texts alongside prints, novels, or exhibitions all presenting alternative visions of race relations in the colonies. If Lorimer succeeds at showing the limited influence of both racial scientists and resistance figures on broader debates around race, it is unclear how public opinion on such matters were ultimately shaped, or if it was as divergent as the litany of sources presented here suggests. Still, Science, Race Relations and Resistance impresses with its exploration of racial rhetoric, and convincingly unravels the tangled relationship between scientific racism and the real problems posed by the ‘colour question’. It thus manages to align imperial history and anthropological history in a new and credible way, and will undoubtedly be valued by scholars in both fields.

University of Warwick ELISE JUZDA SMITH Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography, and the Visualization of the German Nation, 1848–1914 . By Jason D. Hansen. Oxford University Press. 2015. xvii + 193pp. £60.00. Maps are not only an invaluable navigational tool for intrepid explorers, they also have their political uses. As such they have attracted a good deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Maps are not, however, without problems. During one of the interminable inter-allied negotiations at the Paris peace conference of 1919, Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George, held forth about the strategic importance of the Moroccan port of Mogador (now Essaouira). The assembled members of the British delegation were much puzzled, as related in his diary by one of them, the historian Harold Temperley: ‘ “Mogador” said they all, looking at the map on the table. “Where is it?” None of them could find it. Finally, Lloyd George turned to [the] Chief of the Imperial Staff: “Where is it?” “If you take your great foot aside you’ll see it.” .’ A footprint of a different kind is the object of Jason D. Hansen’s monograph on nineteenth-century German statistical science and cartography. In essence, map-making is an attempt to impose, by visual means, a degree of order on an often hostile physical environment; and, in this sense, maps are an instrument for controlling that environment. Hansen’s special interest lies in the use of C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 629 maps to facilitate a sense of ethnic German nationhood in the period between the 1820s (despite the reference to 1848 in the title) and 1914. Mapping the Germans offers a detailed account of the activities of different organizations of professional, usually academic, geographers and statisticians, and more especially their connections with a variety of nationalist groupings, primarily but not exclusively the increasingly vociferous pan-German Alldeutscher Verband. Based on a vast wealth of contemporary specialist literature and maps, with a little sprinkling of archival material, this monograph shows the disparate and often incongruous nature of German nationalism(s). Linguistic, ethnic or cultural attempts to define German nationhood all found their visual reflection in cartographical works in this period. Just as the nascent discipline of demography issued minority groups with statistical ammunition for their demands for redress of their grievances, so the inclusion in contemporary literature, from school books to pan-German pamphlets, of maps showing the spread and distribution of Germanic peoples across central Europe lent to them the appearance of scientific profundity. Such maps, then, were politically significant because they reinforced the activities of various nationalist groups; they gave a seemingly rigorous, academic underpinning to their agitation, and so helped to generate what Hansen calls ‘internal organizational solidarity’. The irony of the story retold here is that, prior to the First World War, the statistical compilations of demographers or ethnic maps produced by cartographers were something of a fringe phenomenon. Their consequences, however, were anything but marginal. Here, as in so much else, the war acted as the great catalyst. At the Paris peace conference population statistics and maps were deployed against Germany, while amongst the geographical community in the vanquished country itself conceptual thinking began to shift in a geopolitical direction. In the process, ethnographical mapping was replaced by the new, all- encompassing notion of Raum (space), a development recently captured in David T. Murphy’s excellent Heroic Earth on the growth of geopolitical thought in Weimar Germany. Mapping the Germans adds to our understanding of the often diffuse nature of German nationalism in the long nineteenth century. But it also casts interesting new light on the politicization of academic disciplines, with pertinent observations on their utter ideological corruption during the first half of the short twentieth century. The inclusion of contemporary maps adds to the attraction of the volume, even though, occasionally, the reproductions are on too small a scale to be of much use to the reader. The prose style is occasionally a little dense and jargon-laden, the blight on modern academic writing. There are also occasional spelling and stylistic slippages. None of this, however, should detract from the merits of what is a very sound and useful book.

University of East Anglia T. G. OTTE The Making of Modern Georgia, 1918–2012: The First Georgian Republic and its Successors . Edited by Stephen F. Jones. Routledge. 2014. xxviii + 363pp. £95.00. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Georgia has moved closer to the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States. The C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 630 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES shift of geopolitical alliances had serious repercussions as Georgia’s powerful neighbour, Russia, is wary of such changes and has actively discouraged any further drift away from Moscow’s orbit. As The Making of Modern Georgia, 1918–2012 explains, Georgia has a long history of breaking from the norms of Eastern Europe and fighting for a constitutional democracy, but has only achieved ‘often ambivalent outcomes’. A preface by Redjeb Jordania, son of the first democratically elected leader of the Democratic Republic of Georgia from 1918 to 1921, writes that even as recently as 2012, ‘there is still little evidence that the first republic, even now, has been incorporated into Georgia’s official history’ (p. xxiii). Stephen F. Jones’s introduction describes the book’s goals, including drawing parallels between the pre and post-Soviet eras and elevating the Democratic Republic of Georgia from beyond a footnote in European history.

The detailed fourteen chapters are divided in four topical parts that examine Georgia’s history with its neighbours, political history, ethnic conflict and the sources of Georgian social democracy. The first section explores Georgia’s historical and contemporary relations with its neighbours. Revaz Gachechiladze compares Georgia from 1918 to 1921 with the more recent era of 1991 to 2010 by discussing how Georgia faced similar problems in both eras with conflict and economic crises, but the latter period includes western backing due to geopolitical concerns as well as having a key position for the transit of oil. Examining how security issues have evolved since the Democratic Republic of Georgia, Alexander Rondeli finds that Georgia faces similar issues with Russia as it did after the First World War, but the roles of the United States and Europe are different now as Russia is a ‘weakened former imperial state’ that ‘continues to undermine the stability and sovereign controls of its weaker neighbors’ (p. 45). Gia Tarkhan-Mouravi also looks at similar issues with the aftermath of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War and finds that instability is a serious concern, but the long-term challenges are about promoting democracy, good governance and education. Mamuka Tsereteli examines Georgia’s geographic location as an energy transit link and argues that the country’s collaboration with Azerbaijan, Turkey and its western allies allowed Georgia to expand its transit function, which was a deterrent against ‘wider Russian aggression in August 2008’ (p. 76). Building from this, Alexandre Kukhianidze reviews military and civilian security to find that human security and the security of democracy are ‘priorities’ that need to be addressed while the government has worked hard fighting corruption and modernizing the economy. In the second part, the chapters are centred on comparing Georgia’s republics. Natalie Sabanadze writes about the dynamics, sometimes shaped by external influences, between ethnic minorities and the state, and concludes that post-Soviet Georgia ‘found itself firmly in the grip of divisive ethno- nationalism’ that requires balancing minority rights and identity with civic and territorial integrity (p. 134). Malkhaz Matsaberidze takes a narrower approach by examining the Democratic Republic of Georgia from 1918 to 1921 with analysis of the constitution, and concludes that the 2010 constitutional reform brought the country ‘back’ to its 1921 ‘parliamentary foundations’. Similarly, Giorgi Kandelaki, a Member of Parliament, draws political parallels between the first republic and contemporary crises by finding that the Democratic C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 631 Republic of Georgia’s ‘system of political pluralism, party cooperation, and parliamentarianism that it established can offer us lessons on how to consolidate the state from within’ (p. 172). Levan Ramishvili and Tamar Chergoleishvili discuss the legacy of the 2003 Rose Revolution by connecting it to a series of societal changes since the 1800s, and argue that ‘social transformation has reached a point of no return’ as all the major social groups now depend on political stability (p. 194). The two final sections focus on ethnic conflict, then move to the origins of Georgian social democracy, respectively. Cory Welt explores minority clashes before the Soviet period and makes several arguments that not all views of Abkhazian and South Ossetian ethnonationalism sought complete independence and the struggles of 1918 to 1921 were not directly tied to the Bolsheviks.

Building from this, Timothy Blauvelt analyses ethnic policy in Soviet Abkhazia from 1921 to 1938 and concludes that ‘Soviet nationality policy failed to create harmony between Abkhazians and Georgians’ while fomenting ‘a potential basis for conflict in the future’ (p. 257). Also examining Georgian–Abkhaz relations, Laurence Broers assesses the contradictory framings of the different sides used after 1991, wherein conflict ‘hardened’ perceptions about Russian interference on the one side and Georgian military incursion on the other. Moving to issues about social democracy, Ronald Grigor Suny writes about Joseph Stalin engaging in 1905 revolutionary activities by highlighting the Mensheviks’ appeal as being more democratic than that of the Bolsheviks, which paved the way for the Democratic Republic of Georgia and provided Stalin with valuable lessons about revolution. In the final chapter, Malkhaz Toria takes a theoretical approach in discussing how the Soviet occupation and Russo-Georgian War are remembered through politics, monuments and education. He finds that state- sponsored ‘memory projects’ about Russian aggression have built cohesion, but ‘dealing with the Soviet legacy remains complicated and unresolved’ (p. 331). The Making of Modern Georgia, 1918–2012 is an excellent collection of essays that combine academic and political expertise on an under-researched country. The book succeeded in detailing the Democratic Republic of Georgia’s significance, which has been often neglected in Georgia’s official histories. Yet as the anthology’s editor acknowledges, a book with such diverse chapters will have gaps, which in this case are viewpoints from the disputed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but also Georgia’s northern neighbour, Russia. Nonetheless, the chapters, introduction and preface examine a range of political and military matters with historical and more contemporary issues about disputed territory and domestic concerns. Rather than dwell on the Soviet Union’s role in Georgia, the book’s themes explain continuity in Georgia’s history, but also detail anomalies that have had significant roles in shaping the country. This book is highly recommended for scholars interested in Caucasus history, expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and ongoing territorial disputes with Russia.

State University of New York, Stony Brook RYAN SHAFFER C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 632 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES The Forgotten Spy: The Untold Story of Stalin’s First British Mole .By Nick Barratt. Blink Publishing. 2015. viii + 288pp. £18.99. With a verve acquired after many hours drawing genealogical tables for television’s Who Do You Think You are? Nick Barratt has turned to his own family by composing the life of his great-uncle, Ernest Holloway Oldham (1894–1933).

This individual developed a taste for the habits of food, drink and clothing among the upper classes by marrying a wealthy widow, Lucy Wellsted (1882–1950), the daughter of an Australian mining engineer who was determined to ensure her prosperity. Oldham’s motive for selling Foreign Office cyphers to the Soviets was not ideology but sheer greed after changes to the administration of his wife’s trust and a reduction in her income from the stock market during the crash of 1929.

His functions as King’s Messenger from July 1929 to September 1931 gave him opportunities to sell secrets to the Soviets until his cover was blown. He then fell into the hands of OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate), the Soviet spy network. The strength of Barratt’s treatment of his motives lies in descriptions of the contrast between his subject’s lifestyle as a bachelor living with his parents in Edmonton and as a husband in Kensington. He explains the structure and methods of the Communications Department in the Foreign Office and the daily routines of cypher clerks and King’s Messengers and how Oldham wanted to move out of the £100 a year pay scales, even to the point of joining the Junior Carlton Club. He shows how his wife transformed his habits by providing a car with a chauffeur. All the dramatis personae are listed at the front of the book, making it easy to follow the pressures placed upon him by OGPU. There is also an element of surprise in the construction of the book when the author has to move to Soviet KGB sources and to the evidence provided in the MI5 file after Oldham came under surveillance. All the records of the Foreign Office Communications Department from 1927 to 1935 have not been preserved in the National Archives. But Barratt shows enterprise in putting together the story of attempts to cover up Oldham’s apparent suicide and the consequences of his betrayal. Quite a lot of this account depends on the evidence provided in the 1973 interview with Dimitri Bystrolyotov, Oldham’s OGPU handler, and on deductions from KGB sources. The book as a whole confirms the importance to MI5 of the debriefing in 1940 of Walter Krivitsky alias Samuel Ginsburg, a former Soviet agent, on Soviet espionage methods described in detail by Kevin Quinlan in The Secret War between the Wars (2014). It also exposes all the weaknesses of Foreign Office security practices and the indignation of George Antrobus when writing for the Foreign Office about King’s Messengers.

University of Bristol J. M. LEE Defence Intelligence and the Cold War: Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau 1945– 1964 .By Huw Dylan . Oxford University Press. 2014. xvi + 240pp. £60.00. Over recent years, the once secret world of intelligence has been the subject of a steady stream of authorized and semi-official publications; notable examples include Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew, MI6 by Keith Jeffery and GCHQ by Richard Aldrich. More recently this genre has been joined by Michael Goodman’s official history of the Joint Intelligence Committee. One C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 633 organization conspicuous by its absence is Defence Intelligence, which enjoys a long and illustrious history dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and arguably before. This omission has now been partially addressed by Huw Dylan’s book Defence Intelligence and the Cold War , which charts the development of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) from its creation in 1945 following the end of the Second World War to its end in 1964, when it formed a central component of the new Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) with the Ministry of Defence. The origins of the JIB can be traced back to the Second World War when Britain’s intelligence machinery expanded rapidly to supply operational planners with up-to-date information on the enemy’s economic, industrial and scientific potential. The wartime arrangements were unwieldy and proved unsuitable for peace: a new organization was required. Headed by Major General Kenneth Strong, General Eisenhower’s wartime intelligence adviser, the JIB was tasked with providing intelligence assessments of an inter-service nature. Based in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, the JIB was not exclusively a military agency.

Its use of civilian staff and open-source intelligence was in contrast to the individual military services who viewed the creation of a centralized intelligence organization with suspicion and disquiet. In its early years, the JIB had to fight for its own existence and was at the centre of debate and controversy over the structure of the British intelligence and defence machinery during the early years of the Cold War. The debates surrounding the creation of the JIB and the manner in which it eventually came to form the nucleus of the DIS reveal much about the prevailing balance of power between the centralizers and their opponents. Based on oral testimony, international archives and private papers, the book sets out to answer three central questions: why was the JIB created at the end of the Second World War; what work did it conduct over the next eighteen years; and why was it merged with the service intelligence agencies to form the DIS? In answering these questions the book shows that far from being a marginal organization, the JIB played a significant part in the Cold War. While Dylan’s contention that the JIB represented ‘a triumph of financial economy and organizational rationality’ is to overstate the case, it is nevertheless true that the JIB fared better than most post-war organizations. This is in part due to the flexible nature of the JIB and the fact it was a compromise agency that reflected a balance of power rather than a final solution. The vision of a centralized military intelligence agency had to await the establishment of the DIS in 1964.

In charting these developments, the book clearly demonstrates that the JIB was at the vanguard of centralization and one of the first organizations to epitomize the inter-agency cooperation that is now a central facet of the modern-day intelligence landscape. The book is divided into five chronological chapters, charting the evolution of the JIB from its wartime origins to its involvement in the bomber and missile ‘gaps’ of the early 1960s, and two thematic chapters that focus on the international dimension of the JIB and its eventual merger with service intelligence to form the DIS in 1964. A key aspect to emerge from the book is the expansive and diverse nature of the JIB’s remit. While some of these activities such as topography, target analysis and estimates of Soviet bomber production, have been documented before, other responsibilities, such as the JIB’s role in economic warfare and export controls, are less well known. The book clearly shows that C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 634 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES the JIB was instrumental in analysing both the Soviet and Chinese economies and determining which commodities, including rubber, pharmaceuticals and diamonds, should be controlled. Dylan cogently argues that the JIB played a consistent and significant role in the economic Cold War and that its conclusions enabled the British government to articulate a pragmatic policy maintaining a balance between the virulent anti-communism of the American Congress, the Soviet desire for strategic goods and Britain’s need to maintain its export market.

Regarded as a safe pair of hands within Whitehall, ministers increasingly turned to the JIB to provide a rationale for declining American requests to implement a more muscular trade embargo that was not in British interests. In common with other works on British intelligence during the Cold War, the relationship with America forms a central theme of the narrative. The book shows that while the Anglo-American intelligence relationship was close and facilitated by bonds of common interest, it was not the closest overseas relationship enjoyed by the JIB. Dylan contends that the most intimate liaison in terms of cooperation and integration was with the Dominion and regional JIBs.

The full extent and influence of these regional outposts appears to have been based on similar lines to the UK/USA agreement governing signals intelligence.

However, owing to the limited availability of the archival record, which is partial, dispersed and fragmentary, a definitive judgement on the global reach of the JIB awaits further study. The book is on firmer ground when comparing the accuracy of the intelligence assessments produced by the JIB and its US counterparts.

In relation to Soviet missile deployment, the JIB concluded that Soviet missile capabilities were not developing as quickly or as significantly as the Americans believed or the Soviets claimed. Many of the American agencies misunderstood and overestimated both Moscow’s capability and its intent; the JIB was more cautious and, in retrospect, correct. The book highlights the key role played by the JIB in reassuring policymakers that Khrushchev’s inflammatory statements were mostly bluster, allowing Britain to play a more conciliatory role in East– West relations. It also confirms the view that intelligence assessments are never wholly objective but equally reliant on cultural, institutional and political biases. The book is less informative when discussing the influence of the JIB on policy development. This is unsurprising given the lacunae in the archival record and the epistemological difficulty of calibrating the impact of any given piece of intelligence on subsequent actions. A further limitation of the book is that, apart from the dominant personality of Kenneth Strong, there is little evidence presented of other opinions or ideas. The views of Henry Tizard, Lord Cherwell and especially R. V. Jones, Head of the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence, are largely absent from the narrative. Such discussion would have provided balance and a much-needed human dimension to an otherwise somewhat dry institutional history. These minor shortcomings, however, are more than compensated for by the level of detail and original material contained in the book, which fills a gap in the literature and provides a valuable resource for all those interested in post-war British intelligence and Cold War history.

The National Archives, Kew STEPHEN TWIGGE C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd LATE MODERN 635 States of Division: Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany . By Sagi Schaefer. Oxford University Press. 2014. xv + 219pp. £60.00. According to common sense, public education and political discourse in Germany, there can be little doubt about the nature of the German division which was forced upon the people in a one-sided and predominantly military move by the Communist state. The intra-German border, especially in the shadow of the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, has been seen as another expression by the East German establishment of territorial rule by dictatorial means. Recent German literature has inspired a fruitful debate about the motivations for the construction of the Berlin Wall – which epitomized the wider division – wherein the German population in general, and border residents in particular, mostly appear as victims of greater and sinister forces. Examples of this type of approach include Matthias Uhl und Armin Wagner (eds), Ulbricht, Chruschtschow und die Mauer: Eine Dokumentation (2010); Manfred Wilke, Der Weg zur Mauer: Stationen der Teilungsgeschichte (2011); and Michael Kubina, Ulbrichts Scheitern: Warum der SED-Chef nicht die Absicht hatte eine ‘Mauer’ zu errichten, sie aber dennoch bauen liess (2013). Yet, by shifting attention from Berlin to the intra-German border, recent international scholarship has tackled this centrist focus. Edith Sheffer’s Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (2011) in particular broke new ground and argued for a social and cultural history of division, reflected in specific local constellations at the GDR’s southern border to Bavaria. In contrast to the common and complacent narrative in reunified Germany, she argued for a more careful observation of local factors. She demonstrated that, in the separation of two formerly economically and socially closely related cities, local residents and local businessmen played a major role in bringing about the character of the border and thereby shaping its social reality. This is where Sagi Schaefer’s book enters the story. He takes Sheffer’s main arguments and applies them to a situation far more representative of the German ‘borderscape’: the vast and economically already marginalized countryside. His research area, the Catholic Eichsfeld, formed a cultural enclave in the middle of a strongly Protestant region south of the Harz mountains. Family ties, landownership as well as cultural relations shaped a distinct Eichsfeld identity, which then was shattered by German division. In about ten years a formerly largely irrelevant county line running through the Eichsfeld region turned into a highly militarized state border. As the brilliant title suggests, Schaefer has a dual goal. First, he is continuing Sheffer’s line of work, transplanting the argument of division as a predominantly locally developing social process from small town to rural Germany. Drawing on intensive archival research, Schaefer demonstrates that local peasants reacted to division in a multitude of ways. Since, in contrast to Berlin, the establishment of the demarcation line as a militarized border did not happen overnight but during a lasting, and for a long time contingent, process, peasants tried to find ways to deal with both the loss of land property and ever complicating cross-border family relations. In particularly detailed chapters the book tells a fascinating story of the continuing loss of control over land and the creative ways it was dealt with, which led to various conflicts on each side of the border. The East German peasantry, for instance, tried to lease their unreachable property to their West German relatives and thus maintain relations. The East German state viewed these actions as at best suspicious and at worst treasonous. The governments of C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 636 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES western states argued for these ‘abandoned’ lots to be used to compensate other peasants for their land loss to the east. The West German federal government, however, intervened because such compensations could have been interpreted as recognition of separation, which would make them unconstitutional. In the examination of such complexities Schaefer presents not only a picture of the daily life of peasants on the border and the conflicts that arose because of their agency, but also directs the reader towards his second goal. In a move away from Sheffer’s predominantly local focus, he aims to bring the state back in. Even when exploring the local specifics of a hinterland region, he demonstrates that governments and the remote state administration remained major players. This approach leads him to some rather general conclusions about the character of division as a project where ‘East and West partnered in constructing the border’ (p. 1). Apart from such general theoretical assumptions, the empirical material displays a more balanced approach to the rather involuntary cooperation of east and west in the establishment of division. Therefore the book mainly profits from the outstanding and telling archival material Schaefer gathered in a multitude of local and governmental archives. These sections demonstrate that, despite shared East and West German agency, qualitative differences defined the character of division and the experiences of lives on each side of the border. This comes to light especially in the dichotomy between the peasants’ entitlement to claim land and rights and the states following their own agendas without much concern for the costs on the ground. Schaefer shows that land ownership, political representation and the freedom of movement along the border are not only the expression of a political system, but also carry abstract concepts of power formation into everyday life. Such conflicts especially came to light in the earlier years of the Cold War. Naturally – and perhaps similarly to Edith Sheffer’s work – these parts of the book are the strongest in addressing the local reality of division. While the book develops its argument up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the increasing complexities of later years receive less attention. While Schaefer’s story of the 1950s and 1960s is mainly focused on social issues with political forces looming in the background, this is turned around for the 1970s. In the wake of rapprochement and inter-German relations, both states agreed on a border commission to refine the borderline as well as to bilaterally discuss issues and events along the border. Here Schaefer again profits from the strength of his groundwork. While other studies perceive the border commission as an expression of conflicting state politics (see Klaus Otto Nass, Die Vermessung des Eisernen Vorhangs (2010) and Peter F ¨ usslein, Die Grenzkommission (2014)), Schaefer demonstrates that open negotiations about the border in the commission also affected the local presence and the character of the border in the Eichsfeld. This, most importantly, included the construction of one of the few border-crossing points which enabled western residents to travel as visa-free short-term tourists into the east ( kleiner Grenzverkehr ). This came with a multitude of revitalized contacts but also new conflicts such as the acknowledgement of interfamily disputes as a consequence of the development of two culturally distinct societies. In line with his focus on the social, Schaefer does not interpret these contacts as precursors of reunification, but rather as an expression of yet another layer of the state of division.

C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE AMERICAS 637 Altogether one of the major strengths of Schaefer’s book is to withstand the many temptations of hindsight and to explore the history of division as an enrolling social process, tied to political conflict. In his wonderful book Schaefer adds a new layer to the history of divided Germany by looking at what is at first sight a marginal region. A closer look, however, reveals that this region is the perfect choice for a comprehensive and compelling history of the effects of division as a multi-level process. It is as much a story of conflict as of cooperation, both intended and inadvertent. Despite the extensive time frame and the book’s relative brevity, it is to be hoped that his inclusion of social and political history in one microstudy of national relevance breaks the ground for many similar studies to follow.

Osnabr ¨ uck University FRANK WOLFF The Americas Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian County . By Julie A. Fisher and David J. Silverman. Cornell University Press. 2014. xxiv + 190pp. $27.95.

Biographies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Native Americans are certainly not hard to come by, but lives of Indians in colonial North America are rare, especially for the seventeenth century. This is not surprising. The dearth of information available on individual natives during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often prevents historians and biographers from investigating what is meaningful and powerful about individual Indians of that period. When those scholars brave enough to venture into this type of project do write their works, they often, and necessarily, are forced to discuss a wider range of subjects than more conventional biographies do, resorting to speculation, thematic digressions or methodological asides to fill up the pages. It takes historians of insight and command to pull biographies like this off, and even then some of these works fall flat. Happily this is not the case with Fisher and Silverman’s work on the Narragansett and Niantic leader Ninigret. They understand the limitations of the evidence – that there is not enough of it, and whatever does exist derives from European colonial sources. Yet despite these issues the authors, convinced of the sachem’s importance, follow every possible path in the materials and have produced a volume of great insight and historical ingenuity. Ninigret was a powerful leader of the Niantics, a native group that attached itself to the growing hegemony of the Narragansetts in the area that became southern New England during the seventeenth century. His importance, and his long life, allow these historians to analyse a series of themes in the history of the region during the century, as Ninigret rose to power during the tumultuous moments of the Pequot War (1634–8), and maintained it through a period of engagement, disease and transatlantic trade and capital, all the way to the disastrous King Philip’s War (1675–6). That longevity allows Fisher and Silverman to document the different roles and demands that sachems played at different times in their lives.

C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 638 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES Skillfully, Fisher and Silverman weave a series of important themes in seventeenth-century Indian and colonial American history through Ninigret’s impressive life. He lived during a period in which war between New England’s colonies and its surrounding Indian populations was a constant threat, and he played significant roles in both preventing and threatening that violence. By doing so, the authors argue, Ninigret’s life ‘captures the multipolar character of the era’s politics’ (p. xix), as Indians and English settlers maintained complicated and often divergent motives in their relations with each other. The sachem also allows the authors to insist on the importance of individual human interaction and the power of emotions in social and political change during the period.

And by focusing on a leader of the Niantics, an Indian group that split from the Narragansetts and maintained neutrality with the English for most of King Philip’s War, Fisher and Silverman hope that their book will counter the dominant argument in the historiography, that the Indians and the New English colonies were on a collision course throughout much of the seventeenth century, and that war would be an inevitable outcome. These historians succeed in their task, almost more than the limitations in their material should really allow. Ninigret is a man clearly worth a closer look, someone who should garner respect as one of the most powerful and important men to live in the English and Indian north-east during the seventeenth century.

His life can help us think through the terrible, tumultuous change that New England represented for those Indians. This work deserves a wide audience, one interested in native biography, native–imperial interaction, and the tactics, strategies and deployment of political and military power in the seventeenth century.

Dickinson College CHRISTOPHER BILODEAU American’s Dirty Wars: Irregular Warfare from 1776 to the War on Terror.

By Russell Crandall. Cambridge University Press. 2014. xiii + 583pp. £27.99. ‘Much of the labeling of insurgent and counterinsurgent forces’, Russell Crandall states, ‘is inherently political’ (p. 16). Few books better illustrate the point. Often inadvertently, America’s Dirty Wars adopts discursive strategies that unmask the author’s political positions and theoretical oversights, revealing as much about ideological allegiances as irregular warfare. Enormously ambitious, this nearly 600-page work spans over two centuries, during which ‘the United States has been engaged in irregular wars almost without interruption’ (p. 3). Despite this constancy, the United States – according to ‘a central premise of this book’ – ‘does not properly learn from its involvement’ (p. 14). In two introductory chapters largely given over to terminology, proper escapes definition. But clues abound, as do contradictions. In a bid for scholarly neutrality, the book’s objective ‘is neither to condemn nor justify America’s track record in dirty wars’. Rather it seeks paradoxically to illuminate the ‘good, the bad, and the ugly’ of it (p. 6), suggesting inevitable ethical underpinnings, along with moral judgments about ubiquitous ugly praxis: endemic atrocities and abuses construed as ‘excesses or errors’ (p. 469).

Irregular is defined via 1949’s Third Geneva Convention as a counterpoint to regular standing armies, and a conservative formulation results. Whoever is in C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE AMERICAS 639 power – hierarchically marshalling a voluntary or conscripted military force, waving national flags and openly carrying weapons – is legitimate; insurgents perforce illegitimate. Attempts at definitional precision expose a definitional crisis. The nominal origin of guerrilla warfare – a tactic, we are told, of insurgents – was the Spanish defence of the homeland against Napoleon’s invading imperial armies.

Momentary conquest achieved, French regulars under this logic engage in counterinsurgency. Invading British and American empires similarly are granted discursive validity, even for their ‘punitive campaigns intended as retaliation for certain offenses ’ by locals (p. 26, emphasis added). Despite occasional nods to anti-imperialist movements, Crandall dismisses out of hand the option ‘to simply stay out’ of these wars, as if forging such broad-based consensus and non-interventionist resolve could ever be simple; instead he proposes that ‘Americans . . . fight . . . as cleanly and successfully as possible’ (p. 12). Thus when the author uses we to refer to the US military, he unselfconsciously declares both his nationalist preferences and professional realities. Outside teaching at Davidson College, the bio discloses, he is employed by the Pentagon and National Security Council. Crandall never asks why the 1977 Geneva protocols (refining categories already outmoded in 1949) have not been ratified by the United States. Civil war is never clearly distinguished from insurgency, military ally from client state (Trujillo’s longevity is unexplained, Franco unmentioned). As to why these armed conflicts incessantly erupt, Crandall gestures toward ‘a country’s national interests’ (p. 24). His section ‘On War’ repeats the turn of nineteenth-century strategist Clausewitz; additional honorific epigraphs go to Caesar and Churchill.

Neither Agamben nor Enloe figure in the bibliography. This mammoth account is largely chronological. Part I addresses, among others, the American Revolution, Native genocides, US Civil War, Mexico, Bolshevism, Nicaragua, and so-called banana wars – which were, more accurately, about American banks, mines, railroads and canals. The Cold War comprises Parts II and III. Part IV stretches across the turn of the twenty-first century, from Iraq to Afghanistan, the Philippines to Colombia. Does Colombia, subject of the author’s previous book, produce insights into the American nation-state’s problematic declarations of war on such capacious categories as drugs and terrorism? Not in abundance. Beyond the predictable alignment of indigent coca farmers with armed terrorists, a ‘U.S.-backe d...win’ is chalked up (p. 362). There is little reflection on the role of US cocaine consumption in generating criminalized hierarchies of production and distribution (a de facto war on poor people of colour at home and abroad) or of US imperial aggression in radicalizing would-be reformers or politicized revolutionaries into civilian-targeting terrorists. Widespread military abuses are recast as anomalies, yielding apologetic assertions that ‘Americans’ supporting role was far from perfect’ (p. 350) and that President Uribe was not ‘somehow a saint’ (p. 360). Of fourteen chapters on the Cold War, Crandall’s treatment of the Greek Civil War perhaps best evidences US anti-communist logics, rationalizations and misadventures. Conceding leftist ‘legitimacy among the Greek population’ as Nazi resisters (p. 167), especially contrasted with right-wing paramilitary terrorism and government torture, Crandall nonetheless constructs UK support C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 640 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES for royalists, CIA machinations and Truman’s $200 million provisioning of a ‘particularly corrupt . . . Greek army’ (p. 169) as a light-footprint success story influencing Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policies. By treating Greece as a pawn in the early Cold War, Crandall fails to engage with subsequent US support for the military junta of 1967–74 and thus fails to account for the enduring Greek antipathy to the IMF and to US overseas military bases. Of the volume’s two dozen maps, none depicts this comprehensive globalized infrastructure of American empire. Instead, the book’s key strength is its thoroughgoing analysis of historically contingent, locally specific battle strategies and combat tactics. Discussions of British and American concentration camps and other unlawful detention centres, for example, are unusually frank. However, the fixed focus on successive techniques of triumph or failure forecloses broad meditation on the global injustice of perpetual American warfare or on the multilateral imperative to stop it. In sum, the book’s stated aim to help Americans learn from military history to fight both successfully and cleanly is half-fulfilled. In this account, US victory repeatedly trumps principle. Winning at all costs (including epidemic PTSD and countless suicides) supersedes fighting under internationally agreed and monitored rules of warfare, not to mention pre-conflict negotiated settlement.

‘Alas’, even after the demise of Cold War enemies, ‘there [i]s always someone left to fight’ (p. 339).

King’s College London JOHN HOWARD Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America . By Peter Andreas. Oxford University Press. 2013. xiii + 454pp. £12.00. The histories that Peter Andreas recounts in Smuggler Nation could provide settings for a dozen excellent heist movies. They range from the darkened coves frequented by smugglers in the American Revolution to the smoky speakeasies of Prohibition to Mexican border towns, and Professor Andreas addresses nearly every vice known to mankind. Writing an academic treatise on sexy and evocative topics has become mainstream since the 1960s and 1970s, but even so students sit up a little straighter and pay more attention when their lecturers reach a topic redolent with human interest. Close attention to Andreas’s arguments is merited, as he painstakingly demonstrates the flaw in much of the United States’ legal framework for 250 years: namely, sincerity is a poor basis for public policy. Andreas organizes Smuggler Nation both thematically and chronologically. Five parts, averaging three chapters each, pair a phase of American history with the hottest smuggled items in the market at that time, whether rum, French brandy, arms, slaves, contraceptives, illegal aliens, marijuana, cocaine or parrots.

While Andreas’s research is thorough, it is not striking for its investigation of new primary sources. Andreas rather relies on the publications of established experts for each period history, such as Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan when dealing with colonial America, and collections of primary sources. As a scholar of government, political science and international relations, perhaps novel historical arguments are not Andreas’s job. Rather, he synthesizes a staggering amount of historical research into an argument that touches and illuminates every decade of American history, an impressive undertaking indeed.

C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE AMERICAS 641 Spinning his tales of intrigue with clarity, Andreas compels his reader to recognize several principles rarely recognized by American political elites. First, government regulation and prohibition of various products provides a vehicle for the expansion of federal powers and the militarization of government agents (i.e. police and border control). The overweening search and seizure powers held by US Customs when protectionism was at its height are a prime example of the first problem. Prohibition transformed the US Coast Guard from a ‘small organization, known chiefly to the mariner’ to a public and muscled military service (p. 239). Second, legislation prompted by moral crusades often produces increased corruption in government, such as paid-off customs officials and complicit judges, more than it produces a pure-hearted population. Historical proof ranges from the colonial customs officials in eighteenth-century British America to the eminently bribable New York customhouse employees of the Gilded Age. While customs workers may have been most susceptible to a share of smuggled pearls or cigars, the higher-ups often gained their posts through political favouritism in the first instance. Third, attempts to eliminate illicit trade may appear successful when in actuality smuggling activities have simply been rerouted or driven deeper underground. This allows the most violent smugglers to dominate the trade as they drive the small-time lawbreakers out of the business through brute force and fear. The US federal government’s recent approach to drug trafficking from Mexico illustrates this point. Cracking down on smugglers with sophisticated technology in the 1990s resulted in the dominance of Los Zetas, a ‘ruthless’ criminal organization whose members were previously part of an ‘elite U.S-trained Mexican military unit’, in the 2000s (p. 329). Fourth, smuggling is an activity created by a legal definition. ‘In other words, smuggling would be defined away in a truly “borderless world” in which free trade and labor mobility reigned in all sectors of the economy’ (p. 334). The alcohol that was prohibited in the 1920s is legal today, and the harder drugs that modern students are taught to abhor used to be available in soft drinks and mail-order pills! (See the 1885 advertisement for ‘cocaine toothache drops’ recommended to children and adults, (p. 255).) Likewise, circumstances defining and restricting illicit activities change. In the early twentieth century, Chinese immigrants used to smuggle themselves from Mexico into the United States by disguising themselves as Mexicans. At that time, no one paid attention to border-crossing Mexicans. Today Mexicans are the most ubiquitous target for politicos railing against illegal immigration. In Smuggler Nation , Andreas makes it is his business to ‘inject a strong dose of historical perspective into today’s overheated policy debates about securing borders and fighting global crime’ (p. 3), and it is to be hoped that his agenda meets with success. I would suggest, however, that Andreas has approached his topic with a libertarian, perhaps even amoral, perspective that leaves the political discussion incomplete. If Andreas’s arguments concerning illicit trade are true, then what does ethical political regulation look like? The astute reader will absorb Andreas’s narrative as a healthy dose of both history and reality while also conscious of the opportunities to reframe the moral questions that arise when government defines, prosecutes and punishes illicit activities.

University of Cambridge KENNEDY SANDERSON C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 642 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES A Concise History of the New Deal . By Jason Scott Smith. Cambridge University Press. 2014. xi + 211pp. £17.99. Approaching the topics of the Great Depression and the New Deal present a significant challenge, since both can be approached from several different angles.

By producing A Concise History of the New Deal , Jason Scott Smith magnifies this challenge by condensing his analysis. Nevertheless, the result captures the spirit of the period and the important points concerning the New Deal, even if important criticisms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s approach are either played down or ignored. The most important point that Smith makes in A Concise History of the New Deal is why Roosevelt and his administration decided to initiate the New Deal. There are many criticisms of the New Deal, even conspiracy theories, concerning communism, corporate welfare and its inability to stop the Great Depression. However, Smith outlines quite well that the New Deal did succeed in breaking the hopelessness people felt at the start of the Great Depression, thus laying the foundation for an eventual recovery. Despite Roosevelt’s clear political machinations, which Smith does highlight to some extent, there was also a general desire to help Americans escape the desperation they experienced in the 1930s.

Smith underlines this point by reminding us how both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt spent a lot of their time reading letters from citizens explaining their specific situation and/or problems. Smith also emphasizes two major accomplishments of the New Deal that had the most profound effect on the economy during and after the Great Depression:

the Glass–Steagall Act and the Social Security Act. Glass–Steagall, which separated commercial banking from investment banking, and Social Security removed fundamental risks and uncertainties from important aspects of everyday life that liberated Americans to take chances to add to the national economy.

While there were other aspects of the New Deal, these two were foundational elements and arguably the most successful in allowing the other pieces of the New Deal to function. Smith also correctly highlights that the environment and the policy-making of the New Deal were not straightforward and were plagued with contradictions and complexities. Throughout he notes the many instances where Roosevelt hesitated concerning several aspects of the New Deal, including Glass-Steagall, because of his philosophy of fiscal austerity that clashed with the ‘Keynesian’ style of the New Deal. He also concedes that Roosevelt initially adhered to some of Herbert Hoover’s initiatives and that the ‘court packing plan’ led to a strengthened opposition and a backlash against the New Deal itself. It was not a smooth process and A Concise History of the New Deal , despite its brevity, presents this important aspect to the reader. That being said, Smith’s affinity for the New Deal does prevent a more balanced approach on the merits and effectiveness of the New Deal in remedying the Great Depression. Outside quoting the opposition, he does not address the weaknesses of initiatives like the Public Works Administration, particularly concerning their corruptibility by big business and corporate lobbyists. At various points he does outline that specific legislation was hijacked by these influences, but implies that this was the result of the wrong implementation of legislation. He never approaches the possibility that it could be that the C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE AMERICAS 643 government might not act rationally and/or independently, which was clearly the case in the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Furthermore, despite the magnitude of what the New Deal tried to achieve in reversing the Great Depression, it was not as revolutionary as Smith or others have expressed. Yes, the New Deal represented a shift in thinking in government service, but these ideas were hardly new or something alien to the American public. The Populist Movement decades earlier in the nineteenth century proposed policies very similar to those embraced by Progressives in Congress in the 1930s and the designers of the New Deal. When compared to other countries at the time, the United States actually represented the middle road between the limited approach of the British and the rather zealous approach taken by the Fascists in Italy. It was, in actuality, a moderate position that sought to placate the various constituencies in the United States who were fearful of losing any advantage in the government’s actions to combat the economic tragedy of the 1930s. Despite these points, A Concise History of the New Deal presents an overall history of the New Deal that captures the spirit of the time, as well as giving lessons for our own. It provides a concise narrative of the political impact of the New Deal, its effects on Americans, and how government service could become a force to insure citizens against the greater risks of capitalism. More importantly, it provides an eerie precedent for how events have unfolded today after the collapse of the banking sector in 2008–9 and lessons we could take to solve the aftermath. As Smith closes, ‘The unfolding story of the twenty-first century’s Great Recession underscores that for a “usable past” to exist, people must first choose to understand it’ (p. 182).

King’s College London ALFRED CARDONE The Great Depression in Latin America. Edited by Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight. Duke University Press. 2014. 362pp. £17.99. Post-revisionism may be defined as the synthesis of orthodox and revisionist schools, with the injection of greater nuance and detail into existing debates.

The Great Depression in Latin America fulfils such a definition, putting flesh on those theoretical or broad-narrative bones which have best weathered the historiographical scrutiny of the last thirty years or so. The obvious (and welcome) casualties of such an approach are soundbites, clich ´ es and glib supra-national generalizations; in their place we find intriguing local studies often challenging their national-historical orthodoxy, bookended by regional syntheses which make important steps towards a new consensus, though one (perfectly reasonably) based as much on questions as on answers. Roy Hora shows that change in Argentina during the (long) Great Depression took forms which run counter to existing narratives. While the initial shock was severe, by the later 1930s Argentina had returned to its pre-1930 trajectory on many economic and developmental issues; by 1947, for instance, half of all households in Argentina owned a radio, constituting two-thirds of all those in South America. Death rates and birth rates fell, and life expectancy (in the capital city in particular) rose dramatically. Meanwhile the urban centres of the littoral were swelled by more than 1 million internal migrants. Hora puts C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 644 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES the case for exploring the correlation between internal migration and ‘the emergence of a more nationalistic, inward-looking cultural climate’, though warns against overemphasizing direct causality (p. 29). And while there was an increase in cultural ‘nativism’ and ‘anti-imperialist rhetoric’, many rural migrants severed their links with their region of origin and remade themselves permanently as urban citizens. The great value of this book is illustrated in two contrasting examples in which region-wide assumptions are undermined and local detail comes to the fore. Doug Yarrington offers an interpretation of Venezuelan politics which seems both persuasive and new. Beginning with Ellner’s distinction between an orthodox school which views the G ´ omez-L ´ opez transition as essentially one of continuity, and revisionists who see instead limited steps towards democracy, Yarrington sets out a third position whereby a change is marked with the accession of L ´ opez, though not necessarily a positive one. Instead, we find the roots of Venezuela’s ‘exclusionary anti-pluralism’, a tradition which continued not only throughout the puntofijista period, but also into the contemporary era. Although Joel Wolfe views Brazil (and particularly the Vargas regime) through a similarly revisionist lens, he concludes that here the strength and reach of the government may previously have been significantly overstated. Instead, Wolfe argues that both political centralization and labour cooptation processes were much less complete than usually suggested. A good deal of the book concerns the working class, as one would expect, but the manifestations of class agency in the face of the Great Depression are shown to be many and varied. In the case of Chile, Angela Vergara suggests – contrary to an orthodox view of cooptation – that ‘working people were able to resist, negotiate, and adapt to the changing economic and political conditions’ (p. 53).

However, alongside this recovery of a radical narrative is a second thread: that of mass migration. This migration was important for its associated effects: not only the regional transfer of knowledge of political praxis, but also in ‘spreading fear among landowners and political authorities from smaller towns and cities’ (p. 53). For Gillian McGillivray, the tension between union activity and direct action as forms of resistance was a crucial aspect of the period in Cuba. The sugar workers’ union was founded in the context of the Great Depression, but legalistic approaches could meet with only limited success in a context of a ‘well-funded secret police force’ and the application of the ley de fuga (p. 248). McGillivray describes the manner in which those joining unions – and a fortiori those organizing them – were forced from their homes and places of employment.

In such circumstances, many favoured sabotage as a means of pressing class interest (or, to put it another way, defending class position). Ingenious methods of arson are described, including time-delayed waxed phosphorous, flaming oiled tree rats, and snakes with fiery brands attached to their tails. By such means (and the more prosaic practice of manual torching), vast quantities of sugar cane were destroyed by radicalized workers. State formation and welfare provision are frequently referenced. For Peru, as the chapter by Paulo Drinot and Carlos Contreras makes clear, this was a period of elite consolidation, not only in economic terms but also with regard to the broad white/ mestizo -indigenous and coast/highlands dichotomies. Peru was ‘passive, not reactive’ in the face of the Wall Street Crash, and was one of the few nations in the region to take the austerity road. Nevertheless, the response of C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE AMERICAS 645 the elite to economic crisis – which ‘echoed developments in Latin American and, indeed, in Europe and the United States’ – came through the mechanism of social security (p. 118). While net spending was reduced from pre-Crash levels even in the late 1930s, the government embraced ‘work creation schemes . . . housing projects...and state-run eateries’ (p. 118). The chapter on Colombia puts forward the useful concept of ‘export protectionism’ as an alternative economic framework which challenges both the idea that there was a clear shift from a laissez-faire export regime to import substitution and also the revisionist view that import substitution began rather earlier than orthodox histories suggest. Instead, Marcelo Bucheli and Luis Felipe S ´ aenz argue that, for parts of the region at least, the export model survived, and that those protectionist policies which were enacted were aimed at the export sector. Hence for Colombia the Great Depression afforded the opportunity to ‘deepen and institutionalize’ the prevailing economic model (p. 130). Like Peru, Colombia adopted pro-cyclical policies; as Knight points out, Mexico was in this group until the return of Alberto Pani to government (as Secretary of Finance) in 1932, which marked a sharp shift into the heterodox, anti-cyclical camp. Not all commonalities have been expunged of course. Jeffrey Gould’s excellent chapter on Central America highlights several regional trends; he focuses particularly on the manner in which ‘ indigenista rhetoric and policies bolstered the region’s dictatorial regimes and had significant political ramifications’, not least the driving of a wedge between the left and much of the indigenous population (p. 206). The contrast with Mexico – where indigenismo went hand in hand with the peak of tolerance for the Communist Party – is clear. Again, though, continuities and organic developments are foregrounded: ‘whereas the rise to power of the military regimes was a prophylactic response to the social and political consequences of . . . rapid immiseration, the subsequent financial and economic recovery from such dramatic depths may have garnered the caudillos some measure of popular support’ (p. 190). This book fills two related but distinct needs. First, it updates and augments a patchy field within Latin American history, that of the 1930s. The introduction, by Paulo Drinot, identifies important lacunae in the current explanatory framework, not least that ‘neither ISI nor populism adequately accounts for the range of processes that the Great Depression either set in motion or accelerated’ (p. 5).

Alan Knight’s conclusion aggregates the collection’s broad economic argument – ‘if the impact was severe, in many cases recovery was rapid and sustained’ – with the ‘more skittish and idiosyncratic’ sphere of politics, where commonalities are rather fewer (pp. 279, 287). Knight divides the political sphere into ‘conjunctural’ and ‘structural’ units of analysis: the former include resurgent oligarchies, new personalist authoritarianisms and redistributive, anti-imperialist rebellion; the latter, ‘a marked tendency for the role of the state to grow, under regimes of both the Left and Right’, and the first hints of what would later become ‘CEPALismo’ (p. 298). In a useful comparison with the 1980s debt crisis, Knight puts forward the argument that the political pressures in both periods were ‘anti-incumbent’ rather than ‘ideologically discriminating’ (p. 294). Second, the publication of this volume removes any excuses that course-setters in 1930s world history may have offered for overlooking Latin America; no longer can there be an appeal to the fewness or freshness of relevant studies. Here are new histories of political economy which give rich contrasts and comparisons C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 646 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES for those studying fascism, communism and corporatism in Europe and North America, with fascinating possibilities for the extension of this impulse into a truly global approach to the 1930s by linking up with histories of African and Asian political economy during the same period.

University College London WILLIAM BOOTH God and Uncle Sam: Religion and America’s Armed Forces in World War II .By Michael Snape. Boydell. 2015. xxiv + 704pp. £30.00. We do not have to look far to be reminded that religion can serve both to confirm and oppose the power of states, domestically and internationally.

Religion can stir people to take up arms or it can pacify them, it can mediate between combatants or stir up conflicts, it can accelerate but also resist military action. God and Uncle Sam touches upon these contradictory functions in analysing the relationship between institutionalized religion and American military action in the Second World War, but it does not explicitly seek to build a general framework for understanding the dynamics between war and religion. This book operates on a more preparatory level. Its main purpose is to correct the popular impression that the American experience in the Second World War was mostly a secular affair with an occasional sprinkle of superstition. God and Uncle Sam turns the tables and makes religion the key topic in the war. The sequence of the terms in the title indicates that the primary domain is religion. The author, Michael Ramsey, Professor of Anglican Studies at Durham University, is an expert in this field. He builds a convincing case for the importance of this under-researched topic by loading 600 pages with examples from private and public sources on all levels in the military, backed up by fifty pages of notes. The book serves a second goal and that is to show that the religious presence in the military apparatus prepared the post-war religious revival in the United States. This outbreak of religious enthusiasm was a result of the strengthened public function of institutional religion. Millions of service men and women shared experiences first-hand in ecumenical cooperation that transcended their church boundaries. Their tours of duty boosted church attendance and prepared the way for the use of religious confirmation of the moral high ground of the Cold Wa r. The emphasis on the continuity of religion in the military logically leads to this result. Though it is a provoking hypothesis, the continuity factor does not satisfy the necessary conditions for revival. Most religious historians argue that the post-war American revival was a result of the dynamics of hope and fear. The incentives for expecting a revival are more complex than the continuity of religion.

While mainline churches benefited from the post-war boom, the competing evangelicals concentrated their efforts in Youth for Christ rallies that were at the heart of the international revival and laid the basis for a new subculture.

Encounters with fellow believers and with other religions broadened the horizon of Christian soldiers and created an awareness of the limitations of and chances for their faith communities. Many Christian servicemen assisted in supporting Christian minorities in occupied countries. Both experiences encouraged some C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE AMERICAS 647 to sign up for foreign missions after the war. The author includes numerous examples of conflicts between different religious practices, but the consensus about the unifying power of religion wins. While the assessment of the effects is debatable, this does not undermine the evidence for the religious presence in the military, and the civilian presence in the war effort. The millions of new recruits and the relatively weak position of the military apparatus before the war secured a strong civilian presence. The author offers a convincing argument in the ratio between combat troops and supporting staff for the claim that religion was not overwhelmed by combat. This is both a welcome and plausible correction of popular belief. In Europe four men were needed to facilitate one soldier in the field and in the Pacific theatre eighteen men. The backbone of the strong position of organized religion was the improved reputation of the chaplain. The position of chaplaincy in the forces had advanced since the end of the First World War, developed further in the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal that familiarized the churches with public service outside their sanctuaries. When the war began, a stream of candidates from the clergy applied for service, as they were attracted by the generous salary, high educational standards, the spirit of cooperation and the important responsibility for keeping up the morale in the army. Moreover, chaplains were needed to give the last rites and to stir the working of the conscience in order to prevent war crimes. This prominent function of military clergy boosted their status. Religion was everywhere, thanks to strong government support for religious values and material support for religious exercises. Prayers and worship services created coherence within the ranks, owing to the overrepresentation of officers from the established churches. The consequence of this supportive function was that all dissenting minority voices were muffled. Even more seriously, this state support violated the US Constitution. Even though the privileges of the three major traditions in the military were widely accepted and the non- denominational character of religious offices broke down church boundaries, these effects made it harder for minority faiths to function with equal rights. The author grants the difficulty for adherents of smaller groups, but underestimates the collective effects. The ecumenical agenda triggered competition between evangelical and mainstream operations. The harmony model overwhelmed the conflict model while at least the perception of religious tension was a strong incentive to invest in revivals during and after the war. Much more convincing is the author’s neutralization of the popular assumption that the feeling of the physical threat in combat led to more religious behaviour. The author cites a great number of testimonies of religious expression, but their effect proved temporary and flimsy. The strength of religious traditions was best visible in the frequency of prayer when in danger. Between 57 and 88 per cent of soldiers prayed under stress. On the home front prayer exploded as millions of Americans started praying intensely for the safety of the troops. But then again, superstition flourished as well. The most direct effect of the presence of clergy was to counter the corrosion of morality. While war crimes are beyond the scope of this book, the conclusion is that the US army conducted itself in a civilized manner, despite the opportunity and power to exploit others. The layer of civilization proved thin, and though it is not said so explicitly, the opening of the book – listing the many investments C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 648 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES in religious infrastructure – and the tail with examples of violence, cruelty and immorality, suggest that during the course of the war the military’s level of morality took an increasingly heavy beating. Perhaps a better conclusion is to say that (male) religion survived during the war. As an extension of civilian religiosity, the church reached deep into the army and showed the institutional power of religion. That may not have been the cause of the post-war revival, but it was definitely a favourable condition. With perhaps a slight overdose of examples, the book makes clear that religion functioned prominently in the war and encourages further systematic exploration of this fascinating relationship.

Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg HANS KRABBENDAM American Immunity: War Crimes and the Limits of International Law .ByPatrick Hagopian. University of Massachusetts Press. 2014. viii + 245pp. $27.95/£22.95. The theme of this compact, well-documented book is exemption in international law, or what is termed in legal circles immunity from prosecution.

This, acknowledges the author, reflects two major, often opposed, tendencies in international jurisprudence after the Second World War: that of universality, characterized by institutions willing to enforce those standards; and that of particularity (p. 1), characterized by political expediency. The protagonist, in this case, is US military conduct. As the world advances along the road of universal jurisdiction, American exemption has prevailed (p. 5), letting Hagopian surmise that the USA in the post-war period ‘has failed to apply to its own citizens and troops the legal standards it has applied to its leaders and troops of defeated enemies and of so-called rogue nations’ (p. 12). In 1955, the US Supreme Court held in Toth’s case that veterans of the US armed forces could not be court-martialled for undiscovered crimes committed overseas till after they had left their employ. Nor could US courts overcome this deficiency by exercising such jurisdiction, thereby preventing a civilian avenue for bringing US military personnel to book. The ‘trial of soldiers to maintain discipline’, went Justice Hugo Black’s opinion, ‘is merely incidental to an army’s primary fighting function’. In so doing, Hagopian notes that important sections of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) were impaired, thereby creating a ‘jurisdiction gap’ filled with legal exceptionality (p. 1). This gap was well known and permitted by virtually every arm of government for decades. It came into play when the massacre of 430 people at the Vietnamese village of My Lai in March 1968 surfaced. Those involved had a legal exit: they could cite the gap that effectively permitted the commission of extraterritorial war crimes when in the service of the US armed services. Hagopian also gives ample room to the other side of the debate, considering such figures as army general counsel Robert E. Jordan III and Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Senate Judiciary Committee, individuals who warned, debated and proposed reforms to plug ‘jurisdictional gaps’ in prosecuting those who had left the services. Prosecution challenges for violations of international law were only compounded by the evolving nature of the US armed forces. Greater reliance on the private sector, including the increasing use of contractors performing C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE AMERICAS 649 functions in foreign theatres, has also complicated jurisdictional accountability for US personnel (p. 128). The remedial Military Extraterritorial Jurisdictional Act, signed into law on March 2000, provides for the prosecution of former military personnel and contractors in federal district courts (p. 130). Even after it was passed, the departmental will to implement it was not there. It has been used rarely (p. 133), and has also been disputed in terms of applicable scope. Then came an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2006 to cover personnel from the private contractor capacity engaged ‘in time of declared war or contingency operations’ (p. 128). The sentiment of jurisdictional escape and exception has prevailed throughout the debates about whether the USA should join the International Criminal Court.

A ‘half-way’ state of affairs has been floated, one where the USA can cooperate in the arrest and transfer of fugitives and share information yet retain discretion over its own nationals (p. 162). That said, Hagopian also concedes that much housekeeping has to be done in terms of improving the image of the ICC itself, which has been marred by tardiness and a more limited prosecutorial remit (p. 160). The author concludes by reflecting on the consequence of immunity from foreign and international legal judgment: ‘resentment breeds insecurity; legal immunity heightens political danger’ (p. 164). The ‘tyranny’ of ‘unaccountable power’ should be worthily abolished, for the interest of all. Many in the Pentagon and Washington’s power circles would disagree. Respect for binding international law, however championed in certain circles, is not always a platform that wins votes.

RMIT University, Melbourne BINOY KAMPMARK Greening the Red, White, and Blue: The Bomb, Big Business, and Consumer Resistance in Postwar America . By Thomas Jundt. Oxford University Press. 2014. xii + 306pp. $34.95. In the 1940s big business recovered much of the power and prestige it had lost during the Great Depression. Business conservatives – for so long held back by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dominating presence – developed powerful networks as part of an increasingly potent backlash against the New Deal, leading to Republican Party gains in the 1942 and 1946 midterm elections. Liberals, meanwhile, adopted a cautious posture. As Alan Brinkley showed in The End of Reform , by the mid-1940s many elite New Dealers had given up on the idea of altering the basic structures and institutions of US capitalism. Instead they increasingly focused their efforts on preparing for a new consumer-oriented world. FDR himself underlined this shift when he announced just after Christmas in 1943 that ‘old Dr. New Deal’ had been replaced by ‘Dr. Win-the-War’. At the war’s end, therefore, the New Deal state and the business community were primed to deliver on their promises of social security and material abundance. A new age of mass consumption, backed by big business and an expanded state, beckoned. The idea that the political, economic, and social settlement that emerged from the war was friendly toward big business and geared chiefly toward satisfying the wants of American consumers is powerfully entrenched in the historiography of C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 650 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES the immediate post-war decades. Thomas Jundt’s new book, Greening the Red, White, Blue , is important because it contests –and substantially complicates – that version of the period from the 1940s to the 1960s. It does so by showing that many Americans rejected the consumers’ republic bequeathed to them at the end of the War, and that many more of them were anxious and discomfited by the dominant position of big business in post-war American life. Jundt builds effectively on earlier studies of consumer politics, activism, and thought such as Daniel Horowitz’s The Anxieties of Affluence and Lawrence Glickman’s Buying Power to show not only that consumer and environmental politics were intimately intertwined but that they emerged in their modern form as a moral and intellectual response to large-scale capitalism. In the 1940s and 1950s, consumer and environmental activists created and then occupied one of the very few spaces in post-war US political culture from which it was deemed legitimate to question and criticise capitalism. Greening the Red, White, and Blue makes this argument persuasively. Jundt’s study is organised into two parts. In the first he traces the origins of environmentalism in citizens’ responses to the atom bomb and the Second World War; in the second he explores the various ways in which those responses came to enter the mainstream of US politics and culture, culminating in the Earth Day extravaganza in April 1970. In addition to its clear organisation, Greening the Red, White, and Blue is notable for its wide cultural range. Its account of the development of consumer and environmental activism is enlivened by references to music, movies, and poetry, as well as to works of technical and popular science.

It combines social and political history, drawing skilfully on the correspondence and official documentation of campaigning organisations such as the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), Women Strike for Peace (WSP), and the Sierra Club. In addition, its careful analysis of key texts in the history of post-war America, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb , will help students, scholars, and other readers to reinterpret these familiar works. Jundt’s readings of major political speeches with a bearing on consumer and environmental politics, such as Lyndon B. Johnson’s May 1964 address on the Great Society at the University of Michigan, are thoughtful and assured. For this reader, however, the outstanding feature of Jundt’s book is its meticulous charting of the efforts of individual American citizens who laboured in the shadow of the bomb to bring their concerns about the quality of the air they breathed, the water they drank, and the soil they tilled to public attention.

Figures such as J. I. Rodale – an avid promoter of organic farming; Fairfield Osborn – a director of the New York Zoological Society who linked atomic power to environmental degradation in public speeches as early as 1946; and William Longgood – an early advocate of green consumption, emerge from this book certainly as pioneers, and perhaps even as heroes, especially because their attempts to publicise the potential dangers of chemical pesticides, industrial pollution, and atomic power – which in many respects were well-founded – were so often dismissed as unscientific quackery. Greening the Red, White, and Blue is essential reading for historians with a teaching or research interest in consumer and/or environmental politics. All historians of post-war American life will profit from exposure to its argument about the function of these arenas of social and political action as spaces of C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE AMERICAS 651 dissent in a profoundly constrained ideological climate and historical context.

This is a major study of the possibilities and limits of consumer resistance.

University of Glasgow DANIEL SCROOP The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City . By Eric Avila. University of Minnesota Press. 2014. xi + 239pp. $24.95. Bringing together a disparate group of sources and synthesizing a great number of popular and scholarly debates, Eric Avila’s The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City is a clear and passionate account about the effects of, and responses to, the massive interstate highway program in postwar America. Looking at multiple geographic sites including Hawai’i, Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego, and St. Paul, Minnesota, Avila explores how the freeway – that weaving concrete contour that symbolized modernity and the literal shaping by the state of the modern city – decimated city neighbourhoods and provoked strong outpourings of resistance. Avila first presents the freeway debate as it is popularly understood: the battle between modernizing, ‘progress’-focused state technocrats and grassroots communities deeply invested in the cultural significance of their localities.

Avila’s key critical enquiry is to show how these battles, and their subsequent narrative of populist resistance, are inextricably bound up with dynamics of race, racial formation and cultural and economic privilege. In revealing this hitherto understudied racial dimension, Avila argues that the successful ‘freeway revolts’ of the 1960s and 1970s were not, as is popularly remembered, the responses of wholly democratic urban communities but structured around specific mobilizations of class privilege, gender and race. The neighbourhoods that most clearly achieved their goals of repelling the bulldozers were predominantly white and wealthy, such as those located in Beverly Hills and the French Quarter of New Orleans. Successful revolts against the state’s city planners were drawn up along a number of different societal and cultural lines, some quite radical. Yet such lines were also hugely mediated by racial and class stratification. The Jane Jacobs-led fights against Robert Moses’ plans for New York were important public demonstrations that, much like Betty Freidan’s work, resisted the spatial confinement of women to suburban neighbourhoods and routines. Yet, also like Freidan, this was resistance that generally ignored working class and non- white women, whose struggles to exist in their neighbourhoods after freeway construction are given as counter-examples by Avila in case studies of San Jose, CA and East Los Angeles. In other examples of successful freeway revolts along the Eastern seaboard, Avila cites Matthew Frye Jacobson in order to argue that the main reason why certain revolts were successful is because they were in line with society-wide consolidations of white identity and ethnicity. In comparing these successful struggles with those racially diverse communities that were first disinvested by freeway planning and then wholly ruptured by freeway construction, such as Overtown in Miami, Rondo in St. Paul, Logan Heights in San Diego and most of East Los Angeles, Avila adds a vitally important perspective to the historiography of urban development. Not only are we presented with reasons why certain communities were saved but we see the callousness with which majority non-white communities were decimated. Despite C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 652 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES the number of viable alternative, circuitous plans, little was left of communities in Rondo, Overtown and West Oakland after freeway construction. What was left of the community was forced to deal daily with the direct environmental impact of the constructions. Those non-white members of the community who were forced to move received little to no help in finding a new place to live. Some of the most important passages in the book are Avila’s discussion of the responses to destruction by predominantly African American and Mexican American communities. These communities – hugely economically oppressed – used (and continue to use) imaginative, artistic, and ironic strategies to attempt to culturally reclaim aspects of the freeway and resist punitive logics of modernity and capitalism. Examining these strategies is perhaps the most creative aspect of the book, reflecting the creativity of the cultural workers it studies. For instance, Avila considers the responses of Chicana feminist poetry and art focused in communities in San Jose and Los Angeles and suggests that their defiance and creative recontextualizing is an important corrective to the vindictive attempt to render these neighbourhoods invisible. Another excellent piece of analysis is when Avila looks at the visual representations of the freeway between white and non- white artists in California, highlighting how a discourse of verticality patterns these two perspectives – those who have the privilege to see the freeway from any angle and those who are literally and figuratively submerged by it. In these sections, particularly in the case of San Diego’s Logan Heights, we see the most enlightening aspect of Avila’s study, which is understanding what he terms ‘the great paradox of this story: that the modernist city, which bulldozed its way through history and tradition to implement its totalizing vision, actually begot sharply particular expressions of racial memory and pride’ (p. 118).

What was a series of destructive acts on mainly African American and Mexican American communities and their sense of space and time actually prompted, with varying degrees of success, cultural and critical recontextualizations that turned the freeway’s logic of modernity on its head, emphasizing instead the longer histories and diasporic geographies of these non-white communities – their roots and routes, to use Paul Gilroy’s framework. As those case studies noted above might suggest, this book is an excellent interdisciplinary exercise within history and American Studies. Avila traverses concepts of planning, social history, local politics, class, gender, racial formation, historic preservation, collective memory, literature, and art and visual studies.

Throughout these fields, Avila writes with a lucid clarity and precision regarding the dialectic between race and place and this ensures his arguments have heft, depth and structure. His interrogation of the freeway-race dialectic is an important addition to the developing debate that considers how the built environment of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernist city disproportionately affects communities according to the structured hierarchies of race. Hopefully this work gives rise to many more productive studies that place race at the heart of urban history.

University of Manchester JOSEPH MORTON C 2016 The Author. History C 2016 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd