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This article was downloaded by: [University College London]On: 22 March 2014, At: 15:33Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

The Journal of Imperialand Commonwealth HistoryPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fich20

Book reviewsRoy Martin Haines a , Peter Burroughs b ,Pauline Croft c , Felipe Fernandez‐Armestod , Paul Webb e , John Villiers b , DennisReinhartz f , Ian K. Steele g , Jack P. Greeneh , Nuala Zahedieh i , P.J. Marshall j , AlanFrost k , David Eltis l , Gad Heuman m , JudithGodden n , Antony Copley o , J. K. Johnson p

, William Barr q , Christopher Fyfe r , NormanEtherington s , Kent Fedorowich t , DeborahGaitskell u , John Lonsdale v , Diane Frost w ,Robert Holland x , D. A. Farnie y , Jill Roe z ,Patricia Grimshaw aa , Tom Millar ab , AnthonyClayton ac , Robert Pearce ad , GurharpalSingh ae & Deryck Scarr af

a Clare Hall, Cambridgeb Londonc Royal Holloway , University of London ,d Oxforde King's College , University of WesternOntario ,f University of Texas , Arlingtong University of Western Ontario ,h The Johns Hopkins University ,i University of Edinburgh ,

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fich20

j King's College London ,k La Trobe University ,l Queen's University ,m University of Warwick ,n University of Sydney ,o University of Kent ,p Carleton University ,q University of Saskatchewan ,r Edinburghs University of Western Australia ,t University of the West of England ,u SOAS , University of London ,v Trinity College , Cambridgew Merseyside Maritime Museum , University ofLiverpool ,x Institute of Commonwealth Studies ,University of London ,y Manchesterz Macquarie University ,aa University of Melbourne ,ab London School of Economics and PoliticalScience ,ac Royal Military Academy Sandhurst ,ad St Martin's College , Lancasterae De Montfort University ,af Australian National University ,Published online: 01 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Roy Martin Haines , Peter Burroughs , Pauline Croft , FelipeFernandez‐Armesto , Paul Webb , John Villiers , Dennis Reinhartz , Ian K.Steele , Jack P. Greene , Nuala Zahedieh , P.J. Marshall , Alan Frost , DavidEltis , Gad Heuman , Judith Godden , Antony Copley , J. K. Johnson , WilliamBarr , Christopher Fyfe , Norman Etherington , Kent Fedorowich , DeborahGaitskell , John Lonsdale , Diane Frost , Robert Holland , D. A. Farnie , JillRoe , Patricia Grimshaw , Tom Millar , Anthony Clayton , Robert Pearce ,Gurharpal Singh & Deryck Scarr (1994) Book reviews, The Journal of Imperialand Commonwealth History, 22:2, 332-389, DOI: 10.1080/03086539408582931

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03086539408582931

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BOOK REVIEWS

The English by Geoffrey Elton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Pp. xiii + 248, 37plates, 8 figures. £19.99 (hardback). ISBN 0-631-17681-0.

The doyen of Tudor constitutional and administrative historians, responsiblewith Professor Dickens for the rehabilitation of that still unlovable character,Thomas Cromwell, faces an unfamiliar task. In the preface he explains hisreservations: the general editors of the series are respectively an archaeologistand an early medievalist, he can claim expertise in neither quarter, nor in that ofthe social historian. But the author's plea that he should confine himself to'political and ideological events', understandable in itself, poses a fundamentaldifficulty. 'Englishness' is an elusive enough concept without precluding theevidence of ancillary disciplines. This is not to decry Elton's achievement,covering a broad canvas and more than a millennium in some two hundred pagesof readable text. But this reviewer at least received a very hazy impression of theEnglish, their strengths, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, cultural distinctiveness, oreven their identity. Perhaps in any case we are too readily misled by anassumption of homogeneity, but that would be to call in question the wholeseries.

What is being dealt with here is the people(s) inhabiting the kingdom ofEngland - from the time of Athelstan - and the manner in which they developedunder the stimulus of internal, mainly political, forces and external pressures.Kingship and law are seen as the important elements of consolidation. Only inthe nineteenth century are we confronted by a more complex grouping, theBritish. It is the British who can claim responsibility for the (second) empire.The first - according to the author - began with Edward I towards the end of thethirteenth century and should be regarded as 'English'.

Inevitably this is a personal, hence idiosyncratic, even occasionally opinion-ated, impression of the march of English history, informed largely by thescholarship of others. Alfred is cut down to size (pp. 24-5), but revisionism infavour of King John is ignored. Maybe a greater offence than Wyclif s hereticalviews (p. 94) was his doctrine of Dominion (responsible lordship) whenextended to the secular sphere! In just over half a decade of power ThomasCromwell is seen as the formative influence in the state as interventionist, a roleto be revived in the late nineteenth century (p. 227). 'Tudor Absolutism' mayindeed be old-fashioned but neither the brutality of Henry VIII nor the agencyof Cromwell should be downplayed. Likewise, although religious (or non-religious) predilections inevitably colour views of the Reformation, whichinvolved massive expropriation and vandalism, even G.W.O. Woodward'sreputedly dispassionate view of the dissolution of the monasteries (worth afootnote?) is open to question in the light of St. Benedict's professed intentions,which did not envisage social welfare beyond the cloister. Marxist interpre-tations are given short shrift throughout and there is a swipe at E.P. Thompson(p. 186 n. 26). Disturbing the shade of John Betjeman, Victorian revivalism inarchitectural style - an intellectual feat - is summarily dismissed: churches andchapels acquired a rather deplorable Gothic aspect. Similarly, the OxfordMovement receives less than sympathetic treatment.

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BOOK REVIEWS 333

Naturally every reader will have his own caveats. The voluminous E.A.Freeman should be juxtaposed to J.H. Round with respect to the Anglo-Saxon -Norman divide. Certainly the 'truth' about continuity cannot be finally estab-lished. Despite the small numbers involved 1066 is rightly accepted as a'relentless watershed' for the English. Interpretations of Feudalism (no 'system',though) are sensibly subjected to a degree of scepticism. Maxwell-Lyte's workon the Great Seal is dismissed (p. 50 n. 27) as an 'effectively unreadabledepository of the Public Record Office's corporate knowledge', though ThomasMadox's arcane volumes on the Exchequer are favourably treated (p. 49 n. 25).Incidentally there is a 1969 reprint of the 1769 (indexed) edition. One looks invain for a note of Mark Buck's work on Stapeldon or of Anne Hudson's classicreappraisal of the Lollards, let alone that of Michael Prestwich (Edward I).W.M. Ormrod and S.L. Waugh (Edward III), or G.L. Harriss (parliament andfinance), though some of these may be too recent.

There is much good knockabout stuff. We learn of the 'entrenched Englishwillingness to pay taxes' (p. 58) prior to King Richard's ransom, the Americans'debasement of English (p. 165); also that the displaced Exchequer 'revengeditself by burning down the Palace of Westminster' with its wooden tallies (p.177), and that Thomas Paine's Rights of Man 'shone with all the mindlessadmiration of abstract principles' (p. 197). The 1980s saw that a 'Santa Clauspolicy' was unaffordable (p. 226), but failure to reduce the Civil Servicerendered remedial action nugatory. Apparently, however, the author is un-aware that even after the Second World War some schoolboys continued tocompose Latin verses. Not everyone will agree with his implied stricture on thepresent state of English cuisine (p. 212), nor with the assumption that theEnglish have ceased to be 'inveterate litigants' and, while leisure activity is givendue place in the widening of horizons, the motor vehicle, which finally banishedthe isolation of the mass of the population, is overlooked.

The style is easy, at times colloquial, but one must surely quibble about therepetition of 'in actual fact' (pp. 5, 15, 25, 61, 154, etc.). Moreover, what is themeaning of the comment (p. 234): 'the Churches are making all sorts ofimprobably [improbable?] backward-looking noises'? Will this volume, indeedthe series as a whole, assist post-Strasbourg mutual understanding?

ROY MARTIN HAINESClare Hall, Cambridge

Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 by Linda Colley. New Haven andLondon: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. x + 429, illustrations. £19.95(hardback). ISBN 0-300-05737-7.

Myths of the English edited by Roy Porter. Oxford: Polity Press, 1992. Pp. xii +276. £39.50 (hardback). ISBN 0-7456-08442.

Unlike anglophone Canadians, to cite an obvious example, the English haveseldom agonized over their identity. Those of us born and bred south of theWatford Gap know who we are, and we have blithely used the terms 'English'and 'British' interchangeably without worrying that Britain is an artificialconstruction of politicians or realizing that canny Scots have slyly cultivated theusage of 'British' in order to mask their hijacking of the former English empire.

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334 THE JOURNAL OF IMPERIAL AND COMMONWEALTH HISTORY

In recent times, however, some faint-hearted or jittery English citizens have feltconstrained to wonder openly about their national characteristics which mightbe worth preserving and about their ambivalent relationships with other ethnicgroups within the British Isles and beyond. This unworthy self-doubting hasoften been ascribed by pundits to the traumatic loss of empire and world-powerstatus; loose talk of the impending break-up of the United Kingdom under thepressure of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and of the decolonization of Ulsterhas played its part. Most unnerving has been the descent into the Europeancommunity and the threat of federal integration with foreigners. The pressureson the English to define and defend themselves and their heritage are likely togrow, but so far historians have provided little guidance or insight concerningthe unique features of Englishness or how the English people relate to theBritish nation. For this reason, we might eagerly anticipate Linda Colley's studyof the process whereby Englishness, and other forms of regionalism, weresubmerged during the 'long' eighteenth century by an over-arching Britishidentity as the wider nation was forged, and Roy Porter's collection of essaysexploring the myths of the English.

In Britons Linda Colley undertakes the formidable, fascinating task ofanalysing the formation of the British nation in the period from the Act ofUnion between England and Scotland in 1707 to the accession of QueenVictoria. Deftly exploiting a rich, varied, and impressive range of material,embracing paintings, cartoons, architecture, sculpture, funeral monuments,theatre, and music as well as written sources, she sets herself two main aims:

to uncover the identity, actions and ideas of those men and women whowere willing to support the existing order against the major threats theirnation faced from without, to establish exactly what it was these Britonsthought they were being loyal to, and what they expected to gain fromtheir commitment. . . [and] to show that it was during this period that asense of British national identity was forged, and that the manner in whichit was forged has shaped the quality of this particular sense of nationhoodand belonging ever since (p. 1).

In the years between the Union and the American Revolution, Colleyemphasizes the cardinal role of Protestantism in inculcating a widely-heldconviction that Britons were God's elect, a people apart, charged with a missionto resist Catholicism as ungodly and despotic. It was this ingrained religioussentiment, she maintains, which ensured defeat of the Jacobite cause, thoughsupporters of the Hanoverian regime recognized the material advantages thataccrued from patriotic attachment to the existing political order and fromavoidance of the horrors of civil war in a country blessed with prosperity andparliamentary government.

A further source of unity and community of interest was derived from theacquisition and exploitation of the Empire. Not only did it yield trading profitsand career opportunities, but it also integrated the Scots into the nationalenterprise on an equal footing, allowing them to invade the British polity,bureaucracy, and armed forces to an unprecedented extent, often to the envyand outrage of English politicians and writers. As Colley expresses it, 'imperial-ism served as Scotland's opportunity' (p. 130). Admittedly, the heady triumphsand imperial prizes of the Seven Years War were regarded by many asdangerous self-indulgence likely to overstretch the nation's strength and

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BOOK REVIEWS 335

resources. The capture of vast, alien, and expensive possessions overseas posedproblems of vulnerability and control, and required greater investment inadministrative machinery and military force. The American War, too, and thecolonists' rejection of British identity as well as parliamentary authority, forcedBritons to reassess the meanings of Britishness and the boundaries of patriotism,as well as the implications of empire, and to confront the dilemmas of fighting awar against Protestant brethren abroad and supporting or criticizing the Britishimperial state at home. Nevertheless, the loss of the American colonies did notshake attachment to empire, and in the long run, Colley contends, this soberingdefeat proved to be more constructive than the trumpeted victories in the SevenYears War. It steeled the resolve of the ruling elite to shore up the fabric of thestate by adopting a firmer governing style in the late eighteenth century. For theremaining empire, she argues, this meant reforms to tighten London's grip, andshe follows those imperial historians who have discerned a tendency towardsauthoritarian rule from the centre, citing the Canada Act of 1791, along with theIndia Act of 1784 and the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800 (p. 145). Butcompared with previous practice in Quebec, the constitutional act of 1791 was areturn to an older representative tradition and a measure of devolution.Historians have tended to exaggerate, outside Asia, the shift towards central-ized autocracy, being unable to distinguish theory and rhetoric from actualpractice, and Whitehall control from local oligarchy.

If religion and empire contributed to the reshaping of loyalism, state power,and British identity, the long-drawn out conflict with France acted as the crucialcatalyst, especially when revolution across the Channel and the ambitions ofNapoleon posed the threat of invasion and sparked twenty years of globalwarfare. Colley explains that the ruling classes responded effectively to thesedire challenges because a transformation occurred in the nation's elite and in theleadership it provided. In part it was knitted closer together and invigorated bythe injection of Celtic elites and dynastic intermarriage, land transfers andagricultural profits, the adoption of new styles of life and public-spiritedambitions. An ethos of public service and private probity was cultivated in orderto demonstrate the assets of strong, stable government by a virtuous, competent,and authentically British elite. There also emerged a far more consciously andofficially constructed patriotism, which stressed attachment to the monarchy,refurbished and made the symbol of national unity against a foreign foe, as wellas a manly cult of military and naval heroism. At the same time, Colleymaintains, ordinary working men and women were drawn unprecedentedly intoparticipation in national affairs and active support of wartime patriotism. Largenumbers of men served in the regular army, militia, or volunteers; womensupplied clothing and insignia, raised money and morale. In the mobilization ofBritish society for war, the mass of citizens were directly caught up in the wareffort or indirectly affected by its impact. In the years after 1815, a final chaptersuggests, this public engagement in political life and widening notions ofcitizenship were reflected in the campaigns against Catholic emancipation and infavour of parliamentary reform and the abolition of slavery. Thus did the Britishruling elite recover from the American reverse and emerge victorious andentrenched from a period of violent upheaval at home and overseas. In thedevelopment of this successful strategy for endurance and recovery, the exerciseof power in Britain was reshaped and a British nation was forged by a broadmass, patriotism and loyalty to the existing political order, forces and sentiments

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which were creative, not conservative, in their effects. Great Britain, aninvented nation, was superimposed on much older regional loyalties andalignments.

Interweaving her second theme, Colley argues that these same decades sawthe emergence of a sense of British national identity among the English, Welsh,and Scots, without in any way displacing or submerging disparate cultures. Onedifficulty in demonstrating this development is that she appears to equateBritishness with loyalty to the current regime or with the patriotism generatedby the French wars. Indeed, the terms are sometimes used interchangeably.But, one might enquire, would all patriots necessarily think of themselves asBritish? Could only loyalists belong to a British nation? Might there not bevarieties of Britishness, especially if we admit that contemporaries assumeddifferent political stances towards the ruling dynasty, the government, thedistribution of power, and the expression of opinion? Colley stresses consensus,and those interests and sentiments that brought the people of Britain together,rather than the religious rivalries and class conflicts that divided them. This maybe a revealing, welcome shift away from the monochrome interpretations ofJ.C.D. Clark and E.P. Thompson, but it does involve some neglect or glossingover in the book of the government's suppression of critics and dissenting voicesby the suspension of Habeas Corpus and other legal measures. Since notions ofauthority and the nation were being debated and contested, it is hard todistinguish with certainty which view of national identity, which 'imaginedpolitical community', predominated and precisely whom it embraced. Colleymakes the further point that Britishness was defined and forged by reference to'the Other', chiefly the French but also to some extent alien colonial peoples;but if a vigorous, persistent challenge to the regime and the prevailing consensuscame in part from within Britain itself, the defining force was not exclusivelyforeign and external. Moreover, we are left with an unresolved conundrum afterhaving read this skilful, stimulating, and scholarly study: what is the differencebetween Britishness and Englishness, what characteristics distinguish a Britonfrom an inhabitant of England, Wales, or Scotland?

In the quest for the essential features of Englishness, we might mostappropriately explore the institutions, ideas, and traditions which have beenregarded, with justification or not, as uniquely and idiosyncratically English.Roy Porter, in a vigorous, wide-ranging introduction to Myths of the English,raises sundry general issues about history and historians. Some of his concernsseem tangential to the book: whether history is an art or a science, the productof imagination or methodology; the changing nature of the discipline and 'itsproliferating discourses' and of the preoccupations of its practitioners. Moregermane is his identification both of the dilemma facing historians as objectiveinvestigators of the past but prisoners of contemporary values and precon-ceptions, and of their responsibility to puncture national myths and dispel themists of popular nostalgia. Unfortunately, readers are not informed exactlywhat the editor and his associates mean and intend by the word 'myth': is it afalse or distorted view of some aspect of the past, an invented tradition or'public parables', supposed peculiarities of national character, resonant imagesand sustaining emblems, an excess of nostalgic hankering or collective escapism,a self-indulgent romanticization, the mystique that surrounds particular institu-tions, individuals, or occurrences? Nor are we told whether the 'myths' underthe microscope are still currently pervasive or ceased to exert a fatal appeal a

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BOOK REVIEWS 337

generation or more ago. Worse still, the editor fails to identify who exactlycomprise 'the English' under scrutiny. Symptomatically, an article on Gilbertand Sullivan refers in its title to 'a British tradition', whereas the editor describestheir operas as 'celebrations of the peculiarities of the English'; one authordiscusses 'the salient elements of Wellingtonian Englishness', while anothercontributor examines 'Britishness' and portraiture. This bewildering uncertaintyof purpose and terminology, which allows individual writers to dash off indiverse directions, necessarily blunts the impact of the volume.

The choice of topics also seems decidedly perverse and not best calculated toexemplify the ostensible themes of the venture. Among the most pertinentarticles, Bob Bushaway explores imaginatively 'The Great War and Remem-brance'. He explains the ways in which state, church, and crown have conspiredto exploit, ritualize, and sanitize private sorrow and popular sentiment in orderto emphasize social cohesion and to discourage a political critique of war orsociety. In an elegant, perceptive, and immensely readable discussion of theSavoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, David Cannadine analyses the rise anddecline of a British institution which both celebrated and poked decorous fun atnational foibles and eccentricities. Clive Emsley portrays 'The English Bobby'as the personification of an English, and supposedly benign, style of policing,now fast receding into nostalgic memory as the gap between the police and thecommunity widens. In 'The Fifth of November Remembered', David Cressytraces the changing celebration of Guy Fawkes' Day and its tame transformationinto Bonfire Night, though his account barely ventures into the twentiethcentury.

Other contributors provide damp squibs. Reba N. Soffer embarks on anexploration of 'Authority in the University', a topic which promises to explodethe Oxbridge myth and the pretensions of a national clerisy, but she soonnarrows her focus to Balliol and Newnham and then concentrates on comparingthe administrations of Benjamin Jowett and Eleanor Sidgwick. As a nineteenth-Century exemplar of 'The Gentleman and the Hero', Iain Pears takes the Dukeof Wellington and his protagonist in war and virtue, Napoleon Bonaparte. Thearticle scarcely scratches the surface of the quintessentially English notion of thegentleman, and the ostentatious public celebration of Wellington's funeral in1852 hardly justifies his claim to be considered the supreme embodiment ofheroism and national greatness in the popular imagination throughout a centurythat witnessed the sanctification of Horatio Nelson and Charles Gordon. Far lessrelevant is M.A. Crowther's portrayal of 'The Tramp', who is no more apersonification or emblem of Englishness than the highwayman or the lagerlout. She argues that romanticization of the tramp in the literature and practiceof the Victorians, as a licensed outsider or innocuous 'oddball', has profoundlyaffected social attitudes and official policies. Marina Warner contributes apretentiously erudite piece on 'Mother Goose and the Old Wives' Tale' whichhas nothing specifically to do with either the English or their myths. Equally outof place is a dull discussion by Margaret Kinnell on 'The Teacher in Children'sBooks'. By far the worst article in the collection is Gertrude Prescott Nuding on'Britishness and Portraiture', a random assortment of information on pricesrecently paid for paintings, commissions and export licences, press releases andphotocalls, which suggests an art-dealer's catalogue or sales-room gossip andpurveys all the excitement of reading someone's laundry lists.

It is disappointing that such an excellently conceived and potentially illuminating

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enterprise should go off half-cocked. An opportunity is missed to expose themany characteristics of Englishness and 'myths' of the English that awaitscholarly dissection. Even if the institution of monarchy and the popular fixationwith royalty have been too excessively scrutinized of late to warrant inclusion,the charade of parliamentary government is ripe for demolition - as devastat-ingly revealed by Bruce Lenman in The Eclipse of Parliament: Appearance andReality in British Politics since 1914 (1992). Other candidates for demystificationinclude English class distinctions, the public school ethos, the distribution ofworthless titles and honours, the rural idyll and aversion to business andtechnology, the role of Protestantism and tenacity of church establishment, thespecious operation of the rule of law. By neglecting such obvious, centralsubjects in favour of peripheral or tangential topics, Roy Porter's collection ofessays skirts around a theme which, it is to be hoped, will excite anotherpublisher. More bravely and controversially still, what about a volume celebrat-ing, instead of disparaging, the English and the continuing value of Englishnessin the face of the Euromaniacs within and outside our ranks?

PETER BURROUGHSLondon

The Tudor Navy: An Administrative, Political and Military History by DavidLoades. (Studies in Naval History) Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992. Pp. x + 317,maps. £35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0-85967-922-5.

The last significant general histories of the Tudor navy were written at the end ofthe century, and a fresh and scholarly study is sorely needed. Unfortunately thisbook does not provide it. Far too much still relies on Oppenheim (1896), LairdClowes (1897), and Corbett (1898-1900). The author, an expert on the mid-Tudor period, comes to the topic via Tudor administrative, rather than naval,history and aims to place the navy in its political and administrative context. Hecontrasts the medieval navy, more an occasion than an institution, with thesteady growth of the Tudor Admiralty, by 1600 a fully-fledged department ofstate. From the accession of Henry VII the navy experienced fairly even growth,rather than a series of booms and slumps. Not surprisingly Professor Loades ismost convincing on the developments between 1540 and 1560. Elsewhere thebook deteriorates for long passages into an account of foreign policy withoutmuch focus on the navy itself. Loades describes Admiral Winter's strangulationof French power in Scotland in 1559-60, followed by the evacuation of theFrench garrison and their dependants, as 'probably the most efficient navaloperation' of Elizabeth's reign, but then tells us absolutely nothing about it.Although the dustjacket blurb points particularly to new research on theArmada, he has read very little of it - apparently not a single item in Spanish -and the narrative of Elizabeth's reign is the old one of an irresistible slide intothe outbreak of inevitable Anglo-Spanish conflict in 1585. This sits uneasily withthe footnotes which provide an obbligato of alternative evidence, acknowledgedbut not incorporated into his interpretation.

In part the problem arises because Professor Loades is not much interested inmaritime matters. There is little on tactics and strategy, nothing on shipboard

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BOOK REVIEWS 339

life. Technicalities get short shrift. The lead line and the portolan, he informs us,were 'rule of thumb' methods that had disappeared by 1600. There is nothingrule of thumb about portolans, among the most elaborate and beautiful of latemedieval manuscripts, and lead lines were as familiar to Nelson's sailors as toDrake's. In the absence of new research, the book is padded with lengthysummaries of standard works such as Andrews on privateering and Wernham onthe Portugal expedition. The Tudor Navy is at best an efficient pot-boiler; itmust be regarded as a wasted opportunity in a distinguished series.

PAULINE CROFTRoyal Hollo way, University of London

The Armada of Flanders: Spanish Maritime Policy and European War, 1568-1668 by R.A. Stradling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xx+ 276, maps. £35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0-521-40534-3.

Madrid, which is as far from the sea as you can get in the Iberian peninsula, isfull of seafood restaurants: a similar paradox lies at the heart of the history ofSpain's seaborne vocation. The Castilians' heartlands are inland; yet in the earlymodern period they acquired the greatest maritime empire created up to thattime. Much work has been done on the 'decline' of this empire - but the wonderof it is that it should have arisen in the first place and endured for so long. PhilipIV could contemplate its extent and resilience on the walls of his throne room,where scenes of sieges raised and invaders expelled celebrated the labours of'the Hispanic Hercules', from Bahia to Breda, from Puerto Rico to Genoa, fromthe Antilles to Cadiz. The problem of how the Spanish monarchy sustained thenaval effort that linked and defended the empire is central to an understandingof this great puzzle of imperial history. 'War at sea', Philip IV justly claimed in1626, 'has greatly advanced the reputation of Spain' and, though challengesmultiplied, Spanish naval supremacy still had many years to run.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, between the voyage ofthe Armada of 1588 and the Battle of the Downs in 1639, one of the mostremarkable theatres of Spanish naval success was the 'northern seas'. Twooutstanding recent books - by J. Alcala-Zamora and C. Rahn Phillips - havebeen devoted to it. R.A. Stradling's complementary study of the strategic andadministrative history of the Armada of Flanders is equally good and fills inmost of the gaps. In a work of painstaking research, presented with his usualfluency and flair, he concentrates on the great days of Spain's northern stationfrom the 1620s to the 1650s. Until the Mardyck channel was opened in 1621,Spain had nowhere to keep a deep-draughted fleet: from then on, possession ofDunkirk was critical and its definitive loss in 1658 can be seen, in retrospect, tohave marked the end of Spanish seaborne power in the region. Dr Stradlingshows, however, that what he calls a 'Dunkirk spirit' animated Spanish recoverythrough many earlier setbacks and that 'constant manipulation and maximisa-

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tion' of inadequate resources - like 'the chariots in a production of Ai'da' -contrived to give an impression of abiding strength in adversity. He gives us avivid study of the Spanish use of privateers and of the culture of privateering - 'a"peculiar institution" in post-Renaissance Europe' and 'a symbol of the bellumomnium contra omnes'. The evidence he presents confirms known reasons forSpain's ultimate failure in the north during this 'prolonged era of the country'seclipse by the northern powers': inadequate supplies of timber and reserves ofmanpower at home; the constraints of a vulnerable and unpredictable cash-flow;the tensions within a system of multiple kingdoms; the urgency of priorities inthe south which, from the early 1640s, drew the Armada of Flanders away fromits home waters, withered its identity and finally led to its permanent withdrawaland effective disappearance as a discrete force.

FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTOOxford

Parameters of British Naval Power 1650-1850 edited by Michael Duffy. ExeterMaritime Studies, Number Seven. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1992.Pp. vi + 144. £11.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-85989-385-5.

Eighteenth-century naval scholarship has prospered of late. As Michael Duffynotes in his introduction, 'there has developed a more questioning approach tothe traditional triumphalist version of British naval history', and this volume,which challenges many hoary assumptions and notes the importance of soundadministration, will be necessary reading for those wishing to keep pace with thefield.

The book's stated theme is the 'parameters' of British naval power. Far frombeing an invincible weapon before which continental governments cowered, thenavy required certain favourable conditions to act effectively. Certainly theever-present demand for men, particularly trained top-men, influenced howmany ships could be sent to sea. Nicholas Rodger examines one aspect of thisproblem in the 'Cornish Connection', where he traces the attempts of somesuccessful captains to draw on local loyalties to attract experienced crewmen.

David Davies has poignant observations on 'The Birth of the Imperial Navy1650-90' where he points out that Charles II and James II had a navy three timeslarger than their father. Moreover both monarchs preferred the larger classes ofships, both to reflect royal prestige and to take advantage of the newlydeveloped 'line' tactics. Naturally such a fleet dictated what kind of war onecould fight. The Dutch had been willing to play at fleet actions, but when theFrench perversely refused to send fleets to sea in the 1690s, choosing toconcentrate on commerce raiding instead, the Royal Navy discovered a new'parameter' to its power. This was compounded by the problems of watchingover Brest from bases which were designed for a Dutch opponent. Governmentsalso havered over proper strategy: should the fleet seek out and destroy theenemy fleet or, in the best Elizabethan traditions, seek out enemy merchantshipping to make the war self-supporting?

Jeremy Black contributes two articles. In the first he reminds us that justbecause there was never a successful French invasion we cannot assume smugly

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BOOK REVIEWS 341

that most governments were not exceedingly fearful of one. Such fearsinfluenced all significant strategic and diplomatic deliberations. The lack of aformidable army made the concern all the more pressing, and added to thestrategic burden of the Navy as the last (and in some cases also the first) line ofdefence. Contrary to accepted wisdom, Black rejects the concept of a 'SecondHundred Years' War' against France, and points to the cordial relations after1715, particularly the 1716-31 alliance. It was this understanding with France,and the consequent neutralizing of any Spanish threat, which allowed the RoyalNavy to exercise maritime supremacy. When the alliance collapsed in 1731 theold fears of a French invasion instantly reappeared. The resulting constraints onBritish naval options in the 1739-48 war amply demonstrate the 'limitation'theme. Black's second paper pursues similar themes from 1775 to 1791. After1763, unlike 1715, the now friendly France and Spain were rebuilding their fleetsand the British position was far less favourable. The 1771 Falkland Islands crisis,while diplomatically successful, denied the Navy the chance to smash oneopponent's fleet before the War of American Independence, which of courserendered the eventual naval problems much more fearsome. The basic lesson ofthat war, reinforced by the humiliation of the 1791 Ochakov Crisis, was thatnaval power is of limited value against a determined and entrenched continentalstate with minimal overseas interests.

Michael Duffy contributes a fine study of the development of the WesternSquadron in the eighteenth-century. Fighting the French challenged the RoyalNavy, which had developed its strategic assumptions in wars with the Dutch.Strategically the main bases, including Portsmouth, were ill-suited to keepingwatch on Brest, the main French Atlantic base. To watch Brest (the merits of'close' and 'loose' blockade are discussed) and to escort inbound and outboundBritish convoys, a British fleet had to patrol the approaches to the Channel, andthe Bay of Biscay. To accomplish this entailed the never-ending expansion ofthe better situated Plymouth, an assault on scurvy, and the implementation of areliable shuttle of supply ships to keep the blockading ships on station. Moreseaworthy and larger ships, better charts of the treacherous Biscay coasts, andthe use of Torbay as the standard refuge, all had to be developed over severaldecades before the system established in the 1793-1815 years became soeffective.

In the last paper, Roger Morriss brings his knowledge of naval administrationto bear on the career of Sir George Cockburn as First Naval Lord from 1841 to1846. This worthy officer has a reputation as a blinkered conservative, areputation which Morriss salvages to a large extent. Cockburn in fact pushedforward many improvements, including much steam construction, the introduc-tion of the screw propeller, and an effective naval reserve system. The 'limits' inthis case were not so much lack of imagination as lack of government funding(sometimes we do forget attractive innovations cost a lot of money), and theobstructive habits of many others on the Board who made Cockburn's life a hellthrough incompetence or enmity.

In general this is a solid collection, and Michael Duffy may be congratulatedon assembling such a talented team of contributors.

PAUL WEBBKing's College

University of Western Ontario

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The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History bySanjay Subrahmanyam. London and New York: Longman, 1992. Pp. xiii + 320,maps, tables. £14.99 (paperback). ISBN 0-582-05068-5.

Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580-1640 by James C.Boyajian. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.Pp. xvii + 356, maps, tables. £40.50 (hardback). ISBN 0-8018-4405-3.

A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia, and America, 1415-1808by A.J.R. Russell-Wood. Manchester: Carcanet, 1992. Pp. xiv + 230, maps,tables, illustrations. £30.00 (hardback). ISBN 0-85635-994-7.

The history of the dramatic rise and eclipse of the Portuguese empire holds aperennial attraction for scholars, not only because of the extraordinary richnessof its documentation, much of it still unpublished, but also because of its globaldimensions and its relevance to an understanding both of the development ofearly modern Europe and of those societies which the Portuguese were the firstEuropeans to encounter. The three books under review all examine the subjectin this global perspective, and two of them draw important and originalconclusions from their examination.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam and James C. Boyajian are both concerned withexplaining the processes of change that took place in the Portuguese empire inAsia, and with showing how the Portuguese concept of empire as put intopractice in the Estado da India evolved and the means adopted to administer,defend and develop it changed in consequence. Dr Subrahmanyam charts insomewhat Braudelian fashion the course of the gradual social and politicalchanges, some of them barely perceptible, that took place in some of the Asiansocieties with which the Portuguese established commercial and politicalrelations during the first two centuries of the Estado da India. Dr Boyajian, incontrast, tackles the narrower theme of the changes that took place in theorganization and operation of Portuguese trade in Asia over the relatively briefperiod of the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. He describes, from astandpoint that is, by his own admission, 'unashamedly Eurocentric' (p. 243),the shift that occurred during this period from privileged, monopolistic royaltrade to private trade throughout the vast maritime trading network in which thePortuguese participated, particularly in those areas furthest from the Estado daIndia's principal centres of power.

Subrahmanyam correctly defines the Estado da India as a collection of terri-torial niches and mercantile networks, but seems reluctant to state categoricallywhether he subscribes to Max Weber's view, as first elaborated by Van Leur andmore recently by Neils Steengard, that Portugal was still essentially a medievalstate in the sixteenth century and that the Estado da India introduced no newcommercial or economic forms but remained almost exclusively a redistributiverather than a productive enterprise, in which plunder and not profit, banditryand not capitalism, force and not the establishment of permanent institutions ofgovernment and administration were paramount. He contrasts the Estado daIndia in this respect with such contemporary Asian powers as the Safavid andOttoman empires, as well as with the Dutch and English East India Companies,and makes a more cautious assessment than does Boyajian of the impact that thePortuguese presence had on the trading world of Asia. He demonstrates that the

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BOOK REVIEWS 343

fundamental changes that occurred in the organization and administration of theEstado da India after the late 1530s, in what he calls the mid-sixteenth century'crisis', were partly due to a series of extraneous events that took place indifferent parts of the world - the creation of the donatory-captaincy system inBrazil, the conquests of Suleyman in Egypt and the Red Sea and the emergenceof several great imperial and commercial powers in Iran, India, Arakan andBurma. He maintains that this period of crisis was followed between 1570 and1610 by an era of re-orientation and resists the idea that the latter period wasone of absolute decline, except to the extent that, as Boyajian also makes clear,it was during these forty years that the Portuguese crown lost its monopolisticcontrol over the trade of the Estado da India to private traders and financiers.Subrahmanyam demonstrates that this did not bring about any absolutediminution in the overall volume of Portuguese trade from Asia on the Caperoute and no corresponding revival in the overland route between Europe andAsia during the same period.

The other crucial re-orientation in the Portuguese empire that Subrahmanyamsees taking place about this time is the shift from the old idea of a seaborneempire based on a chain of fortalezas and feitorias - the niches and the networks- to the notion of territorial expansion in India, somewhat on the model of theSpanish empire in America. He considers that the Portuguese failure toconsolidate this initiative, a failure that he characterizes as a retreat fromempire, was caused chiefly by three factors: first, the formation of a maritimeempire in Mughal India; second, the undermining of the role of the Portugueseas intermediaries between China and Japan as a result of growing Japanesehostility to the Portuguese missions, to Portuguese commercial rivalry and toPortuguese dabbling in Japanese politics; and third, the increasing competitionof the Dutch, specially in eastern Indonesia, the Bay of Bengal and theCoromandel coast. He designates the 1630s as a decade of disasters, followed bya period of restoration, truce and ultimate failure in the 1650s and 1660s, inwhich the Portuguese empire became vastly reduced by the loss of many of itspossessions. In the final chapters he gives a fascinating analysis of the activitiesof 'official' Portuguese society in Asia and the society of merchant adventurers,renegades, langados and rebels that existed alongside it.

Boyajian is more concerned to assess the impact of this series of reverses inthe fortunes of the Estado da India on the economy and society of metropolitanPortugal. His book is based on an extensive study of primary sources and of thework of other scholars in this controversial field, not least among them SanjaySubrahmanyam. In his introduction, Boyajian provides an admirable account ofthe origins of the Portuguese enterprise in Asia and describes its twofoldcharacter: on the one hand the carreira da India for the trade between Asia andEurope with its principal institutions in Lisbon, and on the other the Estado daIndia for the trade within Asia. The principle of royal monopoly underlay bothparts of the enterprise and the author's main purpose is to show how and whythis principle was gradually breached and the trade consequently fell into thehands of private traders. He convincingly demonstrates the important andincreasing part played by the New Christians in this private trade throughout thePortuguese empire and beyond in every commodity from Chinese silk toPeruvian silver, and establishes beyond doubt that by the end of the period thisprivate trade far exceeded the official royal trade of the Estado da India - 'thefaltering royal monopoly of spices' (p. xiii) - both in volume and profitability,

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while at the other end of the empire a wholly new South Atlantic tradedeveloped, based on Brazilian sugar and African slave labour. He argues thatthe extraordinary variety and scope of the commercial activity that wasgenerated by so many individuals trading in so many commodities over so manyroutes brought about a revolution and, indeed, that, by linking the ancientMediterranean trading system to the networks of new maritime trade routes tothe Americas and throughout Asia and by operating a global network ofprocurement and distribution of Asian commodities, this activity created thebeginnings of a world economy. However, he is in no doubt that the Estado daIndia soon ceased to be, if indeed it ever was except in the minds of D. Manuel Iand his servants, a purely redistributive enterprise: already by the 1550s the kingwas granting exclusive rights to his servants to conduct trading enterprises ontheir own account, while a little later the establishment of Portuguese commer-cial contacts and bases in China, Japan and the Philippines gave furtheropportunities to private traders. He also notes, as does Subrahmanyam, that thisdevelopment coincided with a phase of expansion of the Indian economy, just asin the first half of the seventeenth century the intensification of competitionbetween company and private trade coincided with a period of slow growth andeven slight recession in India.

Boyajian considers that the carreira trade reached its zenith in the first twentyyears of the seventeenth century and he vividly describes the inexorable declinethat occurred thereafter, partly as a result of shipping losses from storms,overloading and enemy attacks. He gives a fascinating account of the short-lived, under-capitalized and mismanaged Portuguese East India Company setup in 1628-29 in an attempt to restore carreira shipping to its former levels andof the disasters that overtook the pepper trade after the abolition of theCompany in 1633 and the restoration of royal administration. He demonstrateshow repeated attempts to buttress the carreira da India and revive the peppertrade were nullified by European, especially Dutch, competition on the Caperoute and by the gross incompetence and corruption of the viceregal adminis-tration. Philip III refused to give up his monopoly and his inefficient andunreliable royal shipping, which not only failed to meet the ordinary costs of thecarreira but also severely circumscribed the private traders. Although privatetrade on the Cape route seems to have suffered less in this period from Dutchand English competition, it did nevertheless decline, and Portuguese merchantsincreasingly turned their attention to the Spanish American trade, some of themobtaining Castilian naturalization and establishing themselves in Seville andMadrid.

Boyajian points out that during the 1630s the diamond trade alone attractedsignificant amounts of capital to the carreira da India, and Lisbon remained theprimary distribution centre of diamonds and other precious stones in Europe.New Christians, many of them resident outside Portugal and conducting theirtrade through the Manila galleon, predominated in this trade. The Portugueserevolt of 1640 and the accession of D. Joao IV completed the estrangement ofthe New Christians residing in Castile from Lisbon. The Braganca kings werenot well disposed to them, expropriated much of their property in Portugal andBrazil and executed their kinsmen for treason. In conclusion, the authorcontrasts the unrelieved domestic poverty of Portugal in 1640 with the wealth ofa small number of successful merchants trading overseas, and demonstrateshow, because the social order in Portugal encouraged aristocratic idleness and

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BOOK REVIEWS 345

conspicuous consumption and discouraged productive enterprise, and becausesuccessful merchants tended to adopt these values, the interests of the landedaristocracy tended to triumph over mercantile interests.

Boyajian has compiled a number of useful tables and appendices to supporthis arguments. These include manifests of carreira shipping, analyses of carreiracargo and vessels, estimated Portuguese investment in Asian trading, financialstatements of the VOC Asian factories and, perhaps most revealing of all, ananalysis by region and commodity of the extensive Far Eastern trade of one NewChristian merchant, Diogo Fernandes Vitoria of Manila, who was related tomany other New Christian merchants in Brazil, Goa and elsewhere.

A World on the Move is a very different kind of book. It is described by thepublishers as 'the story of the first and one of the greatest colonial empires: itsbirth, apotheosis and decline'. It is in fact nothing of the sort and, as the authorstates in his introduction, is not intended to be. Instead, Professor Russell-Wood has assembled an anthology of titbits of information about various aspectsof the Portuguese presence in Africa, Asia and America between 1415 and 1800,on which he has tried to impose a spurious unity and cohesion by taking the ideaof movement - any kind of movement, whether of people, vehicles, plants,diseases or ideas - as his underlying theme. The result is an extraordinary ragbagof a book, which, although its wealth of anecdote illuminates many odd andinteresting aspects of the Portuguese imperial achievement, proves nothing newabout it and little that is not either trivial or self-evident. There is, in any case,no real connection between the 'movement' of, say, a sedan chair in the streetsof Goa, the transfer of a provincial governor from Mozambique to Timor andthe transmission of the fashion of wearing top hats from Lisbon to Rio deJaneiro in the nineteenth century: they are all quite different kinds ofmovement. The essential absurdity of trying to link together all these disparateodds and ends of information simply by the tenuous thread of movement isnowhere more clearly revealed than in the section on painting, where the authoris constrained by his theme only to mention those pictures that happen toportray movement.

The reader is led at a breathless canter through long lists of governors,bishops, merchants, mariners, writers and artists, most of whom are only giventhe sketchiest of biographies, consisting of little more than the places theyvisited or lived in and an occasional date. There are also lists of all manner ofother things from islands to vegetables. Professor Russell-Wood appears tothink that by merely compiling these lists he is absolved from the necessity ofdiscussing the idea of movement in relation to the objects he lists. Conse-quently, it is not clear what the lists are supposed to demonstrate other than theobvious fact that the Portuguese empire was far-flung and its resources hadtherefore to be thinly spread and its servants mobile.

The book seems to have been written and edited in great haste. There areinnumerable grammatical, syntactical and orthographic errors: 'forcefully' isconfused with 'forcibly' and 'alternate' with 'alternative'; expatriate is spelt 'ex-patriot' (p. 105); the three continents of Africa, Asia and America are describedas a trilogy; copper is said on page 145 to be the most stable precious metal inIndia instead of its price; Duarte Barbosa and Fernao de Magelhaes (sic) aredescribed on page 216 as becoming 'brothers-in-law through marriage' (howelse?); Columbus was 'exposed to' pineapples in 1492 (p. 170). Cliches andfacetious phrases abound: the Portuguese are nothing daunted, women are the

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fairer sex, priests are men of the cloth, diseases come in hosts, as, even moreinaccurately, do the mendicant orders, and on page 137 Ant6nio Galvao doesthe house-cleaning, rocks the boat and becomes a sacrificial lamb in a singleparagraph. The author frequently contradicts himself. On page 155 Ant6nioVieira is said to have written memoranda to D. Joao IV on the cultivation oforiental plants; on page 157 this information is repeated, unnecessarily, but onlya single memorandum is mentioned.

In a book of this kind, a firm grasp of geography is essential, but Russell-Wood's geography seems vague in the extreme. On page 157 he refers to theMalay archipelago and Indonesia, which suggests that he may be confusingthe archipelago with the peninsula, and then increases the confusion on page162 by saying that yams may have originated in the Malay archipelago, whencethey were carried to Southeast Asia, apparently unaware that the Malayarchipelago is in Southeast Asia. He states incorrectly on page 32 that Makassaris on the south-westerly point of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and thencompounds that error on page 200 by saying that the Jesuit province of Japanincluded part of Indonesia and the Celebes (Sulawesi). He seems equallyconfused about African geography. For example, on page 162 he states thatyams, bananas and plantains were cultivated in the 'forest areas of Africa' priorto the arrival of the Portuguese, then that the Portuguese carried yams from theIndian Ocean to West Africa, which leads the reader to suppose that these forestareas must have been in East Africa. Yet he also tells us that bananas andplantains were brought to East Africa from the forest regions before the arrivalof the Europeans.

These defects would perhaps matter less if the author had succeeded indemonstrating that movement is a meaningful idea on which to base a study ofthe Portuguese empire, but this he has signally failed to do. Both DrSubrahmanyam's book, which is intended for the non-specialist reader, and DrBoyajian's more specialized and narrowly-focused work, whether or not oneagrees with all their conclusions, are important additions to the historiographyof the Portuguese empire in its early phases and both support their argumentswith a wealth of evidence, much of it from primary sources, lucidly andpersuasively presented. The same unfortunately cannot be said of ProfessorRussell-Wood's performance.

JOHN VILLIERSLondon

The Spanish Frontier in North America by David J. Weber. New Haven andLondon: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. xx + 579, maps and illustrations.$40.00; £20. ISBN 0-300-05198-0.

Traditionally, the early history of North America has been taught in the UnitedStates with a strong British bias. After an all-too-brief mention of the firstEuropean (that is, Spanish) encounters with the Americas, the story usuallyshifts quickly to Jamestown, the Pilgrims, and the founding of the originalthirteen colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. Thus, often the impression is left

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erroneously that while the Spanish came for fortune and glory, the English andother northern Europeans came to stay and build. And thereafter, Americanhistory also is set to progress from east to west.

In his new and extensive study, The Spanish Frontier in North America, DavidJ. Weber seeks in part to redress this bias. Weber, the Robert and NancyDedman Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, a past presi-dent of the Western History Association, and a distinguished scholar of thehistory of the North American Greater Southwest, takes the story from justbefore the first encounters of the late fifteenth century to the end of the SpanishEmpire in North America in the early nineteenth century, with two concludingchapters on the transformation of the Spanish frontier and its people and on theSpanish legacy to the United States. With this examination of the early Hispanichistory of the United States, he also illustrates that multiculturalism is not at allnew to the American experience, but rather that it has been central to Americanhistory since the time of Columbus and the conquistadores.

In the first five chapters, Weber deftly revaluates the misunderstandings of theinitial contacts as well as Spanish motivations and actions during this era. At thesame time, he is revealing and praiseworthy of the Amerindians and theircultures. The next five chapters deal with the building of the Spanish Empire inNorth America. In total, while emphasizing the role of the Spanish and theSouthwestern heritage of the United States, the author skilfully brings balanceto American colonial history.

Weber is a sound historian and an engaging writer who has produced animportant book, one which can readily serve as a textbook. It is not only wellwritten but thoroughly illustrated with pictures and maps, and also welldocumented with extensive notes and a comprehensive bibliography. LikeHerbert Eugene Bolton's The Spanish Borderlands (1921) and John FrancisBannon's The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513-1821 (1970) before it and towhich it is clearly indebted, The Spanish Frontier in North America will becomea standard in the Southwestern and multi-ethnic history of the United States.

DENNIS REINHARTZUniversity of Texas at Arlington

The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492to 1800 by Jack P. Greene. Chapel Hill and London: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1993. Pp.xiv + 216, illustrations. $32.95. ISBN 0-8078-2097-0.

Jack P. Greene, leading interpreter and historiographer extraordinaire of earlyAmerican history, refuses to be confined to any single perspective on his field,even that of his own excellent Pursuits of Happiness (1988). His latest book,developed from his 1990 Anson G. Phelps Lectures at New York University, isalso a challenge to David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed (1989), as well asbeing a devastating retort to a misguided recent claim that American exceptional-ism was a nineteenth-century phenomenon.

Greene divides European (mainly English) and Anglo-American perceptionsof America into helpful phases. Sixteenth-century commentators filtered their

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new worlds through old books, though it is a little unfair to dismiss renaissanceand Christian perspectives as entirely backward-looking. Their Utopias werepart of the familiar use of the past to point the way to the future. Greeneemphasizes that America was seen differently from either Africa or Asia;America was a genuinely unexpected surprise, a discovery that was immediatelyappropriated. Greene endorses Daniel Boorstin's old notion of America as a'disproving ground for Utopias'. Virginia, which was the exemplar of a pragmaticBritish America in Pursuits of Happiness, becomes the exception in a continen-tal North America of failed Utopian experiments. Between 1690 and 1760 BritishAmerica was described in promotional literature and colonial celebration as aland of white male freeholds enjoying political power. Yet America was alsobecoming more European, even accepting notions of America as degenerate inculture and civility. Revolutionary America consolidated the belief in Americanexceptionalism with the help of some European revolutionaries. The self-congratulatory celebration of American liberty as unique and exemplary, nowbecame tempered both with some concern about slavery and with someremnants of a colonial culture cringe. However, America's exceptionalism hadbecome America's identity.

After a volume of visions of America, often offered by boosters and self-interested real estate salesmen, Greene's epilogue addresses the naggingquestion of the connection between these intellectual constructions and reality.He chides social historians who have discovered unexceptional patterns of earlyAmerican marriage ages, wealth distribution, and social dependency among thefree population. He suggests, in passing, that the number of married adults wasprobably higher in America, and that American economic inequities did notcompare with those of Europe. Greene clearly condemns the racist blinkers thatallowed Americans to celebrate their own liberty while enslaving others, and healso makes clear that Amerindians were largely excluded from America'sidentity. Can mythmakers who so blythly overlooked so many people beregarded as otherwise reliable witnesses?

This provocative book, illustrated with forty-six delightful and effectivelycaptioned plates, reopens a debate about early America that some of us thoughtwas over, and does so with enthusiasm and authority. This ancient andpersistent theme will be irresistible to triumphal contemporary America.

IAN K. STEELEUniversity of Western Ontario

Sojoumers in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake,1740-1800 by Alan L. Karras. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,1992. Pp. xv + 231. $37.95. ISBN 0-8014-2691-X.

This volume carefully analyses the experiences of 406 young Scottish males whosought their fortunes in Jamaica and the Chesapeake during the last six decadesof the eighteenth century. Those who went to Jamaica (267) outnumbered thosewho went to the Chesapeake (139) almost two to one. A substantial subset 'of ageneral exodus of educated people from Scotland to Britain's American colonies

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in the mid-eighteenth century' (p. 1) - an exodus that, Karras estimates, mayhave reached as many as 9,000 to 10,000 individuals - they were professionallytrained, possessed of some resources, and well-connected, often second or thirdsons. Unlike their poorer countrymen during the same period, they went toAmerica not as emigrants but as sojourners. Viewing the colonies as places 'tobe exploited, not settled' (p. 21), they intended 'to earn a fortune as quickly aspossible and return home with it' (p. 3).

Most Scots who went to the Chesapeake were disappointed in their hopes.With 40.3 per cent working as merchants, 24.8 per cent as tobacco factors, and9.3 per cent as apprentices to merchants, three out of four were engaged inmercantile activities, mostly as employees of Glasgow tobacco firms. Physicians(11.3 per cent) and attorneys and lawyers (5.4 per cent) were the only othersignificant categories. Many Chesapeake Scots remained loyal to Britain andlost their estates during the American Revolution. By contrast, sojournersfound Jamaica, whose importance to Scotland 'as both a trading partner and as amarket for its exported sons, continued to grow' (p. 176) throughout the period,more congenial for the realization of their goal of upward social mobility.Finding a variety of niches open to them, they worked in sixteen differentoccupational categories, albeit four out of five of them were concentrated in thesix categories of merchants (26.6 percent), physicians (19.3 per cent), attorneys(13.5 percent), estate managers (10.4 per cent), planters (6.8 percent), andoverseers (6.2 per cent). Scots may have constituted as many as 40 percent of thewhite residents of a few parishes by 1774. Yet, if Jamaica offered more'opportunities for advancement' (p. 116) than the Chesapeake, the majority ofScots who went there never obtained enough capital to fulfil their goal of livingindependently in Scotland.

This volume contains much useful information on the mentalite and experi-ences of Scottish sojourners in Jamaica and the Chesapeake. A particularlyvaluable chapter shows how 'well-spun ethnic patronage webs' (p. 7) in bothJamaica and the Chesapeake largely determined where they went and what theydid. Unfortunately, Karras's failure to consider the extent to which Scotsparticipated in the public life and institutions of either colony prevents him fromassessing how far ethnic discrimination and their own clannishness preventedtheir assimilation into their host societies. Similarly, Karras nowhere explicitlyconsiders the questions of whether and how knowledge of the Scottishsojourners may alter our comprehension of either of the colonial societies heconsiders. Without telling his readers why, he insistently reaffirms, with regardto Jamaica, his faith in the old cliches about the extent of absenteeism, theabsence of social and cultural institutions, and the monocultural character of theeconomy; he thereby implicitly challenges the findings, published over twentyyears ago, of Richard B. Sheridan, Edward Brathwaite, and Michael Craton andJames Walvin, among others, and ignores evidence that he has himselfincidentally presented showing, among other things, that an extensive andsophisticated legal system existed in Jamaica, that at least one sojourner foundthe resident Jamaican elite 'exceedingly genteel' and 'well-bred' (p. 55), andthat 'significant' numbers of Scots 'enjoyed the way they lived in Jamaica' andchose to stay (p. 73).

JACK P. GREENEThe Johns Hopkins University

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Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, Volume 1, FromAboriginal Times to the End of Slavery by Michael Craton and Gail Saunders.Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Pp. xxiii + 455, maps,illustrations. $60.00. ISBN 0-8203-1382-3.

Historians have a tendency to see the British Caribbean as a homogeneousregion with a single route to development via sugar and slavery. This com-prehensive new history of the Bahamas, drawing on both authors' longcareers in research and writing on the archipelago, should help to put paid tosuch over-simplification. The story of this scattering of barren islands, poor andperipheral to any imperial scheme, admirably demonstrates the differentialpatterns of development in the area. Certain strands in the Bahamian story -such as the significance of the sea, the central role of plunder and contrabandtrade, the institution of slavery - are common to other islands but, in a veryimportant sense, the Bahamas stand apart in not developing a plantationsystem.

The first section of the book uses archaeological evidence and contemporarycommentaries to tell the story of the Lucayan Indians who inhabited the islandsfor about 800 years before being 'discovered' by Columbus in 1492 and wipedout by the Spaniards in just 25 years. The Indians had a maritime economy, butthe authors show how these simple people were uniquely successful in adaptingtheir economy and aspirations to their environment, and striking a balancebetween the resources of the meagre land and the richer sea to achieve self-sufficiency.

The book's second and third sections, looking at European settlement downto the end of slavery in 1838, show that later Bahamians were less easily contentand, whilst the centrality of the sea provides continuity with the Indian past,the quest for riches shaped an economy which was predatory and parasitic.The central props were piracy, privateering and related, more respectable,but equally opportunistic, activities like wrecking, contraband trade, andturtling. Until around the time of American independence farming was forsubsistence only. An influx of settlers from the mainland after 1783 promotedserious attempts to establish a plantation economy producing cotton. But, aftersome initial success, this failed because of the thin, easily exhausted soil. Thedecline was partly cushioned by the profitable development of salt productionbut many disgruntled landholders abandoned attempts to emulate the plantationlife-style of other colonies and left the islands, or moved to Nassau wherethere were opportunities in commerce - notably in privateering and contrabandtrade.

The life-style of the white elite is well portrayed from a wide array of evidenceincluding newspapers, journals and the fascinating (as yet unpublished) lettersof the Kelsall family. But the emphasis is on the black majority drawing heavilyon Saunders' MPhil thesis on Bahamian slavery in the Loyalist period. Asystematic analysis of censuses and slave registration records provides a highlydetailed demographic picture, drawing attention to its relative healthfulness andthe achievement of natural increase - unusual in the Caribbean. The findingsgive firm support to Barry Higman's view that the crucial determinant in slavedemography was the pattern of economic development and that the worstpossible world for slaves was the sugar plantation.

The volume ends with a brief reference to emancipation and the problems this

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posed, setting the scene for issues to be discussed in the second volume, andleaving the reader eagerly to anticipate the completion of this valuable work.

NUALA ZAHEDIEHUniversity of Edinburgh

Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups 1690 to 1790by Alison Gilbert Olson. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: HarvardUniversity Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 261. £31.95. ISBN 0-674-54318-1.

In this book Dr Olson gives a full statement of her interpretation of the workingof the eighteenth-century British empire, of which she gave readers of thisJournal a valuable preview in her article on 'The Board of Trade and LondonAmerican Interest Groups in the Eighteenth Century' (VIII, No.2, 1979-80).The essence of her argument is that empire worked well during the first half ofthe eighteenth century, when a network of informal contacts was allowed toreconcile interests; empire broke apart when the formal authority of GreatBritain was asserted through parliament.

The analysis of the world of the trans-Atlantic interest groups in the first halfof the eighteenth century is based on a very impressive body of research. Olson'snet is cast wide. Interest groups for her are not confined to the inevitablemerchants and planters: they include religious denominations (the Church ofEngland in the colonies is treated as a denomination, which had to lobby likeDissenters) and ethnic minorities, such as Jews and Huguenots. Government onboth sides of the Atlantic, Olson argues, was open to pressure. Colonialgovernors had to be responsive to the wishes of colonial interests. When localauthority was recalcitrant, London could still be manipulated. Trading partners,co-religionists or people of the same ethnic background in Britain were willingto take up issues and make representations to the British government. Mostissues were resolved by the Board of Trade. This much-maligned body was inOlson's view a responsive and flexible manager of Anglo-American interests.With reasonable opportunities for successful lobbying, Americans believed thatBritish decisions that concerned them were amenable to their influence. Theytherefore had no real incentive to challenge British authority.

As is notorious, harmony broke down in the 1760s. Olson believes that theBritish ceased to show 'responsive restraint' and so Americans no longer offered'voluntary compliance'. The increased role of parliament was, she considers,crucial to the British lack of restraint. Parliament was difficult for Americaninterests to lobby and anyway displayed 'an inflexible attitude toward coloniallaw enforcement that did not give the interests much room to maneuver'.Parliament's heightened sense of its own powers seems beyond dispute. On theother hand, much recent work stresses that parliament was extremely sensitiveto pressure. In Paul Langford's words, it deployed its power 'in response to thedemands of interests, groups and communities, not so much imposing asovereign will as providing a legal service'. West Indians had little difficulty inutilizing these services; why could not American interests do the same? The

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extent to which British ministers were focusing on American issues from theoutbreak of the Seven Years War onwards reduced the scope for lobbying. Butthat seems to be only part of the answer. Again unlike the West Indians,Americans were unwilling to use such scope as still existed. However muchcolonial agents or the merchants who traded across the Atlantic might hope tocontinue the old system, opinion in the colonies as a whole was coming tobelieve that they themselves were competent to resolve the issues thatconcerned them through their assemblies. Anglo-American exchanges ceased tobe about adjusting interests and came to be polemics about constitutionalprinciple.

P.J. MARSHALLKing's College London

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific byGananath Obeyesekere. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp.xvii + 251. ISBN 0-691-05680-3.

In January 1779, James King was greatly struck by the 'remarkable homage [theHawaiians] paid to Captn Cook & also to Captain Clerke':

This on the first visit of Captn Cook to their houses seemd to approach toAdoration, he was placed at the foot of a wooden image at the Entranceof a hut, to which from the remnants of Cloth round the trunk, & theremains of Offerings on the Whatta, they seem to pay more than ordinarydevotion.1

In 1981, synthesizing earlier understandings and informing them with wideresearch into various Polynesian cultures, Marshall Sahlins argued that theHawaiians had received Cook as Lono, the god of peace and fertility. Briefly,Sahlin's paradigm is that, arriving in November 1778, Cook came at the time ofthe makahiki, the harvest festival presided over by Lono; that, true toexpectation, he came in a canoe from the land beyond the sky; that his clockwiseprogress about the large island of Hawaii conformed to Lono's expected path;that his ships' masts and sails mirrored Lono's iconography. Giving him thegod's name, Sahlins's argument goes, the Hawaiians accorded Cook all thehonours and obeisance due to Lono. When Cook sailed from Kealakekua Bayon 4 February 1779, he did so at the appropriate time, for the ritual season waschanging, with the warriors turning to hunting bonito rather than mackerel, andKu, the god of war and human sacrifice, coming to ascendency. When, againstexpectation, Cook put back into the bay with a strained mainmast on 11February, events quickly built to his death — which, cosmologically, was thefulfilment of the mythic opposition of the two gods.2 In 1982, in an articleObeyesekere does not notice, Greg Dening offered this essential paradigm froma somewhat different perspective.

Now, in the study under review, Gananath Obeyesekere, an anthropologistworking from distant Princeton rather than among the islands of Polynesia, callsthis paradigm into great question. His key points are:

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BOOK REVIEWS 353

1. The Hawaiians did not deify Cook as an appearance or incarnation of Lono,but rather received him as a high chief. He says of Cook's reception at thetemple Kikiau, for example:'It is clear that Cook is being introduced to the Hawaiian deities, but not as agod Lono . . . that Cook is being installed as a Hawaiian chief (pp. 83-4).

2. Cook's companions interpreted this and other such actions according to adiscourse of civilizing mission, so as to construct the myth of Cook'sapotheosis, which then became enshrined in the British consciousness:

I question this 'fact' [of apotheosis], which I show was created in theEuropean imagination of the eighteenth century and after and wasbased on antecedent 'myth models' pertaining to the redoubtableexplorer cum civilizer who is a god to the 'natives'. To put it bluntly, Idoubt that the natives created their European god; the Europeanscreated him for them. This 'European god' is a myth of conquest,imperialism, and civilization, (p.3)

3. Missionaries (and others) carried this myth back to Hawaii where, ageneration and more after the historical events, the Hawaiians incorporatedit into a rapidly changing cosmology and culture: 'The Hawaiian versions ofCook's apotheosis come from accounts of native scholars and missionariesafter the Hawaiians had overturned their tabu system in 1819, and the firstAmerican evangelical missions had begun to arrive [the following year] (pp.49-50; and see also Chapter 7).

4. Subsequently, Western writers drew on the records of this corrupted cultureto perpetuate the myth of Cook as Lono: "These (Hawaiian) accounts areused by European writers, historians and biographers for their own interpre-tations of the momentous events pertaining to Cook's arrival and sojourn'(p. 50).

Now, it may be that not every daily event at Kealakekau Bay in January andFebruary 1779 can be neatly slotted into the cultural structures Sahlinselaborates; but in my opinion his view is much more persuasive, because bettergrounded in anthropology and history, than Obeyesekere's. The Apotheosis ofCaptain Cook suffers from a number of serious flaws. One is that it is not basedon primary research into Polynesian culture, but is rather an extendedhypothetical reading of European records. Another is that, often, Obeyesekereseeks to establish his point by analogy, especially from his memories of hisyounger life. We may justly ask what real congruences there are between SriLankan and Polynesian cultures? (What would his response be if I were tosuggest, for example, that because Australian Aborigines habitually perceivedEuropeans as the returned spirits of dead Aborigines, it is likely that theHawaiians also recognized Europeans as supernatural beings?) Next, this studyabounds with speculations and probabilities: 'in this last voyage Cook reliedexclusively on Mai, the Tahitian interpreter who knew some English, andconsequently his own Tahitian might well have fallen into disuse' (p. 67); 'Letme hazard a guess . . .' (p. 70); 'it is likely . . .' (p. 144, among many others);'the last sentence probably introduces a piece of Western mythologization . . . "(p. 158). The plain fact is that, at a number of important points, Obeyesekerecan offer no real evidence for his hypothesis, only speculation (see, particularly,pp. 70, 119, 144, 158, 174).

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This work is also generously laced with inconsistencies. For example, whileObeyesekere rejects the clear implication of King's description quoted at thehead of this review, he also uses King as a factual observer when it suits hispurposes (p. 63). He rejects the notion of the deification of Cook, but concedesthat, being kapu, Hawaiian great chiefs were imbued with the sacred (p, 120).(Indeed, I think he seriously underestimates the significance of kapu through-out.) In discussing Cook's account of the Tongan Hnasi ritual, Obeyesekereconcedes that 'he described ,the ceremony well' (p. 33). Later, in order togainsay Sahlins's argument, he says that 'the thesis that Cook was an ethnographerof the modern sort . . . is quite improbable'. Cook was fascinated by nativecustom . . . but his was not the fascination of a scholar' (p. 87). Later still, hesays that Cook's officers 'were, after all, the first ethnographers, imbued with ascientific curiosity' (p. 138). (And from whom, one may also ask, did these learntheir skills?)

Finally, Obeyesekere does mistake himself in the newness of his insights. Forexample, while he takes to task most of those who have written about Cooksince the appearance of Beaglehole's great edition of the Journals for theirdiscourse-bound interpretations, the perception that Cook raged and actedsavagely on the third voyage will come as a surprise to none of them who havealso attended to the primary sources. This has been a common place of thescholarship for a couple of decades now. More significantly, Obeyesekere's keypropositions were offered by Jonathan Friedman in a 1985 article, viz.:

1. Captain Cook was not treated as a 'god' but as a chief of very highstatus. Divinity is quite simply an attribute of high status and Cookmust have appeared as a very high chief indeed with his great ships,powerful weapons and enormous wealth. The Western concept of godis inapplicable to a context where humans can be gods incarnated in auniverse where there is a genealogical and functional continuitybetween gods and chiefs.

2. From the above, it follows that Hawaiians treated Cook as they mighthave treated any foreign visitor of high status who happened to appearduring Makahiki season.

3. The 'apotheosis' of Cook can be better comprehended as a Europeaninterpretation of the Hawaiians' treatment of the illustrious captain.This is a fundamental feature of the integration of Hawaiian into theEuropean system. If Europeans (and Americans) had not returned toHawaii, if no new ships had come, then it is most likely that Cookwould have lost his significance in the following generations of Makahikis.It is the Europeanization of Hawaii that makes the symbolism of Cook apermanent part of the new kingdom. And the symbolism is in largepart European and not an indigenous product.

The colonization of the islands by missionaries who trained local Haw-aiians in the European version of recently Hawaiian history must becrucial here. In other words, it might be argued that the apotheosis ofCaptain Cook as a European image was transferred to Hawaiian history inan emergent colonial situation that made it into a principal aspect ofHawaiian royalty's own identity.4

It is curious that Obeyesekere does not list this article in his bibliography.

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NOTES

1. James King, in J.C. Beaglehole (ed.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on hisVoyages of Discovery (London, 1955-67), III, 509-10.

2. Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Ann Arbor, 1981).3. Greg Dening, 'Sharks that Walk on the Land', Meanjin, 41 (Dec. 1982), 427-37.4. Jonathan Friedman, 'Captain Cook, Culture and the World System,' Journal of Pacific

History, 20 (1985), 194-6.

ALAN FROSTLa Trobe University

Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 by Clare Midgley.London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Pp. xii + 281, illustrations. £37.50.ISBN 0-415-06669-7.

Historically, Western societies developed and applied the concepts of freedomand slavery to a much greater degree than did their non-Western counterparts.In the British case, the campaign to abolish slavery saw the intersection of manyof the great themes of modern Western history. Recently, scholars have craftedmajor works on the links between slavery and abolition on the one hand, andindustrialization, imperialism, domestic class structures and their attendantideologies, racism, and the visual arts (to mention but a few) on the other.Gender, however, except for the role of women in US slavery, has not receivedmuch attention. Clare Midgley's handsomely produced and illustrated book isthus timely, the more so because its author is aware of the wider issues, and goesbeyond the mere filling in of the hitherto almost invisible woman in the story ofthe campaign to abolish the slave trade and slavery. The book's three roughlychronological parts - all well rooted in the primary sources - cover respectivelythe campaigns against the slave trade, British slavery, and slavery in the US,though the last one also takes up reactions to scientific racism and the GovernorEyre controversy. Indeed, the bulk of the story is set in the second and thirdquarters of the nineteenth century. It describes the role of women shifting frominformal and non-organizational at the end of the eighteenth century, throughthe creation of separate women's anti-slavery societies in the 1820s, to awidening concern with social issues beyond slavery in 1860s. Exclusion from theformal political process channelled female activities into boycotts of slave-grownproduce and national petitions (all three of which were organized entirely bywomen). It also facilitated the taking of principled Garrisonian-type positionson issues on which men, with their focus on Parliament, were more inclined tocompromise.

But there is no direct line posited here from anti-slavery to feminism. Like themajority of male anti-slavery activists, the vast majority of women in thecampaign wished to see the replication of their own domestic society in the WestIndies and the US South - including 'patriarchal protection of females', andseparate spheres. There were no British counterparts to the Grimke sisters inthe US who moved on quickly to women's rights issues. Middle-class women'sacceptance of their social roles in the British campaign, and their stress in theirwritings and speeches on slavery as a barrier to 'normal' family life actually had

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the effect of legitimizing female inequality. In the long ran, however, theorganizational skills and 'sense of collective identity' of the anti-slaverycampaign may have provided a foundation for future straggles. Certainly, thepetering out of freemen's aid societies in the 1860s released women for otherissues. For women's position in British society therefore, anti-slavery wasambivalent.

For other issues likewise, female participation had profoundly ambivalentimplications. Indeed, it is the great intellectual strength of this book that it isprepared to tease out paradox. Among females the anti-slavery movementtended to maintain rather than bridge the gap between middle and workingclasses. And on the race issue Midgley notes that the female vision ofemancipation tended more to reinforce than to undermine racial inequality.While there are hints here of links between women's participation in anti-slaveryand overt resistance on the part of women slaves, these are never reallydeveloped. It is nevertheless odd that there is no reference to MariettaMorrissey's book on women in New World slavery - probably the best so far onthe topic. But this is a minor quibble about a fine piece of research.

DAVID ELTISQueen's University

Religion and Society in Post-Emancipation Jamaica by Robert J. Stewart.Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Pp. xxi + 254, maps andillustrations. $42.50 (hardback); $19.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-87049-749-9.The transition to freedom in Jamaica was characterized by significant religiousand social developments. European missionaries, who had played an importantrole in the society during slavery, continued to have an impact in the colonyafter emancipation. Perhaps even more significantly, native religions grewrapidly during this period and were crucial in post-emancipation Jamaicanhistory. Robert Stewart is to be warmly applauded for bringing together thevarious strands of European, African and Creole forms of religion in this highlyinteresting and well-written book.

Stewart usefully reviews the contributions of the various dissenting missionariesin Jamaica. He points to the radical religious and political tradition of theBaptists and contrasts them to the more moderate Methodists and the conserva-tive Anglicans. To his credit, Stewart also analyses the way planters began tomake use of missionaries after emancipation as a means of social control andsubordination. At first wary of missionaries during the slave period, plantersperceived the possibilities of using missionaries to help maintain the social andracial hierarchies developed during slavery.

Stewart also offers other perspectives on the missionaries. He carefullyexamines the interplay between European missionaries and their Jamaicanflocks. As he notes, in many cases, it was the people themselves who determinedwhat role the missionary or priest would play in their lives. Not surprisingly,perhaps, this was not always the role the missionaries themselves had en-visioned. Stewart also explores the problems of racism within the variouschurches. This included a schism among the Methodists over the development ofa native ministry and the case of a black Jamaican, Robert Gordon, who wasdenied a priesthood in the colony because of his colour.

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Religion and Society is particularly good at examining the black Church. InJamaica, the Baptists began as a black Church before European Baptists cameto the island, and Stewart explores the role of black leaders in the developmentof Afro-Creole religious forms. These Afro-Creole religions were also import-ant in political terms: they were a significant factor in the 1831 slave rebellion aswell as many of the outbreaks in the post-emancipation period. Moreover, thearrival of thousands of liberated Africans in this period had a significant impacton religious forms in the island.

Because of the importance of the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, Stewartdevotes considerable attention to the native Baptists and the nature of thishighly politicized religion. In addition, he discusses the conservative reactionamong the non-conformist missionaries in the wake of the Morant BayRebellion. Ten years after the outbreak, he could find no identifiable group ofdissenting missionaries who defended the peasantry. Even the Baptists, at onetime radical abolitionists who subsequently devoted themselves to the cause ofthe emancipated blacks, had become identified with the views of the white andbrown elite.

There are some minor quibbles about the book. Stewart repeats himself onthe cases of Robert Gordon and Henry Taylor; he is incorrect in his dating of theevents immediately leading up to the Morant Bay Rebellion; and he might havedevoted more attention to the Colonial Church Union, even though it fell justoutside his period. None the less, this is an important study. Above all, Stewartis able to point to the strength of black Christianity which continued 'to developas a vigorous alternative and as a source of Afro-creole identity and resistance ata time when European political and cultural hegemony was being reasserted'(p. 189). '

GAD HEUMANUniversity of Warwick

Poverty Abounding Charity Aplenty: The Charity Network in Colonial Victoriaby R.A. Cage. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1992. Pp. 190. $A35 (hardback);$A17.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-86806-437-8; 0-86806^138-6.Australia and its state of Victoria have been well served by research intonineteenth-century welfare history. With the availability of such a large amountof published and unpublished research, the value of Cage's book largely lies inits ability to present a differing viewpoint or to cover a gap in the existingpublications.

This different viewpoint is provided through Cage's expertise as an economichistorian. He firmly bases his work in its demographic and economic contextwhile outlining what he sees as a paradox: that poverty exists amid plenty.Successive chapters survey mainstream, Protestant or non-religious, charitableorganizations in colonial Victoria: the benevolent asylums; ladies' benevolentsocieties; and the oppressive colonial Charity Organisation Society. Theseorganizations are all seen in the context of colonial Australians' obsessiveabhorrence of a poor law. The focus is on governments and organizations; thereare few individuals and no personalities. This material is supplemented byappendices, amounting to nearly one third the length of the text, whichreproduce published qualitative and quantitative data.

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If Cage had concentrated solely on Victoria, the book would read as a usefulempirical study of Victorian colonial charity. However, he makes a number ofclaims in a comparative context. The most contentious of these is that colonialVictoria developed a network of co-operative charities that was 'unique' anduniquely humane and flexible. This claim for 'uniqueness' is developed in thefinal chapter in which Cage outlines the 'poor relief policy and administration' inScotland, England, Ontario, New South Wales and Tasmania. The case of NewSouth Wales suggests that Cage's analysis is flawed. He asserts that ladies'benevolent societies were 'absent' in New South Wales: that State's majorcharitable institution, the Benevolent Society, claimed in 1898 that there were150 local benevolent societies (as in Victoria, usually run by women) in Sydneyalone. My doctoral research demonstrated that these societies complemented amyriad of other women's charities and that they formed a 'network' as a highproportion of members were related to each other and there was also a largedegree of membership overlap. Even within Victoria, the influence of class,race, and affective factors such as religion, is inadequately covered. Catholicsocieties, for example, have been largely ignored. So, too, are the aboriginalinhabitants. These omissions are significant: the Catholic St Vincent de PaulSociety had efficient networks and it was regarded as particularly humane. Incontrast, little evidence of humaneness can be found in the treatment ofdispossessed Aborigines.

The stress on the importance of women to the organization of charity, not inbeing more humane but simply in being so active, is rightly placed as central.The value of this work is, however, marred by Cage's inadequately-based claimsabout Victorian charity in comparison with other systems.

JUDITH GODDENUniversity of Sydney

Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India by Avril Ann Powell. London:Curzon Press, 1993. pp. ix + 339, maps. £30. ISBN 0-7007-021-5.

Two preliminary observations: if, through the end of the cold war, Islam is onceagain to become 'the other', then a study such as this on an encounter betweenIslam and Christianity takes on a wider significance; and if we are on the brink ofa new wave of publications on the history of mission, then this one sets thehighest possible scholarly standard for any sensitive reading of cultures inconflict. Assertions such as these offset some suspicion that this is rather toospecialist a text. Muslims formed but 10 per cent of the population of the NorthWestern Provinces, 16 per cent of the whole of India, though a significantlyhigher proportion of her urban population, 50 per cent in Delhi, 30 per centLucknow, 40 per cent Agra, and constituted a fifth of the world's Muslimpopulation. Missionaries found Hinduism a far more enticing challenge. But 12out of 5,000 Protestant missionaries in India in 1924 (the figure is taken fromBrian Stanley's History of the Baptist Missionary Society) worked amongMuslims. The monograph's focus is on the munazara, or debate betweenrepresentatives of the two faiths. Yet these could be all over in a matter of days,or even hours, though those by correspondence took longer. If the author seestheir significance as being the first occasion Indian Muslims challenged empire,

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one might add the rider, here is yet a further example of how slow they were tograsp its threat. Here is also the making of a new version of a gentry debate -were the Muslims rising or falling in the first half of the nineteenth century? -though the evidence here suggests that in the Gangetic core region, they were atthe least holding their own. So why was there this belated, embattled responsein the 1840s and 1850s?

The debate is set in the longest possible context, looking back to like debatesin eighth century Abbasid Baghdad and sixteenth century Mughal Agra. But inthe nineteenth century adab decorum gave way to bitter dispute, colouringsubsequent, more populist, encounters in the late nineteenth century andbeyond. If, in retrospect, the first stirrings of this new munazara came withHenry Martyn, its actual beginnings were in the confrontations in Lucknow in1833 between the Jewish convert, Joseph Wolff, and the leading Shia mujtahids,the Nasirabadis, intrigued by millenarian claims that echoed their own belief in ahidden Imam. This family was too caught up in the politics of Awadh to pursuethe debate, and it passed to Agra, to an encounter between the German Pietistand C.M.S. missionary, Carl Pfander, the central figure in the text, and theMuslim Vakil, Al-i Hasan, subsequently to be dismissed for corruption.(Lawyers were of course a key agency, for their livelihoods were under theshadow of Macaulay and changes in Anglo-Mahomedan law). But it took eventsin Delhi, the conversions of prominent Hindus, above all, Ramchandra,professor of mathematics at the Anglo-Oriental College, to bring matters to ahead. It was Muslim perception of Company betrayal of its policy of religiousneutrality- the evangelical sympathies of the Lieutenant-Governor of the NorthWestern Province, James Thomason, and officials, such as William Muir, gavegrounds for such suspicions - that led prominent members of the ashrafcommunity, the ulama Rahmana Allah Kairanawi, and Doctor Wazir Khan,product of the new Calcutta College of Medicine, to come out fighting and in1854 challenge Pfander and Thomas French, fellow CMS missionary andheadmaster of St. John's College, to an open debate.

This is a fascinating account of a cultural encounter. The characterization ofits four main contestants could not be bettered. It is rich in irony. Pfander,champion, as he saw it, of a technologically and socially superior culture, choseto defend Christianity on grounds of its higher spirituality; his opponents, Islam,for its superior rationalism: here was an extraordinary inversion of theconventional wisdom of Orientalism that Eastern religions were non-rational. Itwas the very plethora of translations of Christian sacred texts into Arabic,Persian and Urdu, inevitably containing contradictions, that provided Pfander'sopponents with the means of exposing their tahrif, or corruption. The Anglo-Oriental Colleges of Delhi and Agra, intended as bridges between thecommunities, became one major source of conflict: it was to be their librariesthat largely provided Rajmana Allah and Wazir Khan with that new sophisti-cated biblical criticism with which to outwit their opponents. Did George Eliot'stranslation of David Strauss's Life of Jesus come from one of these libraries?Both sides began to mirror the writings of their opponents: Pfander's, compiledof questions and answers, with long textual quotations, taking on an Islamicstyle; Rajmana Allah's assuming the character of missionary tracts. Yet bothwere at cross purposes: evangelicals did not see 'corruption' as a serious barrierto faith, their opponents did not see a sense of sin as grounds for conversion.The cultural battle turned political. Both Rajmana Allah and Vazir Khan were

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caught up in the events of 1857: both subsequently escaped to Mecca. SomeMuslims who had shared their views down to 1857 subsequently sought somemore conciliatory relationship with the West, most noticeably, Sayyid Khan.But the intellectual rift does not seem to have been healed, and here is afrightening example of how Christian and Muslim have gone their separateways.

ANTONY COPLEYUniversity of Kent

The Light of Nature and the Law of God: Antislavery in Ontario 1833-1877 byAllen P. Stouffer. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press,1992. Pp. xvi + 273. $34.95 (hardback). ISBN 0-7735-0918-6.

Professor Stouffer correctly observes in his introduction that the subject of anti-slavery in Canada has been unduly neglected. His book does a good deal tomake up for this historiographical oversight and is a thorough, thoughtfulcontribution to the subject. In two quantitative chapters particularly he hasclearly identified who the anti-slavery leaders were - mostly recent, relativelyyoung, middle-class immigrants, reform in their politics, primarily Scots andmembers of the Free Presbyterian and Congregational Churches. He also showsthat, in contrast, the 'rank-and-file' of the movement was not exclusivelymiddle-class, but contained a solid core of workers and farmers and a substantialgroup from within the black community itself. He draws attention to theimportant, though almost completely unrecorded, role of women in the anti-slavery cause, who, unlike most of their more public male counterparts, seem tohave succeeded in achieving actual practical results by raising money and findingshelter, clothing education and jobs for recently arrived black fugitives. Hisstudy of the Buxton settlement in Raleigh Township demonstrates that, givenhalf a chance, the fugitive blacks were quite capable of becoming good settlersand citizens. In his conclusion he argues convincingly that the anti-slaverymovement was 'neither solely the product of proximity to the United States nordevoid of principles' (p. 216), but was idealistic at bottom. Anti-slavery activistswere a minority who really believed that slaves were human beings likethemselves who had natural rights that were being grossly violated.

The book deserves genuine praise, but few books are perfect. ProfessorStouffer knows a great deal about anti-slavery but his grasp of the history ofOntario is less impressive. (It is revealing that on the subject of the Rebellion of1837 his footnote reference is not to the books of Colin Read and Ronald Staggbut to ten pages in a 1974 textbook.) To take some glaring examples, he statescategorically that Wesleyan Methodists were the largest denomination inCanada West 'with nearly 50,000 adherents' (p. 219). The Census of 1851 (theyear of the founding of the Anti-slavery Society of Canada) lists WesleyanMethodists at 108,520, compared to the actual largest denomination, theAnglicans, at 223,190. He cites without comment or question a report in the

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New York Tribune (p. 101) on settlements at 'Ramsey' (actually RamsayTownship) near 'Brookville' (actually Brockville) and at 'Notowasaga' (actuallyNottawasaga Township), which has the facts as well as the names wrong. Inattempting to explain responsible government (p. 54) he confuses the executivecouncil with the legislative council.

The problem goes a bit beyond mere errors of fact. He is vague about thepolitics of the Union period. In order to explain why some denominations,particularly the Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Wesleyan Methodists,opposed or were indifferent to the abolition of slavery, he alleges, on the basisof no concrete evidence, that they were afraid of offending 'their political allies',the Conservatives. He does not explain what they were afraid of, or what theyhoped to gain from their allies. But were all Roman Catholics, Anglicans andWesleyan Methodists automatically Conservatives? And is it axiomatic that allConservatives were opposed to abolition? John A. Macdonald was certainlyquick to take credit for intervening in the sensational case of the escaped slaveJohn Anderson and is quoted (by Patrick Brode in The Odyssey of JohnAnderson, p. 51) as claiming that it was the Conservatives not the Reformerswho 'had been in the forefront of the anti-slavery struggle'. There is somepolitical confusion, too, in the contention that immigrant lawyers and merchantswere somehow 'outside the circle of power' (p. 188). In Ontario lawyers andmerchants, of any stripe, have rarely been outsiders. In any case in midnineteenth-century Ontario, Reform was power. They were in, and power hadalready been 'redistributed' about as far as it was ever going to be.

The result of Professor Stouffer's statistical work is, as already noted,valuable and revealing, but there are also limits to what he has done with hisnumbers. He understates the extent to which the anti-slavery movement was atiny minority of a minority. For instance, 21.6 per cent of Canadian anti-slaveryleaders in the period 1849-65 were Congregationalists, but since he fails tocompare his religious statistics with the relevant denominational census figures,the significance of this finding is lost. In 1851 there were only 7,747 Congregational-ists in all of Canada West, less than 1 per cent of a population of 952,000. Inother words Congregationalists were wildly over-represented in the movement.(One possible factor here, also understressed by Professor Stouffer, is thatthe movement was very Toronto-centred and the largest concentration ofCongregationalists was in the Toronto area.) Similarly, Free Church Presbyteriansmade up 32.4 per cent of the leadership, but only 7 per cent of the generalpopulation; 43.8 per cent of anti-slavery leaders had been born in Scotland,compared to only 8 per cent of the population. None of these comparativecensus figures appears in the book. The point is that these people were not onlyvery few in real numbers, but were a very specific, select group; yet noconvincing explanation is offered, or really attempted, to show why theydiffered from their contemporaries and even from their co-religionists andcountrymen. Of course they were evangelicals and idealists but so presumablywere many others who did not become involved in the movement. On the otherhand, in asking why most Canadians were unconcerned about, or hostile to anti-slavery, Professor Stouffer would have done better to avoid unsupportedpolitical speculation and to lean more on the statistical evidence in his analysis ofOntario newspaper opinion of the capabilities of former slaves. The majorityeditorial view, quite likely reflecting general popular assumptions, was simplyracist. Blacks were seen as inferiors and as incapable of improvement. The fact

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that slavery had been phased out at an early date in Ontario did not mean thatracism had disappeared with it.

J.K. JOHNSONCarleton University

Science and the Canadian Arctic: A Century of Exploration 1818-1918 by TrevorH. Levere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv + 438, map,illustrations and photographs. £40.00 (hardback). ISBN 0-521-41933-6.

In his introduction Levere states that his book is 'a study of the nature and roleof science in the exploration of the Canadian Arctic' over the period of acentury. This is a formidable task and, generally speaking, Levere has risen tothe challenge admirably. Much of the early part of the story deals with thescience undertaken, almost as a side-line, during the Royal Navy's search for theNorthwest Passage or, after the disappearance of the Franklin expedition in1845 during the search for that expedition. For example, on each of the searchexpeditions standard weather observations were taken every two hours through-out the voyage, including winterings. As Levere discusses, the officers involvedwere even guided in conducting their research by an Admiralty Manual ofScientific Enquiry. Even during these early decades, however, Levere focuses asmuch attention on the scientists who studied and classified the specimens anddata brought home as on the field investigations. A typical example is histhorough discussion of the role of William Hooker and William Swainson inanalysing and interpreting Dr John Richardson's materials, botanical andornithological, from his and John Franklin's explorations of the coast in 1825-27.

With the disaster of the Franklin expedition of 1845-48 and the considerablecost of the numerous expeditions sent to try to solve the puzzle of itsdisappearance, the Admiralty lost its enthusiasm for arctic exploration andscience. It was only when national pride, and to some extent national interest,were threatened by American attempts at the Pole (namely those of Kane,1853-5, Hayes, 1860-1 and Hall, 1871-3) that the Royal Society and the RoyalGeographical Society were able to put sufficient pressure on the Admiralty tomount a British attempt at the Pole, an attempt with a substantial scientificcomponent. This was George Nares' expedition to Ellesemere Island in 1875-6on which Lieutenants Fulford and Gifford carried out studies of terrestrialmagnetism, while Henry Feilden pursued thorough geological, zoological andbotanical investigations.

But a serious outbreak of scurvy during the expedition, forcing Nares toreturn home prematurely, again dulled the Admiralty's enthusiasm for arcticexploration and arctic science. When the proposal was put forward and plansdrawn up (largely through the drive and initiative of Germans and Russians) forthe First International Polar Year, Britain became involved only at the lastminute and, as Levere points out, that involvement 'could charitably be calledmodest'. Even this small contribution was handled by the army, in the form of aparty of four men led by Captain Henry Dawson of the Royal Artillery who

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established a station, as guests of the Hudson's Bay Company, at Fort Rae onGreat Slave Lake. This, like the other two stations of the International PolarYear located in the Canadian Arctic, the American station under LieutenantAdolphus W. Greely at Lady Franklin Bay on Ellesmere Island, and theGerman station under Dr W. Giese at Kingua Fiord in Cumberland Sound, waspurely a scientific endeavour. Science had come of age in the Canadian Arctic,to the point where geographical exploration took a back seat, as the initiator ofthe International Polar Year, Karl Weyprecht, had intended.

Canadian arctic science could well be thought of as similarly coming of agewith Vilhjalmur Stefansson's Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-18; this wasreally the first Canadian expedition aimed primarily at scientific research. WhileStefansson's own northern party completed the geographical exploration of theArchipelago the southern party under Dr Rudolph Anderson carried out a veryimpressive range of studies, including anthropology, geology, botany, meteor-ology and zoology, from its base at Bernard Harbour in Coronation Gulf.

This very brief overview may provide some inkling of the magnitude of thetask which Levere has tackled with such skill, spinning a fascinating and elegantnarrative around the themes of the motives, politics and institutions behind thewide range of expeditions on which science was pursued, as well as the details ofthe field investigations themselves.

In a book such as this it is almost inevitable that the author's own scientificbias should be revealed. Levere's real love is clearly the history of the study ofterrestrial magnetism, and in places this results in uneven coverage. AndrewGordon's three years of study (1884-6) of navigation conditions in HudsonStrait, involving six wintering parties, who concentrated on ice conditions, tides,water temperatures, are dismissed almost slightingly, with the remark thatgeophysical studies were 'strikingly lacking'. Even the biological studies receiveless than their due in Levere's treatment, especially in the later years of thecentury which he covers. Important contributors to the biology of the Arcticsuch as Roderick McFarlane, Edward Preble, Frank Russell and ErnestThompson Seton are nowhere mentioned. Probably the most disturbing weak-ness in Levere's study is the disappointing coverage of anthropological studies.The only such studies listed in the index are those of Franz Boas in CumberlandSound, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson's and Diamond Jenness's work in theCoronation Gulf area. Omitted are Emile Petitot's work on the Inuit of theMackenzie Delta (1864—72), Captain George Comer's studies (in part incollaboration with Boas) on the Inuit of northwestern Hudson Bay (1903-9),Bernard Hantzch's studies of the Inuit of Cumberland Sound (1909-11) andLucien Turner's superlative study of the Inuit of Ungava Bay (and also of theNaskapi Indians) based on his sojourn at Fort Chimo in 1882-4 under theauspices of the Smithsonian Institution.

Of course, these charges of omission might have been disarmed by astatement as to the basis for the selection in the coverage of fields orexpeditions. And certainly Levere can be forgiven for this uneven coverage ofthe sciences, on the grounds that the subject is so vast. But one can guaranteethat no seaman who reads this book will forgive him for referring to CaptainGeorge Back's Hecla, a bomb-vessel of 375 tons, as a 'boat'.

WILLIAM BARRUniversity of Saskatchewan

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The Voyages of the Discovery: The Illustrated History of Scott's Ship by AnnSavours. London: Virgin, 1992. Pp. xvi + 384, maps, illustrations. £25.00(hardback). ISBN 1-852227-117-5.

On 21 March 1901 a very unusual ship was launched from the yards of DundeeShipbuilders' Company, the first British ship built specifically for scientificresearch, and one of the last wooden, three-masted sailing ships to beconstructed in Britain. On 2 April 1986 the same ship returned to the Firth ofTay, cradled within the hull of the floating dock ship Happy Mariner, and on themidnight tide of 3/4 April was eased to her present berth in the inner VictoriaDock at Dundee, where she is now on permanent display. The ship wasDiscovery, and Ann Savours' book represents a carefully researched andfascinating 'biography' of the intervening 85 years of the ship's existence.

Discovery was built specially for Robert Scott's National Antarctic Expeditionof 1901^, and the first 101 pages of the book are devoted to that expedition. Aswith all the chapters of the ship's career, Savours has researched the topicthoroughly, working from original diaries and manuscript sources, and has beenable to cast some interesting new light on certain aspects of the expedition and insome cases has quietly challenged some of the accepted 'facts'. Thus when Scott,Lieutenant Ernest Shackleton and Dr Edward Wilson struggled back toDiscovery on 3 February 1903 from their pioneer journey across the Ross IceShelf, Savours describes the rather touching scene of Scott repeatedly preparingsardines-on-toast for Shackleton as a special treat during the first night backaboard ship, thus dispelling the standard myth of the total estrangement of thesetwo men by this stage.

The next phase in Discovery's career was much more prosaic: having beenbought by the Hudson's Bay Company, from 1905 until 1911 Discovery madealmost annual voyages from London to the Company's various posts in the Bay.One suspects that for this phase Savours was unable to locate any diaries orjournals and hence was restricted to the rather bald facts of the ship's logs. Shehas done her best to spin an interesting fabric from these rather uninspiringsources, but even she has been unable to breathe much life into the record ofthese routine voyages.

Even less well known is the subsequent phase in the ship's history: under themanagement of the Bay Steamship Co. under which name the Hudson's BayCompany acted as agents for the French government, Discovery made a voyagewith war materiel to Arkhangel'sk in the White Sea in 1915, then variousvoyages to French and Spanish ports in 1916-19 and finally (under these owners)an interesting voyage to Novorossiysk in the Black Sea and to Taganrog in theSea of Azov in 1919-20, into the heart of the chaos of the Russian Civil War.

Having been laid up for several years, and after a major refit, in the fall of1925 Discovery sailed for Antarctic waters once again. For the next two yearsshe was involved in the first of the Discovery expeditions, a series of expeditionswhich focused on the marine biology of the Southern Ocean, especially thebiology of the southern whales. Savours' account of this phase of the ship'scareer provides a succinct but readable and informative description of this aspectof Antarctic science, familiar to few except biologists and oceanographers.Thereafter Discovery was the expedition vessel of a further two scientificvoyages in Antarctic waters, the BANZARE voyages (British, Australian andNew Zealand Antarctic Research Expeditions) of 1929-30 and 1930-31. Once

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again Savours' treatment is an excellent, readable account of little-known butscientifically very important expeditions.

By comparison, the last period of the ship's history, spanning over 50 years,was uneventful and prosaic. From 1937 until 1954, functioning as the head-quarters of the Sea Scouts and as a monument to Scott and his companions, shewas a familiar feature of the London landscape at her berth on the Embank-ment, although the vast majority of the many millions of people who saw her, orvisited her, probably assumed incorrectly that she had participated in Scott'sfinal, fatal voyage to the Antarctic. After 1954 Discovery spent about 25 years asa drill ship for the RNVR, still at the same berth, then in 1979 she joined thecollection of historic ships in St Katharine's Dock under the protection of theMaritime Trust, to undergo major restoration in preparation for the return tothe city where she had been built.

Illustrated with a fine collection of historical photographs and paintings(including a number of Edward Wilson's incomparable water colours of theAntarctic), Ann Savours' book does justice to the achievements of one ofBritain's favourite historical ships. The 'biography' is well-balanced and care-fully researched, often from unpublished sources and is replete with intriguingdetails of 'human interest'; the resultant narrative, even when dealing withmundane or tedious aspects such as deepsea oceanographic stations or routinemerchant voyages, holds one's attention throughout.

WILLIAM BARRUniversity of Saskatchewan

People and Empires in African History; Essays in Memory of Michael Crowderedited by J.F. Ade Ajayi and J.D.Y. Peel. London: Longman, 1992. Pp. xxv +254, maps. £36.00. ISBN 0-582-08997-2.

Michael Crowder's death in 1988, aged only fifty-five, was a serious blow to thestudy of African history. It was not only the end of an amazingly extensive rangeof publications, written alone and in collaboration with others, some of themscholarly monographs, some addressed to the wider reading public - includingschool children, whom so many academics ignore - but the loss of an immenselystimulating presence. Wherever he went (he taught in at least nine differentuniversities), he brought excitement, started up new, efficiently organizedprojects, and inspired and stimulated his students and colleagues. Plainly theeditors of this memorial volume will have had no difficulty in bringing togethertheir fourteen contributors, all of whom acknowledge how much they owe to hisencouragement.

The wide range of the contributions reflects Michael Crowder's own interests,and not only as a historian. Eldred Jones's study of The Tempest as a preview ofcolonial rule is a reminder of his concern with African literature (it is only sadthat there is no contribution indicating how he publicized, and was himself apatron of, the African visual arts). The title 'People and Empires' is used as anindicative bracket, not as a straitjacket. It begins, under the loose theme of

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'empire', with two studies of the kingdom of Borno - Bawuro Barkindo on theroyal pilgrimages performed by the Saifawa rulers, and Louis Brenner (whorecalls how it was Michael Crowder who first introduced him to Borno history),on the jihad debate between al-Kanami and Muhammad Bello. This theme isexamined further in the context of the early Sokoto caliphate by Murray Last.

Then follows a series of studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century coastalWest Africa. Amanda Sackur questions Michael Crowder's picture of racerelations in Senegal (a well-supported critique he would certainly have wel-comed). Mavis Campbell follows her impressive work on the Maroons inJamaica with a biographical study of Montague James, their leader in SierraLeone. Akintola Wyse contributes a survey of the wide-ranging Sierra LeoneKrio diaspora, and Toyin Falola a synoptic overview of the West Africandiaspora of the Lebanese. 'Voluntary associations', more theorized about thanstudied by an earlier generation of African historians, are examined critically inthe narrow focus of the colonial Gold Coast by Augustus Casely-Hayford andRichard Rathbone, emphasizing particularly freemasonry. Paul Richards,returning to fieldwork he did in the 1960s in the Yoruba Ikale and Ijalecountries, finds there a theme that has informed much of his own later work,encapsulated in a phrase from an Ikale friend, 'The government does not lovefarmers'. Finally, LaRay Denzer rescues the distinguished political careers ofthree women from the oblivion they have been consigned to - Mabel Dove inGhana, Aoua Keita in Mali and Wuraola Esan in Nigeria.

In 1982 Michael Crowder went to teach in the University of Botswana, wherehe embarked on 'the scholarly passion of his remaining years', as Neil Parsonsputs it, a biography of Tshekedi Khama, unfinished at his death. Thetwo remaining contributions reflect his new Southern African interest. B.T.Mokopakgosi examines a neglected but crucial aspect of the Nama revolt againstthe Germans in 1903, the transfer of their land to Europeans. And Neil Parsonsreturns to Sir Charles Rey, whose diaries he and Michael Crowder edited andpublished in 1988, contrasting a 'mercenary' and a 'missionary' style in theadministration of the Bechuanaland Protectorate.

The editors preface the volume with a brief memoir, and a list of MichaelCrowder's numerous publications. An added attraction is a charming photo-graph of him on the back cover, sitting elegant and relaxed in his home inTangier. It rounds off well an admirable tribute to a humane, versatile, inspiringscholar.

CHRISTOPHER FYFEEdinburgh

Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa's Creation and the Tragedy of the XhosaPeople by Noel Mostert. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. Pp. xxix + 1,355, maps.£25 (hardback). ISBN 0-224-03325-5.

This is a big fat door stopper of a book. No wonder that most academicreviewers have thus far treated it briefly but courteously. It is not good form toadmit in print that life is too short to read books this size. Clifton Crais's muchbriefer work on the same subject has attracted far more serious comment. The

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publishers of Mostert's book, however, have gambled on sales far beyond thecommunity of academic historians by letting it go at what amounts to a bargain-basement price. The book jacket invites comparisons with Robert Hughes' notquite so massive Fatal Shore, which featured on bestseller lists for months. Theobvious hope is that Frontiers will likewise find a large general readership. Theymay be disappointed. Frontiers does not bear comparison with Fatal Shore.Although Mostert writes very well, he lacks Hughes' sparkle and brilliance.Fatal Shore argues a strong, controversial thesis. Frontiers provides a simplenarrative. Hughes' subject encompassed the entire beginnings of white settle-ment on a continent. Mostert is mostly concerned with battles between Britishcommanders and Xhosa chiefs in the area enclosed by the Great Fish and GreatKei Rivers nearly two hundred years after white settlement began in SouthAfrica.

Mostert attempts to broaden his scope to epic dimensions by three hundredpages of introduction reaching back to Bantu origins and Portuguese navigators.A wise editor would have cut all those pages, for they shed no light on the mainsubject. There are some embarrassing passages about 'graceful' Bushmen anddreamy Khoikhoi peoples. Even Mostert's treatment of the interactionsbetween his own Afrikaner ancestors and the Khoikhoi is a diversion, becausehe wisely avoids the argument that they laid the foundations of later SouthAfrican society. Afrikaners are a very shadowy presence in the book comparedto missionaries, officials, and chiefs.

Those who wade through the turgid opening, or skip directly to page 300, willbe rewarded by a superb narrative account of what Jeff Peires has called SouthAfrica's Hundred Years War. Mostert began researching his subject in 1976 andthere is virtually nothing of importance that he has not read. His strong point isthe study of individual human beings. Drawing on missionary and officialarchives he brings many major figures to life as no one has done before.Although Mostert is innocent of theory and light on interpretation, significantpoints emerge from his study of the period 1815-60. The first is the impact ofgovernors and commanders drawn from Wellington's officer corps. Decade afterdecade veterans of the Peninsular War exercised their acquired taste for combatand glory in expensive campaigns that could have been avoided. NeitherParliament nor the Treasury could curb their aggressive habits. Mostert showsthat this was not merely a function of distance which allowed 'men on the spot'to act unhindered. The influence of Wellington and the military aristocracy atthe Horse Guards was an independent variable in the early Victorian Empire.

The second important point to emerge from this book is that in practicallyevery contest Xhosa generals outfoxed and outfought British ones. The totalloss of men and money on the British side in these continuing wars far exceededthe losses in the more celebrated fight with the Zulu kingdom in 1879-80. Whenguns failed, British commanders (and, in one instance, Lord Grey) brought theirfoes to the negotiating table by deliberately instigating famine. Seizing cattleand burning crops generally had the desired effect.

Where Mostert falls down is in conveying the reaction of ordinary Xhosapeople to these experiences. What made them rise again after each fall? Howdid their mentalities adjust to constant warfare. Tied as he is to the archives, andunskilled in reading them against the grain, Mostert is unable to penetratebeneath the top level of Xhosa leadership. Nor is he able to explore theinterdependence of chiefs and commoners. Perversely, though all the evidence

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before him indicates that the Western Xhosa were the pre-eminent militarystrategists of modern South African history, Mostert clings to the hackneyedview that the Zulu were and are the true 'warrior people'.

NORMAN ETHERINGTONUniversity of Western Australia

Occasional Papers on the Irish in South Africa by Donald H. Akenson. Grahams-town: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, OccasionalPapers Series, 1991. Pp. 95, figures and tables. R22. ISBN 0-86810-202-5.

The Irish in Southern Africa 1795-1910 edited by Donal P. McCracken. Durban:University of Durban-Westville, 1992. Pp. 290, maps, tables and illustrations.

Professor Akenson contends that historians of the Irish in South Africa arefortunate because today's generation is a pioneering one. The opportunityexists, he argues, for an 'initial survey of this new historical landscape. Thismeans escaping the traps of whatever familial and personal mythologies mayform one's primitive beliefs' (p. 12). An iconoclast of the first rank, Akenson'sinformative occasional paper comprises, by his own admission, five workingessays which draw on material and ideas which he has employed in the study ofIrish migration to Australasia, Canada and the United States. After a briefintroduction to the Irish diaspora between 1815 and 1922, the author putsforward the idea that Irish migrants - both Catholic and Protestant - were theperfect imperial collaborators. In the case of South Africa, the Irish arrived andjoined a white elite. Highly skilled and largely Protestant, the Irish who landedin South Africa tended to come from the professional classes reflecting the factthat many emigrated from the more industrial and commercial areas of Leinsterand Ulster, especially Belfast and Dublin. This helps to explain their predilec-tion for employment in skilled managerial positions in government, business andindustry.

One of the problems in studying Irish migration to South Africa is the distinctlack of abundant and reliable data. A few rough estimates can be made atspecific time-frames and for certain groups. Therefore, unfortunately, historianshave more of a problem measuring migration flows and patterns than they do,for example, with Irish migration to North America. This is compounded by therelative smallness of the numbers of Irish men and women who made SouthAfrica their home. What does emerge, however, is the quality of the migrant.There was no need to introduce large numbers of unskilled white labourers toSouth Africa because of the reliance on cheaper black labour. Irish men andwomen were highly skilled and qualified, enjoying an elevated social status. Thisfinal point is important. For in the last chapter, Akenson discusses some of thepitfalls historians need to avoid when analyzing the Irish in South Africa. TheAmerican example - where the emphasis has been placed on the urbanization ofthe rural Irish Catholic - does not apply to South Africa, where Irish migrantswere largely Protestant urban professionals. As Akenson concludes, one shouldbe aware of these models, but it should not prevent South African historiansfrom writing the history of this ethnic group on their own terms.

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Donal McCracken attempts, with mixed success, to heed Akenson's sageadvice. This edited collection is in fact volume two of the series entitledSouthern African-Irish Studies. There are twenty contributors who includegenealogists and academics from universities in South Africa and the UnitedKingdom. The work is best described as an attempt at a comprehensiveoverview. The first three chapters discuss aspects of the political impact made byIrish migrants in colonial South Africa. Some collaborated with the imperialregime and served as soldier governors, parliamentarians or judges. Otherswere more troublesome, such as the men of the Irish Transvaal brigades whofought against the British in the Second Anglo-Boer War. Chapters four to sixanalyze the Irish organizations and networks which were vital in maintaining anIrish identity. These included the army, the churches and the Orange Order.The three chapters which follow discuss the distinguished contribution made byIrish migrants to journalism, retailing and botany. And it is N.D. Southey whoshould be congratulated on his enlightening article on prominent Irish retailers.

The final two chapters, which are divided into five and three sections respect-ively, deal with regions of settlement and settlement schemes. Graham Dominyprovides a short but focused and well-written piece on Irish settlement in theZulu marchlands, while Donal Lowry reflects on the impact made by Irish menand women in taming the wilds of Rhodesia. G.N. Vernon's article on JohnGately, an entrepreneur in the Eastern Cape, is an excellent snapshot of asuccessful Irish businessman which complements nicely Southey's article. Muchless successful is the narrative by Shelagh Spencer which is a Who Was Who ofnineteenth-century Irish settlement in Natal. The Forgrave piece on the 1820Irish settlers is equally disappointing and not very stimulating. This is certainlynot the case for Bull's article on aided Irish migration to the Cape prior to 1900,or Tankard's on the Lady Kennaway girls scheme of the 1850s. Both authorsprovide good insights into the problems faced by philanthropic agencies and theirclients in the demanding, and at times disappointing, business of migration. All inall, The Irish in Southern Africa, although comprehensive in its coverage, mayhave been overly ambitious and too broad in its scope. Nevertheless, it hassucceeded in providing a framework for future, more in-depth studies of afascinating subject.

KENT FEDOROWICHUniversity of the West of England

Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980 by IrisBerger. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; London:James Currey, 1992. Pp. xiv + 369. £35 (hardback); £11.95 (paperback). ISBN0-8525-5078-2; 0-8525-5077-4.

Industry in South Africa has been a very male affair. As late as 1981, blackwomen still constituted less than 15 per cent of South Africa's industrialworkers, while white women had largely moved out of factory productionaltogether. Yet, echoing patterns elsewhere, women workers were concentrated

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in areas of manufacturing related to their supposed expertise - food, clothing,textiles. Gender divisions in a racially fragmented working class also held thepotential for a cross-racial female solidarity. Berger is particularly interested inwhen and why this solidarity forged successful worker militancy.

The heart of her important and ambitious study is the coupling andcontrasting of the two largest groups of 'organized' women from differentregions and periods - white garment workers in the Transvaal in the 1930s,coloured food and canning workers of the Cape in the 1940s and 50s, togetherwith the left-wing, transracial trade unions in which they were active, under thenoteworthy leadership of Solly Sachs and Ray Alexander respectively. At theirbest, both unions stood for non-racial unity; community as well as workplaceorganization; and worker democracy and education. The history of both'supports the idea that women are drawn to trade unions that allow them thespace to express personal and community concerns that extend beyond theirlives in the factories' (p. 294).

But to reach her starting point for these unions on p. 70, a quarter of the waythrough the book, Berger surveys the way in which women of all race groupswere generally firmly integrated into patriarchal households as dependants upto 1925, while the 1925-40 period saw increasing numbers of young, singlewomen drawn into factory work if they were white or coloured, domestic serviceif they were African. This introductory overview, as much as the subse-quent detailed analyses of union history, would benefit from being broken up bysub-headings and tables to provide a clearer path through the mass of invaluableinformation. To range over the changing political economy of the century as awhole, trying to encompass the full spectrum of women's industrial employmentwithin the changing context of female income-generation generally, whilebringing out variation by race and region, is an enormous task. It is scarcely tobe wondered at that the threads sometimes become tangled and the readerneeds to stop to unravel them! A concluding bibliography would likewise makeit easier to follow up the extensive literature on which the book is so soundlybased.

The young, badly remunerated and harshly treated Afrikaner female garmentworkers of the 1930s, Berger suggests, had a rather different experience of'class' from that of the well-paid, skilled and privileged white male workers. Thisfacilitated their challenge to ideas of racial superiority and separation, providinga 'virtually unique' exception at a time when domestic service constituted thestandard working relationship between black and white women. Instead, in thegarment industry, 'a small group of women of all races worked at similar oridentical jobs, sometimes in the same factories, and belonged to the same tradeunion, even if to different branches' (p. 296).

Why did Afrikaner women embrace socialist ideas and union fervour fromtheir organizer's East European legacy, in the teeth of family and Churchdisapproval of solidarity round 'class' as opposed to 'nation'? Berger suggeststhat the exuberant Garment Workers' Union of the 1930s, with its songs, playsand dances, lectures, sport and May Day picnics, met their needs as high-spirited, young, single urban women wanting fun and community both in andoutside the factory. The Union 'provided the resources, network and ideologyto link women's work with other aspects of their lives', while aiming also to'redefine the bonds of ethnicity in class-oriented terms' (p. 104). The intriguingmix meant addressing anti-fascist meetings but also taking part in the 1938

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Voortrekker Centenary celebrations. As the largest, most active, femaleworking class organization in the 1930s, the GWU won its members the highestpay for female industrial workers. But once ethnic cohesion was eroded fromthe 1940s - white women dropped from 96 to 64 per cent of all female garmentworkers between 1937 and 1947, and in the 1950s represented an older, marriedage-group with different aspirations - the Union's non-racialism was 'severelystrained'. In the more hostile political environment of the 1950s, with heightenedpressure for Afrikaner cultural conformity, the racially separate GWU branchesretreated from socialism and worked more narrowly to address workplacegrievances.

Berger sees the baton passing in the 1940s and 50s from the GWU to theCape's Food and Canning Workers' Union, 'on the cutting edge of progressivepolitical change' (p. 190) in addressing issues relevant to women workers andmaking political connections between race, class and gender (while likewiseoffering little threat to gender oppression in the home). Both more and lessvulnerable than men because of their seasonal employment, female canningworkers particularly needed labour solidarity, and were disproportionatelyprominent in leadership, political action and strikes. Though legislation forcedAfricans and coloureds into separate unions by 1947, most clustered alike in thelowest work-grades and lived in racially mixed small communities whose localand family concerns the union skilfully incorporated, along with various chargedpolitical issues current in the turbulent 1950s. Berger argues that the struggleagainst passes by Cape African women workers differs from the Witwatersrandprotests, analyzed by Julia Wells as resistance to proletarianization by womenengaged in home-based work. Cape women, by contrast, were guarding theirright to be proletarians and hold on to urban wage labour, against the threat ofrural deportation.

Two final, more impressionistic chapters cover the repressive 1960s and 70s.Larger numbers of poorer, less educated African women with heavy familyresponsibilities moved into exceedingly low-paid jobs in vast factories on theperiphery, their migrancy and separation from family replicating two perennialdrawbacks of domestic service. Active and militant women textile workers in the1980 Frame strike (where the work-force was 70 per cent female) drew strengthfrom Zulu homogeneity and gregarious bus journeys from their densely packed,closely controlled hostels. Though women themselves complained of sexualharassment and enforced birth control, Berger berates the unions for inattentionto gender-specific issues. Later in the 1980s, she concedes, some African womenoffered a bold, provocative critique of male shortcomings while union rhetoricpaid more lip-service to gender equality. Her concluding hope is for women topioneer a new collective struggle in the 1990s 'to demonstrate the integralconnections among women's oppression at work, at home, and in the widercommunity, and to persuade men to question and reject their role in thepatriarchal system' (p. 300).

Although much of Berger's material is familiar in outline to South Africanscholars, its incorporation into such a wide-ranging, analytical synthesisspanning white, African and coloured women workers across three or fourgenerations is especially to be welcomed. Her feminist sympathies enrich andreshape her account of working-class struggles made more fraught and complexby South Africa's racial fractures. Students may battle with the detail and could

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have done with clearer signposts, but the book is bound to be - deservedly -widely consulted.

DEBORAH GAITSKELLSO AS, University of London

The Scattering Time: Turkana Responses to Colonial Rule by John Lamphear.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. xxiii + 308, maps. £ 40.00. ISBN 019-820226-1.

Lamphear opens his study of the long and costly Turkana resistance to Britishand Ethiopian imperialisms with the agreeably combative complaint that otherstudents of the conquest of Kenya, your reviewer included, have, by ignoringthe Turkana experience, judged the process as a whole to be an affair of littlemilitary moment and negligible human cost. But African resistances were warsand, as wars, demand military analyses. In Lamphear's view, Africanist studentsof conquest have been as uncomprehending as teetotallers analysing drink; wehave tied ourselves up in complicated sociological variables and forgotten thesimple fact that war needs decision - a mutual decision to test on the battlefieldthe question of relative power that can be resolved in no other way.

This book represents a splendid research achievement, moving on andsideways from the author's previous study of the neighbouring Jie people ofUganda. Eturkan, the region, is a hard environment in which to work, vast,remote, baking hot. Turkana, the people, are always on the move, a day or twoahead of where the researcher expected to find them. Their knowledge is localand fragmentary, divided as they are into nineteen different sections that form 'aflexible cultural confederation' with no single identity. Each informant isreliably knowledgeable of only narrow segments of kinsmen or fragile networksof 'bond-friends'. The collection of Turkana oral tradition must be as frustratingas finding a straight path through Eturkan thorn-bush. Lamphear has none theless constructed a clear narrative, based on 150 interviews and a reading of everypossible written source, published and archival.

Lamphear organizes his narrative, appropriately enough, around theproblems of military leadership, tactics, logistics and intelligence. He arguesthat the Turkana became an unprecedentedly formidable force in the latenineteenth century, paradoxically because their geographical expansion had bythen outgrown their moiety or generational system and fostered, instead, thelocal or sectional mobilization of chronological age-sets. This localization ofTurkana elders' power left a vacuum that was filled by the rise of 'great diviners'in place of the existing myriad of minor ones. Where elders had often had aninterest in restraining raids, competitive dreamers had a self-interest in spurringyoung war-leaders on. The Turkana gained, therefore, a much clearer percep-tion of their collective power than they had ever had before, something thatcould be tested in battle. It was their misfortune that rival imperialisms to northand south of them, the 'angry-bowelled' Ethiopians on the one hand and theBritish on the other, at one point represented by a district commissionernicknamed 'the great fat red bull' (Lamphear deploys a wonderful repertoire of

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pungent Turkana phrases), were equally expansive, possibly better co-ordinatedand certainly much better armed.

With this triangular rivalry spilling over into subsidiary alliances on all sides,Lamphear has a complicated tale to tell - for the most part with exemplaryclarity - that cannot be summarized here. It reads like a true tragedy, with goodmen on all sides finding themselves committed to appalling deeds with dismalconsequences more difficult to combat than the original clashes that hadprovoked them. 'Scattered' in early 1918 by the largest of the several Britishexpeditions sent against them, Turkana came under colonialism in a starvelingstate, well over a quarter of a million of their livestock confiscated as cataclysmicreparations. In his conclusion Lamphear returns to a general analysis of militarydecisions, for both war and the eventual peace. He has managed to penetratethe military minds of both Turkana and British more than might ever have beenexpected. None the less the real heroes of his account are people like the Britishpoliceman Harry Rayne and the Swedish official in British service, Eric vonOtter, both of whom respected the Turkana. Their correspondence, diaries andmemoirs convey so much more compelling truth than Turkana oral traditioncan, however assiduously collected. By contrast the Turkana hero, the greatdiviner Loolel Kokoi, assumes merely mythic proportions. Turkana hold himresponsible for all decisions and outcomes during his time and even, through hiscurses, after his death but, alas, by the end of the book he has not become a manwhom one feels one has got to know.

JOHN LONSDALETrinity College, Cambridge

Strike Across the Empire: The Seamen's Strike of 1925 in Britain, South Africanand Australasia by Baruch Hirson and Lorraine Vivian. London: Clio Publica-tions, 1992. Pp. v + 117. £5.0 (paperback). ISBN 1-89764O-OO-5.

This is an intriguing piece of work that seeks to unearth a hugely significant, ifsomewhat neglected, episode in labour history. The events of 1925 represent aclassic case of historical amnesia, in that official records (including seamen'sunion records) contain too few references to what is perhaps one of the mostimportant international strikes in labour history. The seamen's strike in thecolonial ports of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Britain has beensuccessfully and succinctly pieced together by the authors, an admirable taskgiven the international context and the almost total absence of this fromhistories of the working class. The significance of the seamen's strike of 1925has, claim the authors, not only been ignored in general labour histories but,more significantly, has been underplayed in accounts of the 1926 General Strike.The question of whether the confrontation of 1925 was provoked so as toundermine seamen before the real battle began in 1926 is an interestingproposition.

In 1925 seamen in these strategically important ports came out on strike after

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refusing to accept a cut in wages their own union had negotiated. Under theleadership of Havelock Wilson (described by many as a traitor to the cause oflabour), the seamen's union agreed to cut wages to a level that shipowners couldafford to pay. The deprivation that a reduction of £1 per month would have onan already poorly paid section of workers leads one to ask on whose side was theseamen's union? Certainly not the side of the seamen. The strikes of 1925illustrate most potently the readiness with which union bureaucrats such asHavelock Wilson and his supporters were willing literally to sell their ownworkers down the river. The rank and file of the seamen's union had noalternative but to take strike action if they were to defend not only their own payand conditions, but more broadly the rights of labour against a sweepingemployers' offensive.

The strikes of 1925 illustrate the importance of the Merchant Service to theBritish Empire; both were inextricably linked. Britain's economic relationshipwith empire was a double-edged sword. Thus, whilst it provided convenientready-made markets for British manufactured goods, at the same time it washeavily dependent on merchant shipping for the smooth operation of itsexport trade. This dependence on merchant shipping bestowed on British tradea high degree of vulnerability that could easily be exposed if and whenseamen flexed their industrial muscle through strike action. The huge losses tomerchant trade (in Australia in excess of two million pounds in freights alone)highlight this vulnerability. Political considerations appear to have faroutweighed economic ones. 'Important as the economic factors were, they weresecondary to the government in its total strategy: the smashing of trade unionresistance.'

The reluctance of the British trade union movement to support the 'unofficial'strike was short-sighted and injurious to the strike's success. Emanuel Shinwell(leader of the AMWU) had warned of the devastating effects the defeat of theseamen would have on the organized working class, an issue that arguablycontributed to the defeat in 1926. Without the support of their own union, it isdifficult to see how the seamen could gain the backing of the wider trade unionmovement, a factor that was crucial to success given the might of the shippingcombines and the lengths they were prepared to go in smashing the strikes.

In any work that deals with merchant shipping and empire, the issue ofcolonial labour and racism has to be prominent. The book makes explicit theracism of white seamen seen in the riots against Chinese and black seamen inBritain in 1911 and 1919 respectively. The more difficult issue of militant tradeunion activity on the one hand and appallingly racist attitudes and actions on theother is made clear through an assessment of the specific context in which thistook place. Thus, with seamen generally facing both challenges from employersto cut their wages and the threat of low paid Asian and African seamen whocould and were used as strike breakers (seen in Australia), white seamenlevelled their anger and frustration against fellow black workers rather thantheir employers.

It is refreshing to find a work such as this that deals sympathetically withinternational trade union action at a time when, after 15 years of Tory rule,'strike' has increasingly become a derogatory term. Moreover, the unpalatableissue of colonial labour and racism, all too often buried in accounts of labourhistory, has been raised in the context of the 1925 strike. This in itself is ofsignificance. The study will make a valuable contribution to twentieth-century

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labour history, particularly to the neglected area of international labour, as wellas offering a new perspective on the 1926 General Strike. The work would makean important edition to booklists in colleges and universities, and as a generalreader to workers interested in their own history.

DIANE FROSTUniversity of Liverpool!Merseyside Maritime Museum

National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy andEmpire, 1926-1932 by Philip Williamson. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992. Pp. xvii + 569. £60. ISBN 0-521-36137-0.

The political terrain covered by Philip Williamson's book has scarcely beenignored by previous scholars, spanning as it does the main tramlines of Britishhistory from the failures of Baldwinite 'independent' Conservatism during thesecond half of the 1920s, the gradual disintegration of the ensuing LabourGovernment culminating in the crisis of August 1931, and the emergence of a'National Government' under the continuing, if attenuated, premiership ofRamsay MacDonald. Owing not least to later twists in British affairs, thestanding accorded to this last administration has not been very high. Althoughconcerned only with its earliest phases, Williamson's analysis fits in with a recentrevisionist tendency to give the National Government more of its proper due.The author does so as part of a sophisticated attempt to lift the British crisis of1929-32 out of those rather narrow (overwhelmingly unemployment-oriented)parameters within which so many previous writers have contained it, and tointegrate the other threads of controversy which came close in those years tocracking apart the body politic. It is because this book examines closely theoverlap between various forms of imperial dissent and national economic strainsin creating a 'politics of extreme uncertainty about the future' that it will be ofconsiderable interest to many readers of this Journal.

What Williamson identifies as a 'new imperialist resistance' after 1928-9 hadtwo main foci: firstly, in the sphere of British Commonwealth relations,epitomized by the passage of the Statute of Westminster (made more sensitiveby its Irish implications) and, secondly, the matter of Indian reform. It ispointed out that the actual effects of these distinct issues on metropolitanpolitics were different. The Commonwealth (or Anglo-Dominion) dimensionhad a broader impact for the obvious reason that it further agitated theprimordial division between Free Trade and Protection which itself enjoyed arevival following the doubtful success of the return to the Gold Standard in1925. Whereas polarities over Commonwealth developments drove Labour andConservative leaderships further apart after 1929-30, India pushed themtogether, if only as a function of heading off their respective lunatic fringes. Asfar as the symbiotic dilemmas of Commonwealth unity and commercialprotection are concerned, the final outcome was one in which 'National' policysubordinated a modest rise in tariffs to an overall mix in which other elements -retrenchment in expenditure, tax increases, interest rate cuts, and an enforced

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but ultimately beneficent devaluation - were more important. Neville Chamber-lain's filial piety ensured that he presided with a deep sense of satisfaction over aqualified fulfilment of his father's programme of Empire Trade expansion; hispragmatism and less extravagant personality ensured that the celebration wasmodest and curtailed by the realities of the modern market-place. In tracing thissequence the author illustrates how Leopold Amery, with his essentially naiveconceptions of imperial economic togetherness, was brusquely pushed to theborders of serious politics, from which only Winston Churchill was later torescue him.

India may have had a less generalized importance for British politics, butin Conservative ranks it made arguably a deeper, if also narrower, incision;it also created more noise, thanks to the bellowing of Churchill. The keydifference here was established early on by, on the one hand, Baldwin'ssupport of the Labour government over the Irwin Declaration ('DominionStatus with reservations') as a means of killing the Indian Question - as Britishpoliticians had failed earlier in the century to kill the Irish Question - with ameasure of constitutional kindness; and on the other hand the astringent view ofLiberal as well as Tory 'Diehards' that the Irwin Declaration was, in the wordsof Simon, 'a very foolish piece of bunkum'. 'Bunkum' was, with regard to India,as in the case of Egypt contemporaneously or Africa later on, the basic ultraappreciation of power-sharing in areas touching imperial interests and responsi-bilities.

Here again, however, events worked in such a way as to disarm the extremesand give the initiative to centrist politics. In Williamson's opinion Churchill'sfailure to make India into 'a new assertion of Britain's right to live . . . andreign with her Empire splendid and united' was by no means pre-ordained.But because the crisis of 1931 loosened the fixed boundaries of partypolitics, it proved possible for the architects of National administration to pushthrough legislation which was certainly 'conservative' in intent, but which, byretaining the goal of central responsibility in Indian government, would havebeen impossible to secure within a Conservative ministry proper. Over India,then, as in the related spheres of the Commonwealth and economic policy, theshock of coming to terms with a 'totally different world' revealed by inter-locking crises at home and abroad had the effect of reinforcing the middleground of British politics and laying the foundations of national policies gearedto the absorption of, and adaptation to, change. This was not a retreat intonegative reaction, but rather the English political order at its pedestrian butsensible best.

This book is the product of painstaking research and a deep knowledge of thesecondary literature. The judgements of which it is composed are alwaysbalanced and sure-footed. Historians of empire, in coming to grips with it, willhave to wade through masses of British party political detail, made lessdigestible by its Cowlingesque density. But the effort is worthwhile, especially asa corrective for those who continue to believe that the 1935 Government ofIndia Act was purely and simply 'more of the same'.

ROBERT HOLLANDInstitute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London

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BOOK REVIEWS 377

Trade, Tariffs and Empire: Lancashire and British Policy in India 1919-1939by Basudev Chatterji. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 521.Rs. 610; £25.00. ISBN 0-19-562815-2.

On 31 August 1920 Gandhi pledged himself to wear thenceforward onlyhomespun cloth. Thereby he rejected not only Lancashire calico but alsothe whole machine-based civilization of the West. The symbolic significanceof his decision was more fully appreciated in India than in England. It con-ferred upon the most prosaic of commodities a quasi-spiritual function, as anagent of national salvation. It powerfully encouraged the wearing of homespuncloth and enabled the rising tide of Hindu nationalism to reclaim for Hindustanthe domestic textile market. Thus during the twenty-five years between 1913-14and 1938-9 the proportion of cotton goods consumed which were supplied fromIndian sources rose from 40 per cent to 90 per cent. Lancashire had lost whathad been since 1843 its largest single overseas market. The history of that greattransformation is the subject of a new and pioneering work which will appealespecially to all enthusiasts for an economic interpretation of history.

Dr Chatterji sets the decline of Lancashire's trade within the paradoxicalperspective of the greatest era of the British Empire in India. The central themeof his book is the persistent efforts made by Lancashire to retain its trade. DrChatterji has revealed the secret history of those efforts by examining a widerange of manuscripts and of sources published before 1988. He has perused notonly official papers in London and Delhi but also the papers of four viceroys,three secretaries of state and three Congress notables. His findings arepresented in the form of two general chapters and six chapters of detailedanalysis. His work represents a valuable contribution to our understanding ofthe Anglo-Indian empire.

Dr Chatterji has clearly demonstrated that India remained throughout thisperiod an appanage of great importance to Britain. India then became in factmore vital to Britain than it had ever been before. During the eighteen years1917-35 it consistently provided the United Kingdom with its largest singleoverseas market: in only ten of the seventy years 1846-1915 had it fulfilled sucha function. In particular Dr Chatterji proves that India's cherished fiscalautonomy remained throughout more apparent than real and that the IndiaOffice was subject to considerable if intermittent pressure from Manchester inthe interests of British trade. Perhaps Manchester's greatest achievement was tosecure the grant in 1930 of a preference upon British cotton goods and tomaintain that preference, despite India's rejection in 1936 of the generalprinciple of imperial preference. The victories achieved by Lancashire proved,however, to lack real substance. The interests of the cotton industry in theIndian market were effectively sacrificed to political exigencies, just like itsinterests in the markets of the Far East: politics and economics remainedinseparably intertwined in the Indian context. Even in the declining importtrade a 15 per cent preference failed to prevent Japanese piece goods fromsurpassing in volume British piece goods from 1935. Perhaps the most interest-ing question raised by this study is not why Lancashire lost its Indian market butwhy it retained it for so long as it did.

It may be suggested that Dr Chatterji understandably tends to exaggerate theimportance of the cotton industry to Britain. Thus he magnifies its contributionto the National Income in 1935 tenfold by subsuming it under the general

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heading of 'textiles and clothing' (p. 440): the true contribution of the cottonindustry to the National Income in 1935 was 0.5 per cent. Such criticism apart,this book will be widely welcomed. The subject is important and remains one ofcontinuing interest. The scholarly apparatus is convincingly thorough. Theconclusions remain of high significance.

D.A. FARNIEManchester

The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin by Al Gabay. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992. Pp. 208. £30.00 (hardback). ISBN 0-521-41494-6.

In early 1880, soon after his spectacular entry into Victorian politics, the youngAlfred Deakin was assured by a spiritualist medium in Melbourne that 'I amthe boy'. The medium also prophesied a trip to London, where Deakinwould address a tribunal, 'the highest in the land', in the interests of Victoria,of Australia, and of the Empire. This 'Grand Prophecy' was taken veryseriously by Deakin, who did indeed attend the colonial conference inLondon in 1887, where he made a great impact. Likewise, towards the endof Deakin's career in federal politics, when his credibility was at its lowest afterthe anti-Labor Fusion in 1909, 'a voice' came to him one Saturday morning:'Finish your job and turn in.' He lasted another three years until compelled byfailing health to resign in 1913; but like the 'Grand Prophecy', the monition wasa turning point for 'affable Alfred', that most attractive of native sons who wasthree times prime minister of the Commonwealth of Australia during its firstdecade.

So argues Al Gabay in The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin. This substantialmonograph is based on Deakin's accumulated private writings in a range ofgenres over a period of forty years, from the 1870s to about 1910, and is the firstto take them seriously. Intended as a corrective to existing biographical studies,which, it is rightly claimed, have failed to appreciate the significance of Deakin'srich interior life, it aims to examine the development of Deakin's religious ideasand beliefs and to demonstrate how he came to identify his political career andreligious quest 'almost totally' (p. 186). The case is made in eight chapters. Thefirst four are arranged chronologically and trace Deakin's spiritual developmentfrom school days to Federation, during which time his 'insatiable appetite forsigns' (p.23) was successively fed by spiritualism, Swedenborg and theosophy,and the problem of vocation was gradually resolved as he came to feel that thetask of nation-building was divinely mandated. Chapters Five and Six aredevoted to Deakin's private writings to that time, in particular six laboriouslywrought 'gospels', about a million words in all, especially those on Bunyan,Swedenborg and 'Spiritism', and some thirty 'out of body' experiences dating asfar back as his days as a writing medium in the 1870s. Then in Chapter Sevencomes what Gabay identifies as a paradigm shift between 1899 and 1910, notablyduring the frustrations of 1905 when he was tempted to abandon politics infavour of the pulpit and his own gospel. Fortunately, since Deakin's most

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significant adminstration (1905-8) was still to come, 'the religion of the best'turned out to be a private faith. By 1909, as Chapter Eight shows, his greatpowers were almost played out and hope of contact with a 'subliminal self, aninfluential concept from Edwardian psychic research, was to be only partiallysatisfied: a sad end to a would-be mystical life, but then as Gabay writes, Deakinwas 'determined to have a mysterious universe' (p. 165).

Dr Gabay has done an authoritative job on extremely difficult sources.Furthermore he has rescued Deakin from a time warp. The spiritual synthesis/breakthough that people like Deakin so strenuously sought never came, partlybecause, as Manning Clark used to say, after the Great War God was high onthe list of Missing Persons, but the quest was a real one and Idealism was still asignificant social force. What also needs to be underlined is that in Deakin's dayradical religious thought was at the cutting edge of intellectual life, as perhapssexuality later became. In nearby New Zealand another Prime Ministe, HarryAtkinson, was a founding member of the Theosophical Society.

The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin began life as an ANU Ph.D. thesis. Aneffective transition has been made. This systematic study of Deakin's inner life iswell-written and it deserves a warm welcome. It fills a long-felt gap, it offers afresh approach to its subject, and it points the way to a more intellectuallyappropriate account of the new liberalism in Australia, of which Alfred Deakinwas the fine flower.

JILL ROEMacquarie University

Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? by Audrey Oldfield.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv + 263. £35.00 (hard-back); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-521-40380-4; 0-521^361-7.

Men in Australia offered women some share in public social power earlier thanin most other Western democracies. In 1902 the new Commonwealth ofAustralia extended to all white women both the franchise and the right to standfor parliament, and the vote had already been granted in the colonies of SouthAustralia and Western Australia in 1894 and 1899 respectively. Only one otherBritish colony, New Zealand, and four states in the American West (Wyoming,Utah, Colorado, and Idaho) were in this progressive company. Given thisprecosity, and given the thriving state of women's history in Australia, it mayseem reasonable to wonder why it should be that in Woman Suffrage in AustraliaAudrey Oldfield has written the first comprehensive history of the women'ssuffrage movement and the political context of its success. Part of the answer liesin the vast extent of the Australian continent. We are not looking at onemovement, but many, each thriving amongst the small, white populations ofwidely distanced colonies, often without close contact with each other. Theprospect of travelling widely to work on diverse sources in each colony (statesafter Federation in 1901) has been a daunting prospect. Historians have found itboth reasonable and simpler to know something of the situation in the two mostpopulous states, New South Wales and Victoria, and to generalize for the wholeof Australia from that basis.

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Audrey Oldfield has at last undertaken the necessary work, and produced ameticulously researched and persuasively documented study that will proveimmensely useful to women's historians and to analysts of Australia's politicalcharacter in the period from the 1880s to the early 1900s. As the title implies,Oldfield's study is driven by the question of whether Australian womenorganized with any real commitment or energy to press for the women's vote, orwhether liberal men, unimpeded by the strong conservative forces of the MotherCountry, passed the measure as an act of chivalry or political correctness. First,Oldfield examines the intersection of male liberalism and the women's move-ment colony by colony, state by state, showing impressive command of detail.She follows this with four chapters which serve to synthesize her findings aroundseveral common themes, and then to extend the significance of the achievementof the suffrage outwards, back to the centre of the Empire. Here Oldfieldexamines, briefly but usefully, the political involvement of women in main-stream politics after they gained the right to hold elected public office.

The paucity of women in federal or state parliaments since 1902 has, ofcourse, been one of the factors that has led historians, reading events backwardsfrom their own vantage point, to conclude that women clearly could not havewanted the vote in the first place, and therefore did not appreciate its potential.Audrey Oldfield leaves us in no doubt that women in every colony combined toagitate for civil rights and did so in a style recognizably feminist in terms of thecontemporary women's movement throughout comparable Western democ-racies. While colonial male legislatures were certainly predominantly liberalon this issue, she demonstrates how women's groups forced the issue to asufficiently high public profile to establish an urgent demand for its passage intolaw. One might perhaps take issue with Oldfield on her treatment of the role oftemperance reformers in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in thecreation of this climate of opinion. The Union clearly had the capacity to involvewomen at the grassroots level, especially in rural areas, in a coordinatedcampaign, and it had important national links, unlike the small, urban-basedwomen's suffrage leagues, the members of which led a single issue campaign.Because temperance activists spoke not only the language of equal rights butalso addressed women's need for protection from male economic and physicalabuse, the genuine radicalism many such women displayed should not beunderestimated. But overall the study is informative, judicious and persuasive.It fills a vital place in the country's historiography, and in the history of thewestern suffrage movement.

PATRICIA GRIMSHAWUniversity of Melbourne

Robert Menzies' Forgotten People by Judith Brett. London: Macmillan, 1993.Pp. xi + 318. £14.99. ISBN 333-592-859.

In 1972, R.G.Menzies, the former Prime Minister of Australia, made a series ofbroadcasts over Australian radio. One, under the heading "The ForgottenPeople' was published as a pamphlet by Angus and Robertson. It later caughtthe eye of Judith Brett, of the faculty of La Trobe University, and provided theanchor and theme for this biographical work on Menzies.

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The 'forgotten people', as Menzies defines them, are the middle class,constantly in danger of being ground between the upper and nether millstones ofthe 'false class war'. They are the 'salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans,professional men and women, farmers', for the most part unorganized, unself-conscious, frugal, not rich enough to have individual power, but the 'backboneof the nation', people of independent spirit - the kind of people Menziesrepresents in parliament, the kind he hopes will vote for him. And vote for himthey did, returning him to office in 1949 for a record 16 years.

Dr Brett dissects the speech and analyses Menzies's career and character frombrilliant Victorian country schoolboy to (ultimately) Lord Warden of the CinquePorts, as an exercise in exploring his 'public face' and his 'private face'. She doesnot really care for either, despite some grudging respect for his intellect andrhetorical ability. She engages in some heavy psycho-analysis: Menzies in a kindof Oedipal relationship with his adoring mother, which he later transferred tothe young Queen Elizabeth; Menzies rejecting the stern wisdom of his father- arejection which 'enabled him so persuasively to represent the culture andpolitics in the middle decades of this century'; his adoration of Britain as thecentre of the world, the source of all ideas - 'fulsome emptiness of his deep lovefor an imagined place, and the aggression and envy this deep love helps keep inplace'; Menzies the illiberal Liberal; Menzies looking for a place in Englishhistory that eluded him because of the 'narcissistic wound of colonial birth'.

The dustjack reports that this is Dr Brett's first book. This reviewer wonderswhether she may not in her enthusiasm be trying to do either too much, or toolittle. She brings several disciplines to bear: the book is part history, partbiography, part political sociology. She writes vigorously and thoughtfully. Herbeliefs and prejudices are never concealed. The book tells us almost as muchabout Dr Brett as it tells us about Sir Robert Menzies.

TOM MILLAR

London School of Economics and Political Science

L'Afrique noire frangaise: I'heure des Indipendances edited by Charles-RobertAgeron and Marc Michel. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1992. Pp. 728.

This work comprises papers given at a five-day professorial-level conference atAix-en-Provence in 1990. The theme is vast; no review within any reasonablelength can do justice to fifty valuable papers. It seems most useful, therefore, tosummarize the contents so that those with particular interests may know what ison offer. Most of the papers are in French, a few are in English, and arearranged in five subject sections each introduced by an overall summary, and asixth concluding section.

The theme of the first section is the role of internal political forces, assessed inThierno Bah's preface to be of prime importance on the road to independence.Joseph-Roger de Benoist examines the evolution and post-1957 aspirations ofthe federalist parties. Jean Suret-Canale writes on the particular case of Guineaand the background to its rejection of de Gaulle's 1958 Community package;one ingredient was the deliberate destruction, by the ruling party, of theterritory's chieftaincies. Daniele Domergue-Cloarec explores the linkagesbetween the metropolitan SFIO (Socialist) and UDSR parties with West

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African groups. Three writers summarize other linkages: Odile Goerg those ofthe mouvement associatif (sport, culture, professions, denominations, farmers,etc.); Bah those of students and intellectual in which he suggests that reports ofCommunist influences were much exaggerated; and Helene d'Almeida Toporthose of the co-operatives, which were not able to bring about an economic self-sufficiency. G.Wesley Johnson and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch turn atten-tion to the elites. Johnson concentrates on the elite of Senegal and suggestspersonal schizophrenia between French and African cultures both in Senegaland elsewhere; Coquery-Vidrovitch interestingly focuses on municipal elitesand, citing the 1959 Brazzaville disturbances, suggests these may be in conflictwith those represented in central government. Myron Echenberg's paper tracesthe formation of military elites which he sees as a response to France's need formodern soldiery, rather than a 1920s colonial gendarmerie, for the Algerian war;he notes how many of this new generation of African officers were later to figurein politics. The two final papers in this section consider the circumstances of theactual transfer of power. In one Denise Bouche sets out the tensions that arosebetween traditional administrators, chiefs, young modernizing administratorsand political groups; she contrasts the fate of the Guinea chiefs with that of theIvory Coast chiefs who adapted to change and were inspanned into the PDCI-RDA. In the second, Regine Goutalier, on the basis of collected personalmemoirs, sets out the sequence of events, histoire au quotidien, in Ubangi-Shari,the Somali Coast and Soudan, with particular reference to the views andattitudes of mind of leading participants, African and French.

The second, political, section is devoted to France and African independence.Paul Isoart and Christian Bidegaray trace the slow surfacing of the concept of aninevitable independence, or at least a flag independence, in the period 1958 to1960, Isoart concentrating on the Executive Council of the Community.Charles-Robert Ageron notes the circumspection with which African nationalistleaders approached the Algerian war - polite offers to mediate which incurredthe disgust of the FLN. Jacque Basso provides an instructive survey of thesimilarities and dissimilarities between the various independence 'treaties of co-operation' concluded with each territory. The opposition of business interests toindependence is set out by Roger Pasquier, and the opposition of more generalcolonial interest by Florence Bernault-Boswell who concentrates her studies onGabon and Congo. Jacques Valette offers a further special study of Youlou'sCongo, and Jacques Binoche usefully summarizes French parliamentary opinionsexpressed in debates on the 1958 Community institutions and the granting ofindependence in 1960. Throughout this section the personality of de Gaulle, hisevolving views and the Algerian war remain leitmotivs.

The third section presents very disparate papers on African perceptions ofindependence. The section is introduced by Elikia M'Bokolo with somereflections on Congo. M'Bokolo then goes on to note the generally very lategenesis of the idea of full independence, the differing African views on Africanunity and the linkages with France, the different roles and styles of the mainactors and the sombre, apprehensive nature of independence in certainterritories, notably Chad, Gabon and Congo. Elis6e Soumonni argues that whileYoruba nationalism in Dahomey and Nigeria pursued a common aim, pre-colonial area animosities and differing colonial policies towards chieftaincy ledto the expression of nationalism in different forms. Bernard Charles chroniclesthe intimidation and violence used, deliberately, by Tourers PDG to rise to

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BOOK REVIEWS 383

power, adding that the sympathy aroused by Tour6's 1958 break with Franceserved to distract external attention from these cruelties. Annie Bart's paper onthe press reporting of de Gaulle's 1958 African travels notes how, with only fewexceptions, praise was in order and criticism discouraged. Two papers look atthe failure of federal ideals. Georges Madiega writes on the strong support for afederal (francophone) West Africa in Upper Volta, support that in the end gaveway primarily in face of the territory's virtual economic dependence on linkswith the anti-federal Ivory Coast. Paule Brasseur records some of the issuesleading to the break-up of the Senegal-Soudan Federation of Mali; the form ofthe links with France, personal rivalries in quest for office, proposals for theconstitution, and economic and budgetary questions. France at first gavecautious support to the Federation, but, as the radical and authoritarian natureof Soudan's political life became clear, France sided with Senghor. MartinN'Jeuma suggests that the fact of the post-1918 division of Cameroun gavenationalism in the territory a conceptual edge, that of reunification, but that alsothat edge was in turn to develop less fortunately into a movement for anovermighty central government. Zan Semi-Bi sets out the reasons for and eventsleading to the evolution of the French 1958 autonomy Community to the 1960flag independence version, which he sees as a valuable renewal for aid and widercultural and human relations purposes. Bernard Lanne, a former administrator,graphically describes the ill-prepared independence of Chad; Fernand Wibaux,a diplomat, in an interesting personal memoir suggests that two reasons for thegeneral lack of preparation were the French colonial systems priority for theopening-up of economies, and the short time-span between the loi-cadre andindependence.

The fourth section looks at the wider international scene, the stage being setin Ren6 Girault's preface which surveyed the diplomatic, strategic and economicconditions of the late 1950s and early 1960s. David Birmingham contrasts theambitious quest for African economic as well as political independence ofNkrumah, with Senghor's preference for co-operation links with France,concluding that in the event the expectations of both were blown off course bythe mental horizons and materialistic values left by the departing colonial order.David Fieldhouse offers a study of the United Africa Company's carefulpolitical neutrality throughout the process of French decolonization, a neutralitythat conserved its interests, except in Guinea, more successfully than inanglophone West Africa. Marc Michel's paper on Paris-London discussions onthe future of African colonies is of especial interest; he notes well-meantattempts by both sides to maintain some measure of co-ordination, less well-meant efforts by both to conserve their own influence and the special problempresented by Guinea's request for recognition. This last issue is examined fromthe French side in Jean-Claude Allain's paper. France initially wished to giveGuinea only a very much restricted international recognition and attempted topersuade others to do the same. The remaining papers in this section concernAmerican attitudes, David Gardinier's survey of American press-reporting andPierre M61andri's wider study of American official policy, that primarily ofattempting to avoid any necessity of choosing between Africa and a Europeanally. Finally in this section Guy Pervill6 sets out the largely unsuccessfullyattempts by the Algerian FLN to present their cause as that of Africa.

The fifth section is devoted to Madagascar, Reunion and the Somali Coast,and is prefaced by Yvan Paillard. Jacques Rabemananjara offers a personal

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account of the role of the Madagascar MDRM movement, of which he was aleading figure, at the time of the 1947 uprising, and a commentary uponsubsequent events. Lucile Rabearimanana suggests that the lavishness of the1960 independence celebrations in Tananarive served to unite Malagasy peoplesbut did not conceal the dissatisfaction with Tsiranana's regime, perceived asneo-colonial. Raymond Delval records the training of Malagasy administrationcadres in France, and the uses to which they were put after independence.Hubert Gerbeau and Edmond Maestri look at the overspill of the 1947 uprisingand the 1960 independence of Madagascar upon R6union, conservative voicesemphasizing the importance of the links with France while a small minoritysought to identify with mainstream anti-colonial nationalism. Regrettably therewas no comparable paper on the Comores. Colette Dubois very clearly sets outevents in the Somali Coast but she suggests that only further research will finallydetermine whether the longer-lasting colonial rule there was the consequence ofinternational and strategic factors or the territory's own internal predicament ofcommunal rivalries and economic strait-jackets.

In the concluding sixth section John Hargreaves discusses independence andequality, suggesting inter alia that British decolonization was a British profit orloss calculation and, further, a recognition that true equality would beunattainable; independence and Commonwealth membership was to be both aconsolation prize for continuing poverty and an absolution for Britain from anycontinuing responsibilities. There is room for more than one opinion on thissomewhat severe judgement. Iba Der Thiam offers an historical survey ofnationalist rhetoric advancing from demands for equality to confrontation,vehement recrimination, Garveyism and pan-Africanism with some Communistinput. Adding colour to this, Christophe Wondji paints for us some of thesymbols, primary and secondary resistance figures, concepts of holy wars, fatherof the nation figures with praise-titles, and military and magico-religioussymbols; Wondji concludes by noting the fate of rulers who failed to measure upto the expectations raised by this imagery. Charles-Robert Ageron traces theevolution of de Gaulle's views on colonies from those of 1944 ('other men andother lands living under our flag') to his acceptance of the inescapability of fullindependence. Finally Michel's summary suggests the goad of Algeria pressedFrance to move quickly to the independence year of 1960 and that this move wascomplemented with the logic of nationalism and the nation-state by the Africanurban elites; Michel believes, however, that the aspirations of the 'man in thebush' were more than simple local political leverage, and merit further research.

What can be extracted from all this? Anthony Kirk-Greene, in a recentHistory Today article, summarized the present state of British end-of-empirestudies and suggested that the next step should be further inquiry intometropolitan political 'quit or not to quit' in-fighting, any evidence of arationalization of colonial withdrawal (in French terms carti6risme), the role oflocal government, colonial governments' support for regionalism, the signifi-cance of agro-economic reform (in French terms all the wide range of localmouvements associatifs to the final EEC Lome Associate status), the role of theUnited Nations and other international pressures, and the precise consider-ations, in the last months of colonial rule, in the minds of metropole ministers,senior colonial officials, and African political figures. This valuable workprovides many answers to such questions in the French empire context. It willalso provide, for those interested, material illustrating some of the more

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BOOK REVIEWS 385

profound consequences of colonial rule, states of mind and disturbance,confusion and dissonance over dependency and dependency abandoned, andquestions of identity.

ANTHONY CLAYTONRoyal Military Academy Sandhurst

The Internationalization of Colonialism: Britain, France, and Black Africa,1939-1956 by John Kent. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. viii + 365. £45.ISBN 0-19-820302-0.

Every student of colonial history is aware of the marked differences in aim andpolicy which characterized British and French colonial rule in Africa before1939. Amid an international climate verging on indifference, symbolizedperhaps by the ineffectual Permanent Mandates Committee, there was nopressure for metropolitan powers to conform to any generally acceptedstandards. French centralization and British decentralization were parallelstructures which, by definition, never met. Yet much changed with the outbreakof war. Not only were colonies now subject to the glare of internationalpublicity, but the war brought about some sort of cross-fertilization of theAnglo-French empires. John Kent asks why, and with what success, the world'stwo premier colonial powers sought common goals and policies in 1939-56.

Kent's task is an extremely arduous one. Not only is his chosen period repletewith an embarrassment of sources, but he has to examine decision-making atboth 'imperial' and 'colonial' levels. There are added difficulties in having toexplain both Vichy and Free French initiatives and take due regard ofAmerican, African and United Nations influences. But despite - or because of-these problems, he has given us a valuable study of colonialism/decolonizationand of international history. His book is clear, scholarly and judicious.

It has to be admitted that it is overwhelmingly a study of failure. Anglo-French attempts to achieve real co-operation never fully overcame the backlogof past suspicions. Little progress was made during the Phoney War. WhenMandel called for manpower from the British West African colonies to replacethe troops recruited from AOF, the British suggested an exchange of statisticaland scientific data. Constructive co-operation rarely rose above this level,except when the Nigerian government gave vital help to the Free French inAugust 1940. Kent analyzes the complexity of Anglo-Free-French and Vichypositions with great skill, explaining why local, ad hoc co-operation in WestAfrica was more successful than larger-scale, metropolitan efforts.

It was a similar story after the war. There was limited technical co-operation,but little thorough economic or political common ground. The French opposedBritish ideas for regional commissions because United States influence would betoo great. Both sides were keen, under the stimulus of economic and financialproblems, to develop African resources, but if the spirit was willing on thisoccasion, the flesh (in terms of available capital equipment) was weak. As forpolitical co-operation, London and Paris were poles apart. The Cousseyconstitution in the Gold Coast seemed to the French an encouragement ofpseudo-nationalists which was likely to undermine the French empire. WhenCohen advised a joint Anglo-French secretariat in Dakar or Accra, he was

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turned down flat. Neither the Combined Commission for Technical Co-operation nor ministerial contacts achieved anything of real substance. Onlydemands by the Ewe people in French and British Togo for unification pushedthe two powers together in an attempt to stem US and UN influence. Kentcarefully documents the origins of the 1956 plebiscites and establishes why theFrench regarded the incorporation of British Togo into the Gold Coast as theonly way of preserving French Togo for the Union Frangaise.

This is a very thorough, densely-documented book, containing many lengthy,untranslated French quotations; but some may find that it is written in a rathermonochrome style and without elegance. Perhaps the most dramatic thing aboutit is the title, and this is misleading. Colonialism was 'internationalized' only inthe very weakest sense, in that it operated in a new, genuinely internationalcontext. The British and French managed to forestall the call of Attlee, andothers, for what is generally meant by internationalization - internationaladministration or an extension of accountability. The sub-title is no better.'Black Africa' is eye-catching; but 'West Africa' would be much more accurate.

ROBERT PEARCESt Martin's College, Lancaster

The Political Inheritance of Pakistan edited by D.A. Low. London: Macmillan,1992. Pp. vii + 292. £45 (hardback). ISBN 0-333-524373.

This edited volume by Professor Low brings together for the first time paperspresented in a conference at Cambridge in 1987. As the editor notes in his wide-ranging introduction, the aim of the work is to move away from the traditionalfixation with why Pakistan was created to focus more closely on the provincesthat actually made up Pakistan. Unlike India, it is argued, the main clues toPakistan's post-1947 history lie not at the national but the provincial level.Consequently, ten papers are presented by leading specialists which examine theprovincial political inheritance of Pakistan.

The central thesis of the work concerns the emergence of Punjabi hegemonyin the new state of Pakistan. This theme is examined by five of the tencontributors. Ali and Major trace the long-term historical trends which inclinedthe Muslim propertied elite to political conservatism. This development, theysuggest, was underpinned by the colonial embrace and the agrarian politics ofthe Muslim-dominated Unionist Party. Talbot and Gilmartin highlight thepredominance of the latter and draw attention to the relative weakness of thePakistan movement in Punjab until 1946. Indeed, the 'success' of the MuslimLeague in routing the Unionist Party was a close-run thing and, as Gilmartincogently argues, brought into sharp conflict the contradiction between theMuslim sense of community and the politics of electoral competition. Dewey, ina lively and, sometimes polemical essay, identifies the organic roots of Punjabimilitarism. In a corrective to conventional wisdom (perpetuated by 'left-wingpolitical scientists'), he pleads for an historical understanding, one which focuseson the empirical and historical relationship between Punjabi society and militaryservice in colonial and post-colonial periods.

If the colonial legacy of Punjab left behind hegemonic tendencies, the othercontributions suggest that provincial support for Pakistan in some of the other

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BOOK REVIEWS 387

regions was often lukewarm or entwined with demands for greater politicalautonomy. As Copeland (Kashmir) and Jansson (NWFP) demonstrate, theprovincial political dynamics were in the main at odds with the Pakistanmovement. Similarly, in Bengal and Sind the enthusiasm for Pakistan wasstrongly tempered with provincial economic and cultural realities. Whereas inthe former these doubts were to surface immediately after independence, in thelatter, as Ansari shows, the development of Punjabi dominance and the thesettlement of muhajirs encouraged the emergence of Sindhi identity whichtraces its roots to pre-colonial times.

Overall, this is a fine publication which brings together timely contributions.In evaluating the political inheritance of Paksitan the volume has also high-lighted the tensions between nationalist and provincial historiography - atension which has a wider resonance in contemporary South Asian than theeditor reluctantly admits. This work is essential reading for any student of SouthAsian history and politics. Given the price, it is to be hoped that the publisherswill seriously consider a paperback edition.

GURHARPAL SINGHDe Montfort University

Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century by Brij V.Lai. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992. Pp. xxii + 404, maps, tables,illustrations. $38.00. ISBN 0-8248-1418-5.

Twentieth-century Fiji is familiar from existing writing, as its history is unrolledin this typically handsome volume in the University of Hawaii Press's PacificIslands Monograph Series. Here is a retelling, at greater length than hasappeared before between two covers, in vigorous, confidently judgementalnarrative, and from much research, though with fact and motive communallymiscoloured, of the story of Fiji's developing multi-racial societies from around1900 until the inauguration of the new constitution resulting from the militarycoups of 1987.

Here are Fijian protests of the early 1900s against aspects of the receivedmodel of Fijian society - though not Fijian complaints about Indian immigrants'arrival nor attention to the fact that two-thirds of indentured Indians wereintroduced when the British were convinced Fijians were dying out. Here is themessianic Fijian Apolosi Nawai, another 'charismatic man who fought the ethosand ideology of British colonialism' to Broken Waves (p. 48), more victim ofcolonial system and resentful chiefs than the fact that his commercial enterprises(themselves not without chiefly participation) omitted to pay commoners fortheir produce. Here are the Fiji-Indians - 'Indo-Fijians', Broken Waves prefers,a phrase suggestive of intermarriage in which the community scarcely engages -standing for political equality on the terms of the despatch which Lord Salisburysent, but not to Fiji (and not as the author believes as Secretary of State for theColonies). The political equality principle was not recognized at all in Fiji untilthe 1920s, and then with continued resistance on communal and demographicgrounds. Here in the racially-structured crown colony are the strikes of the1920s, 40s and 50s; here the Colonial Sugar Refining Company with its pervasiverole until Lord Denning's arbitration award saw it leave after independence in

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1970. Here are the contests over political representation from the 1920s onward,the call under Congress inspiration for common roll and the opposition to that.Here is the Second World War, on which Broken Waves is particularly good; soit often is on education - saving perhaps 'King Arthur and his band of merrymen' (p. 163) - with its emphasis on a wider though imperial world. And, aftermuch else, much of it well done, here are the moves - not very fully discussed,actually, for all the fundamental ethnic divisions negotiations revealed - towardindependence with its hopes for 'a just and fair multiracial democracy' (p. 218).

Justice and fairness, undefined, were apparently negated in Fiji largelythrough 'the unwillingness of its leaders to recognise the changed and changingrealities', those 'aging, entrenched leaders, convinced of their fundamental rightto govern and unwilling to share power with others except on their own terms'(p. 216). Broken Waves assumes a monolithic sense of what is 'fair' and 'just',applying a confessed 'moral vision' which 'is essentially modernist, democraticand egalitarian' though not 'necessarily more justified or better than others withdifferent points of departure' (pp. xvii-xviii). In practice this lofty yet, surely,rather simplistic moral vision, which it might be thought unscholarly to impose,produces a procrustean bed on which to lay evidence selectively from acommunal perspective; especially so, when the post-independence leaders inquestion were from the Alliance Party, elected with votes from all communitiesbut principally by ethnic Fijians who tended to view democracy reservedly. Thatwas because, as the Fiji Labour Party-National Federation Party CoalitionPrime Minister overthrown in 1987 acknowledged before he went into politicson, in practice, Indian votes, though Broken Waves omits to say so, Fijiansfeared political domination through Indian block-voting in the National Feder-ation Party (and saw cause to doubt whether the national interest as that partydefined it would necessarily benefit them, all questions arising from their verystrong sense of Fijian identity quite apart).

Surely not? is the comment too often invited when, however confidently,Broken Waves speaks of indigenous Fijian societies and their ethos, whetherancient or modern. The author's communal straitjacket becomes obvious in thedenouement of 1987. The Alliance was a chiefs' party, not 'modernist' at all?Actually there were as many chiefs, of a sort, in the new Labour Party as in theAlliance. Chiefs were heavily outnumbered on Alliance parliamentary benchesby commoners. Consider Prime Minister Dr Bavadra as portrayed in BrokenWaves: the first 'Fijian leader who could provide a credible alternative to Mara'(p. 262), Dr Bavadra, a westerner and so not acceptable to eastern chiefs, wasthrown out along with his forward-thinking fellow Labour Party Fijians, his'harbingers of a new era' (p. 270), 'his modern-minded Fijians' (p. 263), whohad all been elected as result of 'serious inroads into the Fijian constituency' (p.265) to form a government which, 'for the first time, genuinely reflected themultiracial character of the nation' (p. 267). This was 'in many ways, the comingof age of a new generation of Fijians' who lost office because they were a threatto 'chiefs who already felt themselves under siege from the corrosive effects ofmodern life' (p. 302). In a mode of argument increasingly characterizing thebook, it then agrees these modern Fijians were not so different in backgroundfrom those they displaced; actually there was no meaningful contrast at all, andthe general picture is not far from fantasy. The difference was Fijian members ofthe new government had all been elected as Fiji Labour Party candidates, not byFijians in communal constituencies but in national cross-voting seats dominated

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BOOK REVIEWS 389

by Indian voters, safe, block-voting National Federation Party seats; theCoalition was a minority government overall too, and given its actual, barelycovert Indian leadership and the temper of Fijians, it was very obviouslyinherently unsafe from conception.

At times, then, the 'yawning gap' which, according to the Preface, lay beforeBroken Waves'1 author when he began work on it, was located in a place otherthan historiography where he places it; it is in his understanding of the world ofFiji beyond his own community. The result is a book well worth reading formuch of its length, ending in a single communal perspective, admittingreluctantly after some evasion that Fijians generally approved the first coup. Itwas, as the author warns us at the outset, intended to be a work of 'criticalattachment rather than cool detachment' (p. xvii). The line is fine between thatand myth. When the myth is that a diverse country does or should share a singlemoral vision with political and probably economic implications more advan-tageous to one or more of its components than the indigenous one, and that theindigenous component is far more internally divided than is the case, thedangers of acting on and propagating myth might by now be more obvious.

DERYCK SCARR

Australian National University

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