Reviews and Short Notices

Medieval
Citadel of the Saxons: The Rise of Early London. By Rory Naismith. I. B. Tauris.
2019. xx + 268pp. £20.00.
In this comprehensive, learned and above all engaging book, Rory Naismith
traces the story of London from its birth under the Romans to the end of the
eleventh century and the brink of its apotheosis as England’s capital. From
the outset, London has always been an odd man out among English towns;
Londinium was neither the capital of a civitas, nor a colonia of Roman citizens,
nor even a municipium, but ‘a civilian mercantile centre’ (p. 18), linking the
commercial network of the North Sea with the heartland of the Roman province
of Britannia. But just as Londinium’s rise was fuelled by commerce, so its decline
and eventual collapse was related to the contraction of the trading network on
which it depended; by the mid-fifth century it was ‘still surrounded by sturdy walls
. . . containing a deserted, overgrown and at times boggy expanse punctuated by
crumbling ruins’ (p. 42). When, in the seventh century, a new commercial network
was established, London was resurrected as Lundenwic, outside the Roman walls
to the west, on the site still called ‘the old wic’ (Aldwych). Although by this time
the town lay within the kingdom of Essex (which at the time included Surrey,
parts of what would become Hertfordshire, and all of what became Middlesex),
its regeneration is as likely to lie in the entrepreneurial skills of the merchants
who frequented it as in the actions of any king.
London, of course, was never just a trading centre. The wealth it generated
attracted the attention of the rulers of Britain, and before the end of the
first century, Londinium was ‘the preferred seat for the governor and his
administration’ (p. 26). The same was true of Lundenwic, which (unlike other
incipient urban centres in southern England) lay in ‘everyone’s border-zone’
(p. 59), and was thus both exploited and patronised by the kings of Kent, Wessex
and Mercia as well as of Essex. Under these competing interests, Lundenwic
flourished throughout the eighth and into the ninth century. The old walled city,
however, had not been entirely forgotten, at least in what remained of the western
empire; Gregory the Great had intended it to be the site of the metropolitan
bishopric. The politics of the early seventh century meant that that honour went
to Canterbury, but in 604 London became an episcopal see, and though nothing
remains of the first cathedral of St Paul’s, it is assumed to lie beneath its successor,
on Ludgate Hill. Apart from this, resettlement within the walls began only in the
ninth century, and has been attributed to King Alfred (871–99), though in fact it


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may have begun before his time, and was still ‘a work in progress’ when he died
(pp. 119–20).
On Alfred’s death, only the area between Cheapside and the north bank of the
Thames had been resettled, but the tenth century saw the city expand northwards
towards its walls, while on the south bank, Southwark was flourishing in the
reign of Alfred’s successor Edward the Elder. The city was also developing its
own character and institutions. The peace-guild of London, which enforced the
legislation of King Æthelstan as well as its own local customs, and the cnihtengild,
which perhaps had military functions, both appear in the tenth century, and the
Court of Husting in the early eleventh. The city also became increasingly involved
in royal government, not only as a meeting-place for royal councils, but also as
the centre for production of the coinage for which the West Saxon kings are justly
famous. London not only had more moneyers than any other English town,
but by the early eleventh century was also producing the regularly issued dies
which every moneyer had to use. Its prominence is clear in the contemporary
chronicle for the reign of Æthelred unræd (978–1016); indeed Æthelred, who
was crowned at Kingston-upon-Thames, and buried in St Paul’s, has almost as
much right as Alfred to be regarded as London’s founding father. From his time
onwards, the history of London and the history of the kingdom are inextricably
intertwined; to tell one is to tell the other. The wealth and the self-confidence
of London’s citizens enabled them to survive both the Danish and the Norman
conquests; immigration has always been London’s life blood, and it was able to
accommodate Danes, Norwegians, Normans, Frenchmen and Flemings, while
remaining essentially an English city.
The surviving physical witnesses to London’s past are listed in an appendix,
and their number is quickly enumerated. This is not surprising to elderly
Londoners like myself, who can scarcely recognise among the ever-taller buildings
shooting up from the graves of their predecessors the town we knew as
children. For this reason Rory Naismith’s ability to conjure up London’s earlier
incarnations is not the least remarkable achievement of this remarkable book. To
achieve this feat he narrowly interrogates all the available sources, archaeological,
historical and numismatic, which (as he says at the outset) are ‘only useful if they
are put together in the right way’ (p. 7). His skills are amply demonstrated on
every page, for instance in his discussion of the composite text known as IV
Æthelred, an amalgam of monetary legislation of (probably) the tenth century
and a list of market dues updated at some time in the late eleventh (pp. 177–
8), or his exposition of the ‘Two Emperors’ coinage issued in the names of
Alfred of Wessex and Ceolwulf of Mercia (pp. 115–16). Equally striking is his
evocation not only of London as a place, but of London’s people, such as Imma,
the Northumbrian thegn ransomed from Lundenwic’s slave-market (pp. 72–3),
Bishop Waldhere, caught between a rock and a hard place, and desperately
seeking advice from his archbishop (pp. 56–7), Ælfheah Stybba and Brihtnoth
Odda’s son relaying the decrees of King Æthelstan to the London peace-guild
(p. 135), and Ansgar the Staller rallying the forces of London against the
advancing army of Duke William of Normandy (p. 186). It is the combination of
attention to detail, clear and concise exposition, and narrative force which makes
this book not only an original and illuminating work, but also a pleasure to read.
Independent Scholar ANN WILLIAMS


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Silver, Butter, Cloth: Monetary and Social Economies in the Viking Age. Edited by
Jane Kershaw and Gareth Williams. Oxford University Press, 2019. xvi + 306pp.
£75.00.
This book is a collection of essays based upon a series of symposia on the
Viking Age economy. It builds upon the two earlier publications by James
Graham-Campbell and Gareth Williams, Silver Economy in the Viking Age
(2007), and James Graham-Campbell, Søren Sindbæk and Gareth Williams,
Silver Economies, Monetisation and Society in Scandinavia, AD 800–1100 (2011).
In this monograph, the social and ritual roles of silver in practices such
as hoarding, fragmentation and the conversion of coins into jewellery are
discussed. Other economies are also explored, such as the commodity-currencies
of butter and cloth. There are four main themes running through this volume,
two exploring the function of silver in different economies within the Viking
diaspora, and two examining the non-monetary functions of precious metals and
commodity economies.
Within this book, there are two chapters that examine the use of silver in
Viking Age Ireland. Andrew Woods paints the coinage of Ireland in a new light,
demonstrating that the debasement of Hiberno-Scandinavian coinage was not
connected to failures at the mints. He discusses the lack of correlation between
the kings of Dublin and Ireland and the renewal of the Hiberno-Scandinavian
coinage. Re-coinage appears to have been economically driven rather than
coinciding with the accession of a new king. This leads him to conclude that the
‘perception of inferiority’ (p. 86) of coinage in Ireland has coloured the way in
which it has previously been interpreted. It is interesting that political events, such
as kingly succession or conquests in Ireland, did not affect the coinage of Dublin.
In his chapter John Sheehan reflects on the role of silver in Ireland and how it
was used by the kings in relation to the Church. Sheehan uses hoard evidence
to demonstrate that the period in which the kings of Clann Cholmáin were the
wealthiest coincided with high levels of church patronage.
Two chapters focus upon the fragmentation of silver objects and coins. In
a re-examination of hoard evidence from Scandinavia and the western Baltic
area, Marek Jankowiak concluded that there are many regional variations
in the fragmentation of silver. In general, however, fragmentation occurred
in conjunction with long-distance trade transactions. The patterns discernible
from dirham fragmentation indicate that the Scandinavians consciously selected
heavier coins. Mateusz Bogucki explores the reasons for silver fragmentation as
an economic activity. Using the early eleventh-century Mózgowo hoard from
Poland as a case study, he examines whether the available hoard evidence is
representative of all Viking Age silver.
Scientific methods of analysing the silver content of Viking Age artefacts
are constantly developing. Guillaume Sarah and Stephen Merkel discuss the
latest methods of fingerprinting and ‘provenancing’ early medieval silver. While
both Sarah and Merkel discuss numerous different non-destructive techniques
available for analysing silver, the varying results lead Merkel to conclude
that the taking of ‘samples destructively is almost essential for provenance
studies’ (p. 222). Sarah concludes that meaningful provenance studies stem
from interdisciplinarity. In order to assess the provenance of a silver artefact,
accurate metallurgical data needs to be gathered, but this information can only


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be deciphered if enough historical, archaeological, geological and geochemical

evidence is identified.
Florent Audy provides a fascinating overview of the use of coins as pendants in
Viking Age Scandinavia. He discusses the multifaceted reasons why a coin might
be worn as an item of jewellery, from functioning as a display of Christianity,
to demonstrating international connections and wealth. Coins were socially and
culturally significant, not just their precious metal content.
Gitte Tarnow Ingvardson provides a re-evaluation of the six mixed silver
hoards from Bornholm in Denmark. She discusses how motives for the
deposition of silver hoards were dependent on the individual, but can be used to
understand better the economic, social and political organisation of Bornholm.
Her methodological approach could be applied more generally to the study
of other Viking Age hoards to demonstrate regional variations of hoarding
practices.
Jacek Gruszczynski also presents a new methodology for assessing the
motive for hoard deposition. Using case studies from Gotland and Pomerania,
Gruszczynski suggests that if a hoard was buried within a container then it was
intended to be recovered. It is important, however, to note that he acknowledges
that his theory is still evolving and the ‘deposition and non-retrieval of Viking
Age hoards cannot be explained by a single grand theory’ (p. 185).
Jane Kershaw discusses gold as a means of exchange in Scandinavian-
controlled areas of England. She uses archaeological, numismatic and historical
evidence to conclude that gold was used more widely as a form of payment than
previously suggested by scholars. The number of hack-gold and gold ingot finds
in England, as well as evidence for the testing of the gold, suggests that it was
used as a transactional medium in parts of England.
Ester Oras, Ivar Leimus and Lauri Joosau also focus on gold as a medium
of exchange in the Viking Age. The discussion on the late ninth- to early
tenth-century hoard from Essau in Estonia brings this unique and fascinating
hoard of gold pendants to a wider audience, previously only published by local
researchers in Estonian magazines and journals (Tuna and The Estonian Journal
of Archaeology). This hoard provides invaluable evidence for Swedish Vikings
travelling in the Old Rus regions.
Svein Gullbekk provides an overview of how the Church in Scandinavia
collected money through offerings, tithes, taxes and dues, donations and fines
in the late Viking Age and in the early medieval period. The Church created
a ‘spiritual economy’, whereby money could be used to expunge sin. Gullbekk
concludes that coins had moved from a means of payment to a means of salvation
in the period of Christianisation in Scandinavia.
The final two chapters of this volume discuss commodity-economies in Iceland
and the Orkneys. Michèle Hayeur Smith examines the use of cloth currency in
Iceland, and in particular focuses on the physical properties of Vaðmál. Smith
argues that cultural and economic Norwegian traditions arrived in Iceland with
the Norse settlers and commodity-money came into use in early Viking Age
Iceland. The decline in access to silver is likely to have resulted in cloth being
used as a basic unit of measure and value. Aaron J. Critch, Jennifer F. Harland
and James H. Barrett examine archaeological evidence from Quoygrew, Orkney,
to discern if there is any evidence of a butter economy in the late Viking Age and
the medieval period. Zooarchaeological evidence suggests that cattle and sheep

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were more common in the region than other forms of livestock. Additionally, the
high number of calf bones indicates that dairy farming was important and butter
production highly likely. Historical sources specify the importance of butter as
an export commodity as well as detailing ‘butter skat’ as a form of mandatory
tax.
Silver, Butter, Cloth: Monetary and Social Economies in the Viking Age explores
the character of the Viking Age economies from archaeological and numismatic
perspectives, and is accessible to any scholar with an interest in the Viking Age
(c. AD 800–1100). The main focus of the book, however, is the Viking Age
silver economy. While other non-monetary commodities such as butter and cloth
are discussed, it remains difficult to trace these eleventh- and twelfth-century
practices back into the late Viking Age without further documentary evidence.
Nevertheless, this book is a fine collection of thought-provoking essays that
challenge the idea that only silver was used as a means of exchange in this period.
Additionally, the breadth of geographical locations covered by the articles in this
book is to its credit. This collection of essays provides a survey of new thinking
about commodity-money and an informative overview of the Viking Age silver
economy.
University of East Anglia JOHANNE PORTER

Inauguration and Liturgical Kingship in the Long Twelfth Century: Male and
Female Accession Rituals in England, France and the Empire. By Johanna Dale.
York Medieval Press. 2019. xvi + 292pp. £60.00.
British historians working on England in the Central Middle Ages sometimes
tend to assume that England is inherently different from a homogeneous mass
labelled ‘the Continent’. At best, Normandy had been so deeply absorbed into
the insular political orbit that it became an honorary part of England. Elsewhere
in Europe, historians lacked the wealth of administrative sources associated with
the island kingdom, and instead had to deal with ephemeral topics like ritual
and symbolism, which were of no relevance to their more level-headed insular
counterparts. Worse still, French and German scholars possessed the temerity to
write in languages other than English.
Johanna Dale provides a magisterial corrective to this Anglocentric approach.
Her book heralds a new generation of scholars, who, building on the work
of David Bates, Tim Reuter, Nicholas Vincent and others, seek to place the
English experience firmly in a broader European context. Her approach is
both facilitated and complicated by the materials at her disposal. Drawing on
coronation ordines, narrative sources, judicial statements, letters, charters and
seals, Dale inevitably has to deal with fundamental methodological challenges.
Ordines, for instance, purported accounts of a coronation, were not only the
result of closely entwined textual traditions, but are also almost impossible to link
to any particular inauguration ceremony. Likewise, as Dale points out, almost
four times as many charters survive for the reign of Henry II of England (r. 1154–
89) as for his contemporary Frederick Barbarossa (r. 1152–90), and they follow
a rather different structure and design from that of their French and German
counterparts. And then there was, of course, the problem that, in the German

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case, inaugurations related not only to the enthronement of kings and queens, but
also to the papal ceremonial of an imperial coronation. It is testimony to Dale’s
considerable abilities as a historian that she not only recognises these differences,
but instead uses them to make the case for comparison. As she puts it, the same
instrument can be used to play very different tunes.
The result is an eminently readable, rich and subtle book to which it is
impossible to do justice in a short review. There is just so much to recommend:
how Dale traces the subtle variations and shifts over time between coronation
ordines; her accounts of the saints invoked and the liturgical emphases placed; her
masterful discussion of the importance of dates and their liturgical connotations
not only for the inauguration festivities themselves, but also for the dating of
charters; how skilfully she disposes of assorted historiographical shibboleths;
the assured handling of a rich body of scholarship in English, French and
German; and the sheer wealth of insightful and astute observations, as well
as the vast range of materials consulted. Dale successfully tackles the myth
that the Hildebrandine Schism (or Investiture Contest) had a profound impact
on the development of royal sacrality; shows how different liturgical elements
and prayer formulae could nonetheless be used to express subtle shifts over
time or between occasions; and perceptively discusses the role of tradition in
picking coronation dates, while simultaneously taking to task a sometimes overly
simplistic modern emphasis on coronation regalia. The decision to complement
the liturgical materials with a discussion of charters and seals was inspired.
Both amplified and reiterated the liturgical dimension of kingship, though to
degrees that could vary considerably between the component realms. The relevant
chapters reinforce another central argument of Dale’s: that the significance
of the inauguration was not limited to the event itself, but was continuously
referred back to and invoked in the practice of royal lordship. The overall image
that emerges is one where the sacrality of kingship inevitably manifests itself
differently in each of the realms studied, but where these variations were ones of
degree, not evidence of fundamentally different political cultures. In the English
case, for instance, liturgical kingship was amplified by, rather than standing in
opposition to, the bureaucratic tools at the disposal of kings, while, for much of
the period, Capetians kings were followers of fashion rather than its originators,
and German rulers carved out a distinct ceremonial emphasis depending on who
was crowned and who did the crowning.
The genre of a book review requires that at least some criticisms be voiced.
More could, for instance, have been done with the English practice of making
the actual inauguration dependent on the candidate promising to abide by basic
norms of royal lordship. As Dale points out, there was no equivalent to the
English coronation oath in France and Germany. With the emphasis on the
twelfth century, there is a danger to assume a formalised selection of inauguration
sites, for instance, that only really emerged in the second half of that century.
And there is, of course, the problem that England, France and Germany were
among the few realms for much of the twelfth century where coronation and
unction were both practised. They were still the exception, not yet the norm.
Even so, these are also relatively minor quibbles. Some are simply a matter of
different historians placing different emphases, and others would have required
Dale to write a very different book from the rather splendid one she has. Suffice it
therefore to conclude by stressing just how important, innovative and insightful

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a study this is. Dale has made a major contribution to our understanding of
kingship, political culture, and the interplay between the sacral and the secular in
medieval Europe. Hers is, in fact, one of the most important books on the subject
to be published in the last thirty years. It heralds the arrival of a major new voice
in medieval studies.
University of Aberystwyth BJÖRN WEILER

Justice and Mercy: Moral Theology and the Exercise of Law in Twelfth-Century
England. By Philippa Byrne. Manchester University Press. 2019. xviii + 283pp.
£80.00.
Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England. By Elizabeth Papp
Kamali. Cambridge University Press. 2019. xv + 336pp. £90.00.
Once again illustrating the London bus principle of academic publishing, after
a long wait along come not one but a brace of monographs both devoted to
the same basic phenomenon. In this instance the pairing is serendipitous rather
than repetitive. The bus’s route was first mapped long ago, by Thomas Green’s
Verdict According to Conscience (1985), then by James Q. Whitman’s The Origins
of Reasonable Doubt (2008). Green and Whitman traced the influence over jury
trial by a theology that emphasised the twin perils of uncertainty and false
judgment. As Byrne and Kamali now demonstrate, in an age in which doubt was
the natural correlative of faith, not only was truth hard to establish, but a failure
properly to do so might result in injustice; itself an encouragement to criminal
behaviour, threatening the eternal damnation not only of the criminal but of
judge and jurors. Byrne approaches her subject from a theological standpoint,
Kamali via the routine of judges and juries. Byrne’s chief authorities are Seneca,
Abelard, Peter the Chanter and all those others, including the English chroniclers,
seeking means both to define moral responsibility and to ensure that justice
might be tempered by mercy. This was a task rendered all the more urgent after
1215 when the abolition of ordeal by fire or water in criminal trials obliged
English courts to turn decision-making over to juries previously used in such
cases merely to present the court with evidence or suspicion of criminal behaviour.
Kamali, tracing this pre-1215 evolution more briefly, is chiefly concerned by
what happened next. Using an impressive range of sources – administrative,
jurisprudential and literary – she supplies a definitive survey of the means and
devices by which juries struggled to dispense justice in criminal cases, over the
century after 1215. Arguably her greatest achievement is to obtain certainty
where even Maitland was inclined to fudge. Thus she demonstrates that ‘felony’,
a term Maitland assumed to be undefinable save by the severity with which it
was punished, was itself derived from what was ‘fell’ or ‘bitter’ (from the Latin
‘fel’ for gall, as first suggested by Sir Edward Coke). Via a path winding through
literary pastures, besides the not so still waters of medicine and humoral theory,
Kamali proves that ‘felony’ implied felonious intent and therefore deliberate
or premeditated wrongdoing: in legal terms ‘mens rea’, or guiltiness of mind.
Both authors are commendably keen to define words. Thus Byrne shows that
mercy (‘misericordia’) was a concept enriched by and to some extent superseded
by the Roman-law term ‘aequitas’, or equity, long before 1215. In both books,

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‘tutus’ (adjective) and ‘tutamen’ (noun), in the sense of security for defendants,
justices and jurors, prove significant. So too does ‘discretio’: the obligation or
justification to dispense from strict adherence to the law. Yet discretion opened
the way to injustice, especially in cases of felony where there was no real spectrum
of punishments between death and acquittal. Byrne begins with the age-old
question ‘what is justice?’, i.e. is ‘justicia’ retributive, or a more abstract concept
of righteousness, punishment for the body or medicine for the soul? As this
in turn implies, both books are clearly written, using technical but jargon-free
language, accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. Byrne’s authorities in
theory, and Kamali’s justices and jurors in practice, resolved various dilemmas
by opting for acquittal rather than conviction in cases where it was difficult
to sift lies from truth. In this, as Byrne shows, they followed the best classical
authorities from Sallust to Ambrose. Here, although we are offered a conspectus
of stories from scripture, notably the contrasted cases of Phinehas, Susannah
and Pilate, we might have heard rather more about the Devil as the ‘father of
lies’ (cf. John 8:44), as about doubt itself (‘dubium’) as a concept present in
scripture and hence in later scriptural commentary. The Gospel of Luke (24:25)
refers to those ‘tardi corde ad credendum’, as elsewhere the story of doubting
Thomas exalts those who believe without demanding firm or physical proof. All
of this in a world where physical proofs were hard to come by, yet firm decision-
making (then as now) remained essential for the common good. There will one
day be a more accurate statistical analysis of the rates of acquittal in felony
cases, over time, over type of offence and over geographical range. We may also
question the composition of crown-court juries (freemen all, but of what relative
status?) and the extent to which judicial intimidation of jurors is hidden from us
before the age of independent court-reporting. What is certain here is that both
writers challenge various comfortable assumptions, rewriting English law as a
history not simply of writs but of complicated ethical choices. They suggest that
medieval law did not, as various modernists might suppose, strive after brutally
simplistic or mechanistic outcomes but allowed free and often troubling range
to human conscience. Despite the long-held belief in English exceptionalism,
and the assumption that England was a land spared torture or inquisition, both
Byrne and Kamali reveal the strong parallels to be drawn between inquisitorial
and English procedures, especially in the English coroner’s court, in the interest
shown in accomplices (in heresy trials ‘fautores’), and in the emphasis upon
backsliding or habitual wrongdoing as a swift and certain route to gallows or
pyre. In all such cases ‘fama’, or reputation, remained crucially significant, as in
a ‘confessing society’ did the compulsion to probe motive and intent. English
law did indeed diverge from its continental archetypes, but that divergence was
both slower and more subtle than some are inclined to admit. Behaviours, human
impulses, perhaps even judicial procedures, alter rather less over time than the
terminologies used to describe them. These are both fine books, brim-full with
learning. They promise a bright future not only for their authors but for the
ongoing study of medieval law.
University of East Anglia NICHOLAS VINCENT


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The Figure of Minerva in Medieval Literature. By William F. Hodapp. Brewer.

2019. xiii + 307pp. £60.00.
In the introduction to his new book William F. Hodapp supplies a quotation
from the twelfth-century poet, scholar and commentator Bernard Silvestris that
underpins the author’s own response to the multiple different representations of
the goddess Minerva in medieval literature: ‘One must indeed remember in . . .
allegorical works, that there are equivocations and multiple significations and
that one considers poetic fictions in diverse ways . . . [T]he diverse aspects and
multiple interpretations of poetic fictions must be observed in all allegorical
matters if in fact the truth will not be able to stand in a single interpretation’ (p. 8).
In this rich, wide-ranging study Hodapp demonstrates just how complex and
multivalent the figure of Minerva was in medieval English and Scots literature.
The Roman goddess of strategic warfare, intellectual activity and practical arts,
Minerva was used by medieval poets both as a figure for wisdom and as a figure
for wisdom applied to a particular craft or practice. Thus, in her manifestation
as a martial deity, for example, she was often distinguished from the more
unruly or bloodthirsty prosecution of warfare characteristic of Mars (Ares in
Greek mythology). After providing a comprehensive introduction to the classical
sources for representations of Minerva, and her connections back to the Greek
Pallas Athena, whose origin myth saw her spring forth armed from the head of
Zeus, Hodapp provides valuable intellectual context for the chapters that follow
by carefully placing the goddess within traditions of medieval classicism and
fifteenth-century personifications of Christian wisdom.
Hodapp’s methodology in this book is to propose a fivefold paradigm for
anatomising Minerva’s imagery as it was used in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-
century allegorical and dream-vision poetry. His focus is upon Minerva as
redemptress; mistress of the liberal arts; patroness of princes; idol; and as
Venus’s ally. In each case (with a chapter devoted to each tradition), Hodapp
introduces the particular aspect of wisdom under consideration, outlines the
fundamental late classical and early medieval sources for each tradition, and
then provides a series of case studies demonstrating how selected poetic texts
take up and explore this facet of Minerva and her representation. Chapter 2
examines the ‘sapiential’ tradition which cast Minerva as a figure representing
the redemptive wisdom that one finds through contemplation of God and the
universe. Literary exemplars of this tradition see Minerva incorporated into
versions of the Judgement of Paris story, as in John Lydgate’s early fifteenth-
century Reson and Sensuallyte, only for her (too) to be rejected in favour of Venus.
Such a selection/rejection was employed in such cases as an instructive negative
example, against which Minerva – representing the correct decision, virtuous
wisdom and the contemplative life – was contrasted.
Hodapp follows the sapiential tradition with discussion of the ‘Martianus’
tradition in which Minerva was the mistress and benefactor of learning and skill.
Rooted in the presentation of Minerva as magistra artium liberalium in Martianus
Capella’s fifth-century De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, Hodapp’s exposition of
this tradition begins by considering moments where Minerva’s patronage and the
life of study contrasted with that devoted to Mars and the ways of war. Minerva
appears as mistress of the seven liberal arts in the anonymous dream-vision The
Court of Sapience and in John Skelton’s Garland of Laurel. In the latter example,


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Minerva (as Pallas) advocates for Skelton’s dreamer when Fame attempts to
exclude him from her court.
Chapter 4 examines Minerva as a political figure: as a patroness of a city-
state or prince. Such protection operates on the individual level in the classical
sources Homer and Statius, where the goddess watches over Achilles and Theseus
(respectively) and assumes an armed presence. It is in this tradition that we
see Minerva represent the application of wisdom to the martial sphere, both
in supplying strategic wisdom to those engaged in war, and when exercising
judgement as to when not to fight and applying wisdom to the brokering of
peace. Hodapp traces Minerva’s role as patrona principis in medieval reworkings
of the Troy story by Joseph of Exeter, Guido delle Colonne and John Lydgate.
Attention then turns to Christine de Pizan’s L’Epistre d’Othea (c.1400), in which
the author invents the titular Minerva-like wisdom figure as a means of advancing
the case for the application of learning and good order to chivalric conduct.
Othea represents knowledge and prudence applied to the practice of arms;
one manifestation of this hybridity is the euhemeristic reading of Minerva as
the mythical inventor of armour (p. 153). Hodapp concludes this chapter with
Stephen Hawes’s early Tudor dream-vision, The Pastime of Pleasure, which sees
its hero, Graunde Amoure, educated in both the liberal and chivalric arts.
The final two chapters move away somewhat from consideration of Minerva as
a representative of divine or practical wisdom. Here the focus is, by turns, upon
the goddess as an idol and as the ally of Venus. In the former ‘patristic’ tradition,
she is cast as a demon or as the application of intellectual powers towards wholly
worldly concerns, as is found in the anonymous poem Assembly of Gods and
William Dunbar’s The Golden Targe. Chapter 6 takes a more positive approach
and explores – despite the two goddesses being opposed in many different classical
sources – the presentation of Minerva as Venus’s ally, here drawing on a subtle
reading of one aspect of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the conception of Minerva as
embodying the perfection of a craft or practice, in this case love. Hodapp carefully
traces instances of this facet of Minerva in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, James
I’s Kingis Quair and Charles d’Orleans’s Fortunes Stabilnes.
Hodapp’s book provides a thorough introduction to the multivalent nature
of Minerva in both earlier and later medieval thought and literature. It is to
be welcomed by scholars of medieval classicism, mythography and literature
for offering the first book-length study of this figure and her multiple facets.
Grounded in extensive research, this book at each stage provides the reader
with useful, not quite excursory expositions of concepts pertinent to the ongoing
discussion. Witness, for example, the sections on medieval wisdom literature
(pp. 44–55), the origins of the liberal arts (pp. 82–9), idolatry (pp. 164–8) and
the reception of Ovid (pp. 215–18). On occasions when reading this book,
one would have liked to have learned more about points of overlap or indeed
conflict between the five traditions identified by Hodapp. Since his focus in
this study is predominantly on literary examples drawn from allegorical and
dream poetry, one can easily envisage subsequent scholars taking up Hodapp’s
lead and examining some of the different facets of Minerva as she appears in
other literary genres of this period, perhaps in relation to her representation in
the contemporary visual arts or to her manifestation in sources from the later
sixteenth century and after.
University of East Anglia MATTHEW WOODCOCK

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The Anglo-Latin Gesta Romanorum. Edited and translated by Philippa Bright.

Oxford Medieval Texts. 2019. cvii + 769pp. £135.00.
There can be few types of sources that provide a clearer window into a society’s
mentality than fictional stories shared among contemporaries, both to entertain
and to lay down ethical and theological guidelines. Such is the Anglo-Latin
Gesta Romanorum, a collection of 101 moral tales (with a further eighteen in the
appendix) gathered together in the fourteenth century, including some which were
new, many which had been in circulation for centuries (I recognised a few which
are included in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum) and some
that date back to the classical period. This was an enormously popular source
surviving in 390 manuscripts. It was used initially by the clergy for preaching but
subsequently came to be employed in a far wider range of contexts, later versions
of the Gesta remaining in popular circulation well into the eighteenth century.
The Gesta’s stories represent a fascinating assortment of myths, fables,
theological lessons and quasi-sermons. In structure, each of the tales follows a
standard pattern. They open by supplying the name of the emperor in power in
Rome at the time when the story was set. Some of these emperors are recognisably
from the historical record (e.g. tale 10 is set at the time of the emperor Titus),
but in many cases the named ‘emperors’ are fictional or include either more
recent individuals or those famous for other reasons. Consequently, tale 1 takes
place at the time of the emperor ‘Anselm’, tale 67 at the time of Fulgentius, and
perhaps most remarkably tale 30 is situated at the time of the emperor Averroes
(the famous twelfth-century Islamic writer and theologian); a thought-provoking
point for those interested in Christian–Islamic relations. After this introductory
passage, a story then unfolds almost ubiquitously set in the contemporary
present, following which there is a later section where the author explains the
story’s moral and/or theological message.
In content, the stories contain a vast array of insights on a wide range
of matters. Their basic purpose is nearly always theological or moral, but
what makes them so interesting is that they are often set in unglamorous
locations. So where the main ‘historical’ chronicles of this period focus their
attention on mighty battles, treaties and church councils, the Gesta Romanorum
is more interested in domestic affairs, relations within families, friendships, or
conversations in taverns. Consequently, there is a lot of coincidental detail about
everyday matters that in other sources rarely receive much coverage. Scholars
interested in issues of gender especially will find a great deal to interest them
given the sustained attention paid to marital relations and courtship.
From a theological perspective, these tales are a gift to those interested in
biblical exegesis and, more specifically, the way in which contemporaries were
encouraged to live out their faith. These tales are earthly in their focus and they
seek to show how specific Christian teachings should influence an individual’s
daily life. In this way, the Gesta’s stories set out to provide contemporaries with an
interpretative bridge connecting biblical scripture and lived experience. At times,
the moral message is obvious after reading the first few lines, at times it is more
obscure. For example, tale 8 concerns a knight who saw a toad and a serpent
doing battle. The knight struck down the toad, saving the serpent, but then later
that night, the toad came into the knight’s bed and attached itself to his chest.
The knight then suffered for a long time from the toad’s presence until he was
saved by the serpent, who drew out all the toad’s poison. The moral of the tale

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is that the knight – representing the human race – has a duty to fight the devil
(the toad) and suffer his onslaught, but can have the firm expectation of healing
and salvation from Jesus Christ (the serpent). The employment of animals as
proxies for spiritual figures, ideas or vices/virtues is likewise common throughout
this collection, providing a great deal of material for those concerned with the
symbolism attached to different animal species.
On a broader level, many of the stories are redolent of their broader fourteenth-
century background, containing themes connected to social hierarchy, heresy,
intellectual life and spirituality that will be of interest to anyone working on this
period. For example, historians of the crusades and pilgrimage to the Holy Land
will find it notable that several of these stories include journeys to the east, often in
order to provide a narrative structure and purpose (i.e. character A goes away to
the Holy Land and the story concerns characters B and C and what they get up to
while the pilgrims are gone). Likewise, several stories make brief reference to the
ongoing wars between western Christendom and Egypt, reflecting the sustained
struggle with Mamluk Egypt. There are only a few stories that discuss Muslims
(‘Saracens’) directly, but tale 50 (‘shooting at father’s corpse’) sets out the author’s
view of the spiritual differences between Christians, bad Christians, Jews and
Muslims.
Overall, this critical edition and translation of the Gesta Romanorum is truly
a magnum opus. The translation of such a huge number of different tales –
each containing a broad array of quite specific and technical terms – from the
Latin into highly readable English is a great achievement. The stories themselves
provide illuminating windows into the structures of morality, the realities of
existence and the rhythms of life that represent the beating heart of Christendom’s
collective consciousness. The fact that the stories were so popular only adds
credibility to the idea that they can be taken as indicators of mainstream attitudes,
rather than reflecting liminal or counter-cultural perspectives.
Nottingham Trent University NICHOLAS MORTON

Military Society and the Court of Chivalry in the Age of the Hundred Years War.
By Philip J. Caudrey. Boydell. 2019. xii + 227pp. £60.00.
Detailed records have survived for three of the armorial cases heard before
the Court of Chivalry in late medieval England: Richard, Lord Scrope v. Sir
Robert Grosvenor (1385–90), John, Lord Lovel v. Thomas, Lord Morley (1386–
7), and Reginald, Lord Grey v. Sir Edward Hastings (1407–10). The testimony of
about 800 lay and ecclesiastical witnesses has proved a rich quarry for historians,
but Philip J. Caudrey is the first to devote a book to exploring what this
material, enriched by biographical and prosopographical research, reveals about
patterns of military service, the web of social and political ties connecting the
protagonists in these cases to their witnesses (and the witnesses to each other),
and, more broadly, ‘the role of war-making and chivalric culture . . . in shaping
the outlook and governing the daily concerns of England’s gentry’. Building
on and extending the research agendas of other scholars, Caudrey develops
three interconnected lines of investigation from which emerge new approaches
to exploiting this corpus of evidence. The first considers the military careers of

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the witnesses, as revealed by their supplemented and enriched testimony. The

author does not set out to supplant earlier work in this area; indeed, there is
comparatively little ‘retracing of old ground’, particularly with regard to the pre-
1360 period. Focusing on service undertaken from 1369 onwards, particularly by
witnesses supporting Grosvenor and Hastings, he highlights areas of difference
and contrast, such as the distinctiveness of the Grosvenor witnesses’ service: their
versatility and focus on garrison service. He also reveals what these two groups
of witnesses, and indeed those supporting Scrope and Morley, had in common,
perhaps most notably the frequency of family-level continuities of service into the
reign of Henry V. At least 141 men in the Agincourt army were descendants of
militarily active Court of Chivalry witnesses: family traditions of military service,
established under the Edwardian kings, ‘remained alive and well in 1415’. Fresh
approaches to the Court of Chivalry witnesses and their testimony are to be
welcomed (though the deployment of biographical case studies, intended to add
nuance to our understanding of circumstance and motivation, adds little to the
existing literature), but in this case the impact would have been greater had more
careful and explicit attention been given to underlying contextual developments:
that is, to the militarisation of the gentry from the 1290s onwards, together with
subsequent changes in recruitment patterns and the social profile of soldiers. A
military careerist in the 1330s inhabited a very different world from one operating
in the 1370s and 1380s. The author’s handling of the detail of military affairs is
also not free of error, the most persistent being the conflation of two campaigns
in 1369: men who served with John of Gaunt in Picardy and the Pays de Caux
are assigned to the smaller-scale operations in Gascony. And here and there,
expressive exuberance leads to loss of control. The Guy, Lord Brian who, we are
told, ‘missed most of the picture book chevauchées of the high Edwardian age’,
actually accompanied the king to war, as a member of his household, on every
available occasion from 1327 to 1359–60, being knighted at Crécy along the way.
Second, and more substantially, Caudrey explores the overlapping and
complex roles played by lordship and regional ‘inter-gentry solidarities’ in the
selection of witnesses and, thus, the shaping of testimony in these armorial
cases. The deployment of the Lancastrian affinity in support of Scrope has long
been recognised. Here we learn how, for Scrope, that support was amplified
by genteel social networks, while for others the influence of lordship could be
indirect. Thus, Hastings was reliant on those who had served with his father
under John of Gaunt, while Scrope and Morley benefited from the testimony
of men who had been associated with the Bohuns, the Uffords and the Prince
of Wales. Caudrey’s absorbing analysis of the composition of the various
groups of witnesses illuminates the armorial protagonists’ recruitment strategies,
while demonstrating how, for Scrope and Morley, personal standing and their
families’ distinguished war records enabled them to find witnesses beyond their
principal regional support bases. This promising line of investigation could be
taken further. First, there are the men who testified for Lovel against Morley.
Caudrey draws upon their distinctive testimony, but omits them as a group
from his prosopographical enquiries because only sixty-two, out of well over
two hundred, can be identified. But given that the testimony is complete for
several of Lovel’s hearings in March and April 1386 it is possible to examine the
backgrounds and connections of coherent groups of witnesses. Armorial identity
could also be brought to bear on the matter. An exploration of our witnesses’

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own armorial identities, set within an ever more densely populated heraldic
landscape that was animated by family-to-family armorial dissemination, often
as a consequence of service connections, would offer an additional means of
probing and substantiating vertical and horizontal social relationships within
military society.
Caudrey’s third line of investigation explores the cultural context within which
patterns of military service and the testimony of Court of Chivalry witnesses
should be interpreted. He shows how chivalric memory – at once a complex
fabric of many interwoven threads and a source of cohesion within regional
military communities – was ‘expressed [in Court testimony] through an intricate
and interlocking combination of war recollections, family and regional history,
and popular hearsay, augmented by a combination of written and iconographic
material’. Two themes stand out. One concerns the ‘battle of memory’ that
resulted when deep-rooted traditions within regional military communities
collided in the Court of Chivalry. Vibrant oral tradition concerning a region’s
great families, reinforced by material evidence, ensured that beliefs about ancient
heraldic right formed a living part of regional, as well as family, identity, adhered
to even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Second, it is argued
that comparison of the testimony of the 1380s with that of the 1400s reveals
how attitudes to military events had shifted over time. To witnesses in the mid-
1380s, the 1369–89 phase of the French war, which was fought attritionally and
eventually to a standstill, lacked the lustre of success associated with the period
prior to 1360. By 1408–9, however, the campaigns of the stalemate years, now
a distant memory infused with nostalgia, were viewed more positively. ‘These
shifting attitudes’, notes Caudrey, ‘may partly explain the enthusiasm with which
the gentry . . . returned to arms in 1415’. Caudrey brings subtlety and insight to
the interpretation of the witnesses’ testimony, and yet more allowance could be
made for the impact of interventions by court clerks and copyists on the texts
that have come down to us. In Scrope v. Grosvenor, for example, the imprecise,
formulaic character of the depositions taken down at Plymouth, when compared
with the records of other sessions, raises the suspicion that at best they provide a
heavily abbreviated record of what was said. While affecting our understanding
of patterns of military service in general, this has some bearing on whether
Hastings’s witnesses were actually more ‘celebratory’ about the campaigns of the
1369–89 period than Scope’s had been in the 1380s.
It is unfortunate that a number of pertinent and important publications
appeared too late to be noticed or exploited fully by the author, for they can only
have added weight to what is the most substantial and stimulating exploration
of its subject to date. Caudrey’s book demonstrates how taking a comparative
approach to the witnesses and testimony of the three armorial cases serves to
expand investigative possibilities within both the immediate locality of its subject
and the broader research landscapes of military communities and noble–gentry
relations.
Keele University ANDREW AYTON


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Constructing a Civic Community in Late Medieval London: The Common Profit,

Charity and Commemoration. By David Harry. Boydell. 2019. xi + 216pp. £ 75.00.
Late fourteenth-century London was a turbulent place, epitomised by the
anarchy and violence of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. Harry sketches this
backdrop competently, then proposes that over the next century the response
of London’s governing elite was to address the underlying dissent within
the capital by controlling political language and its underlying ideology to
legitimise their authority. This small elite possessed no hereditary rights to rule,
so they established and communicated their authority through tighter control
of political language and by convincing their fellow Londoners that their rule
was divinely ordained and in everyone’s best interests. They appropriated and
sharpened the malleable concept of the ‘common profit’ to mean the pursuit of
prosperity through participation in charitable activities, the exercise of spiritual
authority and the preservation of harmonious relations. Harry’s intention is
to explore the mental world of the ruling elite of aldermen, mayors and their
professional civil service, not their modes of governance, by analysing the
administrative documents they generated.
The governance of London is known to have become increasingly bureaucratic
and interventionist during this period, and Harry argues that this development
corresponded with a reshaping of political ideology, in which civic office was
sacralised: the elite received ‘homage and worship’ (p. 13) from other citizens
and in return it offered lavish charitable acts. Foremost among the latter
was the memorialisation of those leading Londoners whose activities had swelled
the common profit of the city, including the epitaphs of the exemplary dead.
During the course of the fifteenth century, the elite adapted the notion of charity
to include the production of religious literature and the growth of a textual culture
through expanding access to manuscript and written books. Hence the tiny elite
who governed London nourished the city socially, economically and spiritually,
and became very good at ensuring that everyone else knew it.
The book focuses primarily upon the vernacular literature of fifteenth-century
London, concluding with Caxton’s printed works of the 1480s. It is well informed
by the existing scholarship in a range of disciplines, from political ideology
(medieval and modern), literacy, religion and the economic history of London.
The writing is fluent and accessible, and the argument is sustained and coherent.
Harry retains a salutary awareness of the typicality of the extant sources,
reminding us regularly that these are mere remnants of a once significant London
archive destroyed by the great fire. The result is an engaging, interesting and
accessible scholarly monograph.
St Paul’s School, London, and the University of East Anglia MARK BAILEY

Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century: The Manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas
Eymerich. By Derek Hill. x + 251pp. Boydell for the York Medieval Press. 2019.
£60.00.
To what extent was the inquisition against heresy institutionalised over the
course of the fourteenth century? Such is the principal question posed by Derek
Hill. Comparing and contrasting the two great procedural treatises written by

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Dominican inquisitors – Bernard Gui’s Practica (a product of the southern

French inquisition c.1325) and Nicholas Eymerich’s Directorium (emerging from
the inquisition in Aragon, but written in exile at Avignon in 1376, by a Paris-
trained professional who had twice clashed with the Aragonese crown) – Hill
is obliged to enter a Kafkaesque world in which orthodoxy was enforced
by those determined to prove the existence of a prevailing heterodoxy. Gui’s
Practica was last edited in 1886 and, despite six known manuscripts, failed to
exert any discernible influence over later inquisitorial procedures save at second
or third hand. As Hill demonstrates, the 1886 edition itself obscured Gui’s
intentions by deliberately detaching Gui’s list of contents from the materials
that followed. By contrast, Eymerich’s Directorium circulated in at least thirty-
five manuscripts and more than a dozen early modern editions, being widely
taken up by later inquisitors, not least by the Malleus Maleficarum in which
Eymerich’s mostly masculine suspects are reclothed in the prevailing feminine
terminology of witchcraft. The irony here is that the popular Eymerich, himself
last fully published in 1578, drew very heavily on the (relatively unpopular)
Practica of Gui. Gui worked in close cooperation with the royal authorities in
Languedoc, not least in an effort to avoid the ‘Carcassonne madness’ of 1303 in
which the Franciscan Bernard Délicieux had stirred up local revolt both against
inquisition and against the authority of the French King, Philip IV. By contrast,
Eymerich operated at best with the grudging support, at worst against the express
interests of the Aragonese king, Pedro IV. In Languedoc, where the kings of
France drew profits from the confiscation of the property of heretics, there was
a degree of cooperation between inquisition and local power structures lacking
in Aragon, where costs could not so easily be recouped from the inquisition’s
victims and where Eymerich’s campaign against sorcery created tensions with
a royal court that was itself a major centre for astrology. Eymerich’s belief in
the immanence of demonic powers, derived in part from Aquinas, in part from
rhetoric first deployed by Pope John XXII, contrasts with Gui’s more single-
minded pursuit of dualist heresy, which was by the 1320s close to extinction in
Languedoc. Where Gui was reluctant to use torture (or at least to admit to its
use), Eymerich embraced it as an essential means of dispelling doubt. At the
same time, by acknowledging that, through their demonic powers, the tortured
might continue to deny or muddy the truth, Eymerich applied a further turn to the
screw by which suspicion was twisted into full-blown paranoia. Troubled by the
inquisition’s tendency towards autonomy, as early as 1317, Pope Clement V had
attempted to introduce a degree of episcopal oversight. Gui’s reasoned response
here (itself still unpublished, although surely deserving edition) can be contrasted
with Eymerich’s more strident emphasis upon the majesty of inquisition. This,
as Hill demonstrates, was rendered more rather than less autonomous by an
appeals process that would have been inconceivable to Gui. Such appeals, under
Eymerich frequent and regularised, were themselves incorporated within an
inquisitorial ‘system’ that, as a result, now slipped even further beyond ordinary
episcopal control. Where Gui had employed his sermones generales (medieval
forerunners of the later autos-da-fé) as public displays of the reconciliation of
the repentant and the punishment of the incorrigible, focusing upon essential
points of faith and the particular circumstances of Languedoc, Eymerich’s vision
of heresy extended from the local and particular to pretty much any deviation
from what he was prepared to define as orthodox. In the process, he reached

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far beyond essential points of doctrine to denounce blasphemy, magic and what
was now perceived as a constant demonic assault upon Christian values. Thus
did the enforcement of a collective conscience shift from the temporary and
extraordinary to the permanent, universal and routine. Handling these materials
with quiet confidence, Hill offers a thoughtful albeit slow-moving contribution
to the debate both on heresy and on the bureaucratisation of late medieval
power. Not everything here is perfect. Liber Extra (p. 27) was most definitely not
‘the next volume of canon law after Gratian’. The decision to accompany every
single word of Latin with an English equivalent renders this an even slower read,
where Latin might have been most conveniently supplied in footnotes. Nor are the
translations (or the Latin texts) invariably accurate. For a particularly egregious
example, see text and translation at page 152, where inquisitor and constitutes
should both be ablative, religiosi have become ‘friars’, questiones ‘torture’ and
quinque ‘fifteen’. English exceptionalism perhaps explains the unwillingness to
incorporate the debate on Wycliffe or the Lollards within the wider European
discussion of heresy, creating an artificial and regrettable segregation in which
English and European experts remain mutually deaf to one another’s attempts
at analysis. As an introduction to two of the foundational texts of inquisition,
nonetheless, this serves as both a perceptive and an intelligent guide.
University of East Anglia NICHOLAS VINCENT

Early Modern
The Norwich Chamberlains’ Accounts 1539–40 to 1544–5. Edited by Carole
Rawcliffe. Norfolk Record Society. 2019. xii + 452pp. £17.50/£25.00.
The chamberlains’ accounts of any early modern town or city serve the
historian much as a thorough annual blood test serves the physician: each offers
a succinct but deeply probing snapshot of nearly all bodily functions, whether
that body be civic or human, at a particular point in time. Yet the editing
and transcription involved in producing such accounts for a modern readership
is much more arduous, painstaking and downright ‘fiddly’ than the computer
printout generated from the medical laboratory. As the raw but enormously
detailed record of England’s second largest city, the financial accounts of
Norwich’s chamberlains between the years 1539–40 and 1544–5 have a lot to tell
us about that particular body and provincial urban governance and society in
general. Carole Rawcliffe has listened and transcribed with exemplary and patient
care and edited her text with consummate clarity and judgement.
What these accounts tell us, in minute detail, is that the health of Norwich
in these years was more parlous than uniformly robust, the product of wider
contextual realities of the day as well as the past infirmities of the city itself.
But they also tell us, in equally minute detail, how the city strove creatively
and energetically to deal with the issues before it. Beginning with a prolonged
slump in the international textile trade, and thus a serious drop in local levels
of employment and consumer spending, Norwich’s troubles of the 1540s were
compounded by myriad additional concerns. The two devastating fires of 1507,
still vivid in the memory of older inhabitants, placed a continuing burden on

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the city’s housing stock. When population growth made that loss of building
fabric critically problematic, the city’s leadership had its MPs enter a bill in
parliament requesting relief. The response came in the 1535 statute enumerated
as 26 Henry VIII, c. 8, ‘An Acte for the Reedifying of Voyde Groundes in the
Citie of Norwich’, which granted the civic authorities the authority to require
landlords to repair decayed housing or face fines or forfeiture for failing to do so.
That augmentation of civic control over the local building stock came just on the
eve of the dissolution of the monasteries, which brought properties like the huge
and lucrative Blackfriars complex to the city by the end of that decade. Along
with the large addition to the east end of the Guildhall, and supported by the
robust contributions of several wealthy townsmen, these events spurred the local
construction industry to new levels of activity and expenditure. The brick-by-
brick details are among the most copiously recorded expenditures of the ensuing
years.
When the devastating plague of 1544/5, followed by severe dearth, brought
myriad poverty-stricken survivors to the city in search of relief, that burden
accrued to the food supply as well. Along with the assistance of several
individual wealthy benefactors, the city itself took extraordinary steps to manage
the profusion of beggars and to regulate the food supply. When these same
years brought sharply increased taxation to support Henry VIII’s military
campaigns, the 1544 debasement of coinage and the fallout from the last monastic
dissolutions, the city’s authorities cut back expenses wherever they could. They
cancelled the traditional but expensive annual guild pageant in 1544, cut back on
the annual dredging of the river Wensum, and dragged their heels on paving and
cleaning of the streets.
Overall, these accounts offer a first-hand primer in the intricacies of civic
governance at a time of rapid and unsettling change. They are particularly
insightful on matters of civic finance, building and maintenance, and the
economic, political and social issues of the day. In addition to Rawcliffe’s
scrupulous editing and transcription of the six annual accounts between 1539/40
and 1544/5 and her scholarly introduction to the whole, the volume offers four
colour plates, a general glossary, a list of important local dates and days, and three
appendices to support the text: an indenture describing the chamberlain’s duties,
one chamberlain’s expenses during Kett’s Rebellion of 1549, and an inventory
of the city’s moveable goods in 1552. As a measure of the health of England’s
second largest city of the day, the volume as a whole provides an essential primer
for understanding early modern English civic governance outside the familiar –
but also unique – London metropolis.
Concordia University, Montreal ROBERT TITTLER

Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558–1630. By Michael Questier.

Oxford University Press. 2019. xviii + 499pp. £35.00.
The central conundrum of post-Reformation politics, this important work
argues, was how to square the traditional dynastic strategies of early modern
monarchs with the hardening religious positions of their subjects. Michael
Questier revisits the great controversies of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-

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century dynastic politics: Elizabeth I’s marriage; the status of Mary, queen of
Scots; the English succession, before and after Mary’s execution; the matching
of James VI and I’s children; and the Bohemian revolt that sparked the
Thirty Years War. He takes seriously contemporaries’ awareness about their
possible implications for Britain’s religious orientation: contingency is his
watchword. Professor Questier emphasises Catholic perspectives: crucially, the
hope that dynastic union with Catholic royal families would lead to toleration,
maybe even to the restoration of the true Church. This possibility ensured
that Catholic expectations outlived Mary, queen of Scots. Questier’s book
also explains why Britain’s Protestant monarchs valued (up to a point) their
Catholic subjects. Relative lenity or harshness towards recusants sent signals
to foreign powers (sometimes to raise their offers, sometimes to offset other
unfulfilled commitments) and also defused domestic criticism (a feint one way
to counterbalance a concession the other). For James VI, Scotland’s Catholic
constituency offered leverage: it prevented him from being dependent on the
Elizabethan regime and encouraged other powers to imagine that, deep down,
James was more sympathetic to the old religion than he could let on and thus
might accede to the English throne unchallenged. With some chutzpah, British
and Irish Catholics maintained that, unlike ‘the godly’, their loyalty was not
conditional on the monarch’s religion. This position resonated because, for
many committed Protestants, the crown had indeed become instrumentalised
as the agent of godliness, not only at home but also abroad. Thus, the work
concludes, Charles I’s personal rule was rooted in what was in large part a
Catholic-inspired reading of forward Protestantism as dangerously popular and
antimonarchical.
Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations is an impressive volume: through
an astute and intricate account of events and their contemporary interpretations,
it powerfully vindicates the vital historical principle that ‘the future was not
certain’. The author is being self-deprecating when he states that his book mostly
retells other people’s scholarship. Linking together such a detailed story requires
a great command of a convoluted period. This mastery enables Questier to
demonstrate the interconnections between the British kingdoms, as separate
states and then as part of a composite monarchy. He also shows how closely
Britons tracked the affairs of other European states, where they saw resemblances
and lessons for their own polity. For instance, people remembered that the
St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had been provoked by a cross-confessional
mésalliance of the kind that James VI and I was now proposing. This is
avowedly a ‘political narrative’ of the period: although his introduction mentions
socio-cultural approaches to Catholicism, Questier does not draw on such
scholarship thereafter and avoids the concept itself. The work’s underlying note
is cynicism. Gripping like a thriller, the narrative recounts disasters, pratfalls
and embarrassments; hubris is reliably followed by nemesis. A sense of pervasive
duplicity well accords with some contemporary perspectives. It will not surprise
that ambassadors’ reports – the last word in speculation – are prominent
sources, or that politic kinds of reading loom large. This approach may raise a
paradox. Such double-dealing occurred because Questier’s cast (at least, most
of them, we can only assume) really did care about religion: it was not a
cloak for politics – if anything, the reverse. Of course, this point is implicit in
everything that the book addresses; it needs to be remembered lest, to coin a

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phrase, this rather sardonic work be misread as history with the religion left
out.
University of Cambridge PAUL CAVILL

A Protestant Lord in James VI’s Scotland: George Keith, Fifth Earl Marischal
(1554–1623). By Miles Kerr-Peterson. Boydell. 2019. xvi + 238pp. £60.00.
George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal, has long been renowned for his wealth, his
Protestantism and his foundation of Marischal College, Aberdeen. Miles Kerr-
Peterson re-evaluates that reputation and, through examining some key aspects
of Marischal’s lordship, significantly modifies what we thought we knew about
the man. In doing so, he makes an important contribution to how the Scottish
nobility during the reign of James VI is understood, building on the foundations
laid down by Jenny Wormald and Keith Brown over recent decades. The book
merits attention not because it is ground-breaking but because it ‘add[s] greater
definition and detail to the picture’ (p. 189). Yet Marischal seems an odd choice
for such a study, given that the family’s papers were scattered and largely lost after
forfeiture for choosing the wrong side in the 1715 Jacobite rising.
The first three chapters are the most detailed and sure-footed part of the book,
given the breadth of the source-base for high politics and court intrigue. They
chart Marischal’s upbringing, and his involvement in government, politics and
noble feuds. As a young man, he cultivated influence at court, involving himself in
the factionalism of the 1580s and early 1590s, and his career as a courtier peaked
in leading the embassy to Denmark in 1589–90, standing as proxy for James VI in
his marriage to Princess Anna. After 1595, however, he withdrew from court and
rarely attended the privy council. He did, however, make a brief return between
1604 and 1608, perhaps due to unease at the prospect of the king’s quest for closer
Anglo-Scottish union, which is also suggested by his refusal in 1604 to serve on
the union commission.
The latter half of the book approaches the last quarter-century of Marischal’s
life thematically. It is here that the loss of the family’s papers is most keenly
felt, with frequent acknowledgement of the fact that there is much we cannot
recover with regard to how he conducted his own affairs. There are tantalising
glimpses of his management and development of his estates, and his exercise of
ecclesiastical patronage, but the evidence does not allow a clear picture of his
inclinations, goals and motivations to emerge. We do see that he invested heavily
in developing Peterhead and Stonehaven. Although barred from international
trade because they were not royal burghs, Peterhead provided an ideal setting-
off point and first landfall for shipping to and from the Baltic and Scandinavia,
and both ports lay between Aberdeen and the next coastal royal burgh, so were
able to act as safe-havens and staging posts. They were also well placed to profit
from coastal trade and serve as outlets for the produce of the earl’s estates: a rare
surviving account reveals a profit of £30,000 Scots (£2,500 sterling) on shipments
of his grain between 1608 and 1611 alone.
Marischal’s commitment to Protestantism is traditionally seen in his
upbringing, his rivalry with the Catholic earl of Huntly, and his foundation of
Marischal College as a rival to the conservative King’s College in Old Aberdeen.

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 EARLY MODERN 333

Yet he was no champion of the faith: Kerr-Peterson astutely points out that
presbyterian writers like James Melville and David Calderwood, always eager to
find noble champions, barely give him a mention. Religion played only a minor
role in his rivalry with Huntly, nor did it stand in the way of his marriage to
Margaret Home or cooperation with his Catholic cousin, the earl of Errol. As for
King’s College, it was purged of Catholicism long before Marischal College was
founded. The initiative was really a reaction to the laird of Philorth’s attempts to
found a college and royal burgh at Fraserburgh. Aberdeen did not want another
royal burgh that close, so joined Marischal to thwart the mutual threat. Yet Kerr-
Peterson also suggests that, in founding ‘a collegiate church for a Protestant
age’ (p. 186), Marischal was following a much older pattern. Its staff never said
masses for his soul but it guaranteed his reputation for centuries. Marischal is thus
reframed as a traditional nobleman, which explains his behaviour towards the
churches under his patronage: he favoured kinsmen in parochial appointments
and sought to appropriate benefices to support his children’s education. It is
pithily observed that, in their dealings with the Reformed church, ‘the Earls
Marischal were Protestant nobles, not noble Protestants’ (p. 151).
We also learn that he rarely engaged in violence, preferring dispute resolution
through litigation and negotiation, although he found himself on the receiving
end of threats and overt use of force, even from his own family, which was not
a happy one. His first marriage, to Margaret Home, nearly ended in divorce and
the second followed less than a year after her death in 1598 to Margaret Ogilvie,
who was no more than 15 when they married (he was 44). Their first child, James,
rebelled against his father in 1622, in league with his mother’s lover. They raided
Marischal’s house of Fetteresso, stripping it of its contents. In 1623 George died
a rich man, but he was not surrounded by a loving family. His estranged wife did
not attend the funeral and married her lover the following year.
The book’s central message is that George Keith’s career exhibits continuity
rather than a shift in the role of the nobility in this period, reminding us
that there was more to being an effective nobleman than political prominence.
Marischal’s energies were directed towards the maintenance, consolidation and
aggrandisement of his estates, the enhancement of his regional power and the
securing of his legacy. His overriding motivation was to cement the family’s hold
on its estates through exploiting legal rights, careful management of resources,
and investment with an eye to the long term. That he left the earldom in such
robust health means that his career can be judged a success.
University of Dundee ALAN R. MACDONALD

Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton. By Rob Iliffe. Oxford
University Press. 2017. xii + 522pp. £25.49.
Priest of Nature presents a thorough, original and convincing analysis of
Newton’s religious thought up to the late seventeenth century. This book is
largely based on Rob Iliffe’s three-decade research on Newton’s manuscripts,
now available online thanks to the Newton Project edited by Iliffe. The book
also draws on archival materials concerning Newton’s early years, his scholarly
activities at Cambridge and his involvement in academic politics. Furthermore,

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Iliffe’s attention to manuscript sources is matched by his solid knowledge of

Newton’s public writings together with the theories and authors that influenced
Newton’s context and intellectual growth.
The first two chapters concentrate on Newton’s family background, childhood
and youth. Examining Newton’s years as a student at Trinity College in the
mid-seventeenth century, Iliffe provides an enlightening description of life at
Cambridge in a period of profound religious and political crisis for the university.
He pays attention to the impact that various events and people, such as
Cambridge scholars Benjamin Pulleyn and Isaac Barrow, had on Newton’s
education, piety and character. Newton’s complex and problematic personality
is a recurrent theme in this intellectual biography. This book, however, is not a
traditional biography, in that the remaining ten chapters cover Newton’s life up
to the 1690s by discretely analysing different elements of his religious thinking.
The key topics addressed in this book include the relationship between
Newton’s scientific and religious ideas, his researches on early Christianity,
his anti-Trinitarianism, his consideration of pre-Christian religions and his
apocalyptic studies. Iliffe highlights the interconnections between Newton’s
scientific and hermeneutical methods, making a parallel between Newton’s
abhorrence of ‘imagination’ in religious thinking and his rejection of ‘hypotheses’
in scientific investigation: ‘The triumph of the imagination drew the godly man
away from righteousness, just as the introduction of hypotheses into natural
philosophy corrupted the pursuit of truth. The use of a proper method would
terminate premature and uncorroborated speculation and produce undeniable
philosophical truths’ (p. 351). According to Newton, the meticulous study of both
Scripture and the ‘Book of Nature’ inspired authentic piety and facilitated the
search for truth.
Newton’s Biblicism also informed his consideration of early Christianity in
his private writings, which show his anti-Catholicism and anti-Trinitarianism.
Newton concurred with other heterodox Protestant intellectuals, such as his
friend John Locke, that Catholic hierarchies, dogmas and traditions, as well
as Trinitarian doctrine, resulted from the degeneration of early Christianity.
According to Newton, ‘the great Athanasian conspiracy’ (p. 383) played a
primary role in the distortion of Christianity and promoted the corruption of
Scripture with Trinitarian interpolations like the Johannine Comma (1 John
5:7-8) and 1 Timothy 3:16 – two passages to which he devoted ‘An Historical
Account of Two Notable Corruptions in Scripture’. Iliffe provides a detailed
analysis of Newton’s manuscripts concerning Athanasius and other ‘villains’
– mainly Athanasius’s fellow-Trinitarians and the monks who, according to
Newton, intentionally modified the biblical text. Newton did not limit himself
to denouncing the process of perversion of the Christian religion since at least
the Council of Nicaea. He formulated an anti-Trinitarian, essentially Arian
Christology, which, as Iliffe observes, was indebted not only to his deep and
extensive knowledge of Scripture and early Christian sources, but also to modern
Arian, Socinian and Unitarian texts.
Newton’s Christian primitivism was also influenced by his conviction of
the existence of prisca sapientia among ancient cultures. Like various other
seventeenth-century writers, such as Gerard Vossius, Samuel Bochart, and deists
like Herbert of Cherbury and Charles Blount, to name but a few, Newton
thought that several ancient religious and philosophical systems presented

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notions consonant with proper morality and true piety. He valued the Noachian
law, Egyptian wisdom, Orphic and Pythagorean philosophies, ancient atomism,
the religion of Stonehenge and biblical Judaism, all of which, however, had
deteriorated into idolatry and superstition. Newton developed a naturalistic
history of the corruption of ancient religions, which was caused by ‘the perverted
adoration of heavenly bodies’ eventually leading to ‘the worship of dead men
and statues’ (p. 213). While arguing that priestcraft had a role in the growth and
spread of idolatry, he claimed that ‘this was aided by the inveterately superstitious
character of human beings’ (p. 213). Concerning ancient wisdom, Iliffe has
correctly noted that, despite the sincerity of Newton’s Christianity, his writings
on prisca theologia, which describe Christ as simply the restorer of the Noachian
religion, ‘implied that nothing much more was required of the true religion than
to recognise the divine origins of the cosmos, to believe that Christ was the
Messiah who was resurrected on the third day after his death, and to observe
the moral obligations of Christianity’ (p. 218). Thus, although in other writings
Newton attributed more prerogatives to Christ, ‘the general thrust of his writings
on the ancient religion is of a piece with his tendency to downgrade the role of
the Son in respect to that of the Father’ (p. 218).
The internal coherence of Newton’s religious thought is further demonstrated
by his reflections on biblical prophecies and the Apocalypse. In contextualising
Newton’s apocalyptic studies, Iliffe calls attention to Newton’s debt to other
seventeenth-century authors – especially Henry More and Joseph Mede – and
thus shows that Newton’s apocalyptic interests originated in religious concerns
that were deep-rooted and widespread in seventeenth-century English culture.
Iliffe also highlights Newton’s and other writers’ consideration of historical
and contemporary events – from the early corruption of Christianity to the
conflicts and revolutions of the seventeenth century – as manifestations of a
historical process predicted by Scripture and heading towards the Apocalypse.
In this respect, Iliffe’s analysis sheds new light on the reasons and factors behind
Newton’s involvement, as a representative of his university, in several political
events – especially to oppose James II’s interferences in academic life and, later,
to support William and Mary. Moreover, Newton was persuaded that ‘God had
given his people prophesies so that they might be understood in the latter times’,
particularly ‘at the end of time’, when ‘the wise, and not the wicked, would
understand’ (p. 400).
Newton’s scriptural references to the human understanding in his apocalyptic
writings and his insistence on the constant study of Scripture demonstrate his
belief that ‘the perfection of the understanding involved the relentless study of
sacred texts and the rational examination of the cosmos’ (p. 400). The portrait
of Newton that emerges from this book is indeed that of a deeply religious man,
who struggled with theological questions throughout his life. As Iliffe points out
in the concluding pages, Newton’s life was actually ‘suffused with an overriding
religious purpose. Convinced that he had been created in the Image of God, his
scholarly life was in part an exercise in examining how he measured up to his
maker. As such, it focussed both on perfecting himself and on understanding the
works of God’ (p. 401).
In conclusion, Iliffe’s extremely erudite, finely structured and intelligently
written book offers an invaluable contribution to scholars and students willing to
acquire a better understanding of Newton’s life and work. It is hoped that Iliffe

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will continue his investigation of this subject and complement Priest of Nature
with a second volume concerning Newton’s last three decades, thus producing
the defining work on Newton’s religion for many years to come.
American University in Bulgaria DIEGO LUCCI

William Penn: A Life. By Andrew R. Murphy. Oxford University Press. 2019. xiv
+ 460pp. $34.95.
Andrew Murphy paints a compelling portrait of William Penn, proprietor of
the English colony of Pennsylvania from 1681 until his death in 1718. A man
of complex motivations and zealous prosecution of his affairs, Penn was driven
to protect his lands at all costs, to the detriment of his family and ultimately his
own freedom and health. By the time he died, Penn had saddled his widow and
children with considerable debts, though provisions were made for them by the
sale of his lands and the debts were eventually cleared through the good offices
of his friends. His legacy to posterity, however, is far more precious. Religious
toleration, which he prized so highly, has left its residue upon the conscience of
humanity.
It was not always so. Murphy begins his life of Penn with him incarcerated
in London’s Fleet Prison in 1708, placed there after a public court battle
with Bridget Ford, the widow of a former associate to whom Penn owed a
substantial sum. The sentence created a bleak outlook. For such a high-minded
and principled figure, attempting to govern from across the ocean was both
demoralising and expensive. A reprieve was given through the aid of friends.
Twenty years before, Penn had made his way to America, with royal promises and
charters in hand, to claim the colony for himself and begin the long and arduous
process of surveying. ‘Despite recruiting hundreds of investors into the enterprise
and undertaking an impressive promotional and sales campaign,’ writes Murphy,
‘he never realized the financial promise that American colonization dangled
before his eyes’ (p. 3).
As an attempt to provide a full-length study, readers will find this a judicious
and fair biography. Without over-psychologising his subject, Murphy portrays
a young Penn trying to earn the love of his father, Admiral Sir William Penn
of Wiltshire, whose hopes for the boy’s future were never fulfilled. This was a
problem exacerbated by the admiral’s absence due to his command or his later
imprisonment by Oliver Cromwell in 1655. The young Penn began to have divine
visitations shortly thereafter. At university, he did not get on well. By the time
he was 23, Penn had dropped out of Oxford and renounced his affiliation with
Anglicanism. Though he proved himself a worthy emissary to his father’s estates
in Ireland, young William’s prowess as a businessman was not enough to secure
paternal sanction for his conversion, in 1667, when he joined the Society of
Friends. As a newly minted Quaker, Penn argued boldly for the right of religious
toleration and grew in favour among the dissenters. By the age of 25 he had
printed The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, which laid out the principles
that would guide him for the rest of his life.
Murphy is especially adept at parsing the numerous and often complicated
relations and negotiations Penn made as the proprietor of Pennsylvania. His

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protracted feud with Lord Baltimore over the Lower Counties (today, Delaware),
exchanges with members of the Lords of Trade and Foreign Plantations,
secretaries and collectors who fell short of his expectations, pesky Anglicans,
and periodic flights from the law formed the crucible of his worries. Though
personally affable, Penn was a firm and insistent proprietor: his correspondence
with James Logan, his secretary and agent in Philadelphia, provides ample
evidence of this.
Penn’s final illness saw his friends rally around him, but also saw him estranged
from his eldest son. Murphy keeps a respectable distance from assessing Penn’s
parenting, choosing instead to capture what can be gleaned from the sources,
which suggest a warm and empathetic figure. However, Murphy is not afraid of
going into controversial areas, such as the awkward historical legacy brought
about by Penn’s ownership of at least five slaves. In all, this is a particularly
welcome corrective, as Penn has been poorly served by his biographers, who
have veered between two extremes, portraying him as either a withering failure
or someone who could nearly walk on water.
Redemptorist Archives, Philadelphia PATRICK J. HAYES

African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early
Modern Atlantic. By Herman L. Bennett. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2019.
226pp. £26.99.
This is a slightly frustrating book. On the one hand it contributes significantly
to our understanding of the very earliest years of European encounters with sub-
Saharan Africans, but on the other it is sometimes not especially reader-friendly.
Bennett rightly contends that far too much of our understanding of European–
African interactions is dominated by slavery and the slave trade. This dominant
discourse of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries can easily be read
backwards, shaping the analysis of the early encounters as well. Bennett
paints a different and entirely plausible picture. He notes that the Portuguese
merchants and explorers, who started to venture down the African coast from
the 1440s onwards, were acutely aware of the need to tread carefully. They were
not conquistadors, instead they entered lands that had some powerful states
exercising their own sovereignty. Far from ignoring local power structures, the
Portuguese paid them all due deference, asking permission to go ashore, build
settlements, and commence and then continue trade. Bennett also contends
that too much emphasis has been placed on various papal edicts that could be
read as justifying European (i.e. Christian) oppression of non-Christian peoples.
These, he points out, were largely intended to be used against Islamic people
in North Africa and the Middle East, where the Ottomans were resurgent –
taking Constantinople in 1453. Although they would later be used against Native
Americans, there is little evidence of these edicts being used against Africans. The
Portuguese purchased slaves from the outset of their encounter with Africans, but
they were also aware that not all Africans were potential slaves, only those who
had already been designated as such by local rulers.
By pointing out the medieval, rather than early modern, background of these
encounters, Bennett has certainly done a service to the academy. Ideas about

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power, sovereignty and law were different in the fifteenth century, compared to the
later sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, and as such the interaction with Africans
was founded on a different basis. There is less engagement with ideas about race,
and there has been some relevant writing on this topic (see the special issue
of the William Mary Quarterly ‘Constructing Race’ January 1997 for instance)
that could have been mentioned. Also relevant, but overlooked, is the issue of
disease. Philip Curtin has written about this extensively (but less so for the very
early period), noting that whites were often forced to engage productively with
local rulers because they were unable to sustain white settlements due to tropical
diseases. I felt this was a missed opportunity.
The frustrations I had with this book were due to structure and style. Bennett
spends a lot of time introducing the topic, justifying the need for this particular
book, and analyses the historiography at length. While all this is perhaps
necessary, I felt it went on too long and came at the expense of actual evidence.
Pretty much the first fifty pages are spent this way, one third of the book, and the
historiographic discussions recur throughout. I did not find the style of writing
very accessible. The sentences are complex, overly so, and my concern is that if
this book was assigned to undergraduate students, they would need to sit there
with a dictionary to hand to look up words. I confess I had to look up a couple
myself. Bennett also feels the need constantly to reframe and repeat points by
using ‘asked differently’ or ‘stated differently’, which grates on the reader after a
while. If the point could be made clearer there should not be a need to rephrase
it all the time. Given the variety of locations discussed, a map would have been
helpful.
Bennett’s book is useful for academic specialists with a research interest in the
early Atlantic or the origins of the slave trade as I think he has made a genuine
contribution to the field. Sadly, I would find it hard to recommend it for classroom
use.
University of Warwick TIM LOCKLEY

Modern
Revisiting the Polite and Commercial People: Essays in Georgian Politics, Society,
and Culture in Honour of Paul Langford. Edited by Elaine Chalus and Perry Gauci.
Oxford University Press. 2019. xvii + 270pp. £60.00.
Written by his students and close colleagues, this collection of essays celebrates
Paul Langford’s hugely influential survey of English society and politics in the
eighteenth century, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (1989).
Repudiating the view that this was an age of social and political stasis, Langford’s
book explored the ways in which the growth of commerce and trade, in tandem
with the expansion of empire, ruptured the remnants of feudal society. In a bold
move, he put the emergent middle class centre stage, arguing that it was their
economic, cultural and political dynamism that transformed the country. A code
of morals and manners, entwined with standards of taste and style, politeness was
a way of fostering gentility among this dynamic group and generally civilising


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them, so they could be integrated on some level into the class of gentlemen, and
thus kept on side with the ‘plutocratic’ regime.
Under the headings of ‘politics’, ‘society and culture’ and ‘England, Britain
and the world’, these essays all engage with the core themes of Langford’s work.
But, as the editors observe, they also present an excellent opportunity to ponder
‘how the field has moved on since 1989’, at least as regards the study of political
life. While none of the essays substantially challenge the ‘polite and commercial’
paradigm (in the manner, say, of E. P. Thompson), there is much to be pleased
about, all told. For whereas Langford’s book was justly celebrated for broadening
the canvas of political history beyond the confines of party and faction, the essays
in this volume stretch it further still, encompassing a wider spectrum of the social
and cultural forces shaping political life. A sample of the offerings will suffice to
illustrate.
Examining the complex entanglements between high and low politics, as well
as the increasing intertwinement of both with the world of commerce, the essays
in section one set the tone nicely. Accommodating competing interests was the
order of the day for the political broker John Paterson, according to Perry Gauci’s
piece, as he advanced a programme of social regeneration for London. The secret
of his success was his ability to mediate between the polite and the commercial
worlds of London as represented by Westminster and the City respectively, and to
win support for his projects at a national level. With his elaborate web of influence,
Paterson typified the middle-class movers and shakers who drove historical
change, according to Langford. But ‘his exclusion from the highest political
circles’ reminds us of the glass ceiling that still remained in national politics for
non-aristocrats. Shifting the focus to the nineteenth century, Cindy McCreery’s
essay traces the construction and reconstruction of William IV’s public persona
in visual representations over the course of his reign. Championing the contextual
study of such images, she charts the remarkable shift in public attitude ‘from
admiration to scorn and anger, and finally nostalgia, across a wide range of
printed material’.
In section two, Hannah Barker expands the field of vision to include the
humbler echelons of the middle class, traders. Drawing extensively on personal
diaries, she argues convincingly that it was piety rather than gentility that the
tradesmen and women of Manchester strove to cultivate. If this was true of the
lower middle classes generally, it would represent an important amendment to
Langford’s portrayal.
Section three widens the purview geographically to examine England’s global
connections in the polite and commercial age. In the most ambitious essay of
the volume, Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy insists that British imperial policy
towards America needs to be understood in the ‘the broader imperial context’.
Whereas the policies that culminated in the American Revolution have previously
been viewed as ad hoc reactions to problems of administration, when viewed
in this broader light it becomes clear that they represented a newly developing
attitude towards the empire, involving increasing centralisation. P. J. Marshall
follows the fortunes of the West Indian planter and wheeler-dealer Sir William
Young as he tried and ultimately failed to raise sufficient funds to cut a figure in
polite British circles. The vignette of a family of slave owners who are celebrated
for their humanity, even, it seems, by the slaves themselves, is deeply discomfiting.


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With our stocktaking in mind, it is helpful to identify some of the roads

apparently not taken. As one critic observed, there was less ‘straight political
content’ in Langford’s volume than there had been in its predecessor in the
‘Oxford History of England’ series, Basil Williams’s The Whig Supremacy. There
is less still in this volume. Undoubtedly, the giant strides that have been made
in broadening our conception of eighteenth-century political life are a cause for
celebration. But it is vital that we follow Langford’s example of interweaving the
analysis of the broad political culture and lower-level structures of governance
with the history of politics as conducted by crown and parliament, not least
because it is on this level that the vast majority of people continue to engage
with national affairs.
It is evident, furthermore, that the field would benefit from a closer dialogue
between social and intellectual historians. It is no accident that Langford
borrowed the title of his book from the great legal scholar William Blackstone, or
that he refers to no less than nine leading thinkers in his seven-page introduction.
For not only were the men and women of letters the most perspicacious analysists
of social developments in their age, but they were also instrumental in shaping the
culture of the educated classes, not least by defining the terms of the discussion
about what it meant to be living in a polite and commercial age. Such voices are
conspicuously quiet in this volume. For their part, intellectual historians, and
particularly historians of political thought, need to come to grips with the more
expansive understanding of political life that social historians have revealed.
There is another important way, however, in which this volume enriches
scholarship, and that is as a contribution to historiography. By carefully situating
Langford’s work in its intellectual context, Chalus and Gauci’s crisply written
introduction succeeds in pinning down its significance for new generations
of students. Joanna Innes’s meticulous precis of Polite and Commercial’s less
famous twin Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (1994) may
help to rescue what, as she persuasively argues, was Langford’s most original
contribution to historical research from scholarly oblivion. She sifts coherent
arguments from the circuitous thematic chapters and even translates them into a
chronological narrative. What emerges is a sophisticated and penetrating account
of how propertied society reshaped the political culture in response to the
challenges of radical social and economic change.
Revisiting the Polite and Commercial People is beautifully presented. In their
thematic diversity, the essays are a fitting tribute to a scholar so dedicated to
broadening our approach to Hanoverian politics and a testament to the rude
health of eighteenth-century studies.
King’s College London NIALL O’FLAHERTY

Converting Britannia: Evangelicals and British Public Life, 1770–1840. By

Gareth Atkins. Boydell. 2019. xiv + 329pp. £65.00.
Converting Britannia: Evangelicals and British Public Life, 1770–1840 is the
first monograph from an already prolific writer on religion in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Britain. It is less concerned with the theological and
intellectual issues Atkins has tackled elsewhere, than with the question of

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how a particular body of co-religionists managed to achieve disproportionate

influence within the British establishment: or, in the author’s words, with how
‘evangelicalism . . . operated at the political and cultural “centre”’ (p. 2). The book
intervenes primarily in debates about Evangelicalism, asking us to rethink the
nature and chronology of the phenomenon. It also makes a series of arguments
about the longer-term impacts of the Evangelicals’ temporary institutional
influence, connecting it with the fragmentation of religious authority in public
life during the mid-nineteenth century, and with the dissemination of powerful
discourses about the character of the British nation.
The book’s main point is that the Evangelicals were neither a tightly defined
sect, nor (just) skilled marshals of political pressure from without. They need to
be understood additionally, Atkins argues, as a sprawling network of (mostly)
men, concerned with the pursuit of hard institutional power, and relatively
successful in securing it. Evangelicals spread their tendrils through numerous
repositories of public authority at home, and were similarly preoccupied with
projecting their influence into the wider world. The two parts of the book fall
on either side of this divide. Chapters 1–3 deal respectively with the training and
expansion of the Evangelical clergy; with Evangelical penetration of the City of
London, business and bible societies; and with the place of the Evangelicals as a
party within the Church of England. Chapters 4–6 look in turn at the foundation
of the free labour colony of Sierra Leone, and Evangelical influence elsewhere in
the colonial empire; at Evangelicalism and the navy; and finally at Evangelicals in
the East India Company. The book is completed by a notably elegant conclusion,
which illuminatingly reflects on the volume’s implications for Victorian history.
Converting Britannia backs up its main claims far beyond the point of
reasonable doubt. The scholarly labour behind the volume is imposing: visiting
thirty separate archives is some undertaking, especially when much of the book is
based on an even more intrepid mustering of very various printed sources. What
it must have cost to compile the prosopographical database of 1,000 Evangelical
clergymen which underpins chapter 1 hardly bears thinking about. Throughout
the book, evidence of all kinds is piled up hand over fist, until the reader is
carried away by the tide. Sometimes the lists – mainly of personal names, most of
which only appear once (with dates), but also of parishes, societies, publications,
subscriptions, appointments, etc. – border on the overwhelming. But a book
about a large network and its societal reach must necessarily present a lot of
data. In the light of Atkins’s research, it will be impossible for future scholars
to treat the close-knit ‘Clapham Sect’ as identical with political Evangelicalism.
The writing is uniformly precise, and readers who are not religious historians will
find the book easy to follow, once they manage to recall the meanings of a few
pieces of more recondite terminology dropped into the introduction.
There are a few questions we might ask about the bigger picture. Focusing
on areas in which Evangelicals were relatively successful means that the full
scope of their ambitions, and the reasons behind their failures, become slightly
obscured. Did Evangelicals seek power in other important arenas of public life
(e.g. the judiciary, the army)? If not, why not, and if yes, why were they rebuffed?
We might also wonder about just how self-conscious the Evangelical assault on
‘the institutional high ground’ (p. 257) was. Atkins demonstrates that certain
major figures who exercised moral leadership, like William Wilberforce, or who
commanded significant stores of patronage, like Sir Charles Middleton at the

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Navy Board, possessed a definite sense of duty to promote Evangelical interests

in public life. It is not quite so clear how far the co-religionist rank-and-file they
manoeuvred into place shared the same goal of a specifically Evangelical nation
and empire. There is at least room to wonder about the levels of sympathy between
the generals and the foot soldiers, even if this is a problem which is probably
impossible to solve given the available sources. Finally, on a similar note, Atkins’s
suggestion that Evangelicals ‘were some of the best exponents of the languages
and methods’ of the early nineteenth-century ‘“Age of Reform”’ (p. 3) is also
difficult to credit completely. This is simply because the book does not dwell
on rhetoric or argumentation to the degree that would be necessary to draw
persuasive conclusions about Evangelical languages. The point may well be right,
and it would be interesting to see further work around this issue.
Converting Britannia vindicates its central theses with complete conviction,
and presents a vision of how Evangelicalism operated which must be taken into
account in all future work on the subject. Probably the book’s most important
conceptual innovation, however, is that it draws attention to dynamic connections
between spheres of late Hanoverian public life which had previously been studied
mainly in isolation: not just between the domestic political and imperial worlds,
but also between seemingly distinct constituent elements of each. That it wraps
all this up in a rigorous religious prosopography will make the volume a useful
work of reference, as well as a significant revisionist analysis. It will be fascinating
to see what students of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ultimately
do with Atkins’s insights.
Christ Church, University of Oxford ALEX MIDDLETON

The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and Material

Culture. By Sally Holloway. Oxford University Press. 2019. xiii + 227pp. £60.00.
According to Sally Holloway, ‘Love, understood as a verb, is something that
we do’ (p. 170). In this book, Holloway marshals an impressive array of evidence,
including love letters, novels, medical treatises, lawsuits and material objects
(from gloves to watch-papers), to investigate how courting couples in Georgian
England understood and practised romantic love. Holloway first examines the
language used in love letters, influenced by religious texts, medical theories and
novels, and the role of the love letter in creating and furthering a romantic
relationship. The second section turns to objects: the importance of a ritual
and sensory interaction with objects for sustaining attachment, and the growing
commercialisation of romantic objects by the late eighteenth century. Finally,
Holloway turns to the romantic suffering expressed in letters, objects and breach
of promise suits, arguing primarily that suffering in love was figured as a feminine
experience. Her emphasis on courtship and separation as emotional processes
which were significant stages in their own right is a welcome addition to a
historiography which has generally subsumed them within marriage. The book’s
central argument is that the practice of romantic love changed between 1714 and
1830, influenced by developments in medicine, philosophy, religion and consumer
culture.


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This book is primarily a history of emotions and material culture. Holloway

clearly explains the multiple and complex theoretical frameworks relevant
to her analysis, making the book an accessible and useful introduction for
students or readers new to these disciplines. The strength of the book is in its
interdisciplinarity, as Holloway seeks to analyse the practice of love from all
angles and using multiple source types. One particularly effective and interesting
theme is the embodied nature of love, understood through medical theories of
love and heartbreak as well as through the sensory interaction of gazing at,
touching and smelling objects exchanged in courtship. Throughout, Holloway
excels at showing the relationship between culture and practice, providing
detailed and precise evidence for the replication of cultural ‘scripts’ in individual
relationships. Holloway takes care to draw on a range of relationships, according
to social status, gender and religion, although in the latter case it would have
been interesting to include some non-Protestant examples. Gender was clearly
significant to the experience and perception of romantic love, but Holloway
concludes that social status was less so: ‘in practice the language used by men and
women across social classes was remarkably uniform’ (p. 168). However, most of
Holloway’s examples are broadly middling, and perhaps more could have been
done to uncover the experience of the poor. The book deals unevenly with socio-
economic difference, and given the emphasis on material culture, I would have
liked more on how the purchase and consumption of love objects was limited by
economic status.
Nonetheless, the book is a fascinating addition to the histories of marriage and
courtship, and a significant work within a growing scholarship on emotions and
material culture.
University of Manchester KATE GIBSON

Orphans of Empire: The Fate of London’s Foundlings. By Helen Berry. Oxford

University Press. 2019. xv + 364pp. £20.00.
‘The voices of orphaned and abandoned children are very difficult to hear:
recovering them from almost 300 years ago is almost but not quite impossible.’
So Helen Berry begins this brave and audacious book. In her acknowledgements,
she is candid about her feelings in writing the book. ‘When I started my research
on the London Foundling Hospital’s archive, I had no idea it would affect me
so personally or engage my emotions so directly, and frankly I did not like
it . . . I didn’t anticipate I would find myself caring so passionately about the
foundlings . . . I was afraid I would not be able to complete the project.’
She could not disengage from the foundlings: ‘their voices kept crowding in,
countless stories demanding to be told’. Between the first baby’s arrival and 1800,
a total of 18,050 infants were carried through the gates in Coram Fields and
received into the hospital’s care. This is the scale of Berry’s project. She explains
how they were quickly processed and sent on their way to different wet nurses,
who were expected to care for them for their first year, across the Home Counties.
What gives this book immense resonance is Berry’s controlled objectivity in
handling a huge subject which has many dimensions. We can empathise with
the foundlings’ plight, she says. But what can we do with the story of Foundling

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Hospital children, ‘to make sense of what happened to them and to think about
the lasting issues which their experiences still address today?’ This British story
was a different kind of one from the rescue of abandoned newborns elsewhere:
in Venice abandoned babies were left in a little boat down a discreet and narrow
alley. In Florence, where Brunelleschi’s Hospital of the Innocents draws our eyes
by its architectural magnificence even today, a basin for depositing babies was
placed in an arcade beyond the orphanage walls. Dublin’s Foundling Hospital
placed a revolving basket at the gate. Berry answers her own question, by simply
telling the story of the first hundred years of Thomas Coram’s experiment, in the
context of the general history of treatment of children in Britain and the wider
world from the Georgian period until the present.
So who was Thomas Coram? Berry paints an engaging portrait of him, ‘a plain
speaking and passionate advocate for social reform’. He did not seek popularity;
in fact he was good at alienating people, because he dedicated his life, she asserts,
‘to being a good patriot’. She sees him as ‘wedded to the creation of a fiscal-
military state’, which would expand the colonial empire. If Coram wanted to save
souls, he wanted quite as much to increase national prosperity. Hence Berry’s title
Orphans of Empire. Yet we learn that most of Coram’s children did not in fact go
abroad.
Helen Berry nevertheless found a hero for her book in one orphan who did go
abroad by joining the navy. He was George King. His story, from infancy to his
death in 1857, runs like a golden thread through this book. In fact, it redeems its
whole tragic story of brutality towards and exploitation of orphan children, by
bringing her account to a thrilling and unexpected climax. King was present at
and wrote his own account of the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. He then ended up
in retirement as a Greenwich Pensioner. She restrains herself from overplaying
this hero waiting in the wings. She tells his story carefully: having left him as
an apprentice in a London sweet shop many pages back, in a mere twenty-three
pages at the end of the book comes the dénouement. What a magnificent story it
is to be sure!
It is the subtitle which really explains the content of much of Berry’s book.
Moreover, there is much to celebrate in Orphans of Empire, besides its brilliantly
conceived structure, its pace and its tantalising hero. For Berry has anatomised
this whole extraordinary Georgian social experiment, peopled it with those who
managed it across England and made sense of how Coram, struggling at first,
caught the social consciences of many, who did actually care for some of the
children who were received at his Hospital. Coram showed superb organisation
and commitment to his cause. ‘What mattered to Coram’, Berry notes, ‘was that
aristocratic women were highly influential, well connected and of impeccable
reputation, married to powerful and wealthy men with direct access to political
power both at court and in parliament.’ She explains how he ‘took advantage of
the new mechanisms that existed in the City of London to centralize fundraising’.
Petitioning George II in 1737, he was unequivocal about the project for which
he had lobbied for so long: ‘using powerful rhetoric, he played upon the elite’s
worst fears about the widespread moral and social degradation among the urban
poor’. It was when he was 73, in 1739, that the Royal Charter for the foundation
of the Hospital was finally granted. Coram had sent the king a list of 375
potential governors, about half of whom had agreed to be active not just honorary


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signatories. This was, as he told a clergyman friend in Boston, New England in

1740, ‘my Darling project’.
Foundlings were admitted in batches of twenty. A ballot, in the form of a
bag containing white and black balls, was soon needed on each admission day.
When a mother stepped forward, if she chose a white ball at random her child
was admitted and she would not see her child again. At the poignant moment
of separation, it was usual for mothers to leave tokens with the child – a key, a
charm or a button – so they could identify their offspring again should they ever
be in a position to reclaim them. From the late 1750s, very movingly, it became
customary for mothers to leave their clothes with the child. John Styles has
described how this explains the most significant surviving textile collection from
the eighteenth century, documenting the everyday clothing of pauper women.
The ‘billet book’ describes the clothing worn by the child on admission and it
had samples attached; each child received a number and the foundlings were then
placed in identical clothing to the others admitted that day.
In chapter 3 on ‘a fashionable cause’, Berry gives attention to Jonas Hanway, a
governor of the Foundling Hospital and a lobbyist who ‘did more than any single
person to calculate the economic and human costs of poverty in the eighteenth
century’. His ‘Christian Mercantilism’ was a popular ideology which advocated
free trade. Here were the underpinnings of the Hospital’s raison d’être. In four
central chapters of the book, Berry discusses ‘foundling education’ and finding
work for the hospital orphans. With sections on ‘industry and idleness’ and
‘cruelty and kindness’, the book becomes a hard read. We understand what, as its
author, Berry went through. Her footnotes, by then, are dotted with foundlings’
individual numbers, ready for future researchers, who will have available the
digitised entries soon to be created for the billet books.
Chapter 8 brings release, when, under the title ‘outrageous fortune’, Berry
finally tells George King’s whole moving and arresting personal story. Keeping
this to the end, which anyway chronologically made sense, was permissible
author’s privilege. This makes Orphans of Empire, masterly and relaxed, a
triumph of storytelling. It is also, of course, a first-rate scholarly study.
Independent Scholar ANTHONY FLETCHER

Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in

Enlightenment Europe. By Dale K. Van Kley. Yale University Press. 2018. xii +
370pp. $38.00.
Dale Van Kley made his scholarly name in 1975 with a brilliant analysis of
the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from France in the 1760s. He conclusively
demonstrated that it was largely the work of Jansenist magistrates rather than
the anticlerical tirades of the philosophes. But the Jesuits were not only expelled
from France. Between 1759 and 1767 they were also expelled from the Iberian
kingdoms and their overseas empires, and from the Bourbon states of Italy.
Finally in 1773 the entire Society was dissolved by the pope himself. The
destruction of these leading agents of the post-Reformation Catholic Church was
the most traumatic event in its history before the shocks of French Revolution.
After half a century of further research during which he established unrivalled

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authority in the history of eighteenth century Catholicism, Van Kley has now
widened his purview to take in the whole international story of the dissolution.
It is a formidable achievement, demanding wide linguistic skills, extensive
archival explorations, and mastery of a vast range of doctrinal writings and
secondary scholarship. Of the argument’s three parts, the first seeks to define
the concept of Reform Catholicism, and separate it from what has often been
called Enlightenment Catholicism. Indeed it is something of a surprise that Van
Kley even allows the word ‘Enlightenment’ into his title. Certainly there were
ways in which principles identifiable as ‘enlightened’ were taken on board by
elements in the church, and by none more than the flexibly minded Jesuits; but
these were often among trends which Reform Catholicism sought to combat. The
latter was more a blend of traditions in Augustinian theology and anti-papal or
‘Gallican’ principles of church organisation. It is true that its dominant elements
were Jansenist, and largely reflected French conflicts stemming from the 1713 bull
Unigenitus, but the term also embraces wider tendencies within the church and
the growing ambitions of other Catholic states. What drew it all together was
hostility to the Jesuits and all they stood for or symbolised. How this hostility
played out is the subject of Part 2, a dense analysis of the ecclesiastical politics
of each anti-Jesuit state, and their relationship with successive popes. One of the
charges directed at the Society was that it was a sort of conspiracy against secular
monarchical power; but if there was a conspiracy in all this, it was directed against
the Jesuits. Its epicentre was in Rome itself, among members of the so-called
Archetto group around the indefatigable Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, the Vatican
librarian no less, but a Jansenist with contacts all over Europe. Its influence
was hortatory rather than organisational, but it kept reformers everywhere
apprised of developments in Rome, and how they might be managed. Even so,
much depended at every stage on unmanageable contingencies. Would the French
Jesuits ever have been so vulnerable without the bankruptcy of their Caribbean
trading house, which brought their case before the Parlement of Paris? Would
Charles III of Spain have become so obsessive about the Jesuits if he had not been
looking for scapegoats for the terrifying riots of 1766? What if the vehemently
pro-Jesuit Clement XIII had not died suddenly in 1769, allowing the Bourbon
monarchs to promote the election of a more pliable successor? More might have
been said, incidentally, on the quiescence of the most elevated of all the Catholic
monarchies, that of the Habsburgs. After all, both Joseph II and his brother, soon
to be Reform Catholic rulers, were actually in Rome at the time of the conclave.
Even Clement XIV, who decreed the dissolution, seems to have been appalled
by what he knew he had to do. He delayed and prevaricated as long as he could,
and when the deed was done, it was by a brief, rather than a bull, suggesting that it
might not be irrevocable. His successor Pius VI, although he promised on election
not to restore the Society, clearly dreamed that one day it might be possible. A
sign of his true sentiment was the bull Auctorem fidei of 1794, in effect a new
Unigenitus, condemning all the main tenets of those who had been the Jesuits’
enemies, after the French Revolution had posed even more fundamental threats.
A third part of Van Kley’s text examines this era of guilty regret after 1773, and
the emergence of an ‘Ultramontanist international’ bent on refurbishing papal
authority across the church. Many former Jesuits were involved, and by the early
1790s popular support for the Roman reaction had become widespread. It was
of little avail to a pope destined to die in French captivity in 1799, but the price

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paid by Napoleon for peace with his successor was to recognise a scale of Roman
authority that none of the kings who brought the Jesuits’ downfall to fruition
would have accepted. And this was the pontiff who, as soon as Napoleon fell,
finally restored the Jesuits. In his view, the rot which culminated in the French
Revolution’s war against the church had begun with the capitulation of 1773.
Van Kley’s labours have traced the high politics of the Jesuit suppression, in all
the major states involved, in definitive detail. He is far less interested in events at
ground level. The clashes in Paraguay, which began the Jesuits’ agony, are quickly
skimmed over, as are the tribulations of all the fathers expelled from Portuguese,
Spanish and Neapolitan jurisdiction in the years before the final suppression.
And although he outlines the sheer range and scale of Jesuit establishments
throughout the Catholic world, he tells us nothing about how 800 colleges and
other properties were wound up or disposed of, or what most of the 22,000 former
fathers did after their lives were turned upside down. He does not even mention
the challenge to Catholic elite education posed by the sudden removal of its most
successful practitioners. It was doubtless no part of the author’s intention to open
up yet another vast field such as this. But somebody ought to, if we are ever to
get an idea of the full significance and ramifications of the high-level decisions so
carefully and convincingly analysed here.
University of Bristol WILLIAM DOYLE

Dark Matter Credit: The Development of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Banking

in France. By Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal.
Princeton University Press. 2019. 303pp. £30.00.
Dark Matter Credit deals with an important and interesting subject in an
unnecessarily hyperbolic way. ‘Until now’, its authors announce on page 1,
‘virtually no-one’ had noticed the scale of non-bank sources of credit in
the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French economy. ‘Our discovery’,
they continue, ‘not only overturns the standard argument about banks and
economic growth’, but also raises questions about the mechanisms involved in
the allocation of credit before the rise of the banks. Quite apart from the fact
that the authors of this monograph have been publishing books and articles
on the subject for the best part of two decades, it is hard to reconcile their
claim that until now ‘virtually no-one’ noticed the scale and scope of non-bank
credit, either with the many, often acute, observations on the relationship
between credit, capital, and economic growth in France made, among others, by
Montesquieu in the eighteenth century, or with the equally widespread claims
about the significance of non-bank sources of credit and capital in more recent
studies of both the French economy and the broader process of industrialisation.
The ‘standard argument’ about the relationship between banks and economic
growth in France turns out, on inspection, to be an admirable, but no longer
authoritative, book published in 1967 by Rondo Cameron, while anyone wanting
to find out, for example, how it was possible to claim that Roman law and its civil
code offshoots ‘are thought to hobble financial development’, particularly when
so many nineteenth-century commentators on Roman law said something like
the opposite, will look in vain in the book’s bibliography for the ‘seminal’ article

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referred to in the text as ‘Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, Vishny (1998)’ until they

discover the name of the article’s fourth author (Rafael La Porta) under the letter
P. The work of Stanley Chapman on the part played by attorneys in providing
non-bank sources of credit in the early modern British economy is given much
the same type of treatment as, more saliently, is the work of Amalia Kessler on
the eighteenth-century Paris merchant court and the range of commercial and
credit-related disputes with which it dealt.
That said, this book covers an impressive amount of ground, in both time and
space. While it goes with the grain of many other more specialised studies of
aspects of the French economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from
brandy production to the silk industry, printed textiles or merchant shipping, its
broader aim, as its subtitle is intended to suggest, is to show how economic history
can be used to reinforce the current interest in the relationship between economic
growth and non-bank sources of credit. Peer-to-peer lending, its authors claim,
reached the parts of the French economy that banks were not yet able, or
available, to do. Here, the emphasis falls on notaries as analogous to banks, but
with the further advantage that notaries were locally decentralised, sometimes
worked with other notaries and, most importantly, had access to information
that could facilitate both the supply and demand side of credit relationships. In
France, from 1693, the deeds that notaries drew up and kept were subject to a
royal tax called the contrôle des actes, a duty levied on notarised transactions that
was collected by an extensive network of administrative officials whose records
still largely survive. The content of this book is based on a sample of some 240,000
of these notarised transactions carried out in approximately 100 localities over
a series of six sample years spread between 1740 and 1899. The result is an
analytically sophisticated overview of the scale and scope of non-bank sources of
credit set out as a sequence of images of the many, more or less extensive, networks
of information and credit that accompanied the growth and fluctuations of the
French economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
King’s College, Cambridge MICHAEL SONENSCHER

Imagining Britain’s Economic Future, c. 1800–1975: Trade, Consumerism, and

Global Markets. Edited by David Thackeray, Andrew Thompson and Richard Toye.
Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. xv + 308pp. £88.00.
No topic is seemingly so ripe for historical analysis than the study of past
visions of Britain’s economic future, and this volume offers a rich variety of
insights into this theme from the first ‘Opium War’ to entry to the Common
Market. The book is divided into three sections ‘Markets of the Future’,
‘Imagining Global Trade’, ‘Rethinking Decolonisation’, but the majority of
chapters address the central theme of trade in the ‘British world’, especially the
British Dominions, in the century after 1870. Disappointingly, at a time when
Britain’s return to its mid-nineteenth-century ‘global’, supposedly buccaneering
past is being widely touted, Britain’s emergence as a global economic power is
treated only in respect to the debate over the opium trade in the 1830s, with no
coverage of the wider early nineteenth-century debates over the future direction
of the first industrial nation. Even so, if political economy is missing, there is

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a fascinating and original study by Paul Young of geographical board games,

whose extent and popularity in itself illustrates the burgeoning global sense of the
British public. Similarly when we are presented daily with a possible future based
on an Anglo-American trade axis, only one chapter touches on Anglo-American
relations, in which Stephen Tuffnell, in an elegant essay, complicates the picture
of Britain’s late nineteenth-century imperial project by dissecting the importance
of American business within it in the case of South Africa. Marc-William Palen
engagingly but briefly takes up the theme of Britain’s global free trade vision but
confines his analysis to the extent to which this inspired internationalist feminist
voices in the century after 1846.
The theme therefore which unites the greatest number of chapters is that of
the rise and fall of the interwar emphasis on imperial trade, and the organised
form this took after the Ottawa Economic Conference of 1932. This imperial
trading system was in part the legacy of the Greater Britain projects of the
late nineteenth century, but the ‘British world’ economic bloc was to fade in
importance in the light of rising American economic power, sealed by the Second
World War, and it was finally eroded by the swing to Europe in the 1960s. Two of
the editors, Thackeray and Toye, besides their lucid introduction with Thompson,
combine to dissect the aspirations, rarely achieved, of those who sought to
promote patriotic trade in these years. Dilley, in a clearly focused chapter,
analyses, through the example of the Federation of Commonwealth Chambers
of Commerce, the waning of visions of Commonwealth trade as Europe by the
1960s became the cynosure of those wishing to revive Britain’s economic future.
O’Hara neatly illustrates the wider theme in showing the growing detachment
of New Zealand from earlier Commonwealth dreams, while Clayton reveals the
divided visions of capitalism in Hong Kong before it became the great example
of free market capitalism beloved by Thatcherites such as Sir Keith Joseph.
Finally, Ludlow authoritatively explains why the commercial case for Europe
made compelling sense to business, most Conservatives and the nation as a whole
in the 1970s as the public prioritised economic welfare and consumer choice over
fading imperial dreams, residual Commonwealth loyalties and Labour ‘siege
economy’ aspirations. These chapters cohere well together but others, on the rise
of self-service shopping, capital investment in West Africa and British overseas
representation in francophone Africa, whatever their inherent scholarly interest,
seem somewhat out of place in a collection dealing primarily with the direction
of Britain’s overseas trade in goods.
Most of the chapters engage effectively with the themes of the book’s subtitle,
‘Trade, Consumerism, and Global Markets’, with pertinent material on the
marketplace, business, the state, consumers and their associations, chambers of
commerce and advertising, but, perhaps oddly, economists’ visions of the future
rarely appear. Given the topicality of the book’s theme, which has perhaps gained
in importance during its genesis, this collection, however valuable for its parts,
seems a missed opportunity for a tightly focused and comprehensive analysis of
Britain’s past economic futures, made all the more urgent by the reimagining of
a previously ‘global Britain’ as a foremost contemporary political dream.
University of East Anglia ANTHONY HOWE


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The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression. By

C. S. Monaco. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2018. xiv + 290pp. $39.95.
Divided into four parts, C. S. Monaco’s study of the Second Seminole War
posits that this conflict provides a clear example of settler-colonialism. Part 1
focuses on explaining the origins of the war. Part 2 provides a lively narrative of
the war’s progress and conclusion. Part 3 examines the effect of environmental
forces on the war’s participants. Finally, part 4 speaks to the war’s influence on
American political culture through the symbolism of Osceola and the connection
of abolitionism to contemporary discussion of the war effort.
Monaco clearly articulates his argument that the war ‘was the boldest and
most enduring armed struggle by eastern Indians against the forces of the
United States’ (p. 1). In contrast to previous studies of the war, his narrative is
sympathetic to the Seminole and their allies, in part because he does not simply
take white American or American government sources at face value. Monaco is at
his strongest when narrating the development of the war. He provides fascinating
details that are sure to engage readers, as they did me. For example, Monaco
describes Winfield Scott’s ‘personal hubris’, which ‘resembled the manner of
a rather haughty European aristocrat’. ‘In addition to his own retinue, which
included choice musicians outfitted in full regalia,’ Monaco continues, ‘three
wagons were required to transport the general’s personal collection of fine
furniture and accoutrements, imported wines, fresh fruit, and myriad other
comforts’ (p. 73). Not only do these details grab the reader’s attention, they also
help explain why an arrogant United States Army struggled to defeat an enemy
it considered inferior.
Two authorial decisions make this book less effective than it might otherwise
have been. First is Monaco’s frequent reference in the main text to other
historians and their arguments. This interruption of the narrative seems likely to
limit the reach of the book, since most readers will, as I did, find it distracting. It
probably would have been better to relegate the scholarly fisticuffs to the endnotes
or to omit them entirely. Second is the book’s organisation. On their own, parts
3 and 4 are fascinating and informative. But because they are separate from, and
not interwoven with, the first two parts of the book, they feel disconnected from
the main narrative. Chapter 8, which introduces part 3 and which focuses on
disease, particularly suffers from this detachment.
Overall, Monaco’s work is a valuable addition to the often-neglected study
of the Second Seminole War. While overshadowed by the atrocities suffered
by the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears, the Seminoles’ struggle to maintain
their sovereignty in Florida was important in several ways. As Monaco points
out, the war harmed an already weak economy, ‘delivered a severe setback to
Andrew Jackson’s mission of Indian removal, conjured visions of a pan-Indian
rebellion, and contradicted the deep-rooted national conviction that the military
would forever triumph over Native people’ (pp. 8, 196). For these reasons, which
Monaco clearly spells out, I hope that historians of the Jacksonian period begin
to give the war the attention that it deserves.
Cumberland University MARK R. CHEATHEM


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The Russian Nobility in the Age of Alexander I. By Patrick O’Meara. Bloomsbury

Academic. 2019. xvi + 367pp. £90.00.
Russia boasts a rich tradition of history writing and a massive historiography
(pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet) which must be incorporated into
any scholarly discussion of critical themes and questions. The relationship of
Emperor Alexander I to the Russian nobility is just such a topic. Patrick O’Meara
has done a masterful job of synthesising the available scholarship, Russian and
foreign, while also presenting original research based on provincial and personal
archives, memoirs and diaries, and private correspondence. In today’s world of
seemingly infinite access to information, this is precisely the sort of book that
seasoned scholars and advanced students need (and want) to read. Indeed, for
anyone beginning a project on the Russian nobility or the age of Alexander I,
O’Meara’s study is a productive place to start.
The biography of Alexander I looms large in the historiography of early
nineteenth-century Russia. But O’Meara takes a different tack, and in the process,
he suggests compelling answers to persistent questions, including questions about
the character and intentions of the monarch. For example, what did Alexander
think about constitutional reform and the abolition of serfdom? Did he really
intend or hope to transform Russia? How did his goals and policies change in the
context of ongoing revolutionary activity and consolidation of the Holy Alliance
in Europe? O’Meara illuminates these and other issues by examining the broader
relationship between Alexander I and the Russian nobility, both the nobility writ
large and the individual elite nobles who produced projects for reform and in
some cases joined the secret societies that eventually organised the Decembrist
uprising. One general conclusion reached by O’Meara is that a key reason for
Alexander’s failure to pursue fundamental reform, whether socio-economic or
political, was opposition from the majority of nobles, who preferred to leave
intact the tsar’s power over the empire and their own authority over the peasants.
Another significant theme explored in O’Meara’s book concerns what
historians call ‘the parting of ways’ between the elite nobility (or the educated
service classes more broadly) and the Russian state and monarchy. Here O’Meara
draws upon his extensive experience in researching the Decembrist rebellion,
Russia’s first modern political opposition which sought to overthrow established
social and political arrangements. O’Meara is fully aware of, and clearly conveys,
the complexity of Decembrist historiography, including recent debates about
how to define the ‘Decembrist phenomenon’ and who exactly should be called
a Decembrist. Given that the subject of his book is Alexander I’s relationship
with the nobility, O’Meara focuses attention on how the monarch’s ongoing
interest in reform and avowal of ‘liberal’ principles contributed to disillusionment
and radicalism among the military officers who eventually crossed the line from
enlightened reformism to open insurrection. The Decembrists failed to connect
both with the soldiers under their command and with the mass of provincial
nobles. They likewise proved unable to convince many educated Russians
who shared their progressive goals that revolutionary violence represented the
only way forward. The Decembrists’ isolation resulted in defeat and severe
suppression, but their actions still produced a shift in the trajectory of the
nobility’s relationship with the crown. As O’Meara notes in the Afterword,
although most nobles continued to believe in the need for a single powerful ruler,
the Decembrist phenomenon severed the compact to reform Russian institutions

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which in the eighteenth century had defined the relationship between the elite
nobility and the throne.
In addition to addressing big questions that have persisted in Russian
historiography, O’Meara also provides up-to-date information about a variety
of topics that influenced the development of the nobility. These include legal
and economic status(es), the development of education, service obligations
and opportunities, attitudes to serfdom, and most originally the nobility’s
corporate institutions and participation in provincial government. O’Meara’s
discussion of noble assemblies, judicial institutions and local administration
is based primarily on archival documents from Nizhnii Novgorod province.
In this material the reader again finds potential answers to difficult questions
of interpretation, as well as illuminating facts about a seriously understudied
subject. The author connects the nobles’ lack of interest in their corporate
institutions and efforts to avoid service in local government to the larger problem
of ineffective provincial administration. Although there are pre-revolutionary
studies (discussed by O’Meara) that examine this very important dynamic,
subjects such as the activities of noble assemblies and the nobility’s willingness
to entrust local government to state officials remain in need of comprehensive
scholarly treatment. O’Meara’s discussion of how and why the Russian nobility
abdicated responsibility for local government is a topic that historians will
continue to debate. Did the mass of nobles in fact prefer autocratic rule? What
role did serfdom and service play in their apparent desire to retreat into the
consumption of culture and the routines of the family nest?
Put simply and unequivocally, O’Meara’s book is a delight to read. For
anglophone historians especially, it will be a go-to study of the Russian nobility –
not only for the reign of Alexander I but also for the entire imperial period.
California State Polytechnic
University ELISE KIMERLING WIRTSCHAFTER

Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State,
1840–1880. By Stephen W. Sawyer. University of Chicago Press. 2018. ix + 233pp.
$45.00.
There are numerous books about the origins of the state from the early
Renaissance to the seventeenth century. There are also countless books
about democracy, focusing on aspects such as its ancient form, democratic
sovereignty and modern representative government, with the two latter
categories concentrating in particular on the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. What Stephen W. Sawyer investigates in this book is the genesis of
a later and less understood phenomenon: the ‘democratic state’. His story
focuses on mid-nineteenth-century France, with the emphasis on 1848, the
Second French Empire and the early years of the Third Republic. In this
period, the understanding of the state was transformed from the minimalist
night-watchman eighteenth-century ideal into its modern, activist character.

[Correction added on 17 March 2020, after first online publication: date of Paris Commune from
“1771” to “1871”]


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Sawyer argues that French republicanism fostered a new interventionist state

which influenced other political cultures usually considered as more laissez-faire,
including nineteenth-century Britain. This can be seen in the affinity between
the liberal John Stuart Mill and the socialist Louis Blanc, which is discussed
in the final chapter of the book. As the latter succinctly put it, ‘Yes, the State
and Liberty!’ (p. 165). By the time of the Third Republic in France, ‘Jacobin’
radicals, mainstream republicans and liberals could all agree that the republic
needed to be the final arbiter and had the right to employ emergency powers in
situations of crisis. On this basis, Blanc defended the Thiers government’s violent
suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. As we shall see below, even some of
those who disagreed in that case were not against strong state power as such.
Demos Assembled is structured as six chapters, each dealing with one French
nineteenth-century thinker and a specific theme: Alexis de Tocqueville and
inequality; Lucien-Anatole Prévost-Paradol and equality; Edouard Laboulaye
and emergency; Adolphe Thiers and necessity; Jenny d’Héricourt and exclusion;
and, finally, Blanc and terror. This rather strict concentration on French thinkers
makes the ‘international’ in the subtitle seem rather odd. To be sure, Sawyer puts a
great deal of emphasis on the influence of the British and American constitutional
models on French political thinking. The energy of the American presidency
in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular was attractive for many French
thinkers in the nineteenth century. The French empire in Algeria is a recurrent
theme. And in the final chapter, Sawyer discusses Blanc in the context of British
thinkers such as Mill, Thomas Carlyle and A. V. Dicey. Yet, in any case, ‘French’
would probably have been more suitable in the subtitle than ‘international’.
What brings many of the political writers in Sawyer’s study together is the
preoccupation with democracy beyond the vote, something for which Tocqueville
is of course especially well known. Democracy had to be social in addition to
political. The ‘democratic despotism’ of Napoleon III showed in practice that
the vote could be a problem as well as a solution. One of the authors who wrote
both during and after Napoleon III’s reign was the feminist d’Héricourt, who
argued that France needed to make use of all the tools for social improvement
by including women in politics. At the same time, she challenged the ‘throne
of suffrage’. In order for the vote to be meaningful, the state should play an
active role and ‘provide the conditions for each to develop fully his or her
individual capacities within society’ (p. 144). As part of the process of equal
participation, d’Héricourt stressed the importance of adversarial debate, and
distinguished carefully between adversaries, who could disagree and argue, and
enemies, for whom force would be the mediator. Deeply critical of Napoleon III’s
illiberal democracy, she desired cultivation and expression of difference rather
than unified popular will.
D’Héricourt was, like Thiers and Laboulaye, influenced by the American
state, and she lived in Chicago between 1863 and 1873, where she was active
in the feminist movement. In the United States, government respected rights
and especially the right to debate, which ‘established an appropriate relationship
between the government and the governed because it was constantly subject to
public opinion’ (p. 154). In this way, the freedom and ability to form opinions
and debate was more important than voting. Rather than being distinctive, civil
society and the state permeated one another in the United States. D’Héricourt
also wanted French citizens to have the right to bear arms like their American

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counterparts, as she had followed from a distance the bloody suppression of the
Paris Commune.
Sawyer’s book is both historically and theoretically refined, and although it
may make a slightly narrower contribution than its subtitle suggests (although
by no means a narrow one as such), it will be important for anyone interested in
the origins of the modern state and democracy.
University of Liverpool MAX SKJÖNSBERG

Lloyd George: Statesman or Scoundrel. By Richard Wilkinson. I. B. Tauris. 2018.

xvii + 263pp. £25.00.
Lloyd George has not been short of biographers and the stream of writings on
his life shows little sign of drying up – this book is the second biography of Lloyd
George published by I. B. Tauris in four years, following Travis Crosby’s, The
Unknown Lloyd George (2014). These writers all face the same difficulty, though,
of how to deal with the length and variety of Lloyd George’s career: elected an
MP in 1890, he only left the Commons in 1945, having played a key role in British
politics for at least thirty years, from the early 1900s onwards.
This book takes the route trodden by many predecessors, such as Martin
Pugh’s Lloyd George (1988) and Chris Wrigley’s Lloyd George (1992), of
attempting to summarise the achievements and significance of the ‘Welsh Wizard’
in a short, accessible form. Where it differs, though, is in the attention it pays
to analysing, and passing judgements on, Lloyd George’s character. This is the
most entertaining and successful part of the book; indeed, some sections (such as
pp. 23–7) are extremely well written and perceptive on Lloyd George’s many
failings and unrivalled charm, and are enlivened by a sure-footed choice of
anecdotes and quotations to illustrate the author’s points. Wilkinson’s work may
well be the best introduction yet for those seeking to gain an initial idea of what
Lloyd George was like as a person and the extraordinary spell his personality
could cast.
However, the book also has some serious shortcomings. It lacks any sustained
use of primary sources and this makes it difficult for it to say anything about
Lloyd George’s career that is really new. Moreover, while its grasp of the political
background to Lloyd George’s career is strong in some areas, for example in its
sections on the prime minister’s quarrels with his generals in the First World
War, it is noticeably shaky in others. The treatment of subjects as varied as
Free Trade, women’s suffrage before 1914, the Irish conflict of 1916–22 and the
strategic background to the Versailles Conference in 1919 lacks a firm grasp of
key issues and the extensive historiography on these matters. At points the book
just summarises the views of other scholars, or is over-dependent on one source,
as in the description of Lloyd George’s trip to the USA in 1923, taken from A. J.
Sylvester’s diary (pp. 171–4).
Wilkinson’s work also displays a rather uneven treatment of the different
sections of Lloyd George’s life, with little time devoted to events after 1922. There
are also some factual errors that could easily have been avoided. To give two
examples: on page 48 the judgment in the Taff Vale case of 1901 becomes the


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‘Tory Taff Vale Act’ and the memberships of the two rail unions, the NUR (which
did not exist until 1913) and ASLEF, are confused; and the ‘Geddes Axe’ of
1921–2 is attributed to Auckland Geddes (misspelled as ‘Aukland’), rather
than his brother, Eric Geddes. The book would have benefited from much
more rigorous proofreading throughout and it is surprising to see an academic
publisher such as I. B. Tauris allow a book to proceed to press with so many
mistakes, including missing and unfinished endnotes, and some repeated material
(for example the same Clemenceau anecdote appears on pp. 119 and 160). The
book also contains asides in which the author interpolates his own views on a
variety of topics in a rather puzzling fashion, as at page 135 on contemporary
Ireland. These errors rather undermine any claim the book might have to be a
rigorous treatment of Lloyd George’s career and achievements.
University of Lincoln IAN PACKER

The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy That Never Dies. By Gill Bennett. Oxford
University Press. 2018. xv + 340pp. £25.00.
Gill Bennett will be familiar to historians of modern British intelligence history
and foreign policy. Her career was spent at the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office (FCO), mostly in the its historical section, which she led for ten years.
Since then she has written about British foreign policy and intelligence history.
During her time as Chief Historian, the FCO, under Robin Cook, adopted a
more transparent approach towards public records as well as the activities of the
intelligence services. In 1998, Cook invited the FCO historians to investigate the
circumstances surrounding the 1924 Zinoviev Letter. The Letter, allegedly sent by
the head of the Comintern, Grigori Zinoviev, to the Communist Party of Great
Britain, sought to incite insurrection. Together with a note of protest, written in
the Foreign Office, but not sanctioned by Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary
Ramsay MacDonald, the Letter was leaked to and published in the Daily Mail
just prior to the October 1924 general election. As Bennett suggests, the Letter
damaged support for Labour but did not lose them the election (p. 4).
Cook’s instruction led Bennett, and Tony Bishop, a Russian-speaking FCO
colleague, to various archives in Moscow, where the authorities were cooperative.
When writing her report, which was published in 1999, she also had unfettered
access to material held by Britain’s intelligence agencies. That was not the case
with this volume and Bennett admits that, since the report’s publication, she
has not substantively altered her conclusions about the genesis of the Letter.
However, the book is welcome because it distils a huge amount of research along
with much mature reflection on the Letter, the context in which it was written,
and its periodic recurrence in British politics ever since. The book is a tour de
force, forensic in style, and very well written.
Bennett is particularly good at contextualising discussion of the Letter from
the troubled aftermath of the First World War until recent times. Concerning the
Letter’s conception, she does so with regard to post-war concerns about imperial
security, oversight and perceptions of the intelligence agencies (as well as overlap
between these agencies), and contacts between these bodies and White émigré
Russians. A key aspect of the story concerns the networks within and beyond

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Whitehall, some of whose members were receptive to circulating a document

which might embarrass the Labour government.
Bennett examines the long list of possible suspects, among them the Foreign
Office’s Sir Eyre Crowe. His slippery subaltern, ‘Don’ Gregory, is scrutinised more
closely: the 1928 Francs scandal, which ended his career, was intertwined with
the Letter. However, Bennett’s painstaking study leads her to reject as ‘inherently
unlikely’ (p. 193) institutional conspiracy either at the Foreign Office or, though
with less certainty, because of the ‘private enterprise’ of SIS people in Riga
(p. 248), within the intelligence services. One legacy of the Letter was to tarnish
those agencies’ reputations, particularly in the eyes of Labour, and to raise fears
within it of being hobbled by further intelligence leaks. This is an authoritative
and judicious study of a conspiracy which, as Bennett concludes, is dormant but
not deceased.
University of the West of England JOHN FISHER

The Prohibition Era and Policing: A Legacy of Misregulation. By Wesley Oliver.

Vanderbilt University Press. 2018. x + 265pp. £26.95.
Prohibition has often been romanticised in US history as a ‘noble experiment’
designed to clamp down on crime, corruption and alcoholism. Wesley Oliver’s
The Prohibition Era and Policing questions this narrative with a fresh and
insightful perspective focused on how American courts responded to the excessive
policing that symbolised this period. Oliver’s niche comes in his criticism of the
growing invocation of the ‘exclusionary rule’ by judges, which prevented the use
of evidence in courts when police officers were found to have cut constitutional
corners in the search of property. This, he explains, prompted an obsessive focus
on the legality of police searches to the extent that it became the subsequent
default legal solution for addressing police misconduct. Nearly 100 years on,
this legacy remains, which, Oliver argues, has deflected attention away from
today’s more pressing concerns, such as the reliability of evidence and police
brutality.
The book consists of nine chapters, divided into four sections. To contextualise
his arguments, Oliver’s first section traces the nature of policing in the
early republic up to the Prohibition Era. With the deep-rooted scepticism of
enforcement officials still pervading from revolutionary-era collective memory,
he frames the conduct of police officers through their limitations rather than
their powers. Describing it as a ‘victim-initiated criminal justice system’ (p. 17),
he reveals how judges placed the burden upon the victim of a crime to provide the
probable cause necessary to gain a search warrant against the person they were
accusing. However, as rapid urbanisation followed, the public was convinced by
progressive reformers that a professionalised force was necessary. Thus, Oliver
reveals a rapid transformation from a ‘petty’ police force to an organisation
emboldened, self-regulated and nearly unfettered in its powers.
For historians intrigued with this era, part 2 is where the book is most
stimulating. The new image of a strong and intimidating police force quickly
lost support after Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the US
Constitution to prohibit alcohol in the country. Violent police methods suddenly

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magnified in the public eye, as they now posed a more frequent and visible
presence. Oliver details examples of such methods using the findings of the
Wickersham Commission, set up in 1929. The Commission investigated nearly
every aspect of the criminal justice system, but the greatest attention was given to
its ‘scathing report detailing incidents of physical torture by police interrogators’
(p. 63). In one example, Oliver describes how a suspect in Washington DC was
detained by police in a hotel room for eight days of interrogation despite being
so ill with Spanish influenza that a physician was frequently called to check
on him (p. 69). Oliver convincingly argues that the discord between police and
citizenry had become a nationwide problem, a view that is reinforced by his
extensive research, which covers examples of police misconduct from coast to
coast, spanning the states of Washington to New York.
Oliver’s most striking argument is that the judicial responses to police
misconduct proved the most destructive legacy of Prohibition. Judges throughout
the country began excluding coerced confessions and illegally obtained evidence
in an attempt to deter further misconduct. However, the exclusionary rule’s scope
was limited by its strong focus on police searches. This left lingering effects
when the nature of police issues grew in the decades that followed, but courts
failed to adapt. In parts 3 and 4, Oliver reveals these effects, connecting his
historical era of focus to the current day. Long after Prohibition, courts continued
to adopt the exclusionary rule as the answer to all questions regarding police
conduct. The most damaging consequence was further heavy regulation of police
searches and seizures at the expense of addressing forced confessions. Oliver’s
best example is the famous 1966 Supreme Court case of Miranda v. Arizona,
which set out the requirement of excluding incriminating evidence where law
officers failed to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and have access
to an attorney. In essence, he argues that the Court placed the burden on the
suspects to protect themselves. It was their responsibility to have the agency
and composure to ‘determine . . . whether they are willing to submit to police
questioning while in custody’ (p. 139). This, however, did not guarantee the
reliability of the confession, nor regulate the means with which that confession
was obtained once individuals unwittingly waived their rights. Thus, Oliver notes,
as long as suspects’ rights were read out, there was ‘little protection’ from the
coercive nature of the interrogation (ibid.).
This legacy, the book argues, continues to plague policing practices in the
United States today, where the Court is still unable to present successful ways of
tempering police misconduct. Oliver gives particular attention to contemporary
issues of police brutality and the recent contentious deaths of African-American
males, such as Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Under this pressing issue, the
Court continues to present vague instructions concerning the correct manner
of force used by an officer, arguing separately that officers do not have a right
to use lethal force on a fleeing suspect connected to a non-violent crime, but
acknowledging that officers can and should use split-second decisions regarding
the use of lethal or non-lethal force.
Those seeking information on the Prohibition Era will be surprised about how
little there is on the period itself. Nonetheless, the book presents an insightful link
from past to present. Even if Prohibition is not the full focus, the consequences of
this period leave their presence felt throughout the book and make it a must-read
for those interested in how this period has shaped issues with which Americans

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continue to grapple. In turn, Oliver leaves the reader with a suggestion for more
critical introspection about how courts can reshape the conduct of those officers
currently serving on the front line.
University of Kent JAK ALLEN

MacArthur’s Spies: The Soldier, the Singer and the Spymaster Who Defied the
Japanese in World War II. By Peter Eisner. Penguin. 2018. xv + 348pp. $29.99.
Justifying General MacArthur’s refusal to cooperate with the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), General Willoughby, his Assistant Chief of Staff for
Intelligence, wrote that MacArthur ‘had to improvise his intelligence from scratch
with the Japanese breathing down his neck. He could not sit back and ransack
libraries, even assuming data were there’ (Clayton D. Laurie, ‘An Exclusionary
Position: General MacArthur and the OSS, 1942–1945’, Studies in Intelligence
[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0006122568.pdf], p. 49).
The OSS was excluded from the Pacific theatre for most of the war. MacArthur’s
sceptical approach towards espionage, as well as his bitter personal and
bureaucratic rivalry with William Donovan, head of the OSS, are well known.
Peter Eisner’s book aims to tell a different story.
The book is mostly set during the Japanese invasion and occupation of the
Philippines. It follows the lives of three main characters: US Army Corporal
John Boone (the soldier), Chuck Parsons (the spymaster) and Claire Phillips
(the singer). Boone is separated from his own unit during the retreat to the
Bataan peninsula and the island of Corregidor. Moving to the hills, Boone starts
developing an embryonic resistance movement against the Japanese. Parsons
(the spymaster) – a US Naval Reserve Intelligence officer – initially poses as a
businessman. He is first interned, and later arrested and tortured by the Japanese.
Sent back to the United States he is interrogated by FBI agents who assume he
is a spy. Finally cleared of any suspicion, he is sent back to Australia, this time
to work officially as an intelligence officer in the Allied Intelligence Bureau. The
‘singer’, however, is the real star of the book. Having moved to the hills to meet
her husband, who was serving at the time in the US Army, Claire Phillips finds
herself alone. She has to confront both the hardship of life in the hills and the
locals’ suspicious attitude towards her and her adopted Filipino daughter, Dian.
Finances are tight and prevent her from supporting POWs and other US military
personnel. For this reason, she decides to establish a nightclub, the ‘Tsubaki
nightclub’, taking the name of ‘Madame Tsubaki’. The nightclub is a success
with Japanese officers, businessmen and Filipino collaborationists (p. 78).
Through the nightclub, the money collected and the intelligence gathered,
Claire strengthens her collaboration with Boone. Initially, MacArthur’s orders
for Boone’s guerrillas are to stand back and to avoid confrontation with the
Japanese (p. 217). The group, however, start launching ‘hit-and-run’ sabotage
operations (p. 241). In early 1945, after MacArthur’s landing in the Philippines,
Boone reports for duty at the US Army base. Only then do the guerrillas start a
more frontal attack against the Japanese. In an interesting note, Eisner highlights
a letter from Boone in which he complains that the only aspect that had not
improved was his guerrillas’ relations with the Huks, the Maoist communist

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fighters (p. 217). The Huks would become the object of a large US counter-
insurgency effort led by Edward Lansdale at the end of the war.
The final part of the book follows Claire’s life back in the United States, her
book and movie deals, as well as her lawsuit in the US Claims Court. The lawsuit
aimed at receiving compensation for the funds she had expended in supporting
US forces and the guerrillas. The discovery of the documents from this lawsuit
contributed to Eisner’s decision to write the book. This section, while colourful,
is perhaps less interesting for historians of either intelligence or the Second World
War.
More generally, while claiming to tell the tale of MacArthur’s spies, the book
says very little about the general up until very late in the war. Until then, the
soldier and the spymaster have almost no contact with the general. As Boone
finally joins MacArthur’s forces, Claire is already back in the United States.
The book overlooks the fact that MacArthur was sceptical of both the early
efforts made by the guerrillas and of what could be achieved through the type of
intelligence those units could provide. As Laurie wrote, had MacArthur been less
sceptical, ‘the creation of guerrilla groups . . . and the establishment of an efficient
intelligence and psychological warfare network . . . may have taken place months,
if not years, before it actually did in 1943 and 1944’ (Laurie, ‘An Exclusionary
Position’, p. 49). Had that been the case, the singer, the soldier and the spymaster
could have been better placed to work with MacArthur from the start. Ultimately,
while a pleasing read, the book works better as a biography of Claire Phillips than
as a history of intelligence and guerrilla efforts in the Philippines.
Swansea University LUCA TRENTA

How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry. By

Ernő Munkácsi. Edited by Nina Munk. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2018.
iv + 314pp. Can$34.95.
Of the many controversies surrounding the history of the Holocaust, one
of the most persistent revolves around the complicity of non-Nazi German
individuals, organisations and states in the mass persecution and murder of
Europe’s Jews. The activities of German-allied and German-occupied countries,
the comportment of non-Jewish ‘bystanders’, and even the conduct of the
Jewish communities themselves – epitomised by enduring debates on the role
of the Judenräte (Jewish councils) – all continue to capture historiographical
imaginaries, spurring reflections on the Holocaust’s lasting significance for
European societies today. Placed at the confluence of such critical debates, Ernő
Munkácsi’s How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry,
offers a fascinating and highly significant account of the fate of Hungary’s Jews
between Germany’s invasion of Hungary on 19 March 1944 and the Hungarian
fascist Arrow Cross Party’s seizure of power on 15 October 1944. Written in 1947
from the perspective of the former secretary of the chief Hungarian Judenrat –
and expertly translated, edited and commented in this edition by McGill-Queen’s
University Press – Munkácsi’s book further represents a critical, multilayered
historiographical attempt to grapple with some of the Holocaust’s key questions
of culpability, responsibility and agency.

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As the historian Ferenc Laczó states in his eloquent contextualising chapter,

Munkácsi’s book ‘belongs to a somewhat unusual, mixed genre’ (p. xxxiii).
Writing in his native Hungarian language in the aftermath of the Second World
War, Munkácsi aimed to ‘commit to paper certain episodes’ of those critical
months in 1944 that ultimately saw the deportation of over 437,000 Jews from
Hungary, most of whom perished in Auschwitz. As Munkácsi explains in his
introduction, he felt ‘a need – indeed an obligation’ to offer the ‘truth’ and
‘open the eyes of the public to allow a glimpse of historic reality’ (pp. 7–8).
Drawing both on first-hand experiences, often presented in a ‘neutral’ third-
person narrative, and documents he had salvaged from the archives of the
National Office of Hungarian Israelites, Munkácsi’s account focuses on the
activities of the Budapest-based Hungarian Central Jewish Council, from its
forced inception under Adolf Eichmann’s authority in March 1944 until Regent
Miklós Horthy’s abdication in October 1944. Munkácsi’s privileged perspective
on wartime events, as the Jewish Council’s former secretary general, constitutes a
double-edged sword, as Laczó convincingly argues in his opening chapter. On the
one hand, Munkácsi’s intricate knowledge of the Jewish Council’s perceptions
and actions grants readers profound insight into the distressing balancing act
played by Europe’s Judenräte between complying with and challenging National
Socialist authority, all in the hope of saving as many Jews as possible. On the
other hand, Munkácsi’s account is steeped in a desire for exoneration. Faced both
by Hungary’s post-war People’s Courts, which questioned Munkácsi’s wartime
conduct (p. lxix), and by mounting criticism among the Jewish community, who
claimed that he could have done more to save the Jews (pp. x, xxxi), Munkácsi’s
narrative must be read with prudence. How much the Council knew of unfolding
Holocaust atrocities – and ipso facto what should have been done based on this
knowledge – lies at the heart of Munkácsi’s book, and of larger ongoing debates
on the role of the Judenräte.
As in the accounts of other Jewish council officials, Munkácsi’s book
powerfully illustrates the ‘choiceless choices’ (Lawrence L. Langer, cited on p. x)
faced by Europe’s Judenräte. Installed by order of the Sondereinsatzkommando
Eichmann as ‘the sole organ through which the SS would communicate with
the Jews’ (p. 21), Hungary’s Jewish Council quickly became charged with
organising the country’s Jewish communities at the behest of the German
and, eventually, the Hungarian authorities. As such, the Council was made
responsible, even in the earliest days of the German occupation, for organising
forced labour crews (p. 34), ‘requisitioning’ Jewish apartments (p. 58), and
providing goods, food and other resources to the Gestapo (p. 66). The Council’s
compliance, Munkácsi highlights, had diverse origins. On the one hand, many
nursed a ‘culpable optimism’ (p. 94): particularly ‘the Jewish community
elders . . . entertained the illusion that Hungary would be the exception, a
tiny foothold of an island in a sea of Jewish devastation’ (p. 12), leading to
a ‘ruinous’ and ‘infinite naїveté’ (p. 17). On the other hand, the Council was
directly threatened with ‘fatal consequences for the entire Jewish community of
Hungary’ (p. 46) should they not comply. Working with ‘the Germans’, many
reasoned, would help stave off the worst (p. 66).
As Munkácsi reveals, attitudes among Hungary’s Jewish community varied
considerably, leading to numerous responses. Hungary’s Zionists, epitomised by
Rezső Kasztner, drew on international contacts to attempt alijah and emigration

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(pp. 67, 215–18). Others, hoping to save their own lives, converted to Christianity
(p. 219). Faced by ever more gruesome reports of the deportation of Jews from the
Hungarian countryside and the leaking of the Auschwitz Protocols (pp. 104–32),
a subsection of the Council, including Munkácsi, even circulated an underground
pamphlet appealing for aid from Hungary’s Christian citizens (pp. 141–6). For the
most part, however, the Council restricted itself to pleading and petitioning for
help from the Hungarian government, the Christian Churches and the diplomatic
missions of the neutral countries. In some cases – as with the issuing of protective
papers through Raoul Wallenberg’s Swedish diplomatic mission (pp. 220–6) or
the deportations’ temporary halt due to Horthy’s protest in July 1944 (pp. 204,
257–9) – such measures seemed to have had an effect. Ultimately, however,
the Jewish Council’s actions remained in vain. As Munkácsi’s book shows,
and as current historical scholarship underlines, the activities and decisions
of Jewish councils ‘tended to make hardly any difference with respect to the
devastating outcomes’ (p. xxx). Regardless of the Council’s activities, Hungary’s
Jews lay at the mercy of the Nazi German and Hungarian authorities, the
Holocaust’s countless henchmen and profiteers, and the large-scale indifference
of the Christian majority society.
How It Happened is crucial reading for scholars of the Holocaust. As one
of the first works on the Holocaust in Hungary, Munkácsi’s text helps dispel
the myth that the immediate post-war period was a moment of testimonial
and historiographical silence. To some extent both primary and secondary
source, the book probes key controversies in Holocaust Studies, while opening
perspectives on the development of the field as such. This English-language
edition, furthermore, skilfully contextualises Munkácsi’s work by providing a
preface by the editor, Nina Munk, an introductory chapter by Ferenc Laczó, a
biographical essay on Ernő Munkácsi by Susan M. Papp, twenty-six telling and
carefully commented photographs, a range of expertly drafted historical maps,
and a glossary and incisive textual annotations by Ferenc Laczó and László
Csősz. As such, the book will not only serve as an important reference work on
the Holocaust in Hungary, but will also inspire critical debates on the legacy and
historiography of the Holocaust more broadly.
Institut für Zeitgeschichte München – Berlin CAROLINE MEZGER

Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics. By

Timothy J. Lombardo. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2018. 328pp. $37.50/
£29.99.
The role of the city, or often the decline of the city, is critical in the
transformations of modern political history. The suburbanisation, white flight,
‘busing’, and the fiscal crises of the cities have all received attention in recent
scholarship – all contributing to the understanding of the shift from liberalism
to conservatism over the decades following the 1950s. Despite the modern role of
cities as liberal fortresses on electoral maps, the rise of anti-liberalism and later
the success of conservatism was forged in the politics of the cities. With Blue-
Collar Conservatism, Timothy J. Lombardo challenges assumptions of modern
conservatism as a phenomenon of the South, the Sunbelt or the suburbs. The

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white ethnic anti-liberalism Jonathan Rieder captured in the classic Canarsie:

The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Liberalism (1985) was not restricted to
working-class neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, but was also central to the modern
history of Philadelphia.
Lombardo positions his study of the politics of Philadelphia in the
decades following the end of the Second World War through the character
of police commissioner and later mayor Frank Rizzo, the epitome of blue-
collar conservatism. By analysing political, and sometimes physical, battles
over education, employment and housing, Lombardo is able to provide a
comprehensive account of the rise of Rizzo as a representative of white ethnic
identity politics and populist appeals.
The book is divided into two parts, the first covering the transformation ‘from
liberalism to law and order’, and the latter focused on ‘the rise of blue-collar
conservatism’. The structure, both chronological and thematic, works well. The
first half constitutes a fascinating account of how the liberal reform coalition
and institutions in Philadelphia weakened in the face of widespread opposition
to the Civil Rights Movement as their own representatives, such as Mayor
James Tate, came to recognise the emerging electoral clout of anti-liberalism
sentiment. Frank Rizzo, the titular character of the book, is, however, himself
largely absent from the first part, or rather looming in the shadows as deputy
commissioner.
In the second half of the book, Rizzo moves into focus as the outspoken
police commissioner and later, trading his law-and-order credentials for political
success, mayor. Still, the book is about Philadelphia, not Rizzo. The struggles
over education, employment and housing are intertwined and reinforce each
other as blue-collar conservatism under Rizzo’s tenure. Following the 1971
election of Rizzo, the white, blue-collar neighbourhoods behind his success felt in
control with a standard-bearer as mayor. At the same time, however, the political
influence of the white ethnic identity politics Rizzo championed was inexorably
waning.
The career of Rizzo illustrates the potential, and limits, of the white ethnic
populism and widespread anti-liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s. When Rizzo
in 1978 campaigned for a change in the city charter to run for a third term,
the appeals took on an explicit character. ‘Vote White’, Rizzo told an audience
of supporters and was rewarded with applause (p. 215). His 1980s attempt
at a political comeback further signals the developments of Philadelphia, and
national, politics as he abandoned the racial discourses and disavowed his
reputation as racist in an unsuccessful effort to appeal to the 1983 Democratic
primary electorate. By 1987, the ‘new Rizzo’ and any mea culpas were nowhere
to be found in his run as a Republican. Despite the new party label, Rizzo still
swept the white, blue-collar neighbourhoods he had built his career on, but could
not best the Democratic coalition.
Blue-Collar Conservatism is an engaging read. Lombardo is attentive to the role
of racial resentment, even when the archives offer a discourse often deliberately
void of explicit mentions of race. ‘[B]lue-collar pride was never a solely innocent
expression of pride in place’, Lombardo contends, ‘[i]t also functioned as a means
of reinforcing racial and spatial segregation’ (p. 87). Similarly, the author is able
to highlight the role of women in the anti-liberalism of modern political history,
an aspect of the history of conservatism emphasised by the recent scholarship

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of Elizabeth Gillespie McRae and Stacie Taranto. Lombardo explores how the
activism of women, in the roles of mothers in regard to education and housing
struggles and the roles of wives in relation to employment, garnered sympathy
and media attention.
Illustrating the importance of the urban north in the rise of populist
conservatism, the book is an important addition to our understanding of the
decline of the New Deal coalition, the strength of urban anti-liberalism, and
the influence of white identity politics. ‘Liberalism did not just fail in the
1960s,’ Lombardo posits, ‘it was actively defeated by blue-collar Philadelphians
that protested every liberal policy they viewed as an attempt to destroy their
cherished institutions’ (p. 131). As such, Blue-Collar Conservatism is a necessary
supplement to the scholarship on modern American political history, urban
history, and the history of both the carceral state and conservatism.
Åbo Akademi University OSCAR WINBERG

Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968. By J. Samuel

Walker. Oxford University Press. 2018. x + 185pp. £18.99.
J. Samuel Walker examines the rioting in Washington DC following Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in April 1968. He explores various issues
surrounding the riots, including the economic, social and political conditions,
preceding government responses to urban violence in 1967, the costs, victims
of the violence, and who were the rioters. This short, but informative, volume
draws from official government records, oral histories and archival documents.
Walker’s preface briefly lays out his five-decade history in the Washington
DC suburbs, and how he knew little about the city’s history until he began
researching the book. The introduction has a short overview of the 2015 riots
in response to Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore, Maryland, tying it to broader
race relations and urban disorder history. Walker also highlights the uniqueness
of the 1968 rioting in Washington DC where the military helped to restore
order and how it took ten years before large-scale rebuilding of destroyed blocks
began.
Walker begins with an overview of Washington DC’s infrastructure, race
relations and demographic history until the Second World War. In particular,
he notes the influx of African Americans who fled slave owners during the
Civil War as well as Washington DC becoming the first African American-
majority city in the country by 1957. However, employment ‘opportunities were
limited’ and housing was ‘inadequate in both quantity and quality’ (p. 17).
Turning to increasing urban unrest in the 1960s around the country, Walker
describes the violence and government reaction as well as how the news and
debates fanned concern about similar violence in Washington DC. He also details
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s role in selecting African American leaders of the
city and how those leaders, taking office in the autumn of 1967, were dealing
with problems ranging from substandard living to the highest per capita infant
mortality in the country.


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King was assassinated in Tennessee on 4 April 1968 and the reaction in

Washington DC was immediate with Johnson making a televised statement
within hours that praised King and called for calm. Walker describes the
escalation of crowds that gathered at 14th Street and U Street into two days of
rioting and looting that resulted in destroyed businesses and homes, and showed
‘that black animosity was directed not only at police and firefighters but also
at white shop owners, who became the principal targets of the rioters’ (p. 57).
Following the deployment of federal troops in a show of force, order was mostly
restored after two days and the imposed curfew was later ended a week after
the rioting began. Walker notes that in the aftermath of the destruction, the
government tried to provide people with needed food, shelter and medicine while
thousands of detained rioters ‘flooded’ the justice system with many unable to
pay the high bail.
Turning to media and government analysis on questions about the causes,
victims and rioters, Walker categorises the explanations for the violence into two
groupings. The first argues that a group of agitators or militants ‘incited’ the
violence for their own ends, and the second mirrored analysis of earlier urban
disorder, which focused on issues such as poverty, inequality and despair. Walker
provides some examples of perpetuators and victims that do not fit stereotypes
and explores how the city ‘learned and successfully applied important lessons’
just months later by preventing large-scale unrest following the end of the Poor
People’s Campaign encampment in June 1968 (p. 117). Closing the book, Walker
discusses the lack of sustained commitment to reconstruction and revitalisation
despite apparent federal and local government interest. One factor, Walker notes,
was investors’ reluctance to build businesses in the area, which meant that the
land remained abandoned and undeveloped. This slowly began to change in
the 1980s and 1990s with a new Washington Metro line and city government
building, but the negative aspect of the increased land value was that it raised
property taxes for poor residents. As for why the city has not seen any further
large-scale violence since 1968, Walker cites gains in African American economic
and political power as well as greater racial integration in neighbourhoods.
Yet he cautions that experts ‘all seem to agree on one point – that riots or
no riots, the essential ingredient behind the large-scale disorders of the 1960s
still exists undiminished in black communities – deprivation and resentment’
(p. 134).
Most of 14th Street Is Gone is an impressive and concise history of the 1968
rioting and its aftermath. Nicely incorporating a wide range of primary sources –
oral history, official federal and local records and press – Walker sheds light on
a significant case of domestic unrest in the United States’ capital. In addition,
the essay on sources at the end of the book is also particularly strong and could
have been included in the introduction as it nicely lays out the historiography
and situates the book in the scholarship. There were so many people affected by
the riots, including shop owners, soldiers and residents, that more of their voices
about their experiences would have added another dimension to the study. If the
author had been able to track down these people, not only for their experiences
about the events of the week Walker analysed in the bulk of the book, the
interviews would have also added to the last chapter about how race relations,
neighbourhood diversity and African American political power in the city
evolved. Specifically, these voices would have strengthened his arguments about

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the changes and continuity of issues impacting the African American community
since King’s assassination. Nevertheless, this book is highly recommended for
scholars interested in urban history, African American history and the history of
Washington DC.
Independent Scholar RYAN SHAFFER

The Contest: The 1968 Election and the War for America’s Soul. By
Michael Schumacher. University of Minnesota Press. 2018. xix + 540pp. $34.95.
The tumultuous year 1968 still elicits such a range of reaction over fifty
years on. For many who lived through it, it was an annus horribilis of violence,
tragedy and mayhem. For those more nostalgic for 1968, the year embodied
‘The Movement’s’ best and last hope to bring down ‘The Establishment’. For
those horrified and disgusted with the violence of the 1960s, the year represented
an electoral triumph of ‘law and order’ politics over what they interpreted as
opportunistic lawlessness on the part of urban black youth and spoiled college
kids who had little respect for the authority of their elders. The events of that
year are remembered in simple proper nouns – Tet, LBJ, Orangeburg, Columbia,
MLK, RFK, Chicago, and others. The images – Saigon police chief General
Nguyễn Ngo.c Loan executing Viet Cong prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém on a street
in Saigon; Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young standing over
the slain body of Martin Luther King, Jr., on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel
in Memphis, pointing to the building across the street; Robert F. Kennedy, lying
mortally wounded on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen in Los Angeles,
tended to so symbolically by Juan Romero, a seventeen-year-old busboy who had
immigrated from Mexico as a young boy; jack-booted police beating youthful
protesters outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago – remain seared in the
collective American psyche. The presidential election that astonishing year was,
as Michael Schumacher writes, a ‘war for America’s soul’ (p. xi).
Schumacher, a prolific author, brings an exhaustive yet fresh examination
of the 1968 presidential election in The Contest. Organising his narrative in
four Books – ‘The Candidates’, ‘The Primaries’, ‘The Conventions’ and ‘The
Election’ – Schumacher dissects the 1968 election with an engaging style,
insightful context and poignant narrative that tells the story from the viewpoint
of the participants, as they lived it. He does not allow the now-known future to
overshadow the drama of the moment. This approach enables Schumacher to
capture the human element of these complex events and conflicted personalities.
An accomplished biographer (see Schumacher’s excellent biographies of Allen
Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Eric Clapton and graphic artist Will Eisner, for example),
Schumacher brings his skills to bear on his subjects, namely Hubert Humphrey,
Eugene McCarthy, Richard Nixon, George Wallace and Robert F. Kennedy.
Schumacher challenges some assumptions about the major players of 1968,
allowing some instances for empathy, if only briefly. Consider Humphrey’s
reluctance to step into Johnson’s shoes despite preparing his entire political
life for the ‘top rung’ of the ladder (p. 459); McCarthy’s aloofness hiding
deep ambivalence about his decision to run for President; Nixon’s tremendous
shoulder-chipped ambition juxtaposed to his desire for solitude and family;

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Wallace’s racist nationalism against his love and affection for his dying wife,
Lurleen; and Bobby Kennedy’s political opportunism against the impact of
witnessing poverty in West Virginia, meeting with farmers in Nebraska and, of
course, the murder of Martin Luther King. Schumacher adds humanity to the
drama. These were people, admittedly remarkable if not controversial, but people
nonetheless, caught in a whirlwind.
Along the way, Schumacher gives a fresh telling to well-known stories, such
as that of Mark Rudd and Columbia University President Grayson Kirk, and
David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies in Chicago, and Johnson’s
31 March speech in which he announced to the nation that he would not seek
re-election in 1968. The author also provides an equally fresh look at perhaps
lesser-known players, such as Michigan governor George Romney, McCarthy
and Kennedy campaign speech-writer Richard Goodwin, and head of the ‘Dump
Johnson’ movement Allard Lowenstein. Schumacher’s accounts of ‘Clean for
Gene’ volunteers sleeping on cold floors and living on stale peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches in New Hampshire, of the chaos on the floor of the Democratic
National Convention, and of Humphrey and Nixon on Election Day are superbly
told. Graduate history students should take note – Schumacher shows how to
weave primary and secondary sources together in a compelling narrative. Often
lost in academic histories, letting the story tell itself is an art, one that Schumacher
clearly embraces.
This is a well-researched and wonderfully written book. The Contest captures
the drama and emotion of so many moments as lived by the participants in this
incredible election in this pivotal year. Did we need another book on the 1968
election? Apparently yes. And who won the war for America’s soul? The election
of 2016 revealed that American’s soul is still up for grabs. The Contest is an
essential read for specialists and generalists alike.
Georgia Southern University WILLIAM THOMAS ALLISON

Risk and Ruin: Enron and the Culture of American Capitalism. By Gavin Benke.
University of Pennsylvania Press. 2018. 259pp. £26.99/$34.95.
In March 2019 the Wall Street Journal reported that Jeffrey Skilling, the former
CEO of Enron, had begun to formulate plans for his return to the energy market.
This news may well have raised eyebrows, coming as it did after Skilling had
served over twelve years in a federal prison following his conviction in 2006
on nineteen counts of conspiracy, securities fraud, insider trading and lying to
auditors. The article suggested that one of Skilling’s backers was none other than
Lou Pai, the former head of Enron Energy Services who had made millions of
dollars from selling his stock in the company just months before its spectacular
collapse. It went on to note that Skilling had made over $100 million at Enron,
but it remained unclear exactly how much of his wealth remained after he had
paid out at least $62 million in restitution and legal costs. As Gavin Benke points
out in his book on Enron, popular and media accounts of corporate fraud often
rely on the drama provided by the vanity and greed of such flawed personalities.
However, the thorny moral issue of individual accountability and white-collar
crime aside, readers might also have wondered what Skilling’s return to ‘business

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as usual’ might suggest about the meaning and longer-term significance of the
Enron scandal. How much have the underlying conditions that facilitated Enron’s
rise and fall really changed? Benke attempts to address this question by setting
the story of Enron within the context of the evolution of American capitalism in
the late twentieth century.
Risk and Ruin charts the Houston origins of Enron and the development of its
natural gas business in impressive detail. He describes how the end of the Cold
War, the rise of what Michael Goldman has called ‘green neoliberalism’ and the
accelerated financialisation of the economy in the late 1990s powerfully shaped
the direction and fortunes of the company. Benke is a teacher in the writing
program at Boston University, and his tight focus on the culture of American
capitalism is the principal strength of the book. He pays close attention to how the
neoliberal lexicon (innovation, creativity, flexibility) created the illusion of infinite
growth and fostered positive market perceptions of Enron’s stock price. He also
uses the company’s marketing literature to illustrate how management theories
that were developed in the 1980s and 1990s shaped business culture within
the organisation. Benke argues that Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay’s Sunbelt
Boosterism, his advocacy of deregulation, and perhaps even his close relationship
with the Bush family, were all manifestations of a broader ideological vision. If
neoliberalism is, as Timothy Mitchell has submitted, ‘a triumph of the political
imagination’, then Benke demonstrates how business elites can easily be seduced
by their own conceit. The most fateful decisions taken by Enron’s managers – the
adoption of mark-to-market accounting and the proliferation of so-called Special
Purpose Entities – are best understood within this cultural framework. The book
is therefore primarily concerned with the fashioning of business narratives and
how these contribute to our understanding of the Enron scandal.
Benke does dedicate some space to describing the role of Enron in California’s
energy crisis in 2000 and 2001. He also reports the failure of Rebecca Mark’s
grand development projects in India and elsewhere. However, he is overall less
concerned with addressing the political and material effects of Enron’s global
business. Scholars interested in these aspects might choose to read Benke’s book
in conjunction with Derrick Hindery’s work on the Cuiabá pipeline in Bolivia.
As for the long-term effects of the Enron scandal, Benke suggests that it offered
an unheeded warning to America’s political elite. Not all readers will be fully
persuaded by Benke’s thesis that Enron’s troubles were symptomatic of wider
systemic failures. Some may even consider that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was a
sufficient regulatory corrective to an isolated episode of corporate fraud, one that
was ultimately caused by ‘a few bad apples’. Benke, however, argues that the fiasco
presaged the much larger crisis that engulfed the global financial system in 2008.
He points out that following the Enron bankruptcy Alan Greenspan declared that
it was the proliferation of financial innovations such as credit default swaps and
other complex derivatives that had blunted the impact on the wider economy (p.
173). An opportunity to question the prevailing wisdom of the day, the supposed
perfection of the market, was overlooked.
Risk and Ruin is a clear and concise account of the Enron story, and will
be useful to business historians and those interested in corporate governance,
financial regulation and the energy industry. However, it also attempts to situate
the particularities of Enron’s corporate culture in relation to the wider political
and economic dimensions of the ‘New Economy’. As such, it is a welcome and

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valuable addition to the rapidly growing literature on the history of American

capitalism.
University of Cambridge RICHARD SAICH

General
Suffering and Happiness in England 1550–1850: Narratives and Representations. A
Collection to Honour Paul Slack. Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Joanna Innes.
Oxford University Press. 2017. xii + 260pp. £69.00.
There are eleven contributors to this volume presented to Paul Slack, including
three of his doctoral students. The title invites considerable expectations. All those
writing here come from the generation of Oxford undergraduates when Slack’s
influence was strong there. His well-known authority on plague and his more
recent account of ‘The Invention of Improvement’ in 2015 made the theme chosen
one with obvious appeal to many who have applauded his long mastery in this
field. In his Ford Lectures in 1995, Slack drew our attention to ‘the ways in which
people who sought to change society expressed their intentions’. In a 2007 article,
he wrote about happiness in the later seventeenth century, showing himself as one
of the first to engage historically with this crucial aspect of all our lives.
The book begins with ‘grand narratives’. Alexandra Walsham is at her most
scintillating in discussing suffering, in terms of ‘adversity, providence and agency
in early modern England’. As we would expect, she has all the material at
her fingertips. The editors suggest this section of the book concerns ‘worlds,
discourses and theories’ over time, looking at how each ‘was associated in more
or less indirect ways with emotions’. Phil Withington considers the evolution of
usage of the words ‘happiness’ and ‘felicity’ between 1473 and 1700 on EEBO,
showing how ‘happiness’ was the one that triumphed from around the 1570s
or 1580s. The invention of happiness, in his reading, had a prolonged history,
though one confined within the period of this book. Picking up Walsham’s
and Withington’s themes, Craig Muldrew provides a cogent history of the
development of self-consciously philosophical thought and argument in work on
the self in late seventeenth-century England.
Joanna Innes, exploring ‘happiness contested’, argues that happiness denoted
‘an individual feeling or a social experience, a spiritual state or political
imperative’. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries happiness ‘remained
pre-eminently a name for a desirable condition, naturally productive of positive
feelings’. An international conversation about government and society emerged
‘framed in terms of happiness’. David Hume and Hannah More among others
came into the question; then Malthus’s arguments ‘threw various established
schemes of analysis into disarray’.
When the book turns to suffering in detail, it becomes more problematic.
Michael Braddick’s account of John Lilburne’s sufferings and their representation
is acceptably a straightforward essay in a careful source-based analysis. Faramez
Dabhoiwala’s treatment of petitioning, in its content perfectly respectable, misses
the conception of the book. So does Tim Hitchcock’s study of ‘death, burial and
belonging in Georgian St Giles in the Fields’. Lilburne’s story apart, these three

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chapters do not, as was intended, explicate ‘mobilising suffering and happiness’.

If the book seems about to lose its way, Mark Knights’s biographical study of
James Bovey from 1622 to 1696 hardly allows us to put aside the danger of its
doing so. But Sarah Lloyd’s chapter on poverty and happiness in the eighteenth
century shows her as a new star in the making, in her sympathetic grasp of the
field of charity and poor relief. Her new angle on happiness, she convinces us,
repays much fuller investigation.
This leaves us with two more chapters on ‘experiencing suffering and
happiness’. Sarah Pennell asks about the potential for ‘happiness in things’. She
plunges boldly into emotional engagement and the process of consuming, hailing
recent work by Peter King, Craig Muldrew and Adrian Green. But she concludes
that historians have found ‘knowledge of domestic material environments . . .
especially sparse or terse’. Take the issue of security, ‘fundamental to intellectual,
moral and legal explanations . . . of the origins and development of all rights
in property’. Pennell is disappointed by Amanda Vickery’s discourse on locks,
keys and window shutters in her Behind Closed Doors. Yet we might expect this
volume to celebrate the work of a historian who, more than most, has tackled
possessions in terms of the history of emotions. Pennell hopes to illuminate the
book’s themes by taking us back to the relationship between security and stability.
Thus she provides a learned and thoughtful review of chattel distraint, declaring
that this ‘framed a Georgian conception of indebtedness . . . as a providential
state of being to be pitied and exemplified’.
Perhaps Alexandra Shepard is one of the few contributors here who seems
fully on top of the task the editors have set. Hers is a closely argued analysis
of the ‘pleasures and pains’ of breastfeeding. This, she believes, was an area
where ‘emotional finesse trumped good health and experience’. The ‘fine Lady’
should perform her maternal role, because it was beneath her substitutes, who
were claiming to perform it for her.
The editors confess in the Introduction that they found the book ‘challenging
as well as stimulating’. They found themselves faced with a diversity of
contributions. They see the history of emotions as a ‘crossroads or market place
in which many historians’ paths may fruitfully cross . . . rather than any kind
of bounded community’. They regard this book as a ‘point of encounter’, for
historians with ‘diverse knowledge, interests and skills’. This looks like a degree
of special pleading. Congratulations to the editors on preserving Paul Slack with
these preliminary ‘narratives and representations’ that bear upon suffering and
happiness in this exciting field of burgeoning historical effort.
Moreton-in-Marsh ANTHONY FLETCHER

A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. By Erika Rappaport.
Princeton University Press. 2017. xiv + 549pp. £32.95.
As Karl Marx memorably observed in the first volume of Das Kapital, the
commodity is a very mysterious thing. Nevertheless, ever since Sidney Mintz
published his seminal work on the history of sugar, Sweetness and Power, more
than three decades ago, historians have rendered many commodities considerably
less mysterious, producing detailed studies of their multiple histories and forms

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of representation. Erika Rappaport’s authoritative and multi-layered history of

tea, which combines a sure grasp of existing work in the field with an immense
amount of meticulous archival research across different countries and continents,
is the best account by far we have of this key commodity.
The general story that Rappaport tells is familiar enough. It has after all
been told many times before, not least by growers, manufacturers and retailers
themselves, who have been keen to promulgate romanticised narratives to help
boost sales. The historical reality of course involved the political intrigue and
violence that invariably accompanied capitalist development in the modern
world. The Dutch, French and Portuguese introduced the British to the delights
of Chinese tea in the seventeenth century, but the British soon came to dominate
the global trade, especially after the British East India Company entered the
scene in the 1660s. Promoted as a cure-all, tea drinking became a defining
feature of genteel sociability during the second half of the eighteenth century,
though plebeian consumers also enjoyed a brew as prices fell. British traders
exchanged opium for Chinese tea and kept markets open with the help of
British naval and military power, but they also sought alternative sources of
supply. Therefore, from the 1820s, planters bloodily appropriated land and grew
tea in Assam, although it took over half a century to alter consumers’ taste
in the metropole, only achieved after advertisers had spread messages about
the adulterated, foreign nature of green Chinese tea and the superiority of the
patriotic black ‘British’ variety. From the fin de siècle, an international group of
planters protected and furthered their interests through powerful trade bodies
such as the Indian Tea Association, founded in 1894, which advertised globally
and lobbied governments. Tea thereafter lodged itself firmly in the national
psyche, helping to keep spirits up during the Great Depression and the Second
World War. Decolonisation forced a rebranding of tea, shifting it away from
its imperial and patriotic roots towards affluent young consumers who from
the late 1950s were being increasingly seduced by the allure of the espresso.
Tea consumption fell inexorably thereafter, a decline that even the tea bag and
advertising chimpanzees failed to arrest.
Despite such vicissitudes, tea has remained a quintessential signifier of
‘Englishness’, as the Jamaican-born British sociologist Stuart Hall pointed out:
‘I mean what does anyone in the world know about an English person except that
they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from?
Ceylon-Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of
the English.’ By skilfully interweaving the broader history of the tea trade with
a number of fascinating, apposite case studies, Rappaport throws considerable
light on the ‘outside history’ inside, demonstrating in rich detail how processes
of capitalist consumerism and imperial expansion were inextricably intertwined.
She also shows how tea was freighted with multiple meanings from the beginning:
eighteenth-century pamphleteers like John Waldron bemoaned its supposedly
feminising effects; temperate middle-class and working-class Victorians thought
the tea party pointed the way towards a higher moral and economic order; critics
of adulteration stoked racial fears in their campaign against Chinese green tea;
while merchants like John Horniman attempted to quell anxieties by advertising
the purity of packeted, branded goods. One of the most engaging chapters in the
book shows how, in the late nineteenth century, planters and retailers transformed
the preference of consumers – for whom black tea had been initially too

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bitter – by means of extensive advertising and publicity stunts such as exhibitions.

Drinking empire-grown tea soon became a private and public craze; London
alone had around 7,000 teashops in 1905. By the interwar period, British planters
enjoyed a near monopoly of the global tea trade, although they were threatened in
some markets by rivals including the Chinese and Dutch East Indian teas. Again,
they responded with patriotism, employing the agency head Sir Charles Higham
to lead the fightback, although he failed to turn America into a nation of tea
drinkers, a market survey of 1934 remarking that tea was still regarded in that
country as ‘a woman’s drink, unfit for and unworthy of a man unless he is a sissy’.
Again, the continuing metonymic resonance of the humble cuppa is striking.
In this fine-grained work, Rappaport demonstrates what can be achieved
by studying a single commodity in great depth, tracking it through circuits of
production, distribution, exchange and consumption, carefully reconstructing
the ways in which it has been represented and the different meanings that have
been assigned to it across time. Inevitably, perhaps, there are limitations. The work
tells us a great deal about how the mobile planter Raj, their trade associations
and advertisers saw the world, but it tells us relatively little about those who were
forced to labour in the euphemistically named tea ‘gardens’, which were more
like slave plantations. However, this should not detract from the value of a work
that brings to life so vividly a commodity whose singular history played such an
important role in constituting global capitalism.
University of Essex PETER GURNEY

American Naval History: A Very Short Introduction. By Craig L. Symonds.

Oxford University Press. 2018. xx + 142pp. £7.99.
This work is one of the latest in Oxford University Press’s ‘Very Short
Introductions’ series, which now runs to over 500 volumes. The work comes in
at 121 pages plus another 20 pages of references, further reading and index. The
series states that it is for anyone ‘wanting a stimulating and accessible way into
a new subject’; when the preface (p. xix) refers to ‘the quotidian activities of a
constabulary navy’ one briefly has doubts, at least about the accessibility, but
thankfully this rather dense bit of language is a solitary instance.
Beyond its historical narrative, the work has two underlying themes: firstly,
the argument between the navalists (who wanted a large fleet) and the fiscalist
sceptics and secondly, the changing culture of the navy and how this has reflected
America’s changing society more generally. The first of these themes is referred to
until the navalists prevailed, Symonds dating their victory to precisely 1890 and
attributing it to three developments.
The first of these is the congressional decision to build three new battleships,
which importantly were constructed primarily to defeat other battleships. A
further development cited by Symonds is the publication of the US Census
report indicating that the western frontier had disappeared. He argues that this
suggested that ‘America’s future growth might extend beyond the boundaries of
her continental limits’ (p. 63).
The other development flagged by Symonds is the publication of Alfred Thayer
Mahan’s seminal work The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783.

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This was an analysis of how the small country of Great Britain had built a
global empire, through the command of the seas achieved by its battleship fleet,
from which then flowed trade, wealth, power and military dominance. Symonds
says that Mahan ‘presented this remarkable achievement as a kind of blueprint,
appending a general introduction to the book that itemized the preconditions of
naval dominance implying (at least) that nations possessing these characteristics
could duplicate Britain’s rise to power’ (p. 63). The exact influence of Mahan’s
work upon the development of the American navy is perhaps yet to be fully
explored but its influence on European powers such as Great Britain and
Germany is well known and was indeed recognized very quickly. Sir William
Laird Clowes stated in 1897 (in the general preface of his seven-volume work The
Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to 1900) that Mahan had ‘applied
the teachings of the past to the possibilities of the present and the future’. It does
seem likely that Mahan’s book had a similar impact in the United States.
The navy’s reflection of America’s changing society is shown throughout the
work, Symonds tracing its evolution from largely illiterate international crews to
an educated, enlisted force representative of the heterogeneous character of the
American population and an officer corps populated by men and women of every
race and religion.
In an avowedly short work such as this, a significant issue is what to omit,
but this reviewer has no argument with any of the major decisions made by the
author. There are, however, a few places where a little extra detail would have
helped. On page 19, we are told that Stephen Decatur sailed into Tripoli harbour
and burnt the captured frigate Philadelphia, without the fact or the circumstances
of her capture having previously been mentioned (in fact she ran aground on
an uncharted reef two miles outside the harbour while chasing a pirate ship).
Nelson apparently hailed Decatur’s feat as ‘the most bold and daring act of the
Age’, praise that would surely have been worth including in the book. On page
32, Decatur then appears off Algiers to demand the Dey’s acceptance of a new
treaty, but we are not informed of the outcome. In the Civil War chapter, a map
would have helped, to illustrate both what came to be known as the Anaconda
Plan to strangle the Confederacy with a naval blockade and then subsequent
actions in the war. Lastly, on page 105, dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis,
the ‘naval quarantine’ is mentioned and then that the Soviets eventually agreed
to remove their missiles from Cuba. The impression could thus be gained that
the quarantine had achieved this outcome, whereas in all probability it was the
imminent prospect of American invasion and the consequent possible escalation
to nuclear war that focused minds on the eventual diplomatic solution. A sentence
or two on the navy’s preparations for the invasion might have been useful here.
There is only one quibble with what is actually in the text, Napoleon being
stated (p. 31) as having been defeated at the Battle of the Nations (Leipzig) in
1814 whereas that battle was, in fact, in 1813.
In conclusion, this work does exactly what it says on the tin, being indeed very
short but at the same time stimulating and accessible, even for those who already
have some knowledge of the subject.
Independent Scholar RICHARD DOWLING


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Before the Refrigerator: How We Used to Get Ice. By Jonathan Rees. John
Hopkins University Press. 2018. x + 121pp. $19.95.
Rees’s short, entertaining book is part of the Johns Hopkins University
Press ‘How Things Worked’ series and will be of interest to those working on
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States history. Although it
focuses on one industry in depth, this is an industry often neglected by scholars
of economic history in favour of examinations of steel, coal, cotton and other
prolific outputs of the United States during the Gilded Age. Rees shows how the
changes in technology, transportation and business practices in this one sector
reveal important aspects of economic and social history.
This book takes as its fascinating focus the ice industry, tracing its low-tech
origins in early nineteenth-century Boston, when expansion and innovation were
triggered by demand for the product in bars and taverns and for preservative
uses in meatpacking. Rees argues that, over the subsequent century, this
neglected industry changed diets by ending seasonal and regional variability
and driving food prices down for the lower and middle classes. Technological
change transformed the industry over the century prior to the First World
War, as, once artificial ice had replaced the natural form, the size of the first
commercial ice-producing machines reduced significantly. This was a fast-moving
industry, as both merchants and consumers were willing to accept change, and
without a dominant player, the industry was decentralised and favourable to
entrepreneurship.
The first business in the ice industry was run by Frederic Tudor who, in 1806,
shipped ice from Boston to Martinique, losing money but learning about new
methods in the process. But it was during the third quarter of the nineteenth
century that ice shipments expanded most significantly with 146,000 tons leaving
Boston in 1856 compared to 4 million tons per year by the 1880s. While natural
ice still dominated, during the 1880s an ice rush in Maine saw renewed interest in
the commodity. Further west, Wisconsin ice was valued by brewers such as Pabst,
as well as the Chicago meatpackers.
But by the 1860s the first ice machines had appeared and, although initially
their ice was of poor quality, the decline of natural ice was inevitable. By the turn
of the century there were large ice plants in many Southern cities. An attempt to
establish an ice trust to protect the natural industry produced only a short-term
revival, and from 1904 onwards the market shrank. After the First World War,
ice producers’ imperative was ‘shortening the cold chain’ (p. 45), meaning that
the ice was manufactured much closer to where it was required. The men who
sold this new artificial ice had an unwarranted reputation in popular culture for
dishonesty and lack of cleanliness.
These changes in the ice industry revolutionised food cost and availability.
Beef, fish and fruit became national commodities and thus ended poor health
caused by winter diets short in vitamins. Milk also became a safer product
to consume because it could be kept fresh for longer. This period of ice
manufacture, warehousing and distribution itself lasted only a short time as
personal refrigeration devices became popular, but it took until the middle of the
century before they finally changed the ice market irrevocably. The first electric
fridge was produced in 1928 and, despite ice companies emphasising the fridge’s
lack of reliability, many in the industry saw change coming and entered the ice
box or air conditioning markets. Following the activities of the New Deal towards

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electrification of rural areas, by the end of the Second World War, 85 per cent of
American homes had a fridge and few still relied on ice deliveries. In the twenty-
first century, the size and ice-producing capacity of one’s fridge is an important
status symbol.
Rees’s work is eminently entertaining and accessible. I recommend it as a case
study for students of the history of the modern United States, and to anyone
interested in aspects of social and economic history told from the perspective of
the unusual and unique.
Loughborough University CATHERINE ARMSTRONG

Debating Genocide. By Lisa Pine. Bloomsbury. 2019. xiv + 202pp. £17.99.

Ever since genocide studies emerged as an independent field in the 1990s,
scholars have worked to systematise the knowledge about this particular
international crime. About ten years ago the field itself came under scrutiny. The
present book is yet another attempt to provide a comprehensive introduction
suitable for the classroom. The result is rather mixed, and the fault to a large
extent lies with the framework within which genocide studies operate. The way
Pine goes about discussing the rapidly evolving field of genocide studies and its
intended outcome suggests quite the opposite. The book prompts more questions
than it answers.
The book begins with the concept of genocide and continues with selected
case studies. Among the many aspects of genocide, Pine chose to focus on gender,
prevention, justice and memorialisation. She also briefly touches on
environmental degradation. Pine demonstrates a solid grasp of the literature
when outlining particular instances of genocide. To what is a standard selection
of cases, Pine adds colonial genocides and premeditated mass violence in
Sudan’s Darfur region. The former chapter, which looks comparatively at North
America, the Congo Free State, German South West Africa and Australia, is
also the most judiciously argued. Pine insists that, in spite of an inbuilt element
of racialised violence, colonialism should not be automatically associated
with genocide. Instead, she considers coordinated attacks against specific
tribes, which did indeed on occasion amount to genocide. The chapter on
Darfur is quite comprehensive, too, except that it does not account for the
long-lasting civil war in South Sudan and has little to say about the present
situation. Understandably, Pine had a difficult choice deciding which cases to
include in the book. Thus, she opted to introduce a separate chapter on the
Nazi genocide of the Roma – which she sees in isolation from the Holocaust,
despite a critical mass of empirical evidence to the contrary – but to exclude
the Soviet terror. The latter decision strikes one as odd, especially since Pine
goes on to examine communist Cambodia. Furthermore, one of her questions
to the prospective student is to compare and contrast mass violence in Pol
Pot’s Cambodia and Stalin’s Russia. All in all, Pine does not link individual
cases of genocide effectively. Whenever Pine emphasises commonalities
between different instances of genocide, she does it at a rather superficial level
(p. 125).


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In her discussion, Pine adopts the deterministic approach common to

genocide literature. Throughout the book she uses constructs such as ‘genocidal
possibilities’, ‘genocidal measures’, ‘genocidal violence’, ‘genocidal campaign’,
‘genocidal cause’ and ‘génocidaire’. Perceiving genocide as a normative act, Pine
keeps referring to certain instances of genocide as ‘classic’ or ‘paradigmatic’.
That ties up with her assertion that genocide is a historical process (p. 168)
but goes against the grain of her earlier discussion on ‘competitive hierarchies’
(p. 7). When Pine refers to ‘scholars in the field’, she invariably means
genocide studies, to the exclusion of those academics who do not deal with
genocide per se. To give just one example, historian David Chandler, a
recognised expert on Cambodia cited at length by Pine, has resisted being
drawn into the debate on whether or not the Khmer Rouge committed
genocide.
The organisation of the book leaves a lot to be desired. The centrepiece of the
book – current debates in genocide studies – sometimes is rendered as a single
quote from a certain author or the juxtaposition of one scholar arguing one
thing and others disagreeing. On occasion, the thesis encapsulated in a book
title stands for an entire argument (as with Karl Schleunes and The Twisted
Road to Auschwitz). This is just one of many discursive fallacies in the book.
Far too often, Pine picks an earlier hypothesis on the cause of mass violence
(typically advanced by journalists as the conflict flares up, for example, the
thesis of perpetual ethnic hatred) and expertly dismantles it in reference to
subsequent scholarship. It also happens that Pine takes a particular historical
interpretation as an affirmation of fact (pp. 36–7). Another rhetorical device Pine
is unwittingly using is to present recent trends in scholarship as the ultimate truth
in what might not even constitute an informed debate. For instance, there are
several books that attempt to link the German extermination of Herero in
Africa and Jews in Europe (p. 25). However, no credible evidence has emerged
so far that the Nazis fell back on this particular instance of colonial violence
when conceiving of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. Sometimes Pine
presents the issue of genocide as central to the whole complex of mass atrocities
committed, for example, in the former Yugoslavia (p. 106). At other times Pine
makes a debate that has since long been superseded (for example, the relationship
between the notion of Holocaust and genocide) sound current. At the same time,
what Pine on occasion dubs ‘neglected’ or ‘forgotten’ genocides (targeting such
minorities as the Armenians or the Roma) became public knowledge decades
ago.
Perhaps most crucially, Pine fails to convince why the study of genocide versus
other forms of mass violence is so important. Her argument features a good deal
of tautology. Debates about genocide are important, says Pine, because genocide
stalks human history. It is incomprehensible why genocide but not, say, war
crimes or crimes against humanity should raise ‘our concern for humanity and
our sense of justice and morality’ (pp. 1, 13).
Pine’s discussion on gender and genocide is quite refreshing, though not
entirely unproblematic. As Pine admits, empirical evidence is inconclusive as to
the chain of command or specific intent to use mass rape as a means of genocide.
The discussion of prevention underlines the innate contradiction within genocide
studies. While genocide prevention remains the field’s unspoken raison d’être,
Pine concedes that implementing it in practice has proved next to impossible.

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Here she specifically refers to the original promise and ultimate failure of the
UN Responsibility to Protect initiative. And if prevention should apply to all
atrocity crimes and not exclusively genocide – as Pine concurs with one of the
scholars – what is the point of having genocide studies as a distinct field? The
field of comparative studies may indeed be fast growing, as Pine says, except
that it does not have a sense of direction. By insisting that the debates on the
definition of genocide are crucial for the understanding of genocide (p. 172),
Pine is back at square one with her entire discussion. I would argue that we
have tried that for almost thirty years now, without anything much to show
for it.
The Norwegian Center for Holocaust
and Minority Studies ANTON WEISS-WENDT


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