Risk and Ruin: Enron and the Culture of American Capitalism. By Gavin Benke. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2018. 259pp. £26.99/$34.95. 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1111%2F1468-229X.12949&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2020-03-16 314 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 315 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 316 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 317 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 318 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 319 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, C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 320 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES ‘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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 321 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, C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 322 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 323 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 324 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 325 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’ C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 326 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MEDIEVAL 327 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 328 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 329 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 330 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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- C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 331 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 332 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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. C© 2020 The Authors. History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 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, C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 334 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 335 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 336 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd EARLY MODERN 337 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 338 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 339 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. C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 340 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 341 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 342 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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. C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 343 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 344 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 345 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 346 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 347 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 C© 2020 The Authors. History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 348 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 349 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 350 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 351 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 352 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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”] C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 353 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 354 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 355 ‘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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 356 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 357 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 358 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0006122568.pdf MODERN 359 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. C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 360 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 361 (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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 362 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 363 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. C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 364 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 365 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; C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6766-2194 366 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Authors. History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd MODERN 367 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 C© 2020 The Authors. History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 368 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0540-3901 GENERAL 369 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 370 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd GENERAL 371 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. C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 372 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd GENERAL 373 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 374 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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). C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd GENERAL 375 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. C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd 376 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES 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 C© 2020 The Author(s). History C© 2020 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd