The Conquest of Mexico has long been cast as a tale of villains and heroes. The dastardly Nuño de Guzmán, we have been told, was the cruelest of conquistadors, massacring Indians everywhere, particularly in Michoacán where he tortured and summarily executed Cazonci, despite the fact that the Purhépecha ruler had originally struck a deal with Hernán Cortés. Vasco de Quiroga stands at the other end of the spectrum. This learned humanist bishop, we are told, single-handedly built utopian village-hospitals in Michoacán to shelter the Indians from the likes of Nuño de Guzmán. In this Manichean narrative of the Conquest, natives are either killed or saved by Spaniards. James Krippner-Martínez seeks to restore some Indian agency conspicuously missing in such simpleminded accounts. More important, he seeks to explain how these narratives came about in the first place.

This path-breaking book describes how the Qing state dealt with jian, a Chinese term which the author translates as “illicit sexual intercourse.” Emblazoned on the jacket of the book is the Chinese character for jian, an ideograph most commonly encountered today in the compound word “qiangjian,” or rape. The sight of this character is so shocking (and suggestive) to modern Chinese sensibilities that I had to take the jacket off while on a recent train-trip through China in order to defuse the inevitable prurient questions from fellow travelers. My ruse worked, and by the end of my journey I was rewarded with a clear, compelling analysis of how the judiciary in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century China attempted to regulate the mores of an increasingly marketized and unruly society—a story with no small relevance to the changes taking place in China today.

To an Italian, la questione meridionale, “the Southern question,” is as inescapable as racism is to an American, or “the troubles” are to an inhabitant of the British Isles. But what do foreigners see when they look at the troubled relationship of the Italian South with the rest of the peninsula? In his interesting book, Darkest Italy, Dickie reminds us, first of all, that we face several “questions,” if we wish to use this term at all (13–14). The Mezzogiorno itself was, during the period he considers, 1860–1960, and remains to this day, comprised of diverse geopolitical, cultural, and social components. These appear to have become one in the minds of liberal modernizers, northerners and southerners alike (for example, Pasquale Villari, 55–63). They believed that building the Italian nation required changing cultural attitudes and values in the populace as much as in the elites (4–7); and they assessed the difficulty of their task in the degrees of deviance of various parts of the country from their own normative view of nationhood. “The South” was seen as highest on this scale.

The papers in this volume were first presented at the third Center for Hellenic Studies colloquium, organized by the editors in June 1996. The colloquium brought together scholars from different branches of ancient history, archaeology, and anthropology with the goal of pushing warfare studies beyond mere narrative of wars and battles to an inquiry into the influence of military conflicts on their social, political, and economic contexts, and vice versa.

Scholarly debates concerning cities in the Islamic world have focused on whether there actually is an Islamic city, and have often been framed by the paradigms of nationalism and modernization. Declaring at the outset that they do not believe there is a typical Islamic city, the authors of this volume attempt to redirect scholarly discussion of cities in the Islamic world by presenting narratives of the socio-economic developments of early modern Ottoman Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul. They argue that the history of each city must be understood according to its internal dynamics. In so doing they aim to integrate Ottoman urban history into the study of world history and global cities, and demonstrate how fruitful comparative studies are for the field of Ottoman studies.

What happens when an ancient city, the former capital of two world empires, becomes subject to a new wave of global flows? How does a populist third-world state negotiate transnational networks that challenge its authority, but also create new resources to control? How do heterogeneous residents of a metropolis negotiate their locality when they imagine their city in a global market?

Recent scholarship on twentieth-century Syria has thrown new light on the popular movements that opposed the Arab nationalist government of King Faisal and then resisted the imposition of the French mandate in 1920, on state economic policy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and on the workers' organizations and radical parties that emerged as major political actors during the Second World War. Elizabeth Thompson offers a stimulating synthesis of this literature, and supplements it by devoting explicit attention to the way in which gender dynamics interacted with other factors. Specifically, she argues that a “crisis of paternity” (37–38) set the stage for French rule over Syria and Lebanon following the First World War; the mandatory authorities subsequently established a complex “paternalistic colonial civic order,” in which state officials manipulated the disbursement of material benefits to “a mediating elite” of local notables as a way of exerting “control [over] the unprivileged majority” (66). This system led to the emergence of a full-blown “colonial welfare state” by the late 1930s, which entailed an extensive network of state-funded schools and clinics, along with rights of popular expression and association (163–69). Key elements of the mandate order even outlived the French presence: “Paternal republicanism—the refusal to democratize and expand the colonial welfare state, and the persistence of heterogeneous citizenship rights—would contribute to the causes of Syria's successive coups beginning in 1949 and to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon in 1958” (286).

This book, part of the “Ideas in Context” series printed under the editorship of intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, is an important contribution to the better understanding of Emile Durkheim's sociology and social philosophy.

In the past decade, studies on the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire have taken an “archival turn.” Scholars, such as Engin Deniz Akarli, Suraiya Faroqhi, Hasan Kayali, Süevket Pamuk and Zeynep Celik, have begun reassessing the Ottoman archives in order to challenge the sweeping historical narratives of an earlier generation of scholars, like the theses about the inevitable demise of the empire or about the radical break in political culture with the emergence of the Turkish Republic. This is also the case with Selim Deringil's The Well- Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909, which considerably revises our understanding of Sultan Abdülhamid II's centralization program.

The editors of this volume aim to challenge the precepts of New Historicism (á la Foucault) as they bear upon historical change. If New Historicism had focussed on the ‘operation of power’ through time, with its implications for the periodized social construction of the individual, the editors assert that such radical discontinuity may in fact distort modern perceptions of Greek and Roman antiquity. The essays presented, beyond addressing continuity and change in the broadest sense, are not methodologically coherent, but rather give a sampling of contemporary approaches to periodization.

This book is a meticulous reconstruction of a little over a decade in English Medieval History. Its author, Graeme White, holds the chair of the faculty of History at University College, Chester. Yet rather than fitting comfortably within the traditional niche of interpretation of the accomplishments of kings Stephen and Henry II, as his position might suggest, he shares the perceptions of the late W. L. Warren and of Emilie Amt that Stephen was no nincompoop, and that his successor was not the ingenious monarch once imagined. White, like Warren, does not merely make connections between reigns, he follows the processes that flow through and beyond them.

Ida Altman has written a book that both probes deeply the significance of tying together Iberian and American domains under a common Crown government and brilliantly demonstrates how the comparative history of the first global age ought to be approached. Several recent works have shown the importance of bullion flows, especially those of silver. But for the development of a truly world economy and history, the resulting networks did not have the same impact on all of the localities that they increasingly connected. Altman does an outstanding job of exploring such differences, and their relationship to the interface between the macro-history of the period's new economic and political domains and the micro-history of locality, in ways that highlight human agency.

The practical problems involved in constructing a meaningful account of the lives of Muslim women during the Medieval period would seem to be considerable. Nevertheless, the project is an important one. Through the examination of court and estate records, art, coins, oral and written literature, and Western travelersÕ accounts, as well as contemporary chronicles, the contributors to Gavin R. G. HamblyÕs volume have assembled a diverse set of articles, alternately revealing, enticing, suggestive, and fragmentary.

What happened to the racism that flourished during the “war without mercy” after the Pacific War ended? This is the question tackled by this ambitious book. Racial prejudices and hatreds of all types persisted and even flourished, at times with a vengeance. Beneath the constructed and mutually acceptable post-war cooperative relationship that seemed to characterize United States-Japan relations, racial animosities on both sides of the Pacific festered, threatening to disrupt the official reconciliation and apparent new amity between the former belligerents.

This book is an anthropological study of managerial control and power structures in the Hong Kong subsidiary of a Japanese supermarket chain (here called Fumei). The study is the result of two years of primary data collection using traditional anthropological research methodsÑparticipant observation and intensive interviewing. The book is structured around an introduction, seven chapters, a conclusion, and an afterword. The introduction places great significance on how this study supposedly distinguishes itself from earlier literature on Japanese joint-stock companies (kaisha) and Japanese management practices. Previous anthropological work is criticized for not having provided comparative analyses of the subjects studied.

Until recently, studies of Islamic jurisprudence usually began and ended with the texts of medieval Islam. Apart from the Islamic modernists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the reasoning and writings of jurists of the last five hundred years failed to attract interest in their own right. Colin Imber's study of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Sheikh al-Islam, Ebu's-Su‘ud, the preeminent jurisconsult of the Ottoman Empire, is an illuminating and timely addition to a sparse, but growing, literature dedicated to this more proximate inheritance of the contemporary Islamic world.