The history of parliament: the House of Commons, 1690–1715. Edited by Eveline Cruickshanks, Stuart Handley, and D. W. Hayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 5 vols. i: Introductory survey (pp. xvi+958 and CD-ROM); ii: Constituencies (pp. xvi+945); iii: Members A–F (pp. xvi+1,134); iv: Members G–N (pp. xvi+1,052); v: Members O–Z (pp. xvi+962). ISBN 0-521-77221-4. £250.00 (introductory price); thereafter £300.00.

The publication of these five volumes represents the eighth contribution to the History of Parliament Trust's record of the House of Commons that now extends to twenty-eight volumes containing nearly twenty million words in over 20,000 pages. According to the Trust's chairman, Ted Rowlands MP, completing these volumes that cover the period 1690–1715 ‘has been a thirty-year odyssey’ (i, p. xi) successively directed by Eveline Cruickshanks and David Hayton as editors and Stuart Handley as associate editor. Their appearance completes the Trust's history of the Commons during the ‘long eighteenth century’ from Charles II's restoration in 1660 to George IV's death in 1820, whilst the periods 1384–1421 and 1509–1603 are covered in previously published volumes. In 1998, all the information contained in the twenty-three extant volumes was incorporated into a single text-file CD-ROM with various electronic search functions. Compiled by a team of fourteen distinguished contributors, the format of the volumes here reviewed follows that of earlier publications by the Trust. The first comprises a masterful ‘introductory survey’ by Hayton that extends to over 500 pages with twenty-seven appendices and confers coherence on the other volumes by enumerating the diverse range of constituency customs, election procedures, membership, organization, and activities characteristic of the Commons between 1690 and 1715. The second contains detailed profiles of the 317 English, Welsh, and Scottish constituencies, whilst the remaining three supply biographical entries of the 1,982 Members who sat in the Commons during this period.

This is a review of recent English-language scholarship on the development of Russian identity since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The first part examines literature on the economic and political changes in the Russian Federation, revealing how scholars became more sceptical about the possibility of Russia building a Western-type liberal democracy. The second part investigates approaches to the study of Russian national identity. The experience of empire, in both the tsarist and Soviet periods, gave Russians a weak sense of nationhood; ethnic Russians identified with the multi-national Soviet Union. Seeking legitimacy for the new state, President El'tsin sought to create a civic identity focused on the multi-national Russian Federation. The Communist and nationalist opposition continued to promote an imperial identity, focused on restoring the USSR or creating some other formation including the Russian-speaking population in the former Soviet republics. The final section discusses accounts of the two Chechen wars, which scholars see as continuing Russia's imperial policy and harming relations with Russia's Muslim population. President Putin's co-operation with the West against ‘terrorism’ has not led the West to accept Russia as one of its own, due to increasing domestic repression and authoritarianism.

How the First World War has come to be remembered has, over the past two decades, become a major concern for British historians, eclipsing earlier scholarly preoccupations with war guilt and its political consequences, the impact of the war on social structure and the status of women, and the conflict's role in the rise of the modernist aesthetic. This article surveys both scholarship on the cultural legacy of the First World War in Britain and the debates about how the memory of this war – the ‘Great War’ – has either retarded its consideration ‘as history’ or spurred new, if not always entirely successful, modes of inquiry into the relationships among war, society, and culture. The article argues that memory of the Great War must itself be treated as history; that the meaning of that memory should be placed within the context of the changing events, ideas, and identities of the entire twentieth century; and that more scholarly attention needs to be directed at the popular reception of representations of the Great War by the population at large, and at the power of the various forms of media by which those representations have been conveyed to their audience and have thereby shaped memory of the conflict.

The common law tradition: lawyers, books and the law. By J. H. Baker. London: Hambledon, 2000. Pp. xxxiv+404. ISBN 1-85285-181-3. £40.00.

Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450. By Christopher W. Brooks. London: Hambledon, 1998. Pp. x+274. ISBN 1-85285-156-2. £40.00.

Professors of the law: barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century. By David Lemmings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+399. ISBN 0-19-820721-2. £50.00.

Industrializing English law: entrepreneurship and business organization, 1720–1844. By Ron Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+331. ISBN 0-521-66275-3. £37.50.

Between law and custom: ‘high’ and ‘low’ legal cultures in the lands of the British Diaspora – the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900. By Peter Karsten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+560. ISBN 0-521-79283-5. £70.00.

The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians' understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock's classic study, The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law's pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law's empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law.

Richelieu's army: war government and society in France, 1624–1642. By David Parrott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv+599. ISBN 0-521-79209-6. £65.00.

The dynastic state and the army under Louis XIV: royal service and private interest, 1661–1701. By Guy Rowlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xxiv+404. ISBN 0-521-64124-1. £55.00.

The French army, 1750–1820: careers, talent, merit. By Rafe Blaufarb. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+227. ISBN 0-7190-6262-4. £45.00.

The people in arms: military myth and national mobilization since the French Revolution. Edited by Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+268. ISBN 0-521-81432. £50.00.

From revolutionaries to citizens: antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914. By Paul B. Miller. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii+277. ISBN 0-8223-2766-X. £13.95.

Although all the books under review are military histories, international conflict is not their central concern. They are not primarily campaign histories, nor studies of strategic or tactical innovations, nor biographies of great commanders. If they help to answer the military historian's traditional question – how is military might created and used on the battlefield – then they do so indirectly, through an exploration of how the state marshalled its resources for war, particularly in terms of manpower. This is not just a question of emphasis, or of filling in gaps in the historiography; these books mount a sustained critique on the explanatory models favoured by military historians. Military history, David Parrott suggests, too readily falls into a ‘whiggish trap’: a series of clear-sighted war leaders grasp the potential of technology in achieving the state's foreign policy objectives; technological shifts drive changes in the size and organization of armies, and consequently in the development of the state. And thus was the modern world of large, complex, disciplined organizations made. In contrast, we are offered here a selection of error-prone war leaders, constrained at every turn by the social, political, and financial realities of their day, who were intent not on ‘progress’ but on manipulating the system of which they themselves were a part, and as much for their own ends as for those of the state they served.

The myth of Mr Butskell: the politics of British economic policy, 1950–1955. By Scott Kelly. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. viii+248. ISBN 0-7546-0604-X. £42.50.

The Labour party and taxation: party identity and political purpose in twentieth-century Britain. By Richard Whiting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+294. ISBN 0-521-57160-X. £45.00.

British social policy since 1945. Second edition. By Howard Glennerster. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 2000. Pp. xii+260. ISBN 0-631-22022-4. £15.99.

Governance, industry and labour markets in Britain and France: the modernising state in the mid-twentieth century. Edited by Noel Whiteside and Robert Salais. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Pp. xi+295. ISBN 0-415-15733-1. £45.00.

The final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1918–19)

Hugh Gaitskell (Labour chancellor of the exchequer, 1950–1) remarked in 1957 that ‘professional politicians, when they have been in the job for any length of time, are not well fitted for really deep thinking, partly because they have no time for it and partly because the very practice of their art involves them in continual simplification’. This candid observation has important implications for the study of how past politicians formulated policy. The books under review all deal with differing aspects of British (and also, in one case, French) economic and social policy in the twentieth century. They all show, to varying degrees, that parties, governments, and other political actors have proffered apparently simplistic and muddled solutions to important problems. But was this because of intellectual deficiency on their part, or was it an inevitable consequence of the exercise of what Rab Butler, Gaitskell's Conservative successor, famously called ‘the art of the possible’?

Making peoples: a history of the New Zealanders from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. By James Belich. London: Penguin, 2001. Pp. 497. ISBN 0-14-100639-0. £9.99.

Paradise reforged: a history of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000. By James Belich. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Pp. 606. ISBN 0-7139-9172-0. £25.00.

The Enlightenment and the origins of European Australia. By John Gascoigne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii+233. ISBN 0-521-80343-80. £45.00.

Australian ways of death: a social and cultural history, 1840–1918. By Pat Jalland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. Pp. vi+378. ISBN 0-19-550754-1. £15.99.

White flour, white power: from rations to citizenship in central Australia. By Tim Rowse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii+255. ISBN 0-521-62457-6. £40.00.

The five books covered here might seem a random sample: antipodean oddments from the edge of a review editor's desk. Their subject matter – from ‘ways of death’ in Australia to rationing policies for indigenous Australians – is diverse, as are their approaches: a scholarly assessment of the influence of Enlightenment ideas in the Australian colonies through to a massive two-volume general history of New Zealand to 2000. Yet even in this eclectic mix there are common themes, reflecting current interests and models in the writing of history in both countries. For some time, Australia and New Zealand have been productively positioned in relation to European social change as ‘born modern’ experiments, or at least as colonies which forced or anticipated aspects of the modernity shaping metropolitan centres. There have been several phases of historiography advancing this thesis, each reflecting a desire on the part of historians ‘down under’ to relate their account to wider dynamics, or to incorporate models that redress or refute the ‘isolation’ of their history by exploring categories extending beyond the national chronicle. More recently, historians of post-colonialism have returned the interest. They have traced in the extension of colonialism many of the crucial factors shaping core elements of nineteenth-century European nationalism, even the concept of Europe itself. In complex patterns of interdependence within ‘empire’, these historians have also identified several themes of ‘modernity’: reflexive approaches to ‘self’ and identity; discursive matrices of liberal government; the application and testing of the Enlightenment project of ‘reason’ and the ‘disenchantment’ of scientific knowledge and classification.