A court in exile: the Stuarts in France, 1689–1718. By Edward Corp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi+386. ISBN 0-521-58462-0. £55.00.

Vienna and Versailles: the courts of Europe's dynastic rivals, 1550–1780. By Jeroen Duindam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+349. ISBN 0-521-82262-9. £60.00.

Intrigue and treason: the Tudor court, 1547–1558. By David Loades. Harlow: Pearson, 2004. Pp. x+326. ISBN 0-582-77226-5. £19.99.

Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815: the role of the consort. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii+419. ISBN 0-521-81422-7. £60.00.

Court culture in Dresden: from Renaissance to Baroque. By Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xv+310. ISBN 0-333-98448-X. £47.50.

Over the last three decades, the royal or princely court has become an established feature of the historiographical landscape of early modern Europe. The subject of a forest of monographs and theses, the theme of a plethora of university undergraduate courses, it has even gained an Anglo-American academic society (and accompanying journal) dedicated to ‘court studies’. While the first wave of Anglophone court historians, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, considered it necessary to state explicitly, as David Starkey did in his introduction to the seminal The English court, that the study of the early modern court was a legitimate historical activity, such a stance is no longer necessary. Indeed, few political historians would now omit the court from their narratives, even if their principal focus was directed elsewhere. In The English court, Starkey presented his enterprise, and that of his co-contributors, as part of a broader process of historical revisionism. But, by the late 1990s, court studies had itself become subject to its own internal forces of revisionism. The books reviewed here not only illustrate the diversity of projects undertaken by scholars of the court; they also critique the interpretations and approaches of an earlier generation of court historians.

The German political scientist and philosopher, Samuel von Pufendorf, described the Holy Roman Empire in 1667 as a ‘monstrosity’, because it did not fit any of the recognized definitions of a state. The issue of the Empire's statehood has been the most important consideration in its historiography in recent decades: was it a state? If so, what kind? This review addresses these questions by examining how the debate on the Empire is related to wider controversies surrounding German history, the contemporary process of European integration, and about political organization in general. It explains how these debates are rooted in the political and religious disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that still influence how the history of the Empire is written today. The four principal modern interpretations are identified and assessed: the Empire as a ‘failed nation state’, as a federation, and, more recently, as an ‘Empire-State’ or a ‘Central Europe of the Regions’. The piece concludes by offering a new explanatory framework to assess the Empire's political development.

Samuel Pepys's affair with his wife's companion Deborah Willet is one of the most celebrated episodes in his journal of the 1660s. When Pepys ended his journal in May 1669, he also believed that he had ended contact with Deb. Unable to trace her in the historical record, scholars have been forced to accept this conclusion. However, new evidence shows that Deb Willet did not disappear from Pepys's life. Rather, she married soon after the end of the diary and her husband, the clergyman Jeremiah Wells, quickly became a client of Pepys. This article explores the evidence on the connections between the three in the 1670s, offering a case study of one individual's role in Pepys's patronage network, and reflecting back upon events in the journal.

The recently released Special Operations Executive (SOE) personal file of Major Hugh Bertie Campbell Pollard (HS 9/1200/5) sheds new light on the man who helped fly General Franco from the Canary Islands to Morocco, leading ultimately to the overthrow of the democratically elected republican government and thirty-six years of brutal dictatorship. Contrary to the previous portrayal of Pollard, a genial, rough-and-ready gung-ho ‘adventurer’ who flew the future Caudillo to Morocco on a whim, the files reveal Pollard to have been an experienced British intelligence officer, talented linguist, and firearms expert with considerable firsthand experience of wars and revolutions in Mexico, Morocco, and Ireland, where he had served as a police adviser in Dublin Castle during the ‘stormy days’ of the Black and Tans in the early 1920s. Pollard, who listed his hobbies in Who's Who as ‘hunting and shooting’, was the sporting editor of Country Life and a member of Lord Leconfield's hunt. He was also a renowned and passionate firearms expert having written numerous books on the subject including the section on ‘small arms’ for the official war office textbook. His friend Douglas Jerrold, who himself later served in British intelligence, recalled that Pollard ‘looked and behaved, like a German Crown Prince and had a habit of letting off revolvers in any office he happened to visit’. Once Jerrold plucked up the courage to ask Pollard if he had ever killed anybody.

This is a review of recent English- and German-language publications on suicide, both as an act and a subject of discourse, in the early and late modern periods. It argues that, while publications on the theme have increased considerably in the past two decades, the problematic character of the evidence for suicide has led to a focus on attitudes to suicide at the expense of empirical investigations. The latter have largely confirmed the link between social isolation and suicide, posited by Durkheim, but have revealed differences in patterns across social groups. The growth of lenient attitudes to suicide has proven to be more protracted and contested than originally believed. The ambivalent role of clergy, the persistence of religious sanctions against suicide, and continued efforts by the state to curb suicide all suggest that the term ‘hybridization’ better characterizes the changes over this period than the older term ‘secularization’. Finally, this review recommends that historians undertake further empirical investigations of suicide, where possible, and that they broaden suicide research to include suicidal behaviours and alternative responses to despair in order to identify the specific allure of suicide.

This essay surveys recent scholarly work on the political theory of empire and international relations in Britain during the long nineteenth century. It traces the dominant themes and arguments to be found, points to some interpretative and methodological weaknesses, and highlights a number of topics that remain to be explored in detail. I focus on the following: the relationship between liberalism and empire and, in particular, the role played by the idea of civilization in circumscribing liberal claims to universality; the nature and evolution of international law, and the key role that jurisprudential thought played in shaping conceptions of civilization and setting the bounds of legitimacy for imperialism; the vexed relationship between the history of imperial thought and cultural/political history; and the important, though frequently marginalized, role of the colonial empire in the Victorian imperial imagination. Finally, I suggest that areas that remain to be explored in depth include non-liberal visions of international affairs; the role of theology in shaping conceptions of global order; and the balance between the United States, Europe, and the various (and very different) elements of the empire.

This historiographical review considers recent developments in the writing of imperial history, paying particular attention to the growing emphasis on cultural history. Such an emphasis reflects a close engagement with issues such as the formation of national identity in an imperial context and the ways in which systems of knowledge – including religion, science, and notions of gender – were linked with structures of empire. The extent to which cultural history intersects with concerns of literary scholars and anthropologists – in its engagement with travel literature, for example – further indicates the increasingly interdisciplinary character of imperial history. In conclusion, the review raises the issue of the limits, as well as the strengths, that flow from the expanding scope of cultural history, as well as offering suggestions as to why imperial history is likely to become increasingly important in a globalized world.

Barclays: the business of banking, 1690–1996. By Margaret Ackrill and Leslie Hannah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxi+481. ISBN 0-521-79035-2. £45.00.

The worlds of the East India Company. Edited by H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002. Pp. xvii+246. ISBN 0-85115-877-3. £45.00.

Kingship and crown finance under James VI and I, 1603–1625. By John Cramsie. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002. Pp. xi+242. ISBN 0-86193-259-5. £50.00.

Mammon's music: literature and economics in the age of Milton. By Blair Hoxby. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+320. ISBN 0-300-09378-0. $45.00.

Usury, interest, and the Reformation. By Eric Kerridge. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. 206. ISBN 0-7546-0688-0. £55.00.

The rise of commercial empires: England and the Netherlands in the age of mercantilism, 1650–1770. By David Ormrod. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvii+400. ISBN 0-521-81926-1. £55.00.

The rhetoric of credit: merchants in early modern writing. By Ceri Sullivan. London: Associated University Presses, 2002. Pp. 217. ISBN 0-8386-3926-7. £38.00.

The unshackling of the European economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries was achieved, ironically, by the forging of new and stronger chains of trade and credit within nations, across regions, and around the globe. The seven books under review explore that process from different disciplinary standpoints, but chiefly as it affected England, the country that would become emblematic of commercial advancement and under whose sway the modern capitalist system emerged. How England managed this feat financially and commercially, politically and culturally, amidst the shifting opportunities and perils of these centuries is answered with an often impressive sophistication and imagination that take us well beyond hackneyed analyses prompted by the Weber–Tawney thesis.

Violence in early modern Europe, 1500–1800. By Julius R. Ruff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+269. ISBN 0-521-59119-8. £13.95.

The London mob: violence and disorder in eighteenth-century England. By Robert Shoemaker. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Pp. xvi+393. ISBN 1-85285-389-1. £25.00.

Outlaws and highwaymen: the cult of the robber in England from the middle ages to the nineteenth century. By Gillian Spraggs. London: Pimlico, 2001. Pp. x+372. ISBN 0-7126-6479-3. £12.50.

The duel in early modern England: civility, politeness and honour. By Markku Peltonen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x+355. ISBN 0-521-82062-6. £45.00.

Swordsmen: the martial ethos in the three kingdoms. By Roger B. Manning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+272. ISBN 0-19-926121-0. £47.00.

Rebellion, community and custom in early modern Germany. By Norbert Schindler, translated by Pamela E. Selwyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv+311. ISBN 0-521-65010-0. £55.00.

The history of violence appears to hold a particular fascination for scholars of the early modern period. This is not least because it is so often deemed integral to the differences between modern and pre-modern culture and politics, despite the fact that this particular difference is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The progressive decline and containment of violence – or at least certain forms of violence – has been central to narratives of state formation, the transition from courtesy to civility, a shift from aristocratic to bourgeois cultural hegemony, and the ‘civilizing process’ first theorized by Norbert Elias. Despite Michel Foucault's complication (if not rejection) of their teleological assumptions, such celebratory accounts of modernization have proved remarkably tenacious, albeit in a fragmented fashion. As the selection of books under review here illustrates, with the exception of Manning and, most notably, Peltonen, current scholarship is more likely to uphold, or to modify subtly, rather than to reject entrenched views of a gradual abeyance of violence in early modern Europe in response to imperatives of civility and politeness and to emergent state control.

This review considers Soviet economic history in the light of recent contributions to the historiography. Many of the latest studies in Soviet economic history take the form of archive-based treatments of economic policy and economic administration, the causes and consequences of periodic economic crises (notably famine), and the behaviour of workers, managers, and consumers within the constraints of the planned economy. As a result, we now have a clearer idea of the functioning of the economic system, the extent of coercion at various levels, and the scope of reform initiatives. Disagreement remains over important issues, notably the causes and timing of the Soviet economic collapse.

United States's historians are almost alone in the scholarly world in using the term ‘Indian’ to describe the original inhabitants of the landmass that came to be called the Americas. The term is an artefact of Christopher Columbus's imagination, and it conditions American historiography in ways that reflect the particular logic of the first contact that Columbus initiated. This review draws upon several recent books in native history, as well as a few older ones, to explicate how Columbian logic has informed the evolution of such scholarship and to suggest new ways of thinking about contact, colonization, and acculturation in the Americas. The concept of ‘creolization’, developed by francophone and anglophone scholars in the Caribbean, it is argued, offers a particularly interesting and constructive way to imagine a different history of America's first and second peoples.

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.

German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.

Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.

The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.

Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.

Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.

The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.

Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.

As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.

The last medieval queens: English queenship, 1445–1503. By J. L. Laynesmith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xxviii+294. ISBN 0-19-924 737-4. £35.00.

The marrying of Anne of Cleves: royal protocol in Tudor England. By Retha M. Warnicke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+343. ISBN 0-521-77037-8. £19.95.

Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548–1560: a political career. By Pamela E. Ritchie. East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2002. Pp. xii+306. ISBN 1-86232-184-1. £20.00.

My heart is my own: the life of Mary Queen of Scots. By John Guy. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Pp. xii+574. ISBN 1-84115-752-X. £20.00.

Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+300. ISBN 0-7190-5769-8. £49.99.

Therefore if any man be in christ, let him be a new creature.Old things are passed away: behold, all things are become new.2 Cor. 5:17, Geneva Bible

The Reformation's claim to be, in Patrick Collinson's words, the ‘greatest geological fault line in European civilisation’ rests not on the fact that it proposed a new set of answers to old questions, but rather that it proposed old answers in a new world – the one that came into being with the advent of printing. This confluence transformed the ways in which the yearning for purification and renewal endemic to the religious impulse was enacted and institutionalized during the early modern period. Most radically, the Reformation challenged the socio-political hierarchies of degree, descent, and gender that had ordered medieval society. These hierarchies were most powerfully symbolized by the person of the king. In important ways they were perceived to be embodied in and dependent on him and, through him, on the women who came to be queens. To understand early modern queenship, we must bear this cultural context in mind. Too often, however, historians fail to do so, writing instead of kings and queens in terms more suited to modern political biography. This limits our ability to comprehend not only the phenomenon of kingship, but also – for as long as personal monarchy remained the dominant form of European government – political culture more generally. This review article provides an opportunity to address this historiographical deficiency. I therefore want to begin by sketching out the contours of early modern queenship, before turning my attention to the books under review.

The politics of Italian national identity. Edited by Gino Bedani and Bruce Haddock. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Pp. vii+296. ISBN 0-7083-1622-0. £40.00.

Fascist modernities: Italy, 1922–1945. By Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001. Pp. x+317. ISBN 0-520-22363-2. £28.50.

Le spie del regime. By Mauro Canali. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Pp. 863. ISBN 88-15-09801-1. €70.00.

I campi del Duce: l'internamento civile nell'Italia fascista (1940–1943). By Carlo Spartaco Capogreco. Turin: Einaudi, 2004. Pp. xi+319. ISBN 88-06-16781-2. €16.00.

The American South and the Italian Mezzogiorno: essays in comparative history. Edited by Enrico Dal Lago and Rick Halpern. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. 256. ISBN 0-333-73971-X. £28.50.

Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860: culture, politics, society. Edited by John Dickie, John Foot, and Frank M. Snowden, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. ix+342. ISBN 0-312-23960-2. £32.50.

Remaking Italy in the twentieth century. By Roy Palmer Domenico. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Pp. xiv+181. ISBN 0-8476-9637-5. £16.95.

Twentieth century Italy: a social history. By Jonathan Dunnage. Harlow: Pearson, 2002. Pp. xi+271. ISBN 0-582-29278-6. £16.99.

Milan since the miracle: city, culture and identity. By John Foot. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Pp. xiv+240. ISBN 1-85973-550-9. £14.99.

Squadristi: protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista, 1919–1922. By Mimmo Franzinelli. Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Pp. 464. ISBN 88-04-51233-4. €19.00.

For love and country: the Italian Resistance. By Patrick Gallo. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003. Pp. viii+362. ISBN 0-7618-2496-0. $55.00.

The struggle for modernity: nationalism, futurism and Fascism. By Emilio Gentile. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Pp. xix+203. ISBN 0-275-97692-0. $69.95.

Italy and its discontents. By Paul Ginsborg. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2001. Pp. xv+521. ISBN 0-713-99537-8. £25.00.

Silvio Berlusconi: television, power and patrimony. By Paul Ginsborg. London: Verso, 2004. Pp. xvi+189. ISBN 1-84467-000-7. £16.00.

Fascists. By Michael Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x+429. ISBN 0-521-53855-6. £15.99.

Mussolini: the last 600 days of Il Duce. By Ray Moseley. Dallas: Taylor Trade publishing, 2004. Pp. vii+432. ISBN 1-58979-095-2. $34.95.

Lo stato fascista e la sua classe politica, 1922–1943. By Didier Musiedlak. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Pp. 585. ISBN 88-15-09381-8. €32.00.

Italy's social revolution: charity and welfare from Liberalism to Fascism. By Maria Sophia Quine. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. xv+429. ISBN 0-333-63261-3. £55.00.

La seduzione totalitaria: guerra, modernità, violenza politica (1914–1918). By Angelo Ventrone. Rome: Donzelli, 2003. Pp. xvi+288. ISBN 88-7989-840-X. €24.00.

With its winning of an American Academy Award, the film Life is beautiful (1997), brought its director and leading actor, Roberto Benigni, global fame. Benigni's zaniness and self-mockery seemed to embody everything that has convinced foreigners that Italians are, above all, brava gente (nice people). Sometimes, this conclusion can have a supercilious air – niceness can easily be reduced to levity or fecklessness. In those university courses that seek to comprehend the terrible tragedies of twentieth-century Europe, Italians seldom play a leading role. German, Russian, Polish, Yugoslav, and even British and French history are each riven with death and disaster or, alternatively, with heroism and achievement. In such austere company, brava gente can seem out of place.

Parliament and foreign policy in the eighteenth century. By Jeremy Black. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+261. ISBN 0-521-83331-0. £45.00.

Art and arms: literature, politics and patriotism during the seven years' war. By M. John Cardwell. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Pp. xii+306. ISBN 0-7190-6618-2. £49.99.

The British Isles and the war of American independence. By Stephen Conway. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. vii+407. ISBN 0-19-820649-3. £60.00.

Revolution, religion and national identity: imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795. By Peter M. Doll. London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Pp. 336. ISBN 0-8386-3830-9. £38.00.

Politics and the nation: Britain in the mid-eighteenth century. By Bob Harris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 392. ISBN 0-19-924693. £45.00.

Parliaments, nations, and identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850. Edited by Julian Hoppit. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xii+225. ISBN 0-7190-6247-0. £15.99.

Politik-Propaganda-Patronage. Francis Hare und die englische Publizistik im spanischen Erbfolgekrieg. By Jens Metzdorf. Mainz: Verlag Philip von Zabern, 2000. Pp. xv+566. ISBN 3-8053-2584-3. DM 114.00.

Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783. By Vincent Morley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. x+366. ISBN 0-521-81386-7. £48.00.

Breaking the backcountry: the Seven Years War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765. By Matthew C. Ward. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Pp. 329. ISBN 0-8229-4214-3. $34.95.

The Jacobites and Russia, 1715–1750. By Rebecca Wills. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002. Pp. 253. ISBN 1-86232-142-6. £20.00.

It has never been possible to write the history of eighteenth-century Britain as that of an island entirely by itself. Over a century ago, the Cambridge historian, J. R. Seeley, famously insisted that the history of England (sic) lay as much in America and Asia as in England, whilst G. M. Trevelyan's classic narrative of England under Queen Anne (3 vols., 1930–4) was presented against the background of the War of the Spanish Succession. More recently, John Brewer's remarkable Sinews of power: war, money and the English state, 1688–1784 (1989) demonstrated the extent to which the British state, and its fiscal-political structures, were geared towards the mobilization of military power, primarily to be deployed against France. In The sense of the people: politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (1995), Kathleen Wilson revealed the importance of empire and imperial expansion in popular politicization, whilst Linda Colley's Britons (1992) showed just how central the struggle with France was to the development of eighteenth-century British national identity. At the same time, our understanding of the European and global state system in which Britain played such a prominent role has been illuminated by Hamish Scott's British foreign policy in the age of the American revolution (1990), together with many publications by Jeremy Black including British foreign policy in the age of Walpole (1985) and America or Europe? British foreign policy, 1739–1763 (1997).

Fathers, families, and the state in France, 1914–1945. By Kristen Stromberg Childers. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. 261. ISBN 0-8014-4122-6. £23.95.

Origins of the French welfare state: the struggle for social reform in France, 1914–1947. By Paul V. Dutton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 251. ISBN 0-521-81334-4. £49.99.

Britain, France, and the financing of the First World War. By Martin Horn. Montreal and Kingston: McGill – Queen's University Press, 2002. Pp. 249. ISBN 0-7735-2293-X. £65.00.

The gold standard illusion: France, the Bank of France and the International Gold Standard, 1914–1939. By Kenneth Mouré. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 297. ISBN 0-19-924904-0. £40.00.

Workers' participation in post-Liberation France. By Adam Steinhouse. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001. Pp. 245. ISBN 0-7391-0282-6. $70.00 (hb). ISBN 0-7391-0283-4. $24.95 (pbk).

In the traditional historiography of twentieth-century France the period after the Second World War is usually contrasted favourably with that after 1918. After 1945, new men with new ideas, born out of the shock of defeat in 1940 and resistance to Nazi occupation, laid the basis for an economic and social democracy. The welfare state was created, women were given full voting rights, and French security, in both economic and territorial respects, was partially guaranteed by integrating West Germany into a new supranational institutional structure in Western Europe. 1945 was to mark the beginning of the ‘30 glorious years’ of peace and prosperity enjoyed by an expanding population in France. In sharp contrast, the years after 1918 are characterized as a period dominated by France's failed attempts to restore its status as a great power. Policies based on making the German taxpayer finance France's restoration are blamed for contributing to the great depression after 1929 and the rise of Hitler. However, as more research is carried out into the social and economic reconstruction of France after both world wars, it is becoming clear that the basis of what was to become the welfare state after 1945 was laid in the aftermath of the First World War. On the other hand, new reforms adopted in 1945 which did not build on interwar policies, such as those designed to give workers a voice in decision-making at the workplace, proved to be short-lived.

Subjects of the sultan: culture and daily life in the Ottoman empire. By Suraiya Faroqhi. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Pp. x+358. ISBN 1-86064-289-6. £35.00.

The Ottoman empire and early modern Europe. By Daniel Goffman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+273. ISBN 0-5214-59087. £15.99.

A shared world: Christians and Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. By Molly Greene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+228. ISBN 0-619-00898-1. $29.50.

Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab world: the roots of sectarianism. By Bruce Masters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+222. ISBN 0-521-803330. £48.00.

Consumption studies and the history of the Ottoman empire, 1560–1922: an introduction. Edited by Donald Quataert. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. vii+358. ISBN 0-7914-4431-7. $25.50.

The Ottoman empire, 1700–1922. Second edition. By Donald Quataert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii+212. ISBN 0-521-839106. £40.00.

Since Edward Said first launched his devastating critique of western scholarship on the Islamic world, it has been almost impossible to think of Orientalism as anything other than a euphemism for the systematic distortion of an exotic Other. That imaginings of a fanciful ‘Orient’ are now recognized as providing acute expositions of western pathologies, of references to deep-seated desires and anxieties so disturbing that they only reveal themselves in alterities, goes some way towards explaining the sheer bulk of interdisciplinary publications that have been directly inspired by Said's Orientalism.1 As reflexive phenomena, however, such publications have even less to say about the real ‘Orient’. Rather, the historical reconstruction of Orientalism's ostensible subject has been left to a separate and less conspicuous stream of scholarship that is characterized by painstaking archival research.