The history of reading can link intellectual and cultural developments with social or political change in the eighteenth century. Historians of the book increasingly argue that an understanding of historical reading practices is essential if we are to understand the impact of texts on individuals and on society as a whole: textual evidence alone is inadequate. Recent work on eighteenth-century readers has used sources including book trade records, correspondence, and diaries to reconstruct the reading lives of individuals and of groups of readers. Such sources reveal the great variety of reading material many eighteenth-century readers could access, and the diversity and sophistication of reading practices they often employed, in selecting between a range of available reading strategies. Thus, any one theoretical paradigm is unlikely to capture the full range of eighteenth-century reading experience. Instead, we can trace the evolution of particular reading cultures, including popular and literary reading cultures, the existence of cultures based around particular genres of print, such as newspapers, and reading as a part of social and conversational life. There is now a need for a new synthesis that combines the new evidence of reading practice with textual analysis to explain continuity and change across the century.

Historians face the problem of how to write the history of the eighteenth-century British empire. How can the history of Britain and the history of its empire be brought together? Recent research has demonstrated the value of employing the idea of networks to describe the interrelatedness of empire. In the history of science and economic history such a notion has been quite thoroughly articulated, particularly in relation to the exchange of botanical knowledge and the transaction of goods. Here it is argued that conceiving of empire as a set of networks through which knowledge and ideas were exchanged, trust was negotiated, goods were traded, and people travelled is an avenue worth pursuing in the project to write the history of the eighteenth-century British empire.

Intellectual developments since the mid-1960s have served to assist the efforts of those responsible for American policy in the Vietnam war subsequently to empty the history of that conflict of ethical critique. This article argues for the necessity of ethically informed historical enquiry and, with respect to Vietnam, proposes that there now exists the best opportunity for a generation for scholars to construct a fresh and credible moral history of the war. Increasingly, we have access to the perspectives of the ‘other side/s’: the revolution in the south, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam regime in Hanoi, the People's Republic of China, and the USSR. An examination of the motivations and interactions of these parties, combined with the continuing exegesis of American policy debates, makes clear just how critical concerns (and failures) of ethics were to the development of the conflict. In particular, it clarifies the manner in which US leaders abdicated responsibility in exaggerating the relatively limited strategic challenge that they faced in south-east Asia. Vietnam was not a ‘necessary war’; nor can the decision to fight it – given its predictable consequences for south Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers alike – simply be explained away through the discourse of the honest ‘mistake’.

The alcoholic empire: vodka and politics in late Imperial Russia. By Patricia Herlihy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. vi+244. ISBN 0-19-513431-1. £25.00.

Nikolai Sukhanov: chronicler of the Russian Revolution. By Israel Getzler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xix+226. ISBN 0-333-97035-7. £45.00.

Making war, forging revolution: Russia's continuum of crisis, 1914–1921. By Peter Holquist. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+359. ISBN 0-674-00907-X. £29.95.

The Russian Civil War: primary sources. Edited by A. B. Murphy. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+274. ISBN 0-333-77013-7. £45.00.

Homosexual desire in revolutionary Russia: the regulation of sexual and gender dissent. By Dan Healey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+392. ISBN 0-226-32233-5. £25.00.

These five volumes under review each address different aspects of Russia's experience of modernization and revolution from the 1880s to the 1930s. Our understanding of the scale and complex nature of the changes wrought during these years has been immeasurably enriched by two important factors: first, the recent opening of the former Soviet archives and the detailed case studies that their contents have facilitated; secondly, a mounting reluctance to see 1917 as a radical break with the past and hence an increasing tendency to reinsert the Revolution into a broader series of dynamic and momentous changes that rocked Russia during the period. The rapid expansion of cultural history in the discipline has prompted many scholars to rethink central features of the revolutionary period and to open up new fields of study. Over the last decade, attention has turned to the dynamism and diversity of late tsarist and early Soviet culture embracing topics as wide-ranging as crime, popular religion, the natural and social sciences, and representations of sex.1 Another recent focus has been the experience of conflict across the years of the Revolution and Civil War and its impact on prospects for democracy in Russia.2 The rise to prominence in the historiography of the term ‘modernity’ is an obvious feature of a more comparative analytical framework that has sought to re-insert Russia's revolutionary experience into a pan-European perspective.

The quincentennial of Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1992 generated an enormous outpouring of both emotion and scholarship. At times, it seemed that the emotional issues prevailed. Unlike earlier generations of scholars who had celebrated Columbus's achievements, the cohort of 1992 mostly attacked the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. As the historian Kenneth Maxwell put it, ‘Columbus was mugged on the way to his own party.’ By the time many commentators got through with him, Columbus had become responsible for precipitating centuries of slavery, environmental degradation, and ethnic cleansing in the Americas. He became the antichrist of a secular United States.

The Lancashire working classes, c. 1880–1930. By Trevor Griffiths. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. viii+390. ISBN 0-19-924738-2. £55.00.

Labour in crisis: the second Labour government, 1929–1931. By Neil Riddell. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Pp. xi+267. ISBN 0-7190-5084-7. £45.00.

Classes and cultures: England, 1918–1951. By Ross McKibbin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+324. ISBN 0-19-820853-3. £18.99.

The Labour party in Wales, 1900–2000. Edited by Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams, and Deian Hopkin. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+324. ISBN 0-7083-1586-0. £35.00.

Labour's first century. Edited by Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane, and Nick Tiratsoo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. x+418. ISBN 0-521-65184-0. £25.00.

Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924. By Paul Ward. Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 1998. Pp. viii+232. ISBN 0-86193-239-0. £35.00.

Austerity in Britain: rationing, controls and consumption, 1939–1955. By Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+286. ISBN 0-19-820453-1. £40.00.

Publishers and historians have been unable to resist the opportunity provided by one hundred years of ‘Labour’ to subject the history of the party to fresh scrutiny. Centenary history, however, must rest upon an assumption of continuity. In this case, it is assumed that there is a clear line of descent from the Labour Representation Committee formed in February 1900 to the ‘New Labour’ of the present. There is nothing improper about writing the history of a political party on this basis. Yet, as with other social movements, it is no vast discovery to observe that parties change through time as circumstances and conditions change. The accompanying rhetoric, however, has often skated over such disconcerting realities. When Labour celebrated its half-century, for example, its rise was presented by its chroniclers as a ‘forward march’ in which were enrolled ‘those of all ages and all classes’ who were not afraid to fight for the progress of mankind. Mr Attlee, in his foreword to the volume by Francis Williams, put the matter somewhat differently. Labour's story, he claimed, was very characteristic of Britain. It recorded ‘the triumph of reasonableness and practicality over doctrinaire impossibilism’. It was to be only a decade later, however, that various contemporary observers asked themselves whether the ‘tide of history’ had turned against the party. In the 1970s and 1980s, indeed, commentators and academic writers almost invariably reached for words like ‘crisis’ or ‘decay’ as they contemplated its fate. It looked, indeed, as though the ‘forward march’ might be going nowhere.

‘The word [reform] is a singularly vague one; it means every thing, and any thing; it conveys no positive idea whatever; but seems to have a different acceptation in each different mouth.’ So declared John Walsh, an opponent of parliamentary reform in his 1831 pamphlet, Popular opinions on parliamentary reform. Walsh's observation, which shrewdly identifies a recurring semantic problem for historians of the early nineteenth century, is but one of many illuminating texts to be reprinted in the History of suffrage, 1760–1867, edited by Anna Clark and Sarah Richardson. This publication, when read alongside the other two volumes under consideration, Hannah Barker and David Vincent's Language, print and electoral politics, 1790–1832, which reprints a plethora of electoral ephemera from pre-reform Newcastle-under-Lyme; and Martin Hewitt and Robert Poole's The diaries of Samuel Bamford provides fascinating insights into the constellation of vocabularies, strategies, and concerns that comprised the reforming project.

The five books under review represent some of the recent achievements of Italian historiography of the early modern period. The gradual opening of Inquisitional archives in the 1990s and the growing sophistication of historical analysis of Inquisitorial documents have expanded dramatically our knowledge of and familiarity with the institutional and legal histories of the Inquisition and of the operation of justice in the Italian peninsula. One result of this is that the earlier and innovative work of Carlo Ginzburg in Inquisitorial archives has come under scrutiny. The books under review present a new view of the functioning of the Italian Inquisition, and by so doing shed new light on issues of authority and power in early modern Italy. Implicitly, the books under review also posit themselves against microstoria and address the larger working of power over long periods of time.