Richard Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), 269 pp., pb., £14.99, ISBN 0-340-67727-9.

Ottar Dahl, Syndicalism, Fascism and Post-Fascism in Italy, 1900–1950 (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1999), 180 pp., hb., 280 NOK, ISBN 82-560-1187-4.

Alexander De Grand, Italian Fascism. Its Origins and Development, 3rd edn (Lincoln, NA, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 191 pp., pb., £9.95, ISBN 0-8032-6622-7.

Dahlia Elazar, The Making of Fascism. Class, State, and Counter-Revolution, Italy 1919–1922 (Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2001), 172 pp., hb., $46.50, ISBN 0-275-95864-7.

Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology. Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945 (London: Routledge, 2000), 286 pp., pb., £15.99, ISBN 0-415-21612-5.

Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997), 120 pp., pb., £9.99, ISBN 0-335-19487-7.

John Pollard, The Fascist Experience in Italy (London: Routledge 1998), 158 pp., hb., £40.00, ISBN 0-415-11631-7.

Jeffrey Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln, NA, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 325 pp., pb., £16.95, ISBN 0-8032-9268-6.

I read Professor Woolf's erudite and ambitious article with great interest. The central argument of the piece – that writing a history of Europe is an impossibly complicated, but still worthwhile, enterprise that would involve the interrelation of many different kinds of history – is one that we would probably all accept. I am more more sceptical about three subplots in Woolf's essay.

By the end of the 1950s, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had established its global approach in Dutch development policy, with the United Nations regarded as the ideal platform. This article argues that in the course of the following decade Dutch business interests succeeded in challenging the multilateral approach, with the Ministry of Economic Affairs shaping the legal instruments of foreign aid, such as tied aid and investment guarantees. The article further argues that despite this economic pragmatism the Minister for Development Co-operation managed to represent the Netherlands as a distinterested worldwide actor by the end of the 1960s.

During the Second World War, countless individuals were robbed of their freedom, particularly their freedom of movement, and put into some form of captivity while being deprived, to a greater or lesser extent, of their rights. The most dramatic example by far, the concentration camps, does not concern us here. I shall be dealing in the first place with the fate of prisoners of war during and immediately after the conflict. Numbered in millions, their destinies were very different depending on when and where they were captured, and to which country and ‘race’ they belonged. But there was also another large group of people who lost their freedom, and most of their rights, during the Second World War: civilian internees. I shall be considering their fate here insofar as it is discussed in the works under review below. However, it should be noted here that internees, unlike prisoners of war, were not covered by international law; internment camps cannot be equated with prisoner of war camps.

The article argues that although the Federal Republic of Germany had a genuine interest in the development of the ‘Third World’, it was the pressure of the United States that urged West Germany to become a major donor country during the first development decade. Its economic and financial strength made West Germany the primary target of burden-sharing claims. Having accepted the position as a major contributor of foreign aid to underdeveloped countries, West Germany at first tried to pursue a development policy based on its own postwar experiences and economic concepts in reconstructing its economy. It operated within the framework developed by Western donor countries in the Development Assistance Committee and agreed to soften the terms of its foreign aid-giving during the second part of the 1960s. Its substantial and effective foreign economic assistance policy gave West Germany some leverage in pursuing its own political interests in other fields and in gaining political status in the international community.

As can be seen from the range of books reviewed here, there is considerable interest in studying European foreign policy. Numerous questions about European foreign policy merit attention: how and why has the European foreign policy system evolved? how does it operate? what does it produce? and what effects does it have on the outside world and on European Union (EU) member states? All of these books grapple with at least some of these questions.

It is possible, as Richard Vinen claims, that I arrange historians into categories that are too neat and selective. But I am puzzled by the relationship of his examples to the particular point that I was making. My argument was that the two world wars were experienced as a crisis that placed in doubt the assumptions underlying the interpretation of the long-term progress of European civilisation. I limited my illustration of this to historians who – during these thirty years – wrote histories of Europe that seemed to me to exemplify their responses, either through their vindication of what Europe had offered to humanity until its self-destruction, or, in Toynbee's case, through a comparative study of the cycle of civilisations. Marc Bloch was not included because his Strange Defeat was specific to France; whereas Braudel (whom I should have included) seems to me to strengthen my case, as his Mediterranean certainly carries the message of European civilisation. The fact that Pirenne's great work was only published posthumously is interesting, but it is when he wrote it that matters. His age, like Fisher's, seems to me irrelevant, or possibly even confirms the importance for historians of an earlier liberal period of the identification of Europe's history with progress.

Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 319 pp., pb., £12.50/$18.95, ISBN 0-691-08867-5.

Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 236 pp., hb., £45.00, pb., £15.95, ISBN 0-521-56214-7.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 288 pp., hb., £25.00, ISBN 0-19-505000-2.

Katherine Bliss Eaton, ed., Enemies of the People: The Destruction of Soviet Literary, Theater, and Film Arts in the 1930s (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 230 pp., hb., £59.95, ISBN 0-8101-1769-X.

J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 179 pp., hb., £44.95, ISBN 0-313-30921-3.

A number of recent events have shown that finance still has an important part to play in the modern economy: banks may take excessive risks; accounting and supervisory systems may prove inadequate; stock-market prices may collapse and leave rash undertakings perilously over-indebted. The stagnation of the Japanese economy from 1990 onwards is a stark reminder that such events may have a real impact. Can a knowledge of financial history help to make them better understood? The plethora of recent works in the field at least gives some background against which to measure the rapid changes now occurring. In this article I shall attempt an overview of the field, with particular attention to the recent works listed above. First I shall trace the evolution of the notion of ‘financial systems’ as a coherent and stable set of financial relationships and organisations, as it has emerged from cross-fertilisation of work by economists and historians. One difficulty about analysing such systems is that they can be long-lived (often forty years or more) and so change only slowly and in a way that can be hard to grasp. As a result, many historians tend to neglect the striking differences between countries, whereas economists like to compare snapshots of systems in different countries at a given moment. My object in this article is to alert the reader to the risk that recent advances in the study of the American financial system may become a stumbling block to the study of very different European models. On the other hand, some directions in the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history may throw fresh light both on contemporary European financial systems and on some dark corners in the financial history of the United States.

Brad K. Blitz is Senior Lecturer in International and Development Studies at the University of Surrey Roehampton. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1998. He has recently published articles on European public policy and social policies in Comparative Education Review and South European Society and Politics.

Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 160 pp., pb., €10.90, ISBN 3-525-34017-6.

Alf Lüdtke, Inge Marssolek, and Adelheid von Saldern, eds., Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts, Transatlantische historische Studien 6 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1996), 317 pp., hb., €36.00, ISBN 3-515-06952-6.

Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger, eds., Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 258 pp., pb., $24.00, ISBN 1-57181-108-7.

Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany, Studies on the History of Society and Culture 35 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 333 pp., pb., $50.00, ISBN 0-520-21139-1.

Wade Jacoby, Imitation and Politics: Redesigning Modern Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 226 pp., hb., £49.95, ISBN 0-8014-3438-6.

In 1959, while it was struggling to modernise its economy and to tackle the internal north–south gap, Italy joined Western initiatives to increase the quality and quantity of assistance to developing countries. Politically, this was part of an effort to upgrade Italy's standing in the international arena and to develop a regional role in the Mediterranean. Economically, it could increase exports, but this had to be accommodated to a tight state bugdet and a small private capital market. Therefore in the Development Assistance Group/Development Assistance Committee Italy opposed both narrow definitions and automatic criteria for burden sharing. The 1962–63 structural crisis required a new policy and a limit to foreign aid commitments. Export credits remained the key instrument of Italy's development assistance, while ‘soft loans’ as requested by DAC resolutions were considered incompatible with Italy's capabilities and financial resources and had to be restricted to the multilateral level.

The history of intellectuals, as developed in France, is now venerable enough to have a history of its own. From the early 1980s its development signalled the end of the heroic age of the French intellectual and the beginning of a critical review of French intellectual practice, hitherto overshadowed by a ‘history of ideas’ stigmatised as inclining towards abstraction and idealism. Debray, Bourdieu, Hamon, Rotman and others have variously rhapsodised over the beauty of the intellectual ‘corpse’. At the beginning of the decade the tragic fading of the revolutionary adventure, the bitter retreat into a recrudescent professionalism and the surrender to the perceived invasion of mass culture were together bringing about fundamental changes in intellectual attitudes and created a new set of circumstances which the optimistic could interpret as a redefinition, and the pessimists as a laying to rest, of the function and figure of the intellectual.

This article examines the origins of Norwegian development aid in the early 1950s and the institutional structure, the geographic spread and the goals of the Norwegian aid effort until the early 1970s. The article argues that Norwegian aid must be seen as the outcome of broad set of considerations of an altruistic, geopolitical and domestic political nature. Both domestic and international pressures from within the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development contributed to substantially increasing Norwegian foreign economic assistance from modest beginnings. It is argued that oil wealth played a minor role in this transition.

As ever, the Third Reich and its aftermath are still proving a fertile ground for historians. The Nazi dictatorship and its review and reappraisal during the post-war years continue to fascinate historians. The books discussed in the following review highlight the cultural, political, economic and judicial consequences of the Third Reich for postwar Germany.

The past few years have seen the publication of a number of important contributions to the historiography of the Prague Spring of 1968, the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August that year and the process of so-called ‘normalisation’ in the country and the wider communist world. The Czechoslovak crisis of 1968–9 has never really ceased to inspire either scholarly research or passionate public and political debate. It has attracted even more attention, though, since its thirtieth anniversary in 1998, and a state-of-the-art essay seems appropriate.

Leisure and tourism are not just pervasive social and cultural practices, they are also big business, with tourism now being the world's largest industry. According to the World Tourism Organization, in 2001 tourism generated $462.2 billion in international receipts, despite declining from the previous year owing to the 11 September terrorist attacks. Thus, leisure and leisure travel have long been vital subjects for a variety of disciplines; economics, sociology, geography, anthropology and literary criticism, among them. Yet if leisure in general has in recent years drawn the attention of historians, tourism is just now coming into its own as an engaging historical subject. The works reviewed here indicate that leisure and tourism thrive as fields of interdisciplinary inquiries. They also demonstrate a new appreciation of tourism among historians, as an expression of individual and collective ‘experience’, as well as for its contributions to major developments, such as nationalism and regional development, class formation, and the rise of modern consumer cultures.

Glen O'Hara is Lecturer in Modern History at New College, Oxford. He is the co-author, with Niall Ferguson, of ‘The Myth of the Feelgood Factor’, in N. Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World Since 1700 (London, 2001). He is currently working on a book on British economic and social planning in the 1960s.

Does the turn of the twenty-first century set a new frontier in the writing of urban history? According to demographers we are advancing towards a fully urbanised world where for the first time the majority of the planet's population will live in cities, but for a European urban historian it is difficult to discern a period in contemporary history when this has not been the main trend. In fact, it has been precisely the overwhelming presence of cities in recent European history which has made it so difficult to define urban history as a distinct branch of knowledge. To some extent, the complexity of the urban fabric and the diversity of events which define an urban environment have often constrained the work of urban historians and the heuristic value of their research in comparison with the work of more established disciplines such as social and economic history, the history of planning and architecture or, even more recently, environmental history.

Esther Helena Arens is currently completing her dissertation, ‘The political economy of West German and Dutch development aid to Indonesia during the 1960s’, in the Department of History at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn.