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Book Review: Uncertain Allies: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Threat of a United Europe by Klaus Larres 书评:《不确定的盟友:尼克松、基辛格和欧洲统一的威胁》克劳斯·拉雷斯著

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945l

Dianne Kirby

引用次数: 0

Book Review: The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom by Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski 书评:《罗斯的统治家族:氏族、家庭和王国》，作者:克里斯蒂安·拉芬斯伯格和唐纳德·奥斯特洛夫斯基

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945s

Derek Offord

spring’, the city on the frontline, the final resting place for unidentified Ukrainian fighters, home to thousands of refugees and IDPs, Dnipro came to embody Ukraine’s resilience and inclusivity. And although Portnov maintains that political allegiances back in 1991 and 2014 could not be presupposed, those were the exact choices which have determined what modern Ukrainianness should look like. In the end, ‘who controls Dnipropetrovsk, controls the entire east’ (325). Overall, the book offers a vivid assemblage of interwoven storylines and episodes from the city’s multi-dimensional past, which combined result in an entangled history of Dnipro as a European city. This book is an essential read for everyone wishing to understand the multi-layered history of Ukraine and diversity of its regions. It can also serve as a starting point for scholars wishing to explore numerous episodes and historical events mentioned in the book, which unfortunately could not be discussed in more detail due to the extensive scope of the study.

引用次数: 0

Book Review: Opera: The Autobiography of the Western World by Simon Banks 书评:西蒙·班克斯的《歌剧:西方世界的自传》

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945e

Francis Maes

引用次数: 0

Book Review: Travellers in the Great Steppe: From the Papal Envoys to the Russian Revolution by Nick Fielding 书评:《大草原上的旅行者:从教皇特使到俄国革命》，作者:尼克·菲尔丁

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945c

Derek Offord

matter, as the authors of Mussolini’s Nature, for all their determination to be virtuously antifascist, repeatedly admit. Nuances surface. Thus, the reclamations, if doubtlessly couched in the vocabulary of war, bore much continuity with what had been started under liberalism. Perhaps worse, for all the talk about thereby hardening a united race ready for victory, expensive government intervention brought greater benefit to canny large landowners and industrialists than to more ordinary people. In the Pontine marshes and elsewhere, there was always ‘a gap between the regime’s rhetoric and [its] practice’ (58), a reality that combined ‘low tech. modernisation ... and violence’ (62). Hydro-electrical developments were scarcely a fascist invention and the spread of ‘remote dams’ ‘spoke the language of the big banking and industrial groups, not that of the rural [mountain] folk so celebrated by the regime’ (79). In regard to the design of national parks, policy changed in the 1930s as the regime, allegedly, ‘grew more totalitarian’ (93). Mining and drilling were part of the colonialist venture (with its rape of nature and local people’s identities). AGIP, for example, sought oil off Massawa. But no one found it where, later it might seem to have been obvious, in Libya. Qualification follows qualification in the portrayal of totalitarianism, Italian style. Words and facts fit uneasily together. ‘Nature as an enemy and fascists’ wars on nature’, we hear in the conclusion, ‘were as much narrative devices as they were the practices of environmental governance’ (182). With such a warning, Armiero, Biasillo and von Hardening have purposefully initiated what may be later studies of the complex relationship between the Italians of Mussolini’s regime and the environment.

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引用次数: 0

Book Review: Istoriia rossiiskogo gosudarstva. Tsar’-osvoboditel’ i tsar’-mirotvorets. Lekarstvo dlia imperii [History of the Russian State. The Tsar-Liberator and the Tsar-Peacemaker. Medicine for the Empire] by Boris Akunin 书评：Istoriia rossiiskogo gosudarstva.Tsar'-osvoboditel' i tsar'-mirotvorets.Lekarstvo dlia imperii [《俄罗斯国家史》。沙皇-解放者与沙皇-和平缔造者。帝国的医学]，鲍里斯-阿库宁著

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945a

Anton Fedyashin

identity-formation as a key factor in the development of total, global war. If the war was about ‘us’ versus ‘them’, who or what was part of ‘us’? Here lies the greatest strength of the book. It tells a mostly familiar story, but does so by illuminating just how pervasive and how far-reaching some of the transformations wrought by the war were, and how deeply they impacted ordinary lives. From the neutral Liberian economy destroyed by blockade to the Ngati Porou tribe of New Zealand saluting the Belgian flag following its invasion by Germany, from the desperate letters from an Indian soldier begging his brother not to volunteer for war in ‘civilized’ Europe to the parallel imperial war waged by the French in Volta Bani (current-day Burkina Faso and Mali) in 1915–1917, their tales stay with the reader long after they have finished reading. What is more, these stories serve to illuminate the book’s central argument: that the total, global First World War produced, enhanced or illuminated so many contradictory hopes, fears, claims, expectations and hatreds that no post-war settlement could ever hope to satisfy them all, producing a world with glaringly visible and globally connected inequalities ‘infused with the grief and anger that the violence of the war had unleashed on the world’ (173). I do wonder, however, whether the book completely succeeds in making its point. Firstly, the book’s conscious focus on ‘outlier’ examples from places often very far from the familiar Western Front occasionally makes it harder to see the contradictions in the responses to the war that are so central to the core argument Abbenhuis and Tames are making, especially since many of those examples point in similar directions. Moreover, in replicating the familiar structure of many older and decidedly less ‘global’ First World War surveys, it runs the risk of instilling in the reader the sense that the First World War was something that ‘radiated’ out of Europe, rather than a truly worldwide event that was experienced and interpreted using local interpretative frameworks. A more ‘provincialized’ approach to the war is, perhaps, the next milestone for the ongoing quest to understand total and global war. In the meantime, this book is impressive in its breadth, elegantly written, and provides a short and succinct introduction to the state of the art of research into an ever more global First World War.

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引用次数: 0

Book Review: Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City by Andrii Portnov 书评:安德里·波特诺夫的《第聂伯罗:欧洲城市的纠缠历史》

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945r

Olena Palko

human body (this was nonetheless fashionable in the second half of the nineteenth century, and ironically Marx himself occasionally succumbed to it). To this is dedicated Chapter 2, but these arguments resurface also in Chapter 3 (on the interwar period, the League of Nations, and the end of the mandate in Iraq), Chapter 4 (on the end of empires and decolonization, with special reference to South West Africa) and Chapter 5 (on civilization-based arguments in the twenty-first century, with special reference to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq). While it is obvious that nineteenthand twentieth-century imperialism has entailed exploitation of the colonies, I find it less plausible that colonial expansionism is a necessary consequence of a capitalist economy, and, therefore, that arguments based on one civilization being superior to another are necessitated by capitalism. Capitalism as Civilisation grounds the necessary link between capitalism and imperialism – which was in fact popularized by the first generation of Marxists – in a reading of the first book of Capital (in which Marx makes no explicit link between capitalism and imperialism, despite what some Marxists read into it. For that matter, there are more explicit, if unsubstantiated, links in the Communist Manifesto, which is a work of Marx as much as it is by Engels, and, also for that reason, cannot be taken without further elaboration to represent Marx’s definitive view). Historiography on the origins of empire has added nuance ever since and suggests including the role of ideas and strategy in addition to a crude materialistic or economic reading (see above all the 1998 Oxford History of the British Empire). If one accepts the link between capitalism and imperialism, the key contention of the book is argued for convincingly: arguments based on a distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ people are ‘a historically contingent response to the need to make sense of and regulate a world shaped and reshaped by these dynamics of unequal, yet global, capitalist development’ (4). In fact, even though the introduction may give the impression that the book is confined to very niche debates (such as the contribution of Marxist studies to deconstruction, whose intellectual significance for the historiography of international law is probably marginal), the book’s four case studies are a valuable contribution on the uses of ‘civilization’ arguments, and this is the case whether or not one agrees with the (more ambitious) theoretical framework through which they are presented.

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引用次数: 0

Book Review: Germany and the Confessional Divide: Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989 by Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting, eds 书评:德国和忏悔的分歧:宗教紧张局势和政治文化，1871年至1989年，马克·爱德华·鲁夫和托马斯Großbölting，编辑

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945t

Jacob Saliba

of the most enlightened realms the world has ever known’ (181). On the other hand, the book has many strengths. The authors show deep knowledge of primary sources and look critically at original narratives in them that have been too readily accepted by numerous later historians. They display a command of the secondary literature on their subject. They carefully examine such complex matters as inter-familial and inter-clan relationships and rivalries, the rise and decline of different regions within the lands of Rus, and shifts in the complex understandings and practices governing inheritance and succession. It should also be said that the book is attractively produced and generously illustrated (although a small number of the family trees that are helpfully included in every chapter are difficult to read in the landscape orientation that is used). Nor, finally, should the contemporary resonance of this re-examination of Rus be overlooked. By challenging the anachronistic notion of Rus as a proto-Russian state ruled by a dynasty supposedly founded in the ninth century, Raffensperger and Ostrowski weaken the claims of Great Russian Muscovite rulers and their modern admirers to exercise legitimate autocratic control over all the lands in which Eastern Slavs mingled or competed with other ethnic groups in the Middle Ages.

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引用次数: 1

Book Review: The Conquest of Ruins: The Third Reich and the Fall of Rome by Julia Hell 书评:《废墟的征服:第三帝国与罗马的衰亡》，作者:朱莉娅·赫尔

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945j

R. J. B. Bosworth

引用次数: 0

Book Review: Words in Space and Time: Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe by Tomasz Kamusella 书评:《时空中的词汇:近代中欧语言政治的历史地图集》，作者:Tomasz Kamusella

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945k

Francis King

fading from most political, cultural and economic minds since it is more than one generation since a knowledge of Latin, so long the first qualification for arrival into power in Europe, diminished into a forgotten and deprecated skill of those who once were? Satirists may have labelled Trump ‘Il Douche’ but it is hard to see his aggressive/pessimistic MAGAism as much prompted by his reflection on Virgil and the classics. In gazing at Hell’s remarkable book, am I in reality observing a ruin of two millennia of classicists’ intellectuality, now to be surpassed by AI and a genuinely globalized world which may or may not save itself from environmental calamity?

引用次数: 0

Book Review: The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation’s Past, 1715–1830 by Matthew D’Auria 书评:《法国国家认同的塑造:叙述国家的过去，1715-1830》，作者:马修·德奥里亚

3区历史学 Q1 Arts and Humanities

European History Quarterly

Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI: 10.1177/02656914231199945f

Carolina Renata Armenteros Muñoz De Laborde

powerful, as people in charge of society. Any art form could be pressed into the service of Banks’ thesis. Painting, literature and spoken theatre reflect the same cultural preoccupations. Nevertheless, Banks argues, opera was vital because of its emotional appeal. He suggests that Beethoven’s Fidelio may have incited the Vienna Congress delegates to abolish slavery. To reconcile the two timescales is no straightforward matter. Opera treats history in a mythologized version. For this reason, Banks does not start from its mythologized representation. In the beginning was Creation, artistically represented in Haydn’s Creation and Wagner’s prelude to Das Rheingold. Banks distinguishes 36 topics, which he organizes into three parts: (1) new answers to timeless questions: the basics, such as humanity’s relation to God, to history, to the individual, or to a sense of home; (2) the modern West liberates itself from the Middle Ages – not a narration of the passing of the Middle Ages into Modern Times, but of the treatment of the Middle Ages in opera; and (3) from despotism to pluralism – covering everything from a critique of absolute rulership to the rise of the creative artist and the emancipation of ordinary people. In the way Banks develops his thesis, his great familiarity with the repertoire is well demonstrated. Operas are creatively selected and juxtaposed to illustrate a theme. The disadvantage, however, is the treatment of opera as an art form of cultural signals rather than of content. Opera still comes across as an emotionally exalted art form, rather than a medium for profound and nuanced thinking. Precisely those operas that acquired fame for their philosophical nuance are conspicuously absent. There is no trace of Don Giovanni, nor of The Magic Flute, no Rusalka, not even Pelléas et Mélisande. Messiaen’s Saint-François d’Assise could have offered the necessary balance in a rather one-sided reading of religion as an oppressive force. The fallacy of treating complex art works as mere symptoms runs throughout the book as a whole. Reducing Faust, for instance, to a moralizing story about a sexual liaison in a small bourgeois town amounts to an extreme reduction of one of the most complex philosophical undertakings of western culture. For which readership can this book be intended? Historians may find it of little use. Opera lovers may be a likely audience. The best place for this book is in education. It is widely documented, beautifully illustrated, and above all written with verve. In a single volume, it offers much material that may be of use in an educational setting, especially if treated as a starting point for discussion.

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引用次数: 0

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