The relationship between philanthropy and women is a much-discussed topic in women's studies and history of the welfare state. Women have played a major role in philanthropic endeavors. They were personally involved in caring for the sick, the poor, and other destitutes, and took part in establishing and organizing philanthropic societies that catered to a host of social problems. Both books under consideration address this subject anew, though in very different ways. Elliott's book is about nineteenth-century England, McCarthy's volume includes articles on the development of women's voluntary work in various countries all over the world up to the present time.

New York City's great importance has necessarily attracted exceptional scholarship, including recently a Pulitzer Prize-winning history as well as widely acclaimed studies of the city's physical and social dimensions. Viewed from virtually every angle, the great city's history might appear to have been pretty well exhausted. With the publication of David Scobey's Empire City, however, New York may have received its most innovative and important study to date. Viewing the city's mid-nineteenth century boom as a crucial point in its development, Scobey manages both to infuse familiar subjects with new meaning and to invest them with broad national consequence.

Robert Bonner begins this wonderful and engaging narrative with a nod to contemporary debates over the symbolism and meaning of the Confederate battle flag. “In the 1990s,” he notes, “rebel flags became front-page news” as civil right organizations “worked to discredit a symbol they associated with slavery and racism” while heritage groups defended the flag “as a proud relic handed down from heroic ancestors” (p. 1). Bonner emphasizes in his introduction, however, that readers of Colors & Blood should not expect rumination on these contemporary debates. Instead, he has fashioned a fascinating study that explores how a series of Confederate banners and flags evolved out of and, in turn, shaped a “wartime flag culture that set the emotional tone of the Civil War . . . and brought together powerful themes of defiance, sovereignty, and bloodshed” (2). Although this wartime flag culture existed in the North as well as in the South, Colors & Blood focuses almost entirely on the Confederacy.

That ’modernity' is not simply a Western export to the rest of the world has been much noted recently. Only rarely, though, has the relationship between local and global, colonizers and colonized, and the West and ’the rest' in the production of modernity been so rigorously explored as it is in Timothy Mitchell's new book, Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. With precise, careful analysis of such phenomenon as the economy, capitalism, and expertise, Mitchell illuminates how the world in which we live came to acquire its particular shape.

Semper eadem—always the same—was Elizabeth I's motto, but the accounts and appropriations of her legacy have been anything but. In the century after her death, as John Watkins' study shows, Elizabeth received mostly good press, but she was praised for different reasons by different people, and to greatly varying political ends. Jacobean economists linked James and Elizabeth as saviors of the English nation against Catholic threat. Parliamentarians in the 1630s and 1640s (and Whig historians thereafter) praised an Elizabeth whose supposedly moderate, constitutionalist government contrasted with the tyrannical innovations of the Stuarts; Royalists, by contrast, praised her as a defender of royal prerogative. Elizabeth made an uncomfortable model for revolutionaries, and her famous memory was invoked less during the Interregnum than before or after; but Restoration writers such as Clarendon and William Cavendish advocated a return to Elizabethan government, which Clarendon understood as a via media between tyranny and excessive popular concessions, but which Cavendish frankly praised as a successful despotism. After the Glorious Revolution, the power of the monarchy had become too limited for Elizabethan government to serve as a practical political model of any kind; but popular interest in Elizabeth flourished in “secret histories” which purported to reveal the passions of her private life, a genre which appealed to the public appetite for scandal in high places, and which endures to this day.

Dominant understandings of globalization, according to Gillian Hart, are “disabling.” By measuring the effect of the “global” on the “local,” conventional impact studies rely on a flawed conceptual opposition of time and space: the “global” is temporal and dynamic, the “local” spatial and static (12–13). This drives the lament, heard in post-apartheid government circles, that “there is no alternative” to the pro-globalization policies adopted when the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was displaced in June 1996 by a plan known as Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). “The central premise of GEAR was that an orthodox neoliberal package—tight fiscal austerity, monetary discipline, wage restraints, reducing corporate taxes, trade liberalization, and phasing out exchange controls—would lure investment . . . unleash rapid growth, tighten labor markets, and drive up wages” (20). A few years later, poverty had grown among the poorest and unemployment remained high.

One of the key narratives of political modernity is that of the emergence of human agency in constructing the social order, with theories of divine origins giving way to the notion of humans as lawmakers. While such narratives often center on the death of God and the wresting of sovereignty from monarchs, Reconfiguring Modernity reminds us that they also tend to establish another adversary: nature. Modernity is commonly thought of as a linear movement away from nature or as a dialectical overcoming of nature, which establishes human agency and freedom over and against nature. The prime example for Thomas is Maruyama Masao, a renowned political philosopher who attributed Japan's militaristic nationalism to its failure to establish the primacy of invention or human agency over nature. Thomas questions this conception of modernity based on an opposition between human agency and nature. It is not by negating or overcoming nature that modern political freedoms emerge, she argues. Rather political freedoms come of specific ideological configurations of nature (cosmos) and society (polis). Reconfiguring Modernity thus turns to the history of the idea of nature in Japanese political thought to reconsider the formation of modernity in Japan.

Sami Zubaida's Law and Power in the Islamic World is a fascinating politico-social history of the relations between Islamic law and the procession of political masters who have ruled the Middle East since the Prophet's death. One message is clear: the notion of an omnipotent shariءa, passed from caliph to caliph for fourteen centuries, is a myth held by both Islamist radicals and their Western critics.

While the mildness of the colonial encounter in the European edges of empire is belied by intractable political standoffs in Northern Ireland and Cyprus, such locations traditionally have been of only secondary interest to scholars of colonialism. This book valuably documents the complexity of one such “sideshow in the great game of European imperial expansion” (p. x), the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands (1815–1864), which now form a part of Greece.

The provocative, lucid, and wide-ranging set of essays contained in States of Imagination attempt to fashion a “denaturalizing approach” to the postcolonial state, one that moves beyond both orthodox Marxist renderings of the state as epiphenomenal and modernization-theoretical approaches that substituted a catalogue of negative definitions (narratives of lack) for a critical engagement with postcolonial governance. While rooted in an explicitly anthropological perspective, the introduction and the thirteen essays that follow position themselves in a conceptual “space” between Gramscian and Foucauldian frameworks that have broad interdisciplinary import (p. 3). A central assumption here is that the distinct epistemological grounding of Gramscian and Foucauldian perspectives does not translate into fundamental incompatibility, much less demand a rigorous epistemic hygiene. The conceptually dense introduction and essays seek to parlay the operative metaphor of a “space between” Gramscian and Foucauldian frameworks in order to render intelligible a range of paradoxes constitutive of the state in postcolonial worlds. While the attempted rapprochement between Gramscian analyses of hegemony and class relations and the currently ascendant Foucauldian analytic of governmentality is somewhat uneven in execution, it is motivated by a concern to grasp the “ambiguities of the state” as “both illusory as well as a set of concrete institutions” as “both distant and impersonal ideas as well as localized and personified institutions” as “both violent and destructive as well as benevolent and productive” (5).