ARTICLES
Pirates and Kings: Power on the Shores of Early Modern Madagascar and the Indian Ocean
Jane Hooper, 215
This article describes the ways elites in Madagascar benefited from interactions with European and American pirates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Malagasy leaders expanded their knowledge of global patterns of exchange and used this knowledge to monopolize trade from the island. At the time, the identification and suppression of pirates became a conflict between trade systems in and around the island. The states formed by Malagasy elites challenged British and French influence in the southwestern Indian Ocean and came under attack during the nineteenth century, a period of expanding European power in the region.
Women’s Fashions in Transition: Ottoman Borderlands and the Anglo-Ottoman Exchange of Costumes
Onur Inal, 243
Following the considerable increase in the interactions between Ottomans and Europeans, Ottoman port cities, referred to here as “borderlands,” became meeting places of distinct worlds. Ottoman and British people met, clashed, and grappled with each other in the borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. There was unbalanced, disparate, and disproportionate, but also mutual and constant interchange between the two societies. This article discusses one facet of this interchange: the Anglo-Ottoman exchange of women’s costumes.
Malice in Wonderland: Dreams of the Orient and the Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China
Erik Ringmar, 273
This article explains the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan, the imperial palace compound located northwest of Beijing, by an Anglo-French army in 1860. Bracketing the political and military context, it looks at the ways the emperor’s palace has been interpreted in European cultural history and the ways it was understood by the people responsible for its destruction. To Europeans, the Yuanmingyuan was a place of wonder, and it was more than anything the transformation of the language of wonder that made the palace vulnerable to European aggression. Intercultural aesthetic judgments, the article concludes, always have political implications.
Kipling, the Orient, and Orientals: “Orientalism” Reoriented?
David Scott, 299
Rudyard Kipling and Edward Said are influential figures in reconstructing Western attitudes to the East. Kipling’s comments on the “East” outside India, however, show a different picture from Said’s Orientalism paradigm of negative portrayals of the Orient, which included Kipling as a typical Orientalist supremacist. Kipling emphasized threats from China rather than from the Muslim world. Kipling also had a range of positive comments on Burma, Japan, and Tibet, reflecting a common Buddhist substratum that Kipling seems to have appreciated. Consequently, both the perception of Kipling and the application of Said’s paradigm need adjustment and reorientation.
International Reformation of Swedish History Education, 1927–1961: The Complexity of Implementing International Understanding
Thomas Nygren, 329
This study shows how the international efforts for reforming history teaching, by the League of Nations, UNESCO, and the Council of Europe, were both neglected and implemented before and after World War II. International interest in the promotion of international understanding and discouragement of nationalism was interpreted and influenced by teachers’ and students’ views of history. International understanding and non-European history—but not intercultural history—became a dominant theme in the Swedish curriculum in a complex top-down and bottom-up process.
BOOK REVIEWS
Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee, eds. Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire
reviewed by Emily Wakild, 355
Patrick Porter. Military Orientalism: Eastern War through Western Eyes
reviewed by Peter Mansoor, 359
Walter Scheidel, ed. Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires
reviewed by Lee L. Brice, 362
Adam J. Silverstein. Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World
reviewed by Rudi Matthee, 364
John E. Wills Jr. The World from 1450 to 1700
reviewed by Charles H. Parker, 368
Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wang with Supriya Mukherjee. A Global History of Modern Historiography
reviewed by Jörg Matthias Determann, 369
John Reader. Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent
reviewed by Kathy L. Pearson, 372
Alan L. Karras. Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History
reviewed by Wim Klooster, 375
Francesca Trivellato. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period
reviewed by John E. Wills Jr., 377
François Gipouloux. La Méditerranée asiatique: Villes portuaires et réseaux marchands en Chine, au Japon et en Asie du Sud-est, XVIe–XXIe siècle
reviewed by Laurence Monnais, 380
Samuel Y. Edgerton. The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe
reviewed by Darin Hayton, 383
Richard A. Goldthwaite. The Economy of Renaissance Florence
reviewed by Franca R. Barricelli, 385
Jorge Magasich-Airola and Jean-Marc de Beer. América Mágica: When Renaissance Europe Thought It Had Conquered Paradise
reviewed by Paul Mapp, 389
Júnia Ferreira Furtado. Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century
reviewed by Katherine Holt, 391
Kerry Ward. Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company
reviewed by Ghulam A. Nadri, 393
Leora Auslander. Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France
reviewed by Marilyn Morris, 396
Robin A. Butlin. Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies c. 1880–1960
reviewed by William Kelleher Storey, 399
Steven Patterson. The Cult of Imperial Honor in British India
reviewed by Alison Fletcher, 401
Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography
reviewed by Janell Hobson, 403
Michael Ezekiel Gasper. The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt
reviewed by Will Hanley, 405
Eric Dorn Brose. A History of the Great War: World War One and the International Crisis of the Early Twentieth Century
reviewed by Robert Nelson, 409
Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow, eds. The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization
reviewed by Sonja Kim, 411
Cyrus Schayegh. Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950
reviewed by Afshin Matin-Asgari, 415
Spencer D. Segalla. The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912–1956
reviewed by Ellen Amster, 420
Yinghong Cheng. Creating the “New Man”: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities
reviewed by Aaron J. Cohen, 423
Gary M. Kroll and Richard H. Robbins, eds. World in Motion: The Globalization and the Environment Reader
reviewed by Jeff Crane, 426
Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer, eds. Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation
reviewed by Darryl Flaherty, 429