In this book, Sumathi Ramaswamy explores how the Tamil language became the focus of intense commitments in twentieth-century South India. Following recent calls among South Asian scholars to find alternatives to narratives derived from western experience, she rejects language nationalism as an appropriate conceptual tool for her study, both because the term implies a universal European standard by which language feeling is to be measured and because it is incapable of encompassing the full range of ideas and sentiments that became attached to Tamil. Instead she employs a concept grounded in the discourse of the politicians and writers she has studied: that of tamilpparru or devotion to Tamil.

In his latest book, David Hackett Fischer has set himself the challenging task of linking to the more general cultural history of the Atlantic world the record of price fluctuations therein from the high Middle Ages. To this intriguing task he has had to bring not only the exceptionally broad erudition of a notable university teacher and researcher but also his more recently acquired mastery of the vast literature on price history. His handling of this challenge is quite impressive, even if specialists may disagree with his synthesis or interpretation of specific points. Readers of CSSH should find his pages both challenging and thought-provoking as he explains why price fluctuations in different parts of the Atlantic world tended to be linked, even synchronous. Thus, both the common patterns he detects and the diversity he attempts to explain are of considerable comparative interest.

Berezin's study in historical sociology takes as its starting point an Italian present marked by a resurgence of fascism and by renewed contests for the symbolic space of the piazza. Confident that a new understanding of the “old” fascism can have contemporary social and political relevance, Berezin examines interwar efforts to construct “fascist identities” by fusing public and private selves. In a book that engages political philosophy and the anthropology of ritual, Berezin focuses our attention on public spectacle, “the favored expressive vehicle of the fascist identity project” (p. 5).

This is no ordinary intellectual history of civil society's polysemous elaboration. Colas deploys psychoanalytic, philological, and sociological approaches to explain the mutual dependence of civil society and fanaticism in theology and philosophy from Aristotle and Augustine to Marx and Gorbachev. The civil society-based critique of Marxism-Leninism in theory and practice is familiar and provides the book's contemporary resonance. Attention to the ambiguities and transformations of civil society through translation, from koinonia politike through die burgerliche Gesellsehaft is valuable. Most important, however, is the argument about fanaticism's historical significance in making civil society.

Germany's brief colonial career began in the 1880s after centuries of European overseas expansion. Yet as Susanne Zantop shows in this interesting study, German observers were anything but “passive” during these long years of colonial abstinence. Between the Welsers' ill-fated South American colonial venture (1528 – 55) and the late-nineteenth-century Scramble, German writers generated a huge literature on colonialism which was fraught with fantasies about imperial conquest, European conflict, and German class struggles. While most recent work on German colonialism focuses on the late nineteenth century and on the sites of Germany's eventual overseas empire, this book concentrates on the New World, arguing that it played a more important role in German colonial fantasies than Africa, Asia, or the Pacific. Zantop traces the evolution of colonial discourses within a variety of literary, philosophical, and scientific genres, focusing on the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1870s.

Fieldwork was once a mysterious business: Students were told that it involved “participant observation”: a mode of being apparently located somewhere north of “going native” but south of simply collecting survey data. Advice was informal and practical (keep duplicate notes, bring plenty of ziplock bags). However, the recent loss of confidence in the anthropological project and a concomitant concern with reflexivity has meant that fieldwork has also become increasingly “problematized” and self-conscious.

Stereotypes about gender relations in late Colonial Mexico—whether expressed as academic assumptions or in popular culture—are the targets of Steve J. Stern's important book, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Stern unravels these mythologies through a careful analysis of patriarchy, both the patriarchy of daily life and the patriarchal practices of governance. A central plank of the study is to gage the links between them, and Stern probes the interplay between gendered relations in the household and in the broader sweep of colonial power.

In Post-nationalist Ireland, Richard Kearney provides a cross-disciplinary study which critically reassesses some of the central components of traditional Irish cultural nationalism and republicanism. He also proposes a new framework for a more complex vision of Irishness.