Abstract
This is better than one might imagine. Each of us who has entered the world of ‘Companions’, ‘Encyclopaedias’ and ‘Dictionaries’ knows the difficulties and limitations of the genre; and a ‘Concise’ version could alarm by compounding superficiality with brevity. Concision this collection certainly possesses. Even with the large font deployed by Oxford University Press, the text of these sixteen essays does not reach four hundred pages and some of the pieces struggle to capture a universe in the few thousand words allotted. Three things help transcend the breathlessness. Ulinka Rublack’s editing shows the right blend of sympathetic autocracy which lends coherence to what could have been a surge of loosed cats. Second, she has some very sleek cats with famous names. Third and most decisive, this is not a ‘Companion’ at all: it makes no attempt at surveying a vast field but rather offers a manifesto for a number of fashions, enthusiasms and projects in current Anglo-American historical practice. It resembles David Cannadine’s symposium What is History Now (2002) more closely than any of the larger surveys of global historiography or guides to historical theory that are now filling the bookshelves. The mood of this compendium becomes immediately visible in the list of contributors: seventeen of them because Donald Kelley and Bonnie Smith collaborate in the essay on ‘Historians’. Of the seventeen, nine are based in the United States. Of the eight based in Britain, five are Cambridge historians. A ‘correct’ gender balance among all contributors is punctiliously maintained.
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