and Contextualism. Also, it demonstrates that France’s colonial archive about Morocco was influenced by French colonial knowledge on other parts of the Islamic world, from West Africa to South Asia, as well as by ideas created in other European empires. The only shortcoming of the book worth mentioning is that it does not take more account of the role of Moroccans and their texts in the production of colonial knowledge. It is based on European-language sources (and literature) and, consequently, tells the story from above, from the perspective of French administrators and academics. No doubt, it would have been worth looking more closely into the role of Moroccan local informers and cultural brokers – based on Arabic sources – and their impact on France’s colonial archive. Still, The Ethnographic State is an important, beautifully crafted, erudite work of scholarship. It shows the deep knowledge of a scholar who has dedicated his academic life to the history of the subject. Much has been written on the mechanics of colonial knowledge production and the employment of this knowledge to enhance social discipline and political control in the imperial world, but seldom has a scholar assessed these connections with such rigor. In short, the book makes an important contribution not only to Moroccan and French colonial history but also, and perhaps even more importantly, to our more general understanding of the intersections between empire, power, and knowledge in the imperial age. DAVID MOTADEL London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) The Cambridge World History. Volume VII. Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present. Part 1: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making. Edited by J. R. MCNEILL and KENNETH POMERANZ. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 656 pp. $170.00 (hardcover); $39.99 (paper, 2018). The Cambridge World History. Volume VII. Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present. Part 2: Shared Transformations? Edited by J. R. MCNEILL and KENNETH POMERANZ. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 549 pp. $170.00 (hardcover); $39.99 (paper, 2018). In 1986, Alfred W. Crosby, who recently passed away, published his ground-breaking study Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Expansion of 318 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2019 Europe, 900–1900. One of his most remarkable statements was that, at least relative to what had gone before, between the domestication of the horse around 5000 years ago and the voyages of Columbus, ‘little of importance happened’.1 In the words of Crosby: ‘Indeed, very little happened that was truly new – just more of the same thing [ . . . ] There are some new developments [ . . . ] but they are of minor significance compared to what had gone before [ . . . ] The dominant theme in the Old World is emulation, not innovation’.2 In fact, there are quite some historians who state that it would take even longer before new and society transforming events took place, i.e. the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, as the renowned historian Matthew Smith Anderson claims, ‘during the eighteenth century the continent was still, in its everyday life, closer to the twelfth century than to the twentieth’.3 That would all change in the course of the nineteenth century, which saw, it could be claimed, the most dramatic changes ever recorded in human history. Around 1800 there was no electricity, railways, automobiles, aircraft, telegraph and telephone and numerous other inventions so normal to the present-day society. By 1900, this had all changed completely, at least in Europe and the United States of America. Living standards had improved, be it at a very slow pace, and a number of endemic diseased belonged to the past thanks in part to an elaborate vaccination program (Jenner, Pasteur, Koch), but probably above all because of a better hygiene.4 At the same time, there were still serious threats to public health. For example, as stated by both Robert J. Gordon and Richard J. Evans, cities were still places full of horses: ‘It was estimated that 20,000 tons of horse droppings had to be cleared away from London’s streets every year in the 1850s; thirty years later, 100,000 tons of dung were being removed from the streets of Berlin each year’.5 However, as the nineteenth century progressed, the government took city planning, improved hygiene...
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Mar 9, 2019
Sumit Chaudhary + 2
