Book reviews

CHINA

PAUL A. COHEN. History in Three Keys: the Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xviii, 428 pp. £27.95, paper.

DAVID S. G. GOODMAN (ed). China's Provinces in Reform. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. 278 pp. US$85.00, £50.00, hardcover; US$25.99, £15.99, paper.

HUANG JIANLI. The Politics of Depoliticization in Republican China: Guomindang Policy towards Student Political Activism, 1927–1949. Berne: Peter Lang AG, 1996. US$52.95, £34.00, hardcover.

PAUL R. KATZ. Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: the Cult of Marshal Wen in Late Imperial Chekiang. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. xviii, 261 pp. Index. US$19.95, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

EYAL BEN‐ARI. Body Projects in Japanese Childcare—culture, Organization and Emotions in a Preschool. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1997. 166 pp. £40.00, hardcover.

JENNIFER DUFFY and GARY ANSON, eds. Encounters with Japan: twenty Extraordinary Stories. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1994. 159 pp. A$14.95.

KEN'ICHI GOTO. ’Returning to Asia’: Japan‐Indonesia Relations, 1930s‐1940s. Tokyo: Ryukei Shyosha, 1997. xxvi, 496 pp. Index. ¥12,000, hardcover.

AMY VLADECK HEINRICH (ed). Currents in Japanese Culture: translations and Transformations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 493 pp. Preface, brief biographies of contributors, index. US$52.00, hardcover.

STEWART LONE. Japan's First Modern War: army and Society in the Conflict with China, 1894–95. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Houndmills and London: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press, in Association with King's College, London, 1994. xii, 222 pp. £40.00, hardcover.

COLIN McKENZIE and MICHAEL STUTCHBURY (eds). Japanese Financial Markets and the Role of the Yen. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. 176 pp. Tables, abbreviations, glossary, preface, list of contributors, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. A$39.95 hardcover; A$24.95, paper.

SOUTH ASIA

KATE BRITTLEBANK. Tipu Sultan's Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. 184 pp. Illustrations, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. Rs. 450, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

BENG‐HUAT CHUA. Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London: Routledge, 1997 (revised edition), xiv, 213 pp. Preface, preface to paperback edition, references, index. £45.00, hardcover; £14.99, paper.

STEVEN HEDER and JUDY LEDGERWOOD (eds). Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia: democratic Transition under United Nations Peace‐Keeping. New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996. xx, 277 pp. US$71.95, hardcover; US$29.95, paper.

ROBERT LOWRY. The Armed Forces of Indonesia. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997. xxiv, 282 pp. Tables, maps, graphs, index. A$29.95, paper.

GENERAL ASIA

CHRISTINE DOBBIN. Asian Entrepreneurial Minorities: conjoint Communities in the Making of the World Economy, 1570–1940. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996. 246 pp. Glossary, selected bibliography, index. £45.00, hardcover; £16.99, paper.     

Domestic challenges and international leadership: a case study of women in Australian international affairs

Women in international affairs play powerful and influential roles in shaping laws and policies, negotiating on subjects of war, peace and security, and representing national interest. In Australia, women outnumber men at all levels of public service to executive level one. Yet, women remain under-represented in more senior ranks and appear to experience significant challenges gaining leadership in agencies involved in diplomacy and security. What are the gendered institutions at play in Australian international affairs? Using a comparative case study approach, this paper explores the experiences of senior executive level women leaders across the Australian Federal Government in four case agencies—the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Defence, Department of Home Affairs (DHA), and the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Women’s gendered challenges in international leadership are not surprising within a diplomatic history that has often restricted women’s roles based off the ‘appropriateness’ of sending women as envoys to nations of varying safety and respect for their status. What is surprising is that women report greater sexism, discrimination and harassment from within their own agencies, not from countries in which they are hosted. This has important ramifications globally on gaining and retaining women in international affairs leadership.     

Paratexts and Footnotes in Historical Narrative: Henry Biaudet and scholarly and nationalistic ambitions of historical research 1902–1915

This article explores how Henry Biaudet (1870–1915) and the Finnish historical expedition in Rome used different paratextual elements in their studies on the Nordic Counter-Reformation. The analysis of paratextual strategies of the expedition suggests that application of paratexts in historical narrative reflected the fundamental characteristics of 19th-century historiography: professionalization, development into a research based independent academic discipline and nationalism. Paratexts, such as titles, title pages, lists of previous research, prefaces and with certain restrictions also footnotes, were first of all important genre indicators, which helped to draw a line between popular and professional historical narrative. Second, paratexts served political aims by helping to create images of scholarship in cases when argumentation was politically biased. Despite the important role paratexts performed in the development of modern historical scholarship via shaping historical narrative, historians have paid surprisingly little attention to them. Hence, the analysis of the paratextual strategies of Biaudet and his expedition offers an interesting perspective to the daily practices, values and thinking of historians at the turn of the 20th century.     

The Judicial Bookshelf

The death of Justice Byron R. White on April 15, 2002, occasioned numerous assessments, as had happened when he retired in 1993. From his perspective, he was the accidental jurist. "Well, I never wanted to be a judge," he confessed to a reporter in a rare interview in 1999. "I said to the president I would give it a try." White's "try" lasted thirty-one years, among the longest tenures of twentieth-century Justices. Yet many appraisals of White passed over a critical point: the Supreme Court in 1993 was a very different institution from the one he joined in 1962. This was true beyond the obvious changes in personnel. No one on the bench in 1962 was still sitting when White retired. In 1962, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who succeeded him, was only four years out of Harvard Law School and was completing a year as a research associate at Columbia University Law School prior to joining the professorate at Rutgers in Newark.     

18th- and 19th-century shipyards at the south-east entrance to the West India Docks, London

Archaeological fieldwork in 1997 on the Isle of Dogs, at the south-east entrance to the West India Docks, recovered evidence of 17th- to 19th-century shipyards, associated activities and foreign trade. Reused timbers may be the remains of the 17th-century Rolt's yard. Reclamation along the natural inlet was accompanied by the construction of a timber dry dock probably in the late 18th century. This soon fell out of use and was filled in with the construction of new dry docks to the south in 1806 by Thomas Pitcher. Much of the debris dating to the first half of the 19th century from ship repairing and building and from a range of ancillary crafts, together with ceramics from Iberia and the Far East, probably came from Pitcher's yard.     

The Judicial Bookshelf

Almost anyone who can read would describe the Supreme Court of the United States as a legal body–an institution that says what the law is in the context of deciding cases. May the Court also be fairly described as a political institution? Even to pose the question raises eyebrows, because Americans commonly use the word “political” to refer to partisan politics—that persistent struggle between organized groups called political parties to control public offices, public resources, and the nation’s destiny. In this sense of the word, the federal courts are expected today to be “above politics,” meaning that judges are supposed to refrain from publicly taking sides in elections, from otherwise jumping into the arena of electoral combat, 2 or from deciding cases based on the popularity of the litigants.3 While democratic theory anticipates that elected officials will answer to the people, the rule of law envisions something different: an abiding and even‐handed application by the judiciary of the Constitution and statutes shaped by the people and their representatives.     

Litigating Agency Change

A study of Forest Service-related litigation and administrative appeals was undertaken to examine their potential roles in effecting change within the Forest Service. The frequency of federal lawsuit decisions involving the Forest Service increased markedly between 1971 and 1993, indicating a dramatic increase in the use of litigation as a tool to force change within the agency, particularly in the Ninth Circuit. Administrative appeals followed a similar increasing trend. An examination of the instigators and purposes of lawsuits found that litigation is used most frequently by environmentalists and most often to block commodity production activities by the agency. Although the agency wins the majority of suits in which it is involved, litigants who initiated lawsuits to stop commodity production activities had higher success rates than litigants seeking to challenge additional environmental measures or to promote commodity production by the agency. A qualitative examination of five National Forest Management Act lawsuit case studies concluded that when litigants are successful in legal challenges against the agency, the court decision often results in substantive on-the-ground changes in management, thereby providing an incentive for additional use of litigation as a means to alter agency actions. These results indicate that the courts and administrative appeals process likely have been significant factors in catalyzing change within the Forest Service.