Book Reviews

BRIAN BOND. British Military Policy between the Two World Wars. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Pp. XVI, 419. £16.00. Reviewed by Paul Kennedy

Washington Despatches, 1941–1945: Weekly Political Reports from the British Embassy, edited by H.G. Nicholas, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. Pp. XVIII, 700. $40.00 (US), £20.00. Reviewed by David Reynolds

MARK C. WHEELER. Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, 1940–1943. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Pp. 342 (East European Monographs, No. LXIV). SI8.50 (US). Reviewed by John O. Iatrides

PATRICIA JALLAND. The Liberals and Ireland. The Ulster Question in British Politics to 1914. Hassocks, Sussex, 1980. Pp. 250. £20.00. Reviewed by John Kendle

BRIAN JENKINS. Britain and the War for the Union. Volume II. Montreal: McGill- Queen's University Press, 1980. Pp. IX, 480. $26.50 (US). Reviewed by Frank Lawrence Owsley, Jr.

GEOFFREY ELLIS. Napoleon's Continental Blockade: The Case of Alsace. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Pp. 355. $65.75. (CAN.) Reviewed by Richard Glover

R.D. THORPE. The Uncrowned Prime Ministers. London: Darkhorse Publishing, 1980. Pp. XV, 263. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by J.O. Stubbs

DAVID DILKS, ed. Retreat from Power: Studies in Britain's Foreign Policy of the Twentieth Century. Vol. I. 1906–1939. London: Macmillan, 1981. Pp. 213. £10. Reviewed by Trevor Burridge

DAVID DILKS, ed. Retreat from Power: Studies in Britain's Foreign Policy of the Twentieth Century. Vol. II. After 1939. London: Macmillan, 1981. Pp. 198. £10. Reviewed by Ray Jones

CLAIRE HIRSCHFIELD. The Diplomacy of Partition: Britain, trance and the Creation of Nigeria, 1890–1898. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979. Pp. 234, Fl. 90. Reviewed by A.S. Kanya-Forstner

PHILIP M. TAYLOR. The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda 1919–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp.xv, 363. £25.00. Reviewed by Keith Robbins

NAVY RECORDS SOCIETY. The Keyes Papers, Vol. III, 1939–1945, ed. Paul Halpern. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981. Pp. 398. $;37.50 (Can.). Reviewed by Donald M. Schurman

JOHN TURNER. Lloyd George's Secretariat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp.vm, 254 £15. Reviewed by Patricia Jalland

JAMES NEIDPATH. The Singapore Naval Base and the Defence of Britain's Eastern Empire, 1919–1941. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Pp.XVII, 296. £22.50. Reviewed by C.C. Ong

ELEANOR M. GATES. End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1939–40. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981. Pp. XVIII, 630. $28.50 (US). Reviewed by P.M.H. Bell

F.H. HINSLEY ET AL. British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations. Vol. I, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Pp. 616. $29.95 (US); Vol. H, ibid., 1981. Pp. 690. $39.50 (US). Reviewed by D.C. Watt

E. MARY SMALLWOOD. The Jews under Roman Rule: A Study in Political Relations. From Pompey to Diocletian. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981. Pp. XIV, 595. 96 guilders. Reviewed by Jacob Neusner     

The Grammar of Imperial History

FREDERICK MADDEN and DAVID FIELDHOUSE, eds. ‘The Empire of the Bretaignes’, 1175–1688: The Foundation of a Colonial System of Government: Select Documents on the Constitutional History of the British Empire and Commonwealth, Volume I. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Pp. xxix, 669; $55.00 (us); The Classical Period of the First British Empire, 1680–1783, Volume II. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Pp. xxxiii, 628. –65.00 (US).     

A conceptual model for freshwater mussel (family: Unionidae) remain preservation in zooarchaeological assemblages

Expectations for survival of vertebrate remains have been well developed and intensely studied in the zooarchaeological taphonomic literature. Taphonomic studies of shellfish remains focus on marine species and on variables relevant to remains from paleontological contexts (e.g., fossil marine beds). In this paper we develop a conceptual framework from which to derive expectations concerning the preservation of freshwater mussel remains focusing on two parameters, shell microstructure and shell shape. Shell size does not influence survivorship. Our model is validated through application to late Holocene zooarchaeological mussel assemblages from north Texas. Taphonomically robust species are important regarding zooarchaeological and biogeographic interpretations based on mussel paleofaunas, and fragile species are important indicators of whether or not an assemblage is well preserved.     

Giants in Pageants

After early employment with the archaeologist, General Pitt Rivers, Herbert Samuel Toms (1874–1940) was a curator in the Brighton Museum. Amassing a significant folklore archive, including specimens, photographs, and records of interviews from Sussex and adjoining counties, his particular interest was naturally perforated flints (witch stones or hagstones), used to protect households against witches, domestic animals from the ravages of the nightmare, and to cure a range of diseases. By the 1920s, they were regarded as little more than “lucky stones”, as were necklaces made up of the Cretaceous fossil sponge, Porosphaera.     

The Invisible Hand that Rocks the Cradle: On the Limits of Time Use Surveys

Almost every intervention in the field of international agricultural development — from microcredit finance to fertilizer subsidies to trade policy — has come to recognize gender, and relationships within households, as important. Yet most interventions continue to treat the household as a ‘black box’, with changes within the household measured by the effects on income, anthropometry, health, or other secondary metrics within bargaining models. In this context, there has been increasing interest in time use studies as a way to peer inside this black box. This article offers a review of methods and identifies some of the difficulties facing time use studies in capturing intrahousehold dynamics, and presents the results of a two‐season simultaneous activity time use study in Malawi which aimed to address these difficulties. The results suggest significant limitations to time use surveys. The kinds of reproductive labour that often interest researchers may be invisible to the women responding to time use surveys, with the result that care work is dramatically under‐reported. The authors discuss the implications of the divergence between researchers’ concerns and the women's reports of their lives for time use surveys, and for feminist development research methods more broadly.     

A sense of an ending: late-generation ethnicity and Irish America

Irish America today is at a stage of “late generation ethnicity,” designating an ethnic formation that reaches back many generations in the US and is not being significantly replenished from the country of origin. This is not necessarily a terminal state of ethnic affairs, but it is a transitional one, and the analytical challenge is to identify and understand the features and implications of “lateness,” what the sense of an ending means in the Irish American case. This essay will explore this question, drawing on field study among Irish communities in Chicago, and also consider some of the differences in worldview among Irish-Americans, particularly as these pertain to matters of immigration reform and undocumented Irish in the US.     

Does working long hours cause marital dissolution? Evidence from the reduction in South Korea's workweek standard

Despite its important implications, little is known about the possible impact on marital dissolution of workweek standards, which set the maximum working hours for full-time workers and may, therefore, reduce their likelihood of working long hours. Moreover, evidence on the effect of working hours on marital dissolution comes predominantly from non-causal studies on Western women's work status. The Korean government reduced its workweek standard from 44 to 40 hours between 2004 and 2011. A discrete-time event history analysis of longitudinal data from the 2000 to 2015 Korea Labor and Income Panel Study shows that this reduction lowered male workers’ risk of divorce. The estimated effect is large in absolute size, and we speculate about possible explanations. We cautiously call for further attention to be paid to the plausible causal link between men's overwork and marital dissolution in the work-oriented and gender-divided East Asian societies.