THE HISTORIAN AS A PUBLIC MORALIST: ON THE ROMAN ORIGINS OF A SCHOLARLY PERSONA

In her recent book, Virtus Romana, Catalina Balmaceda provides a fascinating analysis of the concept of virtus in Roman historiography. Although virtus, which translates as courage or more generally as virtue, meant different things to different Roman historians, Balmaceda shows that disagreement was never about whether historians should provide readers with examples of virtue. Historians' differences of opinion focused rather on where such models were to be found and what they should look like. This review essay summarizes Balmaceda's main arguments, raises a question about historians' own virtus, and draws some implications from the book for the study of scholarly personae. Did the persona of the historian as a public moralist, such as is known from nineteenth‐century Europe, originate in ancient Rome?     

Retracted: The Rise,Success, and Dismantling of New Zealand's Anglican‐led Māori Education System, 1814–1864

The above article from Journal of Religious History, published online on 14 August 2019 in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com ), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal Editors in Chief, Joanna Cruickshank and Kriston Rennie, and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed following discovery of an administrative error resulting in extensive overlap between this article and previously published research.     

Book reviews

THE PHILIPPINES

FILOMENO AGUILAR. Clash of Spirits—the History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island. Ateneo de Manila University Press and University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

CHINA

BENJAMIN VANG. Deng: a Political Biography. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. 360 pp. Bibliography, index. US$59.95, hardcover; US$21.95, paper.

CHING KWAN LEE. Gender and the South China Miracle. Two Worlds of Factory Women. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998. xiii, 210 pp. Bibliography, index. £12.95, paper.

LINDA BENSON and INGVAR SVANBERG. China's Last Nomads: the History and Culture of China's Kazaks . New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. 270 pp. Index, photographs, maps, charts, bibliography. US$63.95, hardcover; US$ 24.95, paper.

JAPAN, KOREA

TESSA MORRIS‐SUZUKI. Re‐inventing Japan: time, Space, Nation. New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. US$21.95, paper.

DAVID MYERS and KOTAKU ISHIDO (eds). Japan at the Crossroads. Tokyo: Seibundo, 1998. xv, 253 pp. Bibliography. ¥3000, paper.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

LINDA CONNOR, PATSY ASCH and TIMOTHY ASCH.

Films: A Balinese Trance Séance (30 mins). Jero on Jero (16 mins). The Medium is the Masseuse (31 mins). Jero Tapakan (26 mins). Produced and distributed by the Ethnographic Film Unit, Department of Anthropology, RSPAS, ANU, Canberra. 16mm (VHS cassette). Colour. English subtitles. A$80.00.

CARL A. TROCKI (ed). Gangsters, Democracy, and the State in Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1998. 94 pp. No price given, paper.     

Book reviews

CHINA

MELISSA SCHRIFT. Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge: the Creation and Mass Consumption of a Personality Cult. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 214 pp. Bibliography, index. US$52.00, hardcover; US$20.00, paper.

WM. THEODORE DE BARY and TU WEIMING (eds). Confucianism and Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 327 pp. US$20.50, paper.

MICHAEL B. McELROY, CHRIS P. NIELSEN AND PETER LYDON (eds). Energizing China: reconciling Environmental Protection and Economic Growth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. xvii, 719 pp. Tables, figures, biographical notes, index. US$25.00, paper.

SHUMEI SHIH. The Lure of the Modern: writing Modernism in Semicolonial China 1917–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xiii, 427 pp. US$60.00, hardcover; US$24.95, paper.

SUSAN MANN and YU‐YIN CHENG (eds). Under Confucian Eyes: writings on Gender in Chinese History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 323 pp. Illustrations. US$50.00, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

SOUTH, WEST & CENTRAL ASIA

ARUN AGRAWAL and K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN (eds). Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representation, and Rule in India. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. 316 pp. Foreword by James Scott, introduction, tables, endnotes, bibliography, index. US$59.95, hardcover; US$19.95, paper.

K. J. JOSEPH. Industry under Economic Liberalization: the Case of Indian Electronics. New Delhi: Sage, 1997. 242 pp. Rs450/US$21.00, hardcover.

PETER P. MOLLINGA (ed). Water for Food and Rural Development: approaches and Initiatives in South Asia. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. 377 pp. Rs 495, hardcover.

SOUTHEAST ASIA

M. RAMESH with MUKUL G. ASHER. Welfare Capitalism in Southeast Asia: social Security, Health and Education Policies. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000. xii, 217 pp. £50.00, hardcover.

DAVID M. AYRES. Anatomy of a Crisis: education, Development and the State in Cambodia, 1953–1998. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. 256 pp. US$52.00, hardcover.

MARTIN STUART‐FOX. Historical Dictionary of Laos , second edition. Lanham, Maryland and London: Scarecrow Press, 2001. 527 pp. US$75.00, hardcover.

SINITH SITTIRAK. The Daughters of Development: women in a Changing Environment. London and New York: Zed Books, 1998. ix, 153 pp. Bibliography, index. ISBN 1–876756‐00–4. A$39.95, paper.     

On the Fractal Measurement of Geographical Boundaries

This paper has two main objectives. First, we review and evaluate four different computational methods for measuring the “fractality” of cartographic lines: these are known as the structured walk, the equipaced polygon, the hybrid walk, and the cell count methods. Second, because previous research has restricted the focus of fractal measurement exercises to isolated physical entities, the subject of our empirical study concerns the urban area of Swindon, United Kingdom, that comprises a mosaic of contiguous land-use parcels. In technical terms, the results pinpoint some of the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the four methods, whilst our substantive conclusion is that fractal dimension appears to be a function of both scale and land-use type in our geographical study.