Book reviews

In the context of a shift away from municipal multiculturalism towards community cohesion, and in the light of renewed debates around difference, national identity and Britishness, this article sets out a geographically informed theoretical framework which focuses upon the spatial (re)construction of racial and ethnic identities. The article develops the idea of the everyday as a way of viewing the spatially contingent, complex and negotiated state of inter-ethnic relations in a specific UK city. Not only does this reveal the manner in which strong and stubborn boundaries between social groups are entrenched through the (re)enforcement of spatialised relations of power, but also how accommodations across, between and within difference are realised. Through the employment of empirical material from Leicester, England, the article contends that everyday solidarities emerge from a number of intersecting spatial influences which do not equate to abstract or fixed versions of national belonging.     

Iskandar's Bibulous Business: Wine,Drunkenness and the Calls to the Sāqī in Nizāmī Ganjavī's Sharaf-nāma

The twelfth-century poet Nizāmī Ganjavī has produced his version of the adventures of Alexander as a unique composition mingling known Persian historiography and Qur'anic legends with unusual non-Islamic, especially Greek, elements in order to create his Iskandar-nāma (containing two parts, the Sharaf-nāma and the Iqbāl-nāma) as a synthesis of eastern and western cultures. A first point is the examination of the reasons behind the importance given to wine and drunkenness within the narrative. The poet has stressed this further by heading each chapter with a call to the sāqī. The essay examines the appositeness of the invocations with the episodes in the narrative, it analyses examples of wine imagery (containing references to medicine, to the mirror and to religion) and questions the relation between authorial persona, narrator and characters, examining in particular the famous teetotaler claim in one of the introductory chapters of the first part of the Iskandar-nāma.     

Water wizards: reshaping wet nature and society

The article investigates how humans ‘networked’ wet nature and how this affected the shaping of Dutch society. First, it takes a grand view of Dutch history and describes how wet network building intertwined with the shaping of the Dutch landscape, its economy and its polity. Second, it investigates the specific challenges of wet network building—integrating potentially conflicting uses of water into one design—for the case of the national fresh water supply network (1940–1971). Finally, it discusses ecological damage, emerging new risks and cultural patterns related to wet network building.     

Networking Europe

The paper explores processes of transnational network building in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first section reviews several relevant literatures. It concludes that historiographies of Europe often recognize the pivotal importance of transnational network building, but fail to analyse network developments as well as their entanglement with wider historical processes. Specialized infrastructure studies exist in economic and technological history, but have a distinct (sub)national focus. The networking of Europe has not been investigated. The second section presents a preliminary narrative of transnational network building in the 19th and 20th century. It highlights the relationship between network building and political events in different eras, as well as different types of ambiguities or tensions. The conclusion suggests a number of topics for further research.     

Science,industry and the colonial state: a shift from a German- to a Dutch-controlled cinchona and quinine cartel (1880–1920)

This study shows how control over delicately balanced supply chains from raw material to the final product shifted from one national industry to another. By 1920, Dutch cinchona producers and quinine manufacturers dominated the international cartel that controlled the worldwide production and distribution of quinine (an antimalarial), quinine sulphate (a semi-finished product) and cinchona (the raw material). Twenty years earlier, however, this cartel had been controlled by the German pharmaceutical industry. How can we understand the shift of power in the world’s first pharmaceutical cartel? We argue that the internal shift of power was largely the result of the following three factors: a global industrial laboratory revolution; the vertical integration of a transoceanic network of cinchona producers, quinine manufacturers, (colonial) scientists and state officials across the Dutch Empire; and Germany’s economic isolation during the First World War.     

Anthropological Neurology: Symptoms and Their Meanings According to Joseph Prick (1909–1978)

This article describes the life and work of the Dutch neurologist Joseph Prick (1909–1978) and his idea of an anthropological neurology. According to Prick, neurological symptoms should not only be explained from an underlying physico-chemical substrate but also be regarded as meaningful. We present an outline of the historical and philosophical context of his ideas with a focus on the theory of the human body by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and the concept of anthropology-based medicine developed by Frederik Buytendijk (1887–1974). We give an overview of anthropological neurology as a clinical practice and finally we discuss the value of Prick's approach for clinical neurology today.