To Remain Focused on the Implications of Everything That He Discusses for Colonialism in General and British Colonialism in Particular

456 | LYDIA MURDOCH to remain focused on the implications of everything that he discusses for colonialism in general and British colonialism in particular. Although each colonial situation is unique, certain elements of imperialism and re- sistance to it have general import. Hence, Gallant frequently cites other colonial experiences by way of comparison or contrast. This kind of social history, based on primary sources that reveal signiªcant truths about the activities of the peasantry and other working- class people, informed by historical and anthropological perspectives, and focusing on the colonial context, is typical of the current trend in hybrid scholarship. Experiencing Dominion represents one of the ªnest ex- amples of this innovative approach to historical subject matter. At the outset, Gallant states that “the central aim of this book is to undertake an engagement with debates on hegemony, power and identity in contem- porary historical and anthropological literature” (x), and he delivers what he promises. Gallant does not merely pay lip service to anthropol- ogy; he seriously incorporates relevant perspectives from the discipline in his analyses of the data. Peter S. Allen Rhode Island College Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain. By Michael Bentley (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 334 pp. $45.00 Robert Arthur Talbot, third Marquis of Salisbury (1830–1903), Britain’s three-term prime minister and leader of the Conservative party from the mid-1880s until just before his death, can no longer be dismissed as a “second-rate politician,” as he once was during the interwar period (317). Bentley’s book joins two other recent works, Andrew Roberts’ Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 1999) and David Steele’s Lord Salis- bury: A Political Biography (London, 1999), in reassessing the Conserva- tive leader’s signiªcance. Bentley promises to add an innovative approach to biography that places the subject of study in the context of his times. He avoids tradi- tional grand narratives, refusing to interpret Salisbury as a sign of the declining power of the landed aristocracy or as a Conservative interruption in the triumph of Liberalism beginning with William Gladstone. Instead, he celebrates Salisbury’s Conservatism as a precedent for the politics of Margaret Thatcher, especially on issues of property and class. Both poli- ticians demonstrated the central conviction that “[r]ather than throw up one’s hands about the class war, better to win it” (155). Bentley’s thematic rather than strictly chronological approach suc- ceeds in providing a useful survey of Salisbury’s elite circles and particular brand of Conservatism. The chapters cover a variety of intellectual and political topics, ranging from his views on the Irish Question, property rights, and the state to the Church, the empire, and the Conserva- tive party. Bentley’s methodology, however, may be less innovative than Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219504771998024 by guest on 25 September 2021 REVIEWS | 457 he suggests, since, as he willingly acknowledges, Victorian biographers were great promoters of the “Life and Times” approach. Bentley is refreshingly honest about his process of selecting the particular Conservative environments that he explores. He pays less attention to topics that previous biographers have treated in depth, such as Salisbury’s foreign policy and his often discordant relationship with the Conservative party, and concentrates on those areas that interest him most. Above all, this is not a social history of rank-and-ªle Conservatism “from below,” a brand of history that, Bentley claims, “has its place,” but “frequently does not know its place” (3). It is also not a study, like Steele’s recent biography, eager to explore Salisbury’s attention to mass politics despite his antidemocratic convictions. The Conservative environments examined are limited to Salisbury’s elite circles—Oxford, his estate at Hatªeld, the House of Lords, and the London drawingrooms where Salisbury and his Conservative colleagues made policy while sip- ping brandy by the ªreside. In order to enter these exclusive circles, Bentley draws primarily from Salisbury’s private and ofªcial correspondence as the sources most revealing of his character and ideas, demonstrating in the process a keen appreciation for Salisbury’s well-known satirical wit. Bentley also relies heavily on Salisbury’s speeches in the House of Lords, but dismisses his public speeches as mostly “ºat and desultory,” since he “often found it hard to establish a wavelength with the audience he so cordially loathed” (295, 299). (In stark contrast to Bentley, Steele interprets the public speeches as “possibly the most striking expression of Salisbury’s person- ality” [8].) Unlike previous scholars who focus on Salisbury’s numerous contributions to the Saturday Review and the Quarterly Review from the late 1850s to the mid-1860s, Bentley convincingly argues that such great emphasis on Salisbury’s journalism is misplaced. Salisbury wrote these articles for money, and, more important, they represent his Conservative principles at an early stage in their development. Salisbury emerges as an individual of contradictions, who, following in Edmund Burke’s shoes, was devoted to protecting what he under- stood to be common English institutions and historical precedents and yet was not rigidly opposed to change in any form. Although he was no- torious for his statements against “progress,” he was also an amateur sci- entist and a great supporter of the railroads. He even reversed the layout of his seventeenth-century mansion so that the new front would face the recently built railway station. A vocal champion of elite patronage, Salis- bury detested individuals who asked him for special favors. When dis- cussing women and politics, he used the language of his day to criticize the House of Commons about its dealings with India, chastising its members for having “so little genuine knowledge or conviction that they vote like women,” but he also privately supported women’s suf- frage as a stabilizing, conservative force in politics (232). The signiªcance of such contradictions tends to be overshadowed in Bentley’s account by the overarching theme of Salisbury’s Conserva- tism—his devotion to tradition and established institutions, especially Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219504771998024 by guest on 25 September 2021 458 | ERNEST BENZ the Established Church, the Queen, the landed aristocracy, and even political parties. In the end, Bentley sacriªces a degree of nuance in his ef- fort to enlist Salisbury as a symbol of Britain’s “intractable culture” in the face of the “new Britain” of Tony Blair (321). His book, however, does reveal Salisbury as a ªgure of rich and imposing complexity, whom historians would do well to reconsider. Lydia Murdoch Vassar College Changing Family Size in England and Wales: Place, Class and Demography, 1891–1911. By Eilidh Garrett, Alice Reid, Kevin Schürer, and Simon Szreter (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 526 pp. $90.00 This collaboration analyzes anonymous data from the 1911 fertility cen- sus made available two decades ahead of the release of the original to the public in 2012. The returns capture fertility and mortality rates at a mo- ment when both were declining precipitously. The four authors set out to persuade historians and demographers that interpreters of those dy- namics have wrongfully slighted geography in favor of economics. In particular, they envisage myriad declines in death and birth rates, each in a distinct communication community. Such communities, as much anthropological as geographical, encompass social interactions in the street and at the workplace, in local dialect and through force of example. Communication communities are not natural ecologies but human cre- ations, arenas for the negotiation of gender and class, and homes to pop- ulations beneªting and suffering from imbalances in political power during an era when municipal authorities bore responsibility for public health. Thirteen English and Welsh locales were selected for heterogeneity rather than representativeness. The returns for their 100,000 residents provide the foundations for exciting ªndings. The book also re-analyzes old county and district ªgures for the country as a whole, but conclu- sions from such agglomerations are liable to ecological fallacies. By contrast, individual-level data bring to light the true importance of the neighborhood. For example, child mortality was lower in districts where many servants resided and higher in districts where boarders were common, even in families lacking such servants or boarders themselves. Children’s health depended on the salubriousness of the overall environ- ment rather than on the characteristics of their own dwelling. Indeed, very few factors speciªc to the child’s household mattered: Unemploy- ment of the father increased the frequency of deaths, whereas a mother born in eastern Europe—a proxy for Jewishness—lowered it. Parents’ retrospective reports on births also reºect common envi- ronmental factors, this time social rather than hygienic. Low fertility ob- tained throughout milltowns where women worked in textiles, even when the wife herself was not so employed. This conclusion has long Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002219504771998024 by guest on 25 September 2021.

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