Reviews 30/3 6/6/00 10:27 Am Page 443

04_reviews 30/3 6/6/00 10:27 am Page 443 Reviews Nazik Saba Yared, Arab Travellers and Western Civilization, London, Saqi books, 1996; ISBN 0–86356–336–8; £45.00 East may be East and West West, but the scholarly interest in inter- actions between the two has been profound. The burden of such studies has, however, tended to be lopsided and one-way. Works on Western approaches to the East, including the Middle East, are now legion. Surveys of Arab travellers to the West have been much less common, particularly when produced by non-European scholars. Those that do exist have dealt mainly with the medieval period or with political and religious attitudes. Nazik Saba Yared reveals much new material relating to nineteenth — and early twentieth — century travellers who dealt with economic, social, literary, scientific and technological aspects of the West. She divides her study into three chronological sections, 1826–82, 1882–1918 and 1918–38, and charts an interesting dynamic of changing attitudes and instrumental responses during these eras. The approach is highly schematic, but some intriguing results emerge. In the first period, her travellers were generally highly westernized and were sometimes Christian converts. Their principal concerns were often related to the introduction of the concepts of the French Revolution to the Middle East, including the debate about the appropriateness of slavery to a modern society. Inevitably, questions of nationalism, law and notions of absolute and unjust rule were prominent in their thinking. They accepted the Western idea that the original powerful dynamic of the Arab world had ebbed away and they tried hard to reconcile ideas of progress with this alleged passivity. They looked for answers in Western education, an ideal- ized vision of free debate, science, the arts and the possibility of scientific proof of supernatural forces. In the second period, the travellers were much more concerned with fears of European domination, as perfectly illustrated by the British campaign in Egypt in 1882, in this case propping up tradi- tional rule against the potentially progressive revolution of young officers led by Urubi Pasha. The idea of the nation was much more developed among this group, but there was also a higher degree of scepticism both about Western political systems and supposed economic success. Whereas the first group had shown little interest in class, the second was much more aware of the social dangers induced by Western industrialism and the possibilities of class warfare. An European History Quarterly Copyright © 2000 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 30(3), 443–460. [0265-6914(200007)30:3;443–460;013192] 04_reviews 30/3 6/6/00 10:27 am Page 444 444 European History Quarterly Vol. 30 No. 3 acutely critical eye was brought to bear upon the Western arts and there was a more pronounced recognition that the West owed a good deal to the East in this area. The basic freedoms of the Arab tradition as well as the considerable distinction of Arabic science were now stressed. In other words a harder cultural carapace was being formed to cope with apparent Western dominance. By the third period, a much more powerful resentment against the West had emerged. The West was despised for its secret treaties, its violence and its barely concealed imperialism, as in the mandates system of the League. A fascination with nationalism was replaced by the ideals of Islamic federation and Arabic unity, sometimes expressed in secular forms. Economic backwardness had now to be overcome on Eastern rather than Western terms, following Arabic ideals of spirituality, antimaterialism and social justice. The combi- nation of Western and Eastern qualities was seen as achievable on Oriental terms and by the methods of a civilization that was both more ancient and more refined than that of Europe. Yet there were certain continuities too. First, the fascination of these Arab travellers with the technology of the West and their tendency to categorize cultures through a set of technological criteria, albeit with different emphases over time, was entirely con- sistent and tends to confirm the work of Michael Adas and Daniel Headrick looking in the opposite direction. Second, although Edward Said is never mentioned, there is much of interest here for the great Orientalism debate. If the West constructed an Orient pre- fabricated in order to be ruled, then it is clear that Arab intellectual travellers, certainly in the first two periods and even to a small degree in the third, were often complicit in the visions of the East created by Western travellers and scholars. They were activated by very similar concerns, although by the twentieth century they were primarily caught up in the need to respond to the West, not least through that most potent form of resistance, cultural rediscovery and pride. In this, they mirrored developments taking place in India (perhaps earlier) and contemporaneously among Africans and Afro-Americans. Thus there is much of interest here to historians of inter-cultural relations, not least in the intriguing ways in which the author deals with changing attitudes towards women, Western theatre, fine arts, science and literature. For those who cannot read Arabic, this book is a mine of valuable and absorbing information. John M. MacKenzie Lancaster University 04_reviews 30/3 6/6/00 10:27 am Page 445 Reviews 445 José Ignacio Fortea Perez, ed., Imagenes de la diversidad. El mundo urbano en la Corona de Castilla (S. XVI–XVIII), Santander, Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cantabria/Asamblea Regional de Cantabria, 1997; ISBN 84–8102–150–4; 513 pp. The history of early modern Spain is, in some respects, that of its towns. At the start of the Habsburg era, the greatest challenge to the polity which had emerged since the advent of the Catholic Kings (and which Charles V was inserting into a rather different structure), came in the form of that abortive ‘revolution’, on the part of some of the Castilian cities, which we know as the revolt of the ‘comuneros’. Nearly three hundred years later, the first real steps towards dis- mantling the Spanish ancien régime were taken by the Cortes sitting in Cadiz during the struggle against Napoleon. In the intervening centuries, key themes in Spain’s history are virtually identifiable with individual cities. It is almost impossible, for example, to isolate the Indies trade from Seville and Cadiz, or the emergence of the absolute, centralized modern state from both the growth of Madrid and the fall of Barcelona in 1714 to the troops of Philip V. The importance of the subject has already generated some fine studies of individual cities and towns — including those of Bennassar on Valladolid, Amelang on Barcelona, and Ringrose on Madrid — but the subject has by no means been exhausted. The present volume, on the diversity of the urban experience in early modern Castile, brings together sixteen papers given at a con- ference on that subject, held at the University of Santander in June 1996. Most of the essays restrict themselves to Castile, some focusing on individual towns. However, Roberto Lopez Vela briefly con- siders the Aragon cities in an essay on the Inquisition in the Castilian towns while Richard Kagan ignores the latter altogether in a piece on the cities of the Spanish Americas which argues the lateness of the type of walled defences associated with the so-called ‘Military Revolution’ and prefers to focus on other types — spiritual and so on — of defence. Most of the contributions sit well within the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but a few do not. These include Jaime Contreras’s piece on Old and New Christians in the fifteenth century and Isidro Dubert’s study of family structure and the contribution to urban growth of immigration in Galicia (not hitherto regarded as a major urban centre), focusing on the experience of Santiago de Compostela, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The great danger with a collection of this sort, and reflecting a sometimes rather parochial approach to local and regional historical studies (which cannot always be dissociated from the nature of the 04_reviews 30/3 6/6/00 10:27 am Page 446 446 European History Quarterly Vol. 30 No. 3 funding of research and publication in Spain), is that it adds up to little more than an ill-matched assortment of narrow studies, none of which is aware of the larger picture. Indeed, Tony Thompson cautions against this in his contribution on royal patronage in the cities and political integration in the latter in Habsburg Spain. So, too, does James Amelang, in a plea for greater use of the compara- tive approach, in his essay on urban culture in early modern Spain. Fortunately, most of the pieces in this volume manage to avoid this trap. The editor, José I. Fortea Perez, keeps the larger canvas in view, in an essay on the towns, the Cortes and the problem of political representation in early modern Castile. In addition, that of Maximo Garcia and Bartolome Yun — privileging second-rank towns such as Burgos, Leon, Palencia, Valladolid and Zamora rather than on Madrid and Barcelona — explores consumerism, lifestyles and political change in the Castilian cities between 1750 and 1850, in order to evaluate demand-led models of economic growth that have been put forward to explain similar developments in eighteenth century England. It might be said that the collection focuses unduly on the Habsburg era, and — for example, Juan E. Gelabert Gonzalez on the pressures associated with Spain’s wars between 1632 and 1650 — on fairly well-known aspects of it.

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