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Reviews of Books
[1932]) his work provides valuable information about
the process of restoring rural France and is distinguished by excellent maps and solid data. It also offers
an interesting complement to Richard Kuisel's Capitalism and the State in Modem France (1981); Thomas
Grabau's Industrial Reconstruction in France after
World War I (1991); and J. Favier's Reconstructions et
modernizations: La France apres les ruines, 1918-1945
(1991).
THOMAS W. GRABAU
Nebraska Wesleyan University
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM. The Career and Legend of
Vasco da Gama. New York: Cambridge University
Press. 1997. Pp. xxiii, 400. $59.95.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam has become a leading historian
of Portuguese activities in the East, especially India,
during the early modern period. In the course of less
than a decade he has written five books and has edited
five others. His most recent contribution is a reexamination of the career of Vasco da Gama (1469-1524)
and of the myths that have arisen, from the sixteenth
century to the present, demonstrating that he was, as
one well-known historian asserted in 1970, "one of the
greatest argonauts of Modern Times" (p. 363). Indeed,
as recently as a decade ago, a poll revealed that 58.8
percent of the Portuguese consulted considered him to
be the most admired figure in their history.
One of the virtues of this impressively researched
book, which is based on archival sources in Portugal,
Spain, and Italy, and on the extant literature in nine
languages, is that it makes use not only of the older,
often myth-creating literature of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century but especially of the abundant
recent scholarship, particularly in French and Portuguese, concerning the court of Portugal, its major
factions, and its most conspicuous agents overseas
between the 1490s and the 1520s. Another is the
author's analysis of the evolution of competing myths
concerning the characters and achievements of the two
arch rivals, Vasco da Gama and Afonso de Albuquerque, whose descendants and admirers, including major
chroniclers and nationalist writers, perpetuated the
exploits of their heroes. The elaborately textured
chapters are complemented by four maps and thirty
illustrations, but the book lacks a glossary or an
adequately analytical index.
Subrahmanyam's Vasco da Gama is far from a
heroic figure. He began life as a minor noble who may
(or may not) have been born in the southern coastal
town of Sines. It is not at all clear why this landsman
was selected by Manuel the Fortunate (1495-1521) to
lead a modest expedition of four ships to the pepper
emporium of Calicut (1497-1499), nor is it apparent
why he was not also appointed to command the next
expedition to the East, one headed by an even more
obscure figure, Pedro Alvares Cabral, best known for
his surprise discovery of a portion of the Brazilian
littoral (1500). Vasco da Gama did return to India in
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1502-1503, when he bore the exalted, Columbusinspired title of Admiral of the Seas of Arabia, Persia,
and India, and again in 1524, when, as the Count of
Vidigueira, he became Portuguese India's second viceroy, the first to die on Indian soil. The figure that
emerges-when we actually glimpse him-from these
pages is that of an irascible, arrogant, uncompromising
leader who was preoccupied with enhancing his own
estate and that of his clientele, a merciless killer of
unfortunates who seemingly opposed his ambitions on
land and sea in the East, a spendthrift who practiced
petty economies at the expense of subordinates, and,
in general, a figure hardly deserving of admiration.
Given the relative paucity of uncontaminated
sources, Subrahmanyam's portrait of Vasco da Gama
may be as reliable as that of any other scholar who
preceded him. (For the most part, he successfully
mutes his criticism of others whose views he does not
always share, save for his unnecessary and unfortunate
attack on the octogenarian Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, a leading and often inspirational Portuguese
scholar since the 1940s.) I do have several concerns
with this outstanding volume, however. The first is that
it contains numerous digressions that will interest
specialists but will weary all but the most intrepid
general readers. There are long sections of chapters
where Vasco da Gama is wholly or largely absent.
Second, the author occasionally reaches beyond his
evidence to assert as fact what is really only inference
(as, for example, his assertion that Vasco da Gama lost
the court's favor during the years 1505-1518 because
of his uncles' misdeeds in the Indian Ocean. Here is a
classic instance of the sort of post hoc propter hoc
reasoning we were all taught to avoid.) Third, while
Subrahmanyam successfully strips away many mythological encumbrances from the famous Argonaut, he
fails to provide his reader with a distillation of his own
view of the real Vasco da Gama. Nevertheless, this is
an outstanding, provocative biography, and this reviewer eagerly awaits Subrahmanyan's promised studies of Dom Francisco da Gama, Vasco's descendant
and an equally controversial viceroy of Portuguese
India.
DAURIL ALDEN
University of Washington
BRENDAN SIMMS. The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian
High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the
Executive, 1797-1806. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 390. $69.95.
At Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, Napoleon's armies
vanquished Prussia, setting the stage for the so-called
Prussian reform era, the meaning of which historians
have debated for two centuries. Brendan Simms has at
least two major purposes in his book about Prussia in
the Napoleonic era. The first is to depict Prussian
diplomacy in the years immediately preceding the
infamous defeat. His other goal is to refute the work of
scholars who find explanatory connections between
OCTOBER
1998