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Reviews of Books
In this, of course, Drayton echoes such classic
works as Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (1904), R. H. Tawney's Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism (1926), C. B. Macpherson's Political
Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), and, more
recently, David Hancock's Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic
Community, 1735-1785 (1995). What makes his book
distinctive and original is its grounding in the richly
symbolic and metaphorical soil of gardens. For early
modern Europeans, which emphatically inciuded the
English, gardening became a favorite sport of nobility
and royalty, a means of displaying their wealth and
clout. It was in the eighteenth century, however, that
such figures as Charles "Turnip" Townshend, Thomas
William Coke of Norfolk, and Arthur Young elevated
the new scientific agriculture to the level of gospel. For
them, the empire was the British nation's "useful
garden," to be tilled, planted, manured, and above all
improved.
The ideology of improvement found its greatest
promoter and patron in Sir Joseph Banks, many of
whose papers have recently been made available in
their original holograph form on the World Wide Web
(http://www.sinsw.gov.au.Banks/). And it is with Banks
that Drayton's hitherto sweeping survey settles down
to more detailed analysis. Banks's role in promoting
imperial gardening—the transformation of the Kew
Gardens from Royal to national treasure and responsibility; the patronage of the well-known exploration
voyages of Captains Cook and Bligh; the development
of a network of imperial gardens where valuable
botanie discoveries could be cultivated, grafted, and
transplanted—was truly prodigious. Although less
spectacular than the founder, his successors followed
up and institutionalized his example. Not only Bligh's
infamous breadfruit but quinine, rubber, cocoa, and
many other crops were brought to Kew and then
transmitted to Calcutta, Sydney, Kingston, Singapore,
Accra, and elsewhere through the far-flung network of
imperial botanical laboratories.
The economic value of all these botanical products
has of course been incalculable. Yet Drayton argues
persuasively that for Banks and his fellow imperial
botanists, the economic argument of empire was a
means of justifying what for them was mainly a professional objective. The British were gardeners not so
much because it was profitable as because they were
British. Like cricket or fly-fishing, it was their hobby.
Nor, since many of the products were food crops,
without which it is hard to see how the world's
expanding population could have been fed, was this
phase of expansion all that reprehensible.
Although this is preeminently an eighteenth and
nineteenth-century book, Drayton continues it on into
the twentieth, when Joseph Chamberlain's doctrine of
"undeveloped estates," the several versions of "backwardness" and "underdevelopment," the World Bank,
and UNESCO were all manifestations of the idea of
improvement. Drayton's book is one of the most
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
successful so-called New Empire histories I have encountered. It is a pleasure to read. He has succeeded in
breaking down the Chinese walls that have separated
British domestic and imperial history, the history of
science, and the history of gardening. All who are
interested in any of these fields will need to read this
book. Moreover, since I for one would like to use it in
the classroom, I hope that Yale University Press will
soon bring out a paperback edition.
JOHN W. CELL
Duke University
PAULA BARTLEY. Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in
England, 1860-1914. (Women's and Gender History.)
New York: Routledge. 2000. Pp. xi, 229. Cloth $85.00,
paper $25.99.
Paula Bartley carves out new territory in a muchexamined field in her study of Victorian and Edwardian prostitution. She does not attempt to offer fresh
insights into the causes of prostitution or the campaigns for regulation or deregulation, areas analyzed
so perceptively by such historians as Judith Walkowitz
in her now-classic Prostitution and Victorian Society
(1980). Instead, Bartley focuses on the efforts of
reformers to eradicate prostitution by eliminating
prostitutes, at first through rehabilitation institutions,
then through preventive measures, and finally through
suppression.
Bartley argues that the first attempts to eliminate
prostitution were led by optimistic religious reformers
who believed that with successful intervention, prostitutes could be rehabilitated and reintegrated into
society as moral beings. Groups sponsored by the
Church of England and other religious denominations
established penitentiary institutions where prostitutes
were confined and inculcated in middle-class morality,
even as they were trained in practical domestic skills
that would allow them to find employment other than
sex work. When these institutions for rehabilitation
proved unsuccessful, reformers turned to attempts to
prevent women from betoming prostitutes in the first
place. Such organizations as the "Ladies Associations
for the Care of Friendless Girls," with its many
branches throughout England, established training
schools for poor working-class girls. They also founded
homes for unwed mothers, in hopes that presumably
one moral failure would not turn into a life of prostitution.
In the late nineteenth century, according to Bartley,
there was a shift away from environmental to biological explanations for prostitution. With the new concern about racial strength, eugenicists postulated a
connection between feeble-mindedness and sexual
promiscuity and argued that women of defective mental capabilities were most susceptible to prostitution.
These prostitutes were seen as especially dangerous to
the race because of the many defective children they
would presumably have as a result of their sex work.
Institutions were therefore established to provide for
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
feeble-minded women the care and support that would
keep them off the streets.
Failing to prevent prostitution, Victorians turned to
suppression, in the form of moral purity crusades and
vigilance societies. These groups aimed at strengthening the laws against brothels and solicitation and
sought to enlist the police in the enforcement of these
laws. Like the earlier reforms, these efforts also failed.
By the early twentieth century, however, prostitution
was in decline, which Bartley attributes to better
education and employment opportunities for workingclass women, as well as better welfare provisions,
which allowed desperate women to survive without
resorting to sex work.
This volume in the Routledge series "Women's and
Gender History," edited by June Purvis, is based on
extensive research in the papers of the various reform
societies, including their correspondence and journals.
It also draws on the records of the Home Office and
the Metropolitan Police. The book contains much
intriguing material, particularly on the institutions of
penitentiary reform. The weaknesses of the book,
however, diminish its use as a work of serious scholarship. The writing style is awkward, with constant
run-on sentences that are sometimes hard to follow,
and too-frequent use of the passive voice, which makes
for unreferenced subjects and therefore fuzzy meaning. Key people are referred to without any biographical information. For example, Bartley refers throughout the text to Ellice Hopkins, of whom she says
sweepingly that "when the prevention of prostitution is
mentioned, historians are unanimous that Ellice Hopkins was a crucial figure" (p. 14), but Hopkins is
presented as a disembodied name, with no explanation
of her life or affiliations.
More serious than the weaknesses of style are the
inconsistencies in the text. Bartley, for example, argues
that reformers tried to establish alternatives for poor
women other than workhouses, in that workhouses
sent women out into domestic service, "the occupation
most susceptible to prostitution" (p. 8). However, most
of her discussion of the reform penitentiaries on the
training of former prostitutes is devoted to the primary
goal of training "rescued" women to be domestic
servants. One does not expect consistency among the
reforming societies, but the inconsistencies should be
explained or at least acknowledged. The failure to do
so relates to probably the greatest weakness of this
book, the lack of sufficient analysis of the rich material. Bartley probably attempts to cover too much
material. For example, the last section on moral purity
crusades summarizes a very broad subject that includes
much more than concern to eliminate prostitution, and
coverage of this broad topic in limited space necessarily lacks depth.
This wonderfully researched study offers valuable
material that furthers our knowledge of the various
campaigns against prostitution in late Victorian and
Edwardian England, but its poor writing style and its
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lack of sufficient analysis make it more a mine of great
source material than a polished work of scholarship.
NANCY FIX ANDERSON
Loyola University New Orleans
JAMES K. HOPKINS. Into the Heart of the Fire: The British
in the Spanish Civil War. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. 1998. Pp. xxii, 474. $60.00.
The drama that was the Spanish Civil War is laden
with popular mythology, and this mythology remains
a resilient force on Britain's radical left to this day.
Written from a British Communist Party perspective,
the mythology has been sustained by "official" accounts of the 2,000 or so British volunteers who
journeyed to Spain and rallied to the defense of the
Spanish Republic. Praising the role of the Communist
Party, these narratives sustain the legend that the
British volunteers were a united front in action, coming together for what has been depicted—in simple,
black and white terms—as a courageous struggle for
democracy and freedom against the evil of fascism. But
a far more complicated picture emerges from James K.
Hopkins's work. Rather than simply a case of "good
versus evil," democrats versus fascists, Spain became
"a battleground of totalitarianism—of the left and as
well as the right" (p. 289).
What Hopkins reveals is an uncomfortable truth:
the Communist Party subjected the volunteer British
Battalion—which included many noncommunists—to
strict partisan control. As a volunteer army, the International Brigades prided themselves on freedom of
discussion, but the reality was a Communist Party
that suppressed democratie pluralism. To his credit,
Hopkins is the first to draw on material from newly
opened archives in Moscow to recount the experiences
of those "dissident volunteers" at odds with the Stalinization of the British Battalion. Amounting to as
many as 400 men, these "political unreliables" experienced character assassination, surveillance, and incarceration; there is also the suspicion that some were
intentionally sent on perilous missions that they might
be well and truly silenced.
But this book amounts to more than exposing the
truth buried beneath the Communist Party's glorification of the British Battalion. The ambitious task
Hopkins has set himself is to write a history of the
British in the Spanish Civil War from a broad perspective that takes account of both middle-class and working-class volunteers (their respective histories have
typically been written separately). Yet his chief concern lies specifically with radical middle-class and
proletarian intellectuals for whom Spain represented
a real opportunity not only to defeat the menace of
fascism but also to live the ideological vision of
equality between classes. Consequently, Hopkins devotes considerable space to the attitudes of the radical
intelligentsia in 1930s Britain. Much effort is directed
toward locating left-wing intellectuals in their true
political and cultural context.
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