Volume 53, Number 17 · November 2, 2006
Surprises of the Empire
By David Gilmour
Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850
by Maya Jasanoff
Knopf, 404 pp., $27.95
One of the eccentricities of the historical profession is its tradition of explaining very complicated events by means of very simple formulas. For decades historians tried to explain the French Revolution through the actions of monolithic classes—the 'aristocracy,' the 'bourgeoisie'—until Richard Cobb and a few other scholars sug- gested the events were easier to understand if you treated people as individuals rather than as members of a class (acting in unison), a crowd (rioting for the same motives), or, worst of all, a list of statistics.
Review, 3708 words
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