“In the myddest of our lyvynge / Death compaseth us rounde about.” These lines from a popular medieval hymn, transmitted in eleventh-century St. Gallen, serve as a fitting epigram to Craig Koslofsky's study on The Reformation of the Dead. In this well-argued, stimulating book, the author traces the fate of the dead in early modern Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the eighteenth century. He approaches “the history of death” (Philippe Ariès) from the social order of the living. Drawing on the anthropology of ritual, Koslofsky explores the art of dying, funeral rites, and the topography of burial places. In a series of fascinating episodes Koslofsky skillfully applies the insight that “liminality” provides an “opportunity” to act (p. 8). In Leipzig in 1536, for instance, various urban groups clashed over what was perceived as a threat to traditional burial practice when Duke George of Saxony mandated that, for the sake of hygiene, the dead were to be interred outside the city walls. This ordinance instigated varied responses and severe resistance. University professors insisted on their right to be buried intramurally. Mendicant monasteries expressed fears of losing control over religious life in the city. The whole dispute occurred in an atmosphere of heightened confessional strife. Burial in places other than the churchyard signified either a dead person's dishonorable status or allegiance to Reformation ideas (though Duke George was Catholic). A tenuous settlement was reached when the Duke granted privileges to professors and required the payment of extra fees for city burials.

This study of Dravidian ethnic mobilization in twentieth-century south India is a recent contribution to current theoretical debates on ethno-nationalism and mass politics. Eschewing a conventional state-centered approach to ethnic politics, it examines how political parties and societies interact to shape and direct ethnic identities.

The aim of this book is to explore the practical consequences of chivalric codes in medieval Europe. Strickland strips away the romance of chivalry and exposes the systematic rationality that lay behind the antagonistic behavior of Europe's warrior aristocracy. It is easy enough to appreciate how the ravaging of enemy territory was a calculated act of war and profit, but Strickland shows how even chivalric codes, of which respite, ransom, and honorable treatment of opponents are but a few examples, were conventions adopted by the warrior caste to limit death and injury among themselves. That foot soldiers, crossbowmen, and Celtic pastoralists were not covered by these conventions is made brutally obvious by the mutual massacres that characterized relations between knights and plebeians. The codes were not always followed within the warrior aristocracy, of course, but such cases of abrogation were often either the consequences of a noble feud or tactical moves in the game of legitimation and coalition-building. When kings executed baronial rebels, Strickland argues, this implied that their rebellion had pushed them outside the covenants of chivalry.

The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid explores the foundations of apartheid political economy in South Africa, its development and the factors that promoted its collapse. The authors use rational-choice theory to reconceptualize the political economy of apartheid, arguing that apartheid was not an immutable, “irrational” form of racism, but rather a redistributive policy designed to benefit whites. In general, the authors contend, the ability of economic interest groups like white workers and capitalists to prevail on the state to meet their interests depended on certain characteristics, like size of organization, which affected their capacity to organize effectively. Lowenberg and Kaempfer further argue that international economic sanctions were of limited importance in ending apartheid: economic and political sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other advanced industrialized countries were supposedly ineffective in part because those sanctions appeared “to reflect the exigencies of interest group policies within the sanctioning countries . . . without regard to their target” (119–20).

This volume by Şevket Pamuk of Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, probably best known for his earlier work entitled The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade, Investment and Production (CUP, 1987), is a significant addition to the literature on the interface of early modern imperial and monetary systems. Dealing with the political economy of the Ottoman empire over its sprawling life-span, the book traces the evolution of the relationship between the Ottomans and money, from the time that early Ottoman coinage emerged in the 1320s from under the Byzantine shadow, to the nineteenth- century integration into the Gold Standard, and the financing of the First World War. The long span covered is divided for purposes of expositional convenience into five periods, respectively 1300–1477, 1477–1585, 1585–1690, 1690–1844, and finally 1844–1918. Interestingly, despite Pamuk's own background as a specialist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is the second and third periods that are most extensively treated, between chapters 4 and 9. Yet, there is enough here for those concerned with both the earlier and later periods to be satisfied that they have not been short-changed by the book's ambitious title.