John M. Mackenzie

Essay and Reflection: On Scotland and the Empire

Nationalism characteristic cannot be gainsaid: its remarkable capacity to energize the writing of history. The faltering resurgence of Scottish nationalism since the late 1960s has helped to bring about an extraordinary renaissance in Scots historiography, of which one interesting aspect has been the extensive discussion of Scotlands role in the British Empire and, for good or ill, the significance of the imperial experience of the Scots in binding them into the British state. At the same time, historians in North America, Australasia, and elsewhere have become interested in discovering the demographic origins of the cultural characteristics of former colonial territories. Yet there has

Reviews : J.A. Mangan, ed., The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society, London, Frank Cass, ISBN 0-7146-3398-4, 1992; xii + 228 pp.; £30.00

bourgeois authors. Moreover, her analysis of press accounts of criminality is limited to four newspapers: The Times and the Daily Telegraph of London, and Le Temps and Le Petit Parisien of Paris. The Daily Telegraph and Le Petit Parisien were cheap, popular papers. But how much of their readership was lower middle class, or working class? Did socialist and other radical left-wing papers report on crime differently? In short, the reader gets no sense of what the ’lower orders’ really thought about crime. This limits the usefulness of Leps’ thesis.

FRANCIS MADING DENG. Africans of Two Worlds: The Dinka in Afro-Arab Sudan. Pp. xx, 244. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978.

Egypt was able to capture the support of the Egyptian masses in a moment of enthusiasm ... (this) second stratum does not rule but is the stratum without which the rulers can not rule.&dquo; One can approve of his &dquo;revisionist&dquo; orientation which focuses on social structure and not just political culture, which seeks greater clarity in the political processes between elites at the center and periphery of power instead of the more static demographic description of such elites. His concern is with the ways in which central politics impinge on local politics and vice versa, emphasizing interaction and relationships that exist between and among levels of party organization and govern-

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induced changes had not taken place the author would have chastized the Cuban revolution for failing to change. The same can be said about Lowry’s other criticisms regarding the liberalized divorce laws, increased mobility of women, and so forth: to a &dquo;devil&dquo; theorist of the Revolutionlike Lowry-the Cubans are damned if they change, and damned if they do not. JAMES F. PETRAS Department of Sociology State University of New York Binghamton