434 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

downplays the influence of royal statute and parliamentary legislation in theeconomic evolution of eighteenth-century Scottish (or English) publishing,particularly the decision by the House of Lords to abolish perpetual copyrightin 1774. Instead, he highlights the intention of publishers to reach informalagreements among themselves on the extent of and limits to literary property.Finally, Sher eschews the exotic sauces of reader-reception theory, statistics gonemad and hyper-technical bibliographical analysis. For him, the writing of historyis empirically based, a story well told and intelligibly interpreted.

While economic arrangements between authors and publishers play a significantrole in Sher’s work, The Enlightenment and the Book is also fascinating literaryhistory. Exemplary authors include Tobias Smollett, David Hume, William Rob-ertson, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and Hugh Blair, each of whom occupiesa key position in Sher’s alphabetical biographical database of 115 representativeEnlightenment Scots. A second database, organized chronologically, lists theimprint date (between 1746 and 1800) and gives important publication informa-tion for 360 British first editions by these 115 individuals and, where relevant,for Irish and American first reprints of their books. Sher identifies forty-six Britishfirst editions by Scottish authors as bestsellers, ranging from five novels bySmollett and three histories by Robertson, to William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine,William Smellie’s edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Mungo Park’sTravels in the Interior Districts of Africa.

Sher devotes more than one-fourth of his text to Irish and American republi-cation of Scottish Enlightenment books. Since they mainly served the Irish andAmerican markets, were beyond the scope of British copyright legislation, andgenerally exported books to Scotland and England in more modest and afford-able formats than the originals, Dublin’s reprinters, according to Sher, were notpirates in the strict sense of the term. This position surely is worth furtherdiscussion, as perhaps is Sher’s general assertion of the ‘national mission’ of theScottish Enlightenment. When all is said and done, The Enlightenment and theBook leaves one highly satisfied. It is an accessible feast of intellectual comfortfood, a copious and hearty meal for bibliographers and bibliophiles, historians,literary scholars, and anyone else interested in the material foundations ofcultural diffusion.University of Oregon RAYMOND BIRN

Late Modern

Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c.1763–c.1840.Edited by David Cannadine. Palgrave. 2007. 167pp. £19.99.

It is a pity that this book is so short, because there is much of promise here.Nevertheless, instead of developing the lectures as full-scale essays, there is anunfinished quality to this book and the reader is sold short. This is even morethe case if the space occupied by endnotes and index is deducted from the text.A general synoptic piece on ‘Britain, the Sea, the Empire, the World’ by theever-excellent Felipe Fernández-Armesto is thought-provoking. He argues that,by standards of durability, the British empire was a feeble affair compared withthe great land empires which grew up in modern times, those of China in centralAsia, Russia in Siberia, and America. He goes on to argue, more questionably,

LATE MODERN 435

© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

that the British empire was a nineteenth-century phenomenon, and that whatneeds to be explained in England’s sixteenth century is not the imperial effortbut the lack of it. The Irish would not have agreed. This is followed by StephenConway’s attempt to argue that naval power and empire focused on Europeancommitments, a useful piece that is part of a larger argument he is making. PeterMarshall considers the maritime dimension of empire and British identity.Maxine Berg looks at the trade in luxuries from Asia to Europe, arguing thatthese imports into Europe stimulated particular industries and a new sense inEurope of quality, middling-class consumer markets to be tapped. Richard Draytonexamines maritime networks and the making of knowledge, an overly brief butthoughtful piece. He argues that ‘knowledge becomes situated, and then tran-scultured, as the asymmetric effects of geography lead to local engagements andperceptions and exchange’ (p. 80). This argument is taken forward by SimonSchaffer on ‘Instruments, Surveys and Maritime Empire’, while Philip Morganbrings in race and Catherine Hall gender, both instructive pieces.University of Exeter JEREMY BLACK

Loyalism in Ireland, 1789. By Allan Blackstock. Boydell. 2007 x + 296pp. £50.00/$85.00.

The year 1792 stands as Year One of the modern counter-revolution. Thearmies of the Austrian emperor and Prussian king invaded France; in LondonJohn Reeves launched the Association for the Preservation of Liberty andProperty against Levellers and Republicans; in Dublin the corporation issued adeclaration of ‘Protestant Ascendancy’. It was also the year of the levée enmasse, of the London Corresponding Society, with ‘members unlimited’, and ofthe Catholic Convention in Dublin, whose delegates could boast a popularelectoral mandate broader than any to which any unreformed parliament could(or would wish to) lay claim. The year 1792, in short, witnessed mass mobiliza-tion, loyalist and radical alike, on an unprecedented scale. Yet, in comparison torevolutionary, republican or nationalist politics, or to the historiography ofEnglish popular conservatism, the history of Irish loyalism has been neglectedor as Allan Blackstock shrewdly notes, studied ‘vicariously’, functioning as a sortof occasionally glimpsed ghostly negative to the vivid portraiture of disaffection.This book sets out to correct that deficiency, relate the Irish to the British expe-rience, and restore to plebeian loyalists the agency long denied them by a nationalist-leaning, quasi-Marxist analysis which has long consigned Orangemen and theirkind to the realms of ‘false consciousness’ and ‘ruling class’ manipulation.

The research is impressive, producing a rich hoard of detail, which, however,sometimes clutters up a densely packed narrative, more than it advances historicalargument. Dr Blackstock’s argument is nonetheless persuasive. Popular loyalismdid indeed enjoy both government sanction and elite sponsorship, but the footsoldiers of Protestant Ascendancy and the British connection were never themere unwitting instruments of Dublin Castle or local gentry. Rather theresubsisted a ‘transactional’, and often unstable, relationship, ‘negotiated’ and‘mediated’ by landlords, magistrates and clergymen. That cross-class alliancefunctioned most effectively in the run-up to, and aftermath of, the 1798 rebellion,and began to unravel as the need to close ranks against a common revolutionaryenemy faded. The dilemma for the propertied classes was how to motivate and