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Book Reviews 151

ics that are mentioned only briefly. In short.Open Wound is a tour deforce of synthesis.On the penultimate page of his book, Ev-ans notes that African Americans are uniquein having "a traditiona historical memoryextending over centuriesof viewing societyfrom the bottom" (p. 247). This can be saidof Evans as well. He offers a narrative that,reflects the experience and point of view ofblacks in their perennial struggle against racialoppression. This quality is suffused throughoutthe text and is also evident in the details thatEvans incorporates; for example, blacks jokedthat the acronym for Franklin D. Roosevelt'sNational Recovery Act (NRA) stood for "NegroRemoval Act" because the bill allowed em ploy-ers to fire some workers and increase the work-loads of the rest. Evans's view from the bottomis also reflected in his sardonic observation that"the Civil War was . . . the only American warabout which the losers were allowed to tell thestory", as well as in his pessimistic observationthat "in the misery, chaos, and high incarcera-tion rates suffered by African Americans of theinner city, one may see some of what lies aheadfor the rest of American society" (pp. 191, 5).This is the sober pessimism of a scholar whohas surveyed the entire record of race in Amer-ica, and, rather than striking the familiar chordof "the long road to freedom," has instead cho-sen to remind the reader from the title onwardthat this is an "open wound," still festering andawaiting redress.

Stephen SteinbergQueens College and Graduate CenterCity University of New YorkNew York, New YorkMoving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Inti-macy in an Age of Global Empire. Ed. by TonyBallantyne and Antoinette Burton. (Urbana:

of anthropology, history, geography, and post-colonial studies, challenge the literature thatsees empire's intimate ties as "profoundly lo-cal" or personal, and isolated from empire's"globalizing work" (p. 5). This local-globaldivision, argue the editors, has effectively ren-dered the local static and representative onlyof so-called traditional cultures/groups; it hasportrayed local cultures, groups, and ideas asacted upon, but never acting, and mobility assolely the domain of colonizers. By linkingspace and sexual practices as technologies ofempire, this volume explicitly seeks to unset-tle this division through attention to how inti-macy was "embodied" across and in spaces ofernpire that itself depended on the movementof capital, commodities, knowledge, and in-struments of power (p. 7).In addition to the editors' introduction andepilogue. Moving Subjects has three parts. Thearticles in part 1, "Vantage Points: Movingacross Imperial Spaces," explore the intimaciesof empire across a range of vantage points andlocales: from the violence and coercion of Gap-tain James Gook'sfirstexchange with, and pro-duction of ethnographic knowledge about, theMaori (in Rachel Standfield's essay); the sexualrelationships between U.S. whalers and NgaiTahu Maori women and between indigenouswomen and early fur traders in the Westernhemisphere that, though short-lived (whalersand fur traders quickly moved on) , positionedthese women as cultural interlocutors (DavidHaines); and letters through which a Scottishmissionary in Nova Scotia attempted to main-tain familial connections fundamental to hismanhood and sense of place (Elizabeth Vibert)and those, between Mary Taylor and Gh arlotteBronte, through w hich these friends imaginedand managed the space of empire (GharlotteMacDonald); to the daily enactments of mod-ern labor regimes and contact between men

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152 The Journal of American History June 2010

or ethnic) label but as a community definedby faith (Adrian Carton), the alleged kidnap-ping of an eighteen-year-old servant in mid-seventeenth-century London (Dana Rabin),nineteenth-century anxieties over social rankin southern Africa (Kirsten McKenzie), a tri-al that brought the question of intimacy intonineteenth-century public discussion (AdelePerry), and the examination of leprosy in colo-nial Hawaii (Michelle T.Moran).While I found all the essays compelling, Iwas most interested in those in part 2: "'Af-fective Economies': Sexualities and the Usesof Intimacy." Building on the work of SaraAhmed, thse pieces explore the complexityof sexual encounters at the heart of the mul-tifaceted political project that is empire. Mi-chael A. McDonnell's piece on a mtis fam-ily in the Great Lakes region of the UnitedStates examines how native and mtis women's

intimate relations and strategies helped "cre-ate, sustain, and indeed challenge Europeanempires and the conventions of new [NorthAmerican] nations" (p. 152). Kerry Wynnlooks at the effects of the westward movementof both settlers and U.S. national boundariesinto previously Cherokee territory. This move-ment, imagined and announced as a marriagebetween Indian and Oklahoma territories, inturn, became a technology of U.S. imperialpower and authority. Christine M. Skwiot,building on Wynn's work, explores how twoHawaiian women used gender roles to rejecthaole (white American) discourses of Hawai-ians as a "dying race" and "advance indigenousrights" under the new political reality (p. 192).Despite their strategies, haole appropriation oflocal knowledge became a way of legitimatingand furthering a U.S. political project that re-quired access to resourcescapital, land, andlabor. Katherine EUinghaus's article weaves be-tween the United States and Australia to ana-

elicited are not just by-products of empire (orany political project), but are the stuff tha t givepolitical projects their power and hold.Deborah CohenUniversity ofMissouriSt. LoSt Louis, Missouri

Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structureand Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830. Ed.by Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault.(Cambridge: H arvard University Press, 200 9.xii, 622 pp. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-674-03276-7)What is Atlantic history, and how does writ-ing the Atlantic world relate to historical in-vestigations of smaller or larger geographiccontexts? Such questions are addressed onlyin the sparkling introduction by Bernard Bai-lyn, the recognized evangelist of the genre.All other thirteen contributors to this twelve-essay collection are converts who provide strik-ing examples from their ongoing research ofhow they practice Atlan tic history. The subjectcould have no better advertisement becauseeach of the "probings" into the Atlantic expe-rience is elegantly written and taps neglectedsources, and while they eschew orthodoxies,the authors reveal shared assumptions aboutthe Atlantic world and how the history of itsevolution through the early modern centuriesmight best be investigated.The first such assumption, to take DavidJ. Hancock as a representative figure, is "tbatno state or person set out to create an Atlariticmarket economy" and that nobody deliberate-ly fashioned an Atlantic world (p. 120). Rath-er, a "self-organized" community and econo-my (ibid.) emerged from the various tradingand communication networks shaped by Eu-ropeans and Euro-Americans as they exploitedthe space that came within their orbit through

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