Colonial Empires Compared: Britain and the Netherlands, 1750-1850 (review)

222 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) Bible through Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana and that the principle so fundamental to Lollard hermeneutics, namely that both the figurative and spiritual meanings of Scripture must agree with the literal, is ultimately the legacy of Cicero’s legal thought expressed in De inventione. In ‘Ciceronian RhetoricalTheory in the Volgare: a Fourteenth-centuryText and its Fifteenth-century Readers’, Rita Cox focuses on an anonymous translation of the Ad Herennium from Tuscany. The most salient aspect of the text she analyses is the author’s insistent attempt to underline the relevance of the text to the deliberative oratory of contemporary communal councils. He does this by ‘modernizing’ classical examples and putting them in a contemporary context. The rhetorical culture envisioned in this text disappears along with the communes. James J. Murphy’s ‘Rhetoric in the Fifteenth Century: From Manuscript to Print’ offers a broad comparison between the rhetorical treatises in manuscript (1350-1465) and printed texts (1465-1500). He concludes that printed books were both more numerous and different in kind. In the final essay (‘Political Rhetoric and Rhetorical Politics in Juan Luis Vives’, Nancy Struever supports Ward’s and Cox’s emphasis on the pragmatic nature of medieval rhetoric by emphasizing the political nature of Vives’ rhetoric. She reiterates a theme in her earlier work, that the classical quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy is essentially a conflict between pragmatism and foundationalism (p. 255). This collection of essays does what a good festschrift is meant to do: it honours its recipient by showing the fruitful ways in which his insights can be expanded to other texts. Allison P. Coudert Department of Religious Studies University of California at Davis Moore, Bob and Henk van Nierop, Colonial Empires Compared: Britain and the Netherlands, 1750-1850, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; hardback; pp. 204; RRP £50; ISBN 0754604926. This is an exercise in comparative history only at a superficial level. Such a comment is not intended to denigrate the merits of the individual essays within the volume, which are consistently interesting, informative and scholarly. However, methodological precision and clarity of purpose are often lacking. No doubt this is due in part to the book’s origin in papers delivered to the Fourteenth Anglo- Reviews 223 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Dutch Historical Conference in 2000. The five sections each contain two essays, one by a British and one by a Dutch scholar, exploring the themes of the AngloDutch relationship, cultural perceptions of the non-European world, the role of each nation’s navy, imperial finance, and the relationship between metropolis and colonies. There is a sense of artificiality to this neat arrangement of chapters, as if the round peg of the contributors’ diverse research interests has been forced into the square hole of a tidy editorial schema. Acogent introduction providing some justification for the arrangement might alleviate that impression. But the introduction begins with a few cursory comments on the benefits of comparative history, an almost embarrassed admission that: ‘[a]t first glance it might seem that the comparative element is conspicuous mainly by its absence’ (p. 1), and a plea for readers to make their own comparisons and contrasts between the articles. Thereafter, Stephen Conway simply summarises each of the essays. It seems unusual that the voices of the two editors themselves are entirely silent, and that a third scholar has been invited to pen the introduction. Perhaps this is a symptom of the volume’s most obvious flaw: the need for far more rigorous editorial oversight. This is true both from an academic perspective (readers are left largely in the dark as to reasons for the choice of individual essays and their pairing) and from a technical point of view. The book contains far too many annoying typographical and editing errors (‘modern’ is spelt as ‘modem’ throughout; the dates of the fourthAnglo-Dutch war are variously given as 1780-4 and 1782-4). For this the publishers must also take some blame. Having exorcised these gripes let me say something about the individual essays. The two that work best as a paired unit are those by Glynis Ridley and Angelie Sens on perceptions of...