History from Between

The Brokered World and its depiction of the crucial role of “go-betweens” in the development of modernity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The impulse behind this history from between is found to be similar to the 1960s movement for a history from below. While convinced that this critique of the idea of European imperial acquisition of the “view from nowhere” is well placed, the reviewer notes the dangers of over-valorizing the role of the go-between if broad, secular economic and cultural change and its constraints are not duly considered. Capturing the complexities of modernization is no easier from the sole viewpoint of the go-between than from that of the imperial impresario.