Book Review

Comparative/World

This collection of twelve essays, a product of the 1999 Commonwealth Fund Conference at University College London, demonstrates the possibilities and limitations of comparative history. Authors compare the American South and the Mezzogiorno, the term Italian historians use to refer to the southern part of their country. Almost without exception, for the purpose of this collection, the American South is the nineteenth-century South. Two of the essays survey the literature. Peter Kolchin identifies the major themes in the historiography and handles them with thoroughness and fresh insight, as he points out three comparative possibilities: North-South comparisons; internal comparisons, or the idea of "many souths," and external comparisons between the South and other societies. The frequency with which other contributors refer to Kolchin's comments is indicative of their salience and trenchancy.	1
Equally stimulating is the literature survey by J. William Harris to introduce the section on gender as a category of comparative analysis. Some might be surprised to learn that Harris begins his discussion of gender with W. J. Cash's Mind of the South (1941), Joel Williamson's Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (1984), and Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordon, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), before moving on to the work of Anne Firor Scott, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Catherine Clinton, and other historians. Yet Harris's perceptive overview presents an elongated perspective on gender and its coming of age in the historiography, especially when seen in light of the work of Suzanne Lebsock, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. His suggestions for future research include women and their work inside and outside the household, roles in property transmission, and religion; Protestant and Catholic dimensions of patriarchy; masculine and feminine roles in race and class definitions in the South and the Mezzogiorno; and the function of honor in the two societies.	2
Coeditors Enrico Dal Lago and Rick Halpern introduce the collection, point out the central themes, and summarize the contributions. Familiar themes include economic marginality, slavery and capitalism, ideologies of the landed elite, rural labor conditions, the rise of nationalism, and modernization and reform. Later Dal Lago draws connections between the American abolitionists and labor in the two souths by comparing the American antislavery movement to the Italian movement for national unification between 1830 and 1860. Unfortunately most of the essays are not what Kolchin calls "true historical comparisons in which the historian actually compares two or more developments, events and geographic areas" but "historical juxtaposition" (p. 47). The reader is left to make side-by-side comparisons. Comparative history has always been limited by the difficulties of becoming a specialist in different areas of the world where barriers of language, different historiographical traditions, and the need for familiarity with relevant historical precedents and cultural forces all steepen the learning curve. Still, awareness of comparable developments brings significant benefits, as this collection shows, in terms of a dialogue on the causes of change and the bases of continuity, the bread and butter of good history.	3
Nineteenth-century landed elites, their ideologies, and their attitudes toward modernization and reform are the subjects of several essays. Richard Follett's study of Louisiana's landed sugar elites finds no conflict between planter values and capitalism. Marta Petrusewicz's essay on the Mezzogiorno found one-half of the landed elite to be eager modernizers, particularly when they saw how modernization would benefit them. Lucy Riall, who studied the great grain estates between 1770 and 1910, also showed how rural reform could be exploited for conservative ends, despite the failure of such actions to guarantee commercial success or even economic stability. Bruce Levine concludes the collection with observations on modernization, capitalism, and backwardness in the two souths.	. . .