| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, editors. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 445. Cloth $89.95, paper $24.95.
An impassioned plea for world history, this collection of articles treats topics ranging across half a millennium and far-flung geographical locations. As editors Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton note, it is no longer possible to think uncritically in terms of "the West," "Asia," or "Europe" as distinct political and cultural entities because they have been in contact, conflict, and deeply interdependent relationships since at least the fourteenth century. The volume focuses on empires and imperial power because these have been powerful sponsors of the cultural intermixing, fusion, appropriations, and extinctions that have molded the global politics of today's world. The editors have gathered articles that analyze high politics and state practices, to be sure, but that also bring to light the stuff of everyday life: the languages we speak, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, our sexual mores, our bodily adornments, and our religious outlooks.	1
This volume has a specific purpose not registered in the title, and that is to help bring the study of women and gender into world history. The editors rightly point out (and one is shocked that it is necessary to do so in 2005) that gender as a research theme is almost totally absent from world history. The goal of this volume, as the editors express it, is to use gender as one analytical tool among many—one that can provide historically nuanced accounts of gendered divisions of labor and political power across cultures.	. . .

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