796 Reviews of Books
Yankee work traditions and Lancashire class customs
within New England mills.
The freshness of Greenlees's approach and scholar-
ship breathes new life into the historiography of early
textile industrialization, turning our attention away
from deindustrialization and globalization. She strives
for a balance between gender and class analysis, an in-
tersection of business and labor history, and a reassess-
ment of the assumptions about early industrial pro-
cesses. Still, it is a stretch to accept Tamara K.
Hareven's work as applicable to pre-1860 analysis. The
challenge to historians is Greenlees's transnational vi-
sion of the wickedly complicated, local nature of the
early industrial process: inconsistent, erratic, and non-
linear. This process turns gender into one of the vari-
ables of economic change embedded in the cultural/so-
cial context of the localities that shaped the new
industrial world.
MARY H . BLEWETT
University of Massachusetts,
Lowell
Oz FRANKEL. States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and
Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the
United States. (New Studies in American Intellectual
and Cultural History.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press. 2006. Pp. x, 370. $48.00.
Oz Frankel has written a strenuously empirical, theo-
retically informed study that reaches across a wide
range of subjects, geographies, and politics to examine
how official knowledge was created in the nineteenth
century. It argues that this knowledge project was vi-
tally important to liberal democracies that were replac-
ing older, hierarchal structures of rule with eivil soci-
eties capable of governing themselves.
Frankel's eight chapters explore various efforts to or-
ganize the categories of life and so make life more gov-
ernable. These include the birth of parliamentary com-
missions in Great Britain (assigned with investigating
the plight of the poor, or the use of child labor, or fac-
tory conditions, or the system of education), American
Congressional reports (including, of course, land sur-
veys), narrative accounts of expeditions of discovery
and exploration (that were inseparable from American
continental expansion and railroad building), the
American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission (seeking to
discover a "black subjectivity" that would then become
the basis for integrating the former slaves into the body
politic), and a burgeoning anthropological interest in
Indian life, under the partial aegis of the new Smith-
sonian Institution and invariably invested in questions
of the nation's manifest destiny. These investigations
were related to the formal apparatus of government in
different ways, but all contributed to the state's redef-
inition of itself for a liberal age. As such, they addressed
political and ontological issues concerning government
and population, the "culture of the social fact," the
market's role in the production and dissemination of
information, the construction of national memory, the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
creation of a reading public, and the relationship be-
tween authorship and authority, and between publicity
and the public.
All this respective talk about knowledge and the pub-
lic raises the specters of Jürgen Habermas and Michel
Foucault, who nevertheless fill a modest role in this
work. Frankel seems determined to keep his discussion
from becoming bogged down in clichés about public
spheres and panopticons. This does not mean, however,
that he has nothing to say about such matters. He ar-
gues, for instance, that the state is a vigorous agent of
the "free circulation of ideas" and, therefore, a dom-
inant influence in a putatively autonomous public dis-
course. This role is further complicated by the fact that
the state simultaneously functions as subject and object
of its own inquiries, acting as both investigator and in-
vestigated. This resulted in a dynamic better described
as "panoramic" rather than "panoptic," according to
Frankel. That is to say, social facts were generated by
a diverse roster of interested agents—legislators, bu-
reaucrats, field agents, local representatives, experts,
inspectors, witnesses (representing all sides of the ques-
tion), and even counter-investigations (initiated by such
quasi-state institutions as trade unions)—who pursued
the truth by means of a no less politicized repertoire of
questionnaires, interviews, instructions, transcriptions,
and publications. And so, while facts eventually "speak
for themselves," this only happens at the end of a con-
tested process by which they first have to be discovered
and defined.
Another name for this process is democracy, mani-
fested in the liberal state's ideological—and practical—
need to make some kind of place in civic life for the
heretofore marginalized. Official inquiries prove essen-
tial to a form of governance that no longer rested on the
naked coercion and secrecy long preferred by the ab-
solutist state. As such, the new culture of fact did not
just usher in novel investigatory techniques. It also sig-
naled a far-reaching reinvention of the very nature of
authority and the politics of truth. This, as Frankel
shows, is how the state came to represent the people.
Frankel engages a great many subjects and scholarly
debates, often crossing disciplinary boundaries to do so.
This is the source of considerable satisfaction for the
reader, as is Frankel's palpable investment in good writ-
ing. Indeed, he leaves us wanting to know more. The
book almost entirely avoids the subject of statistics, for
instance, another new form of knowledge invented to
organize the unprecedented movement and chaos of
mass society. One also wants Frankel to expand his dis-
cussion of the political nature of the liberal state, in-
cluding a comparison of its British and American in-
carnations. A survey of investigatory practices should
also include such other knowledge industries as muse-
ums and such knowledge-driven phenomena as exper-
tise. But these complaints are not indicative of any fun-
damental shortcomings. Indeed, they testify to
Frankel's outstanding achievement in revealing the im-
JUNE 2008
 Comparative/World 797
portance of another site of production in the industrial dian organizing, Coleman goes so far as to suggest "that
age, namely, the production of social knowledge. schooling played a crucial role in the very physical sur-
MICHAEL ZAKIM vival of Indians" (p. 262). Similarly, he speculates that
Tel Aviv University Irish schooling "may actually have stimulated Irish na-
tionalism" (p. 241). Never forgetting the unequal power
MICHAEL C. COLEMAN. American Indians, the Irish, and relations, Coleman also makes the case that students
Government Schooling: A Comparative Study. (Indige- and teachers influenced and indeed "needed each
nous Education.) Lincoln: University of Nebraska other" (p. 265). Coleman prizes "complexity" and he is
Press. 2007. Pp. xii, 367. $49.95. sensitive to conflicting evidence and "messy" "reality"
(pp. 269-270).
Michael C. Coleman's book provides a superb history Coleman's work generated several questions in my
of U.S. government Indian schools (mainly boarding mind. He, like some other historians, characterizes
schools run by whites) and British government Irish what most Indian and Irish students underwent as "pro-
schools (day schools administered by the Irish) from the letarianization" (p. 268). The reproduction of class is
1820s to the 1920s. Coleman makes a compelling case clear in the Irish history. Coleman notes that the cat-
for comparative history. He offers more than a history egory of class might not apply to Indians because they
of education in a narrow sense because what Indian and were classified as "culturally different" (p. 268). But
Irish students experienced was a comprehensive, yet might historians revisit how class formation related to
never total, process that "extended influences into ev- Indians? Indian boarding school students were trained
ery area of Irish [and Indian] life" (p. 266). Reading it vocationally to be skilled and semi-skilled laborers. The
I was reminded of Ann Laura Stoler's provocative com- Society of American Indians founded in 1911—mostly
parative histories and also Katherine Ellinghaus's fas- made up of boarding school students, some of whom
cinating Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of made it to college—tactically considered their oppor-
White Women to Indian Men in the United States and tunities in the class structure. If Indians thought about
Australia, 1887-1937 (2006). Coleman studies how themselves in terms of class, should not historians do
schools functioned as a "weapon of state" (p. 38) de- so? As noted, Coleman frames school as a weapon of
signed to assimilate what the ruling groups viewed as a state. Might capitalism, not just the state, play a greater
"'problem population'" (p. 57). causal role in Coleman's explanations? At times U.S.
Coleman combats the framework of both American federal policies were formed on the premise that pred-
and Irish exceptionalism by analyzing the similar—as atory land grabbing was unstoppable.
well as distinct—patterns of institutionalized "decul- This impressively researched and argued compara-
turation" and "enculturation" (p. 64) in "hegemonic tive history inspires as well as instructs the historical
systems of domination" (p. 240). The comparison of at- imagination.
tempted Americanization and Anglicization casts light JOEL PFISTER
on institutional strategies, the mixed attitudes of tribes Wesleyan University
and local communities in this process, and the issue of
native language loss. By comparing the two systems, NIALL FERGUSON. The War of the World: Twentieth-Cen-
Coleman can better highlight aspects of conditions and tury Conflict and the Descent of the West. New York:
patterns that might not otherwise have been visible. He Penguin. 2006. Pp. lxxi, 808. Cloth $35.00, paper $18.00.
shows that American Indian history can illuminate Eu-
ropean history and vice versa. The big question motivating this lengthy book is noth-
Coleman also focuses on why some Indian and Irish ing less than that which troubled Oswald Spengler in his
students and parents favored such schooling even analysis of the decline of the West. But in his magis-
though it meant negotiating an attempted detribaliza- terial overview of twentieth-century conflict, Niall Fer-
tion of Indian students and an Anglicization of Irish guson's responses differ substantially from those artic-
students. Some Indian and Irish students strategically ulated by Spengler. In this treatment, Ferguson
embraced "education" because it equipped them with identifies three main sources of the endemic conflict
self-defensive weapons. However, if schooling was at- that ultimately precipitated the decline of the West:
tempted assimilation, it was not only that. Government empires in decline (e.g., Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman,
Indian schools never fully attained top-down power Russian), economic volatility, and ethnic conflict, the
over students. Some students took intellectual joy in last of these verging on race war.
learning varied ways of contemplating themselves and Throughout this work, Ferguson is careful to marshal
their world. Dr. Charles Eastman, a Santee Sioux who considerable evidence in support of his propositions. In
attended Indian schools before matriculating at Dart- contrast to many diplomatic historians, he makes much
mouth College and Boston University Medical School, use of economic data, especially in support of the vol-
wrote, "The more [education] I got, the larger my ca- atility conjecture. Indeed, the book is filled with bar
pacity grew, and my appetite increased in proportion" graphs and other summary measures, not only of eco-
(p. 153). Considering ways in which government edu- nomic trends, but demographic as well. Some of the in-
cation has advanced Indian political, economic, and formation is startling, such as the high rate of inter-
cultural struggles for self-determination and pan-In- marriage between European Jews and non-Jews right

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2008

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