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DOI: 10.1086/ahr/109.3.865

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 Comparative/World
assumes a North. Yet most southern historians do not
think of themselves as practicing comparative history.
Ko1chin's well-known studies of southern slavery and
Russian serfdom are exceptions but need not be, and
he suggests how.
The book has three chapters. In each, the author
considers a broad range of topics and historical liter-
ature through the lens of comparative history. The first
chapter looks at the question of southern distinctive-
ness. Any effort to define the South means measuring
it against some place else, what Ko1chin calls the
un-South, usually the North but not really because the
North exists in many southern histories less as a real
place than as a mirror of the South. If, for example, the
southern economy was essentially capitalist then it was
like the North, and if not, then it was unlike the North.
But just how capitalist was the North? The answer is
typically assumed: more than the South. A consciously
comparative approach would give us some needed
precision.
Southern identity is an elusive subject for research-
ers. It, too, is typically measured against the un-South.
Indeed, regional identity is often taken to be uniquely
southern, just as being southern means having a
uniquely regional identity. There might never be much
agreement on the meaning of being southern, but the
relationship between regional and national identity
may be fruitfully explored, and the circular argument
broken, through thoughtful comparison with other
regions-the West, for example. Ko1chin points to
some enlightening scholarship on the borders of South
and West.
Chapter Two, "Many Souths," explores the regional
and temporal variations within the South and the ways
the region might be compared with itself. The third
and final chapter, "Other Souths," covers comparative
history proper. Among the more intriguing subjects
discussed in these chapters are the failure of Confed-
erate nationalism and the significance of emancipa-
tion. The South existed before the Civil War largely as
a shadow of an imagined un-South; however, once the
shooting started the new Confederate nation needed
to be something more substantive. But what South was
The South? Upper South, lower South, east, west,
slaveowning, nonslaveowning, male, female, white,
black? Once separated from the struggle with the
North over the meaning of the Union, more than one
of these divides needed bridging if the Confederacy
was to stand on its own. Just as "South" implied, then
as now, something unstated, unexamined, and often
unintended about the North, so it implied an internal
unity that did not exist. To say that most southerners
supported the Confederacy is to ignore the slaves who
obviously opposed it, a clear majority in two states and
who, in combination with Unionists and many white
women, probably constituted majorities elsewhere. In-
deed, it is doubtful whether the Confederacy ever had
the support of a majority of southerners, unless by
southern one means white men. All too often, Ko1chin
observes, this is what historians mean, although recent
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865
studies of the many Souths make the assumption
untenable.
The question of whether the Confederacy collapsed
of internal weaknesses or fought long and hard to the
bitter end is yet another implied comparative question,
as is the depth of Confederate nationalism. If it turns
out that compared to other separatist movements the
South had a strong sense of nationalism, then the
cause of its defeat is to be found elsewhere, to the
north, perhaps. In any case, the most violent conflict in
U.S. history was, compared to other wars, a moderate
affair in terms of casualty rate. Emancipation, Ko1chin
points out, although often represented as hollow, was
in fact quick and utterly transforming compared to
other emancipations, such as the long, drawn-out, and
partial emancipation of Russia's serfs.
Kolchin's discussion generally sticks to the big issues
of slavery, war, and emancipation, noting but glossing
over the implications of a comparative approach for
studies of family life, politics, gender, and urbaniza-
tion. No mention is made of Edward L. Ayers's "Valley
of the Shadow" project, which compares the Civil War
experiences of two Shenandoah Valley communities,
one in Pennsylvania, the other in Virginia, and would
seem to be just the sort of history Kolchin calls for.
Still, this book is full of keen observations and insights
of interest to all historians, not just those who attend
to southern history. Robert Fogel once observed how
often historians make implicit quantitative assertions
that might be more explicit and thus more precise and
thoughtful. Kolchin, likewise, urges historians to be
more thoughtful about the implicit comparisons they
make all the time. His point, like Fogel's, is a good
one, and ought to be well heeded.
CHRISTOPHER MORRIS
University of Texas,
Arlington
ALAN BRAY. The Friend. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press. 2003. Pp. 380. $40.00.
To a modern observer, friends of whatever sex who
kiss, share a bed or even a grave, and write loving
letters full of embraces are to be explained by refer-
ence to the intimacy of sex. It is only in that post-coital
moment that most of us seem able to give ourselves
fully to another. Alan Bray has created an archeology
of a type of friendship, of intense intimacy, that lasted
almost a millennium, but that was largely lost in the
creation of modernity during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. It was an intimacy between men,
full of kisses and physical love, that was nevertheless
essentially nonsexual.
The evolution of the modern family and of kinship
networks and their Frankenstein monster, the posses-
sive and affective individual, lies at the heart of all
Western social history metanarratives. In a British
context, the works of Lawrence Stone, Alan Macfar-
lane, and Peter Laslett have, from very different
perspectives, depicted the family unit marching in
JUNE 2004
 866 Reviews of Books and Films
lockstep toward a particular modernity created some-
time between 1660 and 1840. It was a modernity
refracted through sexual identity and the creation of
heterosexuality and homosexuality, through the liter-
ary imagination and the creation of the novel, and
through a new civil society, underpinning a powerful
nation state. But most importantly, it was a modernity
found in the personal relationship between a husband
and a wife, a mother and her child, a child and his or
her parent.
Bray's book and subject provide a powerful new
component to this story that both radically shifts our
understanding of premodernity and points the way
toward a more humane and useable postmodernity. By
creating a new history of same-sex friendship and
charting the impact of same-sex relationships on poli-
tics and sexuality, religion and domesticity, Bray ex-
poses a facet of Judeo-Christian history rarely exam-
ined over the last millennium. His starting point is the
tradition of sworn brotherhood. Bray traces this phe-
nomenon to the early medieval church and equates it
precisely with marriage, using a range of funeral
monuments to sworn brothers as the basis for his
discussion. In many respects his argument is one from
silence, but he convincingly demonstrates the existence
of this liturgical form, even if it is impossible to
demonstrate its commonality. Having created this for-
mal and ritualized context for male friendship, Bray
uses the precise details of everyday practices among
men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to
demonstrate the role of physical intimacy in generating
friendships and alliances. The shared bed and meal,
the kiss, and the embrace are each located within a
complex symbolic world in which all men were actors.
In the process, he gives us new access to the world of
the bodily gestures, smells, and tastes that bound men
together in this most physical of worlds.
What Bray has discovered is what appears to be a
world in which intimacy and emotional affect are as
likely to be located among and between adult male
friends as they are to be found between men and
women, parents and children. In the process, he
delivers a powerful corrective to narratives of moder-
nity that depict medieval and early modern people as
in some way less feeling than their modern counter-
parts. Having described this world, Bray then charts its
decline and transformation under the influence of a
modern emphasis on sexual and family identities, the
rise of heterosexuality, and the obverse face of this
new minted coin, homosexuality. By exploring the lives
of Ann Lister (the author of the earliest and most
intimate lesbian diary) and John Henry Cardinal New-
man (that luminary of resurgent British Catholicism),
Bray explores how this tradition of friendship survived
in the perhaps unlikely environments of Lister's York-
shire gentry circle and the Catholic intellectual circles
of late nineteenth-century Britain.
Bray died just as this book was going to press, but for
over twenty years he was a major contributor to the
creation of a coherent Western narrative of sexuality
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and affect. His Homosexuality in Renaissance England
(1982) described the creation of a new form of sexual
identity in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries and helped to delineate a major strand of what
most historians have come to see as a coherent modern
period. This deeply personal book adds an important
component to the narrative Bray helped create in the
1970s and 1980s. It tells a story that provides an
alternative to the frequently false intimacy found in
sex, a story that will speak powerfully to a new
generation for whom the mechanics of sex (both
heterosexual and homosexual) holds few mysteries, but
for whom friendship is an uncharted territory.
TIM HITCHCOCK
University of Hertfordshire
ROBERT ALDRICH. Colonialism and Homosexuality. New
York: Routledge. 2003. Pp. xii, 436. Cloth $80.00,
paper $24.95.
"[A] thorough investigation of the connections be-
tween homosexuality and imperialism from the late
1800s," the back cover of this book says. I am not sure
I agree. It is more accurate to say that Robert Aldrich
writes about homosexuality where it overlaps with
colonial circumstances in any way. European settlers,
native populations, stray observers, authors, district
officials, prostitutes, lingo, catamite parlors are all
discussed. Homosexuality in literature is side by side
with mateship among Australia's convict population,
maharajahs, Polynesians, and Andre Gide's depiction
of Algiers. It is all good.
It is true that Aldrich did not have to search very
hard for his material. Lord Kitchener, for instance, was
homosexual. Sir Richard Burton was at least bisexual.
Georges Clemenceau eulogized Marshall Lyautey with
respect: "an admirable, courageous man, who has
always had balls between his legs-even when they
weren't his own." T. E. Lawrence wrote a fantasy of his
own caning and rape and arranged to have his com-
panion and servant, Dahoum, sculpted as classical
alabaster nude. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who
founded the Boy Scouts, liked looking at photographs
of naked boys, whereas "female nudity disgusted him."
Men had sex with each other in the Foreign Legion(s),
the Bataillons d'Afrique, the prisons of New South
Wales, the gazebo behind the big house. Melanesian
boys serviced European men noncomittally, amused
that their masters wanted to be diddled. Some person-
ages are treated both as literary voices and as private
persons. E. M. Forster is cited. for A Passage to India
but also in his correspondence. "I promised myself,"
he wrote to his lover, Mohammed, "that on my return
I would get you to penetrate me behind, however much
it hurt" (p. 318). Paul Bowles and Jean Genet were
stirred to creativity by North African men. Cecil
Rhodes had very close male companions. District
officers fell into scandal; the murderer Reginald Poole
managed to have his execution commuted by reason of
insanity at the time of his broken-hearted murder of
JUNE 2004