368 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

The point here is that Mann’s research explodes the widely held view thatFrench colonial troops, particularly long-service career soldiers, transformedcolonial politics simply because their military service assured them of ‘citizen’status within the French empire. Becoming enfranchised citizens, with awardsand pensions to boot, was one thing, but overturning the deeper traditions ofAfrican social order was quite another. Moreover, Mann argues convincinglythat colonial ex-servicemen were neither as homogeneous nor as powerful as isoften assumed by those who contend that former colonial soldiers became deci-sive players in the nationalist politics of the late colonial period. Again, his workis revisionist. Quite understandably, former soldiers sought first and foremostto secure the benefits and, above all, the remunerations due to them. Whenpolitically organized, in Mali at least, their sympathies tended to lie with moreconservative party political alternatives than with militantly anti-colonial groupssuch as the Communist-affiliated Union Soudainaise – Rassemblement DémocratiqueAfricain. Indeed, soldiers’ relationships with the colonial state were characterizedby ambivalence rather than hostility, by a profound sense of mutual obligationrather than by any reflex loyalism.

Bringing matters up to the present day, Mann explains how the perceptionthat the former colonial power owed a ‘blood debt’ to its black African troopsshaped long-running, and ongoing, disputes over soldiers’ pension rights andWest African immigration to France. Taken as a whole,

Native Sons

uses Mali’sformer colonial soldiers as the means to connect the past with the present, thelocal with the national and international, and the pre-colonial with the colonialand post-colonial periods. It is quite an achievement.

University of Exeter

MARTIN THOMAS

Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya

.By Edward I. Steinhart.

James Currey/East African Educational Publishers/OhioUniversity Press. 2006. viii + 248pp. £16.95.

Ed Steinhart’s book offers three, linked arguments. Hunting, he suggests, hashistorically been more important to East African societies than is usuallyacknowledged. This African hunting knowledge provided an essential basis forthe emergence of that distinctive colonial phenomenon, the luxury hunting safari.And the development of a new anti-hunting ‘preservationist’ ethos from the1940s produced a late-colonial emphasis on gathering images, rather than hunt-ing trophies, which was to endure into the postcolonial state. Preservationismturned white hunters into photographers, and made African hunters into poach-ers – particularly in Kenya, where it led to the banning of all kinds of hunting.These three arguments are made with great clarity here, and if they seem uncon-tentious, this is perhaps because the last two decades have seen a steady streamof publications on conservation and game in Africa, from Steinhart and others.How much, one might reasonably ask, does this book represent a further advance?

Steinhart himself suggests that part of the distinctive value of this book liespartly in its interest in class. He evokes this to explain the triumph of preserva-tionism over what he calls (not always consistently) an earlier ideology of ‘con-servationism’, which viewed hunting and ‘game control’ as part of the managementof wildlife. There is a slight uncertainty over what he means by ‘class’; the intro-duction declares a ‘Marxian perspective’, but actually it is class in another sense

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which figures in the analysis, with Cannadine’s aphorism on empire as a ‘classact’ cited approvingly. And so, appropriately, there is much concern with metro-politan antecedents here: the big game safari is presented as derived from thegentlemanly hunt; the game park as a descendant of the aristocratic huntingpark. In the end, the argument seems to be one which turns on a very Cannadine-like theme of the eclipse of aristocratic social values. Conservation gave wayto preservation because an aristocratic tradition – which emphasized that thehunter owns the prey – gave way to an alternative ‘bourgeois’ vision of wildlifeas collectively owned and requiring preservation for posterity.

In making this argument, Steinhart inevitably draws heavily on the writingsof white hunters and game experts, and their heavily anecdotal style creeps intohis prose. Steinhart may not harbour much affection for the lengthy safari ofgun-toting aristos who stalk (no doubt carefully downwind) across his pages,but his sense of appalled fascination is palpable, and in the end it is these figureswho dominate the book – rather eclipsing the African hunters. Steinhart repeat-edly insists on the importance of the latter, but we actually find out rather littleabout them, while learning more than we might wish about Grogan, Blixen,Finch Hatton and all. It seems a pity that this book ends up so much as a studyof white hunters, with its argument derived from an analysis of metropolitansocial change.

University of Durham

JUSTIN WILLIS

Western Imperialism in the Middle East 1914–1958

. By D. K. Fieldhouse.

OxfordUniversity Press. 2006. xvii + 376pp. £65.00.

D. K. Fieldhouse is an experienced, masterful presenter, synthesizer andanalyst of modern imperialism. Having most recently edited a British memoirfrom post-Ottoman Kurdistan, he has moved on to this general survey, whichalthough empirically informative and clear, is far narrower than its title suggests.It restricts itself mainly to politics and administration in the territories underBritish and French mandatory authority after the First World War. Disappoint-ingly, there is almost no reflection on general western imperialist ideologies, forms,motivations, and their overall regional manifestations and long-term implica-tions; these are indeed exciting and controversial themes, neglected by this text’sself-imposed economic, social, cultural and theoretical limitations. Even oil isbarely mentioned. Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula and Iran are not considered atall, precluding so many vital questions. Discreet United States involvement isalso, astoundingly, omitted beyond a narrow recital on Truman and Palestine.

Nevertheless, the preceding Ottoman context, emerging nationalism, Zionism,and dynastic statehood in Iraq and Transjordan are reviewed coherently andsuccinctly, along with the most salient aspects of sub-national Iraqi politics andFrench gubernatorial policy in Syria and Lebanon. Arab experience is generallyframed however in tacitly subordinated and reactive ways, almost wholly inpolitical-organizational terms, and, as throughout, from narrowly selected sec-ondary works and no journal literature. All told, Professor Fieldhouse presentslittle that is either substantially or interpretatively new; his foreword explainsthat he was encouraged to write by his colleague, the renowned Professor W. R.Louis. When asking oneself why, it is clear that students and lay readers will besaved much labour in referring to this orderly accounting of events and its concise