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Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s1930s. Edited by sebastian conrad and dominic sachsenmaier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 276 pp. $74.95 (cloth). The historical study of globalization has entered its adolescence. This volumes forward notwithstanding, it can no longer be said that the eld has been ceded to social scientists, that historians need to provide the necessary context for global integration, or that historians need to embrace transnational approaches to global history. These challenges have been met by a succession of thoughtful works over the past decade. The task now for historians is how to implement the ideas this infant historiography has advanced. It is time to actually write the history of globalization. The volume under review is thus a welcome addition, meeting the challenges of global history head-on. The contributors are members of Conceptions of World Order: Global Historical Perspectives, a research network sponsored by the German National Research Foundation, and this volume illustrates the scholarly benets of such collaborative work. It provides a model, if at times an uneven one, for how historians can illustrate global connections in an empirical and coherent manner. A perennial difculty for global historians is how to encompass the global without losing sense of the particularity of the local. Global history demands wide-ranging expertise, which single historians rarely possess; truly global histories, such as W. H. McNeills The Rise of the West (1964) or John Darwins recent After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (2007), are thus rare and distinctive accomplishments. The more common approach is to pool the expertise of several specialists with the aim of producing a work greater than the sum of its parts. A. G. Hopkinss edited collections Globalization in World History (2002) and Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local (2006) and Frank Trentmann et al.s Beyond Sovereignty (2007) are fruitful examples of this approach. Competing Visions of World Order deserves a place next to these works on global historians shelves. Conrad and Sachsenmaier tie together the books chapters through the concept of global moments, dened as events of a popular signicance that appealed to people in discrete and distant locations (p. 12). There is a danger here in selecting the global moment to t the argument one wishes to make, but by and large the contributors use this organizing construct to good effect. The formation of ideas of world order was a necessary prelude to the emergence of international-

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ism in the mid twentieth century. The books contributors highlight the era of the new imperialism, World War I, and the postwar decade of the 1920s as the key gestational period for opposition to a Eurocentric world order. Four main types of opposition are identied. Subversive internationalists worked for change within the international system, nationalist movements challenged the hegemony of multiethnic empires, regional and pan-movements fostered oppositional identities built on cultural or ethnic bonds, and traditionalist movements created discursive coalitions to fend off or manipulate the intrusion of Western modernity. Individual chapters are organized into three parts, drawing variously on all four forms of oppositional movements. Part 1 details concepts of world order during the high era of European imperialism. Harald Fischer-Tin illustrates the links between the Salvation Armys work in Britain and India, Christian Geulen demonstrates the centrality of racial thought to visions of world order, and Matthias Middell, in the volumes most narrowly focused chapter, surveys late nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century German world histories. Part 2 pairs Erez Manelas chapter on the Wilsonian Moment in the colonial world, an abstract of his ne recent book on the subject, and Sachsenmaiers chapter on Chinese intellectuals response to World War I. Part 3 focuses most closely on alternative ideas of world order. Conrad and Klaus Mhlhahn show how Chinese labor migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered a stronger Chinese identity both within the diaspora and at home; Cemil Aydin, in the books best chapter, shows how Japans military victory over Russia in 1905 became a metaphor for Asian modernity (p. 224) from Istanbul to Java. Finally, Andreas Eckert repositions pan-Africanism within the Black Atlantic world as a topic par excellence for global and transnational history (p. 241). The volumes virtue is less in the originality of the topics chosen than in its reconceptualization of these topics in their global context. The best chapters are those that meet this challenge most directly. Aydin draws expertly on Turkish and Japanese historiography especially to show exactly how Asian audiences fashioned the Russo-Japanese war into particular anticolonial discourses, despite the fact that Japan had borrowed so heavily from the West, which these oppositional voices sought to resist. In a similar vein, Geulen looks at the familiar topic of race and social Darwinism in a new light, showing how race shape[d] and dene[d] particularity and difference (p. 90) on a global scale, and was thus central to the world order visions of internationalists of all stripes. His section on the 1911 Universal Races Congress demonstrat-

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ing this argument is the best use of the global moments concept in the book. Other chapters are less successful in connecting their particular topic to the global. Fischer-Tins chapter on the Salvation Army begs, but does not fully answer, the question of how intra-imperial activity constitutes a transnational or global interaction. Empires were certainly often global, as was the British, but they were not always strictly transnational. Middell provides close readings of the work of German world historians Karl Lamprecht and Hans Ferdinand Helmolt, but his assertion that their ideas had a transnational signicance because Germany was one of the motors in an internationalizing academic environment (p. 100) is not fully substantiated. Unlike Aydin or Manela, Middell takes the reception of the ideas hes studying for granted rather than demonstrating how they were received, which is why they are important as components of global history in the rst place. Uneven copyediting throughout the volume sometimes detracts from the clarity of argument. A collective bibliography would also be helpful, though the notes for each chapter are comprehensive. The editors of this volume are to be congratulated for bringing together such a cohesive collection of essays, and for providing in their introduction a clear-headed assessment of the continuing signicance of the rst era of globalization. daniel gorman University of Waterloo