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History from Between
- Technology and Culture
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 52, Number 3, July 2011
- pp. 610-613
- 10.1353/tech.2011.0109
- Review
- Additional Information
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The Brokered World and its depiction of the crucial role of “go-betweens” in the development of modernity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The impulse behind this history from between is found to be similar to the 1960s movement for a history from below. While convinced that this critique of the idea of European imperial acquisition of the “view from nowhere” is well placed, the reviewer notes the dangers of over-valorizing the role of the go-between if broad, secular economic and cultural change and its constraints are not duly considered. Capturing the complexities of modernization is no easier from the sole viewpoint of the go-between than from that of the imperial impresario.