The American Historical Review February 2006 [antikvár]

In This Issue This issue contains the American Historical Association presidential address, two articles, and an AHR Forum. The presidential address takes on the large problem of the development of the nation-state in the context of European history. One article presents an analysis of the use of airpower by the British in the Middle East after World War I; the other is an examination of the use of ethnography by the Japanese in their rule over Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s. The Forum confronts a central problem in American history: the perennially high murder rate in the United States. In addition, the issue contains our usual extensive book review section. Readers will note, however, that there are no film reviews. An explanation for this omission is given below. Presidential Address James J. Sheehan's presidential address, "The Problem of Sovereignty in European History," is an expanded version of the one he delivered at the AHA meeting in Philadelphia on January 3, 2006. In this survey of several centuries of European political history, taking us right up to the establishment of the European Union, Sheehan observes that sovereignty has too often been understood in terms of the inexorable "rise of the sovereign state." The historical record, he argues, shows a much more complex and varied story than a simple process of state making. Indeed, a look beyond the handful of Western European states that have served as the paradigm of political development reveals sovereignty's limits, unevenness, and incompleteness. First, he reminds us that sovereignty is not a thing, nor an institution, but rather a "collection of. . . rights, powers, and aspirations"—of "claims" put forth by state authority upon other elements of a polity with some shared sense of legitimacy. He then proceeds to lay out the historical obstacles that confronted the claims of sovereignty—religious, territorial, and legal. But law, in particular, was both a brake on sovereignty and a means of consolidating it, which leads Sheehan to counsel historians to pay more attention to legal history. "We have too often been content to leave legal history to the lawyers," he cautions, "which is as unfortunate as leaving