756 Book Reviews

expended much energy in devising theoretical ways to do this. One device has been the
idea of Quebec citizenship advanced by the Larose Commission, sections of whose
report preface each of the books chapters. The idea was meant to be inclusive,
detaching civic identity from ethnicity, but was attacked by opponents as exclusive and
nationalist and was dropped and abandoned.
Left to choose between multiculturalism and assimilation, Quebec has opted for an
interculturalism, a third way. This does not seek to exclude ethnicity altogether, an
impossible demand since culture and social structure themselves are framed by
ethnicity. Instead, it accepts cultural pluralism on condition that French remains the
predominant public language. The authors support this and suggest that at the same
time Quebec should liberate itself from Parisian French by opting for international
French as the standard, with quebecois variations. Such a language regime could
match the combined civic and ethnic identity that they favour and link local with
international arenas.
There are sections on the internationalisation of Quebec, a central part of the
nation-building project, on anglophones and on indigenous peoples, which sustain the
general argument. So Quebec accepts North American economic integration and
globalisation as ways of supporting its autonomy project; the authors should, however,
have paid more attention to class- and sectoral-based oppositions to free trade within
Quebec. There is an accommodation with anglophones, over two-thirds of whom now
speak French, but they have not bought into the project of the Quebec civic nation.
The section on indigenous peoples is less positive and the authors call for a
differentiated citizenship, without elaborating on what this might look like.
The arguments are generally convincing and well documented although sometimes
unnecessarily stretched to meet political theorists demands for universalisation. They
accept, for example, the argument that language can never be de-ethnicised and
support this with the example of the United States. Yet, the recent question of Spanish
aside, English has in fact been de-ethnicised in the USA, which is precisely why
immigrants are so keen to learn it. The argument cannot be extended to Quebec
because the context is different; language is an ethnic marker there. In fact, almost
anything can be an ethnic marker, which is why it is so important not to confuse ethnic
differentiation with its visible symbols. Similarly, they try to universalise the argument
that citizenship usually means the same as nationality by referring to Australia and the
United Kingdom; yet in the non-English parts of the UK the distinction is critical. As
anyone listening to the speeches of Gordon Brown will know, the arguments are no less
tortuous than in Quebec.
The Quebec example has a lot to teach students of nationality and nationalism, and
Oakes and Warren have made a valuable contribution to understanding the complex-
ities of language and culture in the forging and remaking of the Quebec project.

MICHAEL KEATING
European University Institute

Jonathan Eastwood, The Rise of Nationalism in Venezuela. Gainsville, FL: University

Press of Florida, 2006. 212 pp. d39.95 (hbk).

Coming after the United States and Haiti, in the 1820s the Spanish American republics
and Brazil were the rst wave of new nations to emerge in the west. Despite that, they

r The authors 2007. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007

Book Reviews 757

have received comparatively little attention from the better known theorists of
nationalism in the last three decades, although the revival of interest in nationalism
has produced a lot of work in Latin America itself. So a book in English on the rise of
nationalism in Venezuela, the country that provided much of the leadership during the
independence wars in the north of south America, should be a welcome addition to the
eld. Unfortunately this is not the book.
Jonathan Eastwood chooses to start with a lengthy review of various theories of
nationalism, placing himself in the school of Liah Greenelds historical sociology, as
exemplied in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (1992). None of this review is new,
and the readers impatience mounts. Eastwood then feels that he must start well back
from any possible beginnings of nationalism in Venezuela, with an again lengthy
consideration of Spanish nationalism under the Hapsburgs and Bourbons, with a
digression on the works of Goya, and his thoughts on Feijoo, Campomanes,
Jovellanos and the nature of the Spanish Enlightenment. Half of the main text of
the book is spent before the reader gets to Venezuela. There is much on anomie,
status-inconsistency and status anxiety, and rather heavy weather is made of teasing
out the nuances in the Spanish terminology of nacion and patria, with uncertain results:
the authors training is clearly sociological rather than historical, and the translations
of the citations from Spanish authors are always pedestrian and sometimes hardly
comprehensible. Finally, there is an account of late colonial Venezuelan society and of
the crystallisation of independence. Despite the authors access to the important
collection of early Venezuelan pamphlet literature in the Houghton Library at Harvard
and a visit to Venezuelan libraries and archives, this remains sketchy and rests on a
narrow range of sources and secondary authorities. The outline of the course of events
after 1808 is particularly thin: there is no mention at all of the popular royalist uprising
of Boves, and only one of Pablo Morillo.
The author is certainly correct in pointing out that nascent Venezuelan nationalism
had nothing to do with industrialisation and not much to do with print capitalism,
but beyond that he is not very illuminating. In criticising the familiar theories of
Benedict Anderson, he might have pondered more the value of what Anderson writes
about bureaucratic circuits and administrative divisions, certainly pertinent to the case
of Venezuela within the Spanish imperial framework, and though he cites some of the
seminal work of the late Francois Xavier Guerra on the proto-politics of the Spanish
American empire in the era of independence, there appears to be much of it he has not
read.
Anyone looking for a thorough examination of how many Venezuelans felt
themselves to be Venezuelans at the beginning, the middle or the end of the events
that led to independence will be disappointed. The author is an uncritical admirer of
Eugene Webers Peasants into Frenchmen (1979), which while conceding its many
merits one may think severely understated the degree to which the French were aware
of being French before the Third Republic. His assertions about the consciousness of
the bulk of the nation of Venezuelans do not rest on any evidence. Just as the
Napoleonic Wars left a profound impression on millions of Frenchmen, the indepen-
dence wars in Venezuela, more intense than elsewhere in South America, made a
profound impression there, as did the subsequent events leading to Venezuelas
emergence as a separate republic in 1830.
These things can be documented. In the case of Venezuela one can even say that the
available evidence is exceptionally rich. Yet the author has read none of the classic
memoirs or histories of the independence period: no sign in text or bibliography of

r The authors 2007. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007

758 Book Reviews

Baralt y Daz, or of Restrepo; no reference to the diary of Sir Robert Ker Porter, which
sheds a good deal of light on popular feeling; no Caracciolo Parra Perez, only one
reference to German Carrera Damas, and that one not to his most relevant work; little
sign of the immense amount of material from this era that has been reprinted in
Venezuela in recent years. If sociologists address historical questions, they must be
prepared to read history, and a half-hearted attempt at that makes this book a missed
opportunity.

MALCOLM DEAS
University of Oxford

Margherita Zanasi, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republic of China.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 336 pp. $55 (hbk).

Margherita Zanasi in this book investigates rival attempts at economic modernity in

Republican China after the 1911 revolution. Between the two major contenders within
the nationalist party, the Jiang Jieshi group which favoured an authoritarian militarist
model of state-controlling economic organisation and the Wang Jingwei faction which
envisioned a civic national economy based on private capital to be forged by reformist
policies, the latter attracts her attention and sympathy. Taking nation-building as her
central theme, Zanasi challenges the conventional assumption that nations are
products of technological and socio-economic forces. Instead, she argues that it is
the idea of what constitutes a modern nation that leads nation builders to shape
national institutions and a national economy. Herein lies a great merit of this work in
which values, convictions and aspirations are taken seriously as indispensable or at
times even decisive factors in historical explanation. No doubt sharp separation
between the material and ideal, the objective and subjective, or between the structural
and the individual is implausible; Zanasi, however, does demonstrate, using her
splendid archival research and representational skill, the working of ideological
struggle and discursive power. The result amounts to a testimony, along with a
refreshing body of recent scholarship, for the paradigmatic claim that nationalism
comes before the nation rather than the other way round.
Another potential strength of the book is its contemporary relevance. Zanasi
notices that the questions her protagonists asked in the late 1920s and 1930s have
returned in a similar fashion since the late 1970s despite the sea changes that China
experienced throughout wars and revolutionary upheavals. What characterises a
modern economy? What role would such an economy play in nation-building? Is the
domination of a free market private sector essential for economic modernisation? How
might the Chinese nation achieve modernity without losing its distinctive identity?
These questions are just as resonant to debates in China today. Drawing parallels
between the Nanjing decade and post-Mao decades could be risky for their sheer
differences in domestic and international conditions. Yet redening the economic
foundation of the nation indeed remains a task as an unnished project. In fact she
could have gone even further to identify more practical and also more politically
contentious issues common to both eras, from foreign investment to economic and
social justice. The notion of comprador bureaucratic bourgeoisie, for example, could
be a starting point for useful comparisons between monopoly capital represented by
big families in control of the most part of Chinas economy toward the end of 1940s

r The authors 2007. Journal compilation r ASEN/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007