426 ▪ Book Reviews

mulligatawny soup along with beefsteak and Stilton, the clubs themselves were hybrid prod-
ucts, shaped by their immediate environment as well as the distant world of elite British society.
In India, as in Britain, the club was a creation of the nineteenth century, and the years
between 1870 and 1900 were boom years for the establishment of new ones on the subcon-
tinent. Cohen devotes the bulk of In the Club to chronicling how these institutions worked:
in the rules and bylaws governing membership, fees, and elections; in the mechanics of bud-
geting, bookkeeping, and the procurement of goods from port wine to billiard balls; in the
functions assigned to particular spaces, like the library, and to particular workers, like the
hall porter; and in the code of expectations, written and unwritten, that structured the behavior
of club members from the playing field to the banquet table to the ballroom. The weight of
institutions and norms matters to Cohen’s argument because it allows him to present clubland
as a microcosm of “civil society”: a place where authority was bound by rules, where major-
itarian votes determined policies, and where disputes were kept within limits by the bonds
of community. While Cohen acknowledges that barriers of wealth, status, race, and gender
kept the overwhelming majority of Indians from ever crossing the threshold of a clubhouse,
he nonetheless argues that clubs “served the valuable purpose of teaching skills and instilling
civic practices” needed for “democratic institutions” (43).
Perhaps the best evidence for this claim is the proliferation of clubs founded by and for sub-
altern groups who were excluded from the redoubts of white masculinity. The Parsi elite of
Bombay congregated in the Ripon Club; the Sinhalese community of Ceylon had the
Orient Club; the Nilgiri Ladies’ Club brought together the wives of prominent men, both
British and Indian, in the hill station of Ootacamund. Some of the hidebound imperialist
clubs changed over time, too, with the prestigious patronage of Indian princes and the occa-
sional Indian guest of honor functioning as a leading edge for integration. Like other historians
of the public sphere, Cohen hints that practices of civility and sociability had a cascading logic
that gradually eroded barriers and forged connections in unexpected ways.
And yet, even when clubland opened up in some ways, it remained segregated and elitist in
others. Is this what Cohen means by “a colonial civil society” or “a colonial form of civility”?
Precisely because the possibilities are so intriguing, one longs for a clearer definition of terms;
the passing references to Jürgen Habermas, Robert Putnam, and network theory do not really
suffice to make interpretive sense of the exhaustive detail on club operations. There are
grounds, too, for questioning the portrait of clubs as associational utopias. Because the
source base consists largely of rulebooks, charters, and other bureaucratic documents, clubs
in this account risk appearing more orderly than they really were. One lesson we might
draw from Forster and Orwell is that petty scandals, seamy intrigues, and savage controversies
often lurk beneath the surface of imperial hierarchies—even if, as Cohen successfully shows,
the clubland portraits of those literary observers deserve to be seen as caricature rather than
fact.

Erik Linstrum, University of Virginia

AARON DONAGHY. The British Government and the Falkland Islands, 1974–79. Security, Conflict
and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 270.
$90 (cloth).
doi: 10.1017/jbr.2016.21

Academic works on the history and politics of the Falkland Islands are comparatively few.
Where they do exist, they almost exclusively take as their subject the brief but vicious Falklands
 Book Reviews ▪ 427

War of 1982, when Britain wrestled back the islands from Argentine occupation. The war and
its aftermath proved to have significance that outweighed the brevity of the conflict. The re-
taking of the islands, courtesy of a remarkable military campaign at a distance of nearly
7,000 nautical miles from the United Kingdom, showcased the formidable expeditionary pro-
ficiency of Britain’s armed forces at a time when few believed Britain had any real need other
than to counter the Soviet threat in Western Europe (and foreshadowed the type of warfare the
U.K. military has become focused on since the Cold War). This action became a fundamental
catalyst for other kinds of reappraisals. In many ways the events of April to June 1982 mark a
watershed in Britain’s post-1945 history. The war and its victory have come to define the
Thatcher premiership courtesy of the subsequent electoral landslide, just a year later, when
the country went to the polls with the events in the South Atlantic still fresh in mind. A hesitant
nation, reluctantly but stoically resigned to “decline,” was seemingly transformed overnight, in
the popular mind, to a more confident one with renewed vigor that translated more broadly.
The legacy of empire had proven to be the vehicle by which that past was laid to rest, in one
sense, and yet ushered in a new, more confident, less diffident Britain.
This perception and focus on the war and its aftermath have dominated studies of the Falk-
land Islands, appropriately so in many regards. There is, however, much more to the history of
these territories and to the 1982 conflict. As the author of this new study, Aaron Donaghy,
notes, “‘The Official History of the Falklands campaign Volume I; re origins of the Falkland’s
war’ is dwarfed by the larger second volume, which examines the military campaign.” Dona-
ghy’s work attempts to redress that balance not only by his focus on the origins of the conflict
but also in the (comparatively) much earlier time frame that he examines, 1974 to 1979. This
period, a time of Labor administrations and two prime ministers, Harold Wilson and Jim Call-
ahan, is only occasionally referenced in any studies and none to the extent of Donaghy’s.
Donaghy, as he explains in the introduction, makes good use of recently declassified material
to paint a much more comprehensive picture of the origins of the Falklands War, to describe
the challenges and responses faced by the participants themselves, and also to look earlier than
the immediate causes of the 1982 conflict and instead examine those years when tensions rose,
most notably in the autumn of 1977. Donaghy also paints a fuller picture of Labor’s efforts to
ward off a direct Argentine effort to assert its sovereignty claims and shows how diplomacy and
the preparation for military action worked hand in hand to avoid the actual need for force. As
such, the book illustrates more fully what has hitherto surfaced only on occasion and usually via
the words, in print or otherwise, of the participants themselves. Of particular note and interest,
to this reviewer at least, was the detail and narration of the strong islander lobby and their
agency in impact decisions and policy in London.
As one who has examined the Falkland Islands conflict in terms of the military dimension, to
read and gauge the scale of the diplomatic effort and endeavor through the 1970s was certainly
sobering and enlightening. As the events narrated and discussed are the obvious prelude to the
conflict of 1982, this work offers a valuable insight into how conflicts and crises can be diffused
before they occur and exactly what is needed to ensure that happens. Donaghy’s book also ties
in nicely with an earlier volume in this series examining the various negotiations between the
United Kingdom and Argentina in an earlier decade: Martin Abel Gonzalez and Nigel
Ashton’s The Genesis of the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands Conflict: Argentina, Britain and the
Failed Negotiations of the 1960s (2013).
Donaghy’s is a refreshing and useful study and also a timely one. At the time of writing, the
Falkland Islands and their sovereignty have been in the news once again with renewed saber
rattling on the part of the Argentine government and especially its combative president, Cris-
tina Kirchner. Kirchner’s media antics at the Group of Twenty summit in the summer of 2012,
with U.K. prime minister David Cameron serving as foil, thrust the topic of the islands once
again to the forefront of the media cycle. The referendum on the political status of the islands
and their approximately 2000 residents, in March 2013, which returned a convincing “yes”
(of 99.8 percent) to the question of whether the Falkland Islanders themselves supported
428 ▪ Book Reviews

the continuation of their status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom, served to
bring the ever-present question, and fact, of the Falkland Islands to a far wider audience
than usual. Additionally, various military analysts debated and concluded that the Falkland
Islands were in a far more parlous state of defense than ever they were before 1982, or that
the comparative sophistication and quality, if not quantity, of Her Majesty’s armed forces in
the second decade if the twenty-first century were more than sufficient to head off any ill-
advised Argentine gambles.
All told, Donaghy’s scholarly work rescues a vital and woefully underexplored segment of
the history of U.K.-Argentine relations with regard to the Falkland Islands. In doing so, it
sheds valuable light on the subsequent conflict of 1982 as well as the wider pressures on the
United Kingdom and the workings of the various Labor administrations, so long associated
and overshadowed by discussions of domestic rather than foreign policy.

R. P. W. Havers, George C. Marshall Foundation

GAVIN M. FOSTER. The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class, and Conflict. Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. Pp. 315. £60 (cloth).
doi: 10.1017/jbr.2016.22

For the most part, debates surrounding the Irish Free State period and the postrevolutionary
decade have centered on two principal narratives: the “heroic” narrative of state building and
state stability on the one hand and the “counterrevolution” narrative (the “revolution be-
trayed,” as it were), on the other. In the process, alternative perspectives have been somewhat
neglected. Accordingly, Gavin Foster’s new volume, The Irish Civil War and Society, is a
welcome addition. His thought-provoking book provides some valuable insights, particularly
his underlying thesis that deep-rooted social animosities and divergent notions of status and
respectability (as opposed to rigid concepts of class) played a critical part in the political and
military split of 1922–1923.
Foster’s study draws together a body of existing literature with extensive new research. In a
fashion similar to Jason Knirck in Afterimage of the Revolution, he opens with a useful, scene-
setting chapter to contextualize the work and, in this case, to emphasize the importance the
“play of social forces” (223) had in Irish society. While this opening gesture may be less sig-
nificant for specialists in the field, Foster’s engagement with the work of other historians dem-
onstrates a clear understanding of the historiography. Equally, his evenhanded treatment of the
language used by both sides of the civil war divide to describe the social character and moti-
vation of their opponents will be especially beneficial to students unfamiliar with the vocabu-
lary, social perceptions, and “politics of respectability” (83) that pepper the writings,
commentaries, and official sources of the period. Publishing restrictions may have prevented
the reproduction of a selection of the cartoons Foster uncovered in the Plain People. Nonethe-
less, readers would have enjoyed studying them, especially the depiction of the “Saorstat
Twins” (Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith) (78) or the “cigar-smoking, fur-coat-wearing
‘fat-cat’” portrayal of Collins (69). But this is a rather trivial objection, and accurate references
are provided in the footnotes.
Some of Foster’s themes are novel, and he is innovative in his approach. He makes very
striking use, for example, of the way symbolic manifestations of class, status, and political iden-
tity could be expressed through clothing.
Foster’s point that social attitudes had a vital role in the treaty split is a valid one, and he
supports it with recent regional research on the period. (In the west of Ireland, for instance,