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the British, politically and by other means, supported Jewish nationalism in the 1917Balfour Declaration of the Jewish right to a ‘national home’ in Palestine.

The last chapter (Chapter 8) of the book is somehow different to the precedingchapters and is probably the least cohesive in the book. It discusses a series of eventsextending over half a century from 1948 to the 1993 Oslo peace agreement betweenIsrael and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and subsequent agreements.What is significant here is that following the 1948 war that brought the expulsion ofsome 700 000 Palestinians from Palestine and the territorial fragmentation of Palestinebetween three states (Israel, Egypt and Trans-Jordan), Palestinian nationalism remaineddormant for a decade, slowly recovering from the shocks of war and uprooting.Eventually, it re-emerged in areas outside Palestine with the establishment of the PLOin the mid-1960s. The absence of territorial control and the ongoing war with Israelnow became major factors in shaping Palestinian identity. The Palestinian leadershipsearched for various ways to regain Palestine or parts of it by political, military andother means. To date Palestinians have failed to achieve full self-determination andcontrol of their lives despite a century of sacrifices. Nevertheless, the Palestinians havesucceeded in surviving as a nation and people with a strong identity and have neverabandoned their aspirations for statehood and self-determination. The return of thePLO to Gaza, gaining partial control of the lives of the people, is considered by manyas a first step in another journey of a thousand miles which ultimately will lead to thecreation of a national state for the Palestinians.

In summary, this is a useful and eminently readable study. It certainly fills a gap inthe study of the historical geography of Palestine, and Jerusalem most particularly.Khalidi presents much empirical evidence and argues his views effectively. His accessto historical documents saved by members of his family have added a fresh personaltouch to the book and its source materials. Some Palestinian scholars might, however,criticize Khalidi for overemphasizing (or indeed even publicizing) the part played bymembers of his own family when he describes the role of the Jerusalem elites inconfronting Zionism and appealing to the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul for assistanceor redress. Overall, the book remains a provocative addition to the still unfoldinghistory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

University of Toronto G F

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D P. MC, Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian BritishEmpire (London and Washington: Leicester University Press, 1997. Pp. x+242. £55.00hardback)

In 1898 the French journal L’Eclair pronounced that but for its Kew-trained labourforce British imperial botany would be “un immense corps sans cerveau” (p. 79). DonalMcCracken’s Gardens of Empire traces the history of that great body in the hundreds ofbotanic gardens cultivated around the globe. Each botanic gardens (the author insists onthe plural) shared a commitment to experimentation with ‘economics’—plants requiredfor the manufacture of stuffs as diverse as quinine, rubber, cloth, tea and timber.

Beginning in the late-eighteenth century with the botanical nationalism of Sir JosephBanks, the book follows with meticulous precision the successes and failures of botanicgardens throughout the nineteenth century. This is not a neatly linear history, however.The fortune of each botanic gardens, as told by McCracken, was determined not so

1999 Academic Press

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much by the evolution of imperial policy as by the character of individual gardens’directors. Indeed, the author stresses that “the specific history of the economic impactof . . . colonial botanic gardens in the British empire is not the economic history of theBritish empire” (p. 132). Thus while the text touches upon frictions between privatenurseries and state-sponsored botanic gardens, and the petty administrative difficultiesarising where gardens were funded by both central and colonial governments, thishistory focuses upon the actions of individuals, principally the men trained and exportedby imperial botany’s brain at Kew Gardens. Dynasties figured significantly amongstthose gardens held to be the most enduringly successful in the period. The Moorefamily, for example, controlled the Botanic Gardens at both Glasnevin (Dublin) andSydney between 1838–1922 and 1848–96, respectively (pp. 31–32). It is notable thatKew’s importance during the same period is usually ascribed as much to the familialties of its directors, the Hookers, as it is the social and political context of its operation.The decline of Britain’s botanic gardens in the early twentieth century is described asmirroring both the fading Victorian plant craze and the empire at large, while thewaxing and waning of individual gardens is explained through a combination ofdirectorial idiosyncracy and local accident.

The workforce required for the production and maintenance of botanic gardens isless well defined than their directorship. However, McCracken does give an idea of thesorts of groups engaged in unskilled work. Significantly, many gardens were establishedwhere cheap or free labour was available. In 1885–86, for instance, botanic gardens inGranada and Barbados were conveniently situated alongside a prison and a reformschool; the Sydney Botanic Gardens contained its own convict barracks. Kew’s resistanceto convict labour on grounds of “laziness and insubordination” (p. 98) was ignored,largely on the grounds of necessity, because the higher wages paid by nurseries and thebuilding trade creamed off the regular workforce. Similarly, we are told that WestAfrica was the only part of the empire where indigenous recruits were on occasionused as curators, a post normally held only by Europeans, because Kewites wereunwilling to “live and work in a very trying and unhealthy climate” (p. 72). In orderto maximize economic botany in this area some Africans did train at Kew in 1893 and1894 by request of the colonial office but by 1900 the practice had stopped. Kew’sdirector considered that “equality with young Englishmen [destroyed] their prospectsof future usefulness” (p. 80).

McCracken’s attention to the discrepancies between practice and proselytism in thecommunications of botanic stations is enlightening, never more so than when the precisefunction of botanic gardens is under discussion. Running through all such debates arethe pronounced tensions between the practice of science and the pursuit of leisure. Thiswas a common preoccupation during the nineteenth century, reflected in the popularityof amateur science on the one hand and public spectacles such as industrial exhibitionson the other. Gardens of Empire shows how botanic gardens felt these tensions acutely,especially within colonial life where they might function as social attractions, appendagesto canny governors’ residences, market gardens as well as scientific institutions. Fewcurators initially welcomed the public but all would eventually be forced economicallyto do so. Joseph Hooker acknowledged in 1866 that “there is nothing like a Museumand Gardens to screw money out of the public for science” (p. 77).

Like Hooker, Donal McCracken is concerned primarily with the cultivation of‘economics’. But, also like Hooker, he recognizes that the influx of new varieties from“lands where extraordinary shaped and coloured plants grew” heralded the “birth ofgardening for the ordinary person” (pp. x and 1) by making available exotic plants atlow prices. Public opinion never made the distinction between botany and pleasure sothat even as the fashion for popular science declined, that for gardening did not. As

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McCracken says at the beginning of this book, “by 1901 gardening was more than justa pastime. It was an adjunct to imperialism” (p. x).

Gardens of Empire will be welcomed by readers interested in the history of colonialbureaucracy as well as those concerned more precisely with imperial botany. It providesa useful companion volume to Ray Desmond’s Kew: The History of the Royal BotanicGardens (London: Harvill Press, 1995) and Lucille P. Brockway’s Science and ColonialExpansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press,1979). It is judiciously illustrated with contemporary photographs and engravingsreproduced from Kew publications and the Gardener’s Chronicle.

Royal Holloway, University of London R P

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K J, Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii+328. £45.00 hardback)

Erich Mendelsohn must figure in any list of the most famous architects in interwarGermany. In this book Kathleen James sets out to examine his contribution to thedevelopment of German architectural modernism and to set aside some of the mythssurrounding this architectural genius. While Mendelsohn’s name is often mentioned inthe same breath as other luminaries such as Peter Behrens, Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius,Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ernst May, James contends that Mendelsohn was in fact anoftenperipheralfigure in leadingarchitectural circles.Moreover, itwashis independenceofthinking and different perception of modernity (in part conditioned by his Jewish faith)that fashioned the individuality of his architectural responses to mass consumption whichform the focus of this book. Consumption, not production, spaces were critical to theGerman experience of modernity and, James argues, it is in this light that Mendelsohn’scontribution to German modernism should be recast. Mendelsohn’s consumption-oriented projects, especially new retail spaces, were singularly innovative, extensivelydiscussed, widely copied, and highly attuned to economy and society in the WeimarRepublic. However, this proved to be a double-edged sword: precisely because they weresuch clear reflections of and positive contributions to a particular era, the enduring qual-ities characteristic of some of his contemporaries’ work were missing.

Mendelsohn’s work is traced from the germination of his ideas in late World War Itrenches to his self-imposed exile in March 1933. By no means a biography, the bookis composed of a progressive narrative of seven chapters and a conclusion. A broadranging introduction binds the book together. Mendelsohn’s ‘dynamic functionalist’approach is situated with respect to other paradigms and his major rivals’ work. Jamescontends that Mendelsohn’s “dynamic functionalism integrates stylistic experimentation,constructional innovation, and disparate influences from the surrounding culture”(p. 3) including Expressionist painting, reinforced concrete construction, and industrialimagery. Throughout the book James is able to argue tightly and convincingly thatMendelsohn was unique among his contemporaries because his “dynamic functionalismencompassed economical construction, efficient spaces, and the latest mechanical systemsbut whereas other architects focused on industrial imagery and standardised con-struction, Mendelsohn excelled at making industry’s effect upon life far from the factoryfloor thrilling rather than threatening” (p. 3).

The book is divided into three broad sections. The first traces the early influenceson Mendelsohn including his first commission, the Einstein Tower observatory in

1999 Academic Press