COMPTES RENDUS- BOOK REVIEWS 475

personal experiences of victims and their families . While a coherent synthesis, the book deals best
with the periods around the First World War and the Great Depression. Displaying a fine sense of
selectivity, Brandt presents a restrained, balanced, and convincing analysis of the American response
to venereal diseases from a number of perspectives beyond his central focus on federal health policy.
No Magic Bullet uses the historical case example of venereal diseases to raise provocative general
question about social stigma and the social construction of disease.

Toby Gelfand
University of Ottawa

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K.N. Chaudhuri- Trade and Civilisation in the Indimz Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise
of/slam to 1750. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. xiv, 269.
The human significance of the sea, as portrayed by Fernand Braude! in his work on the
Mediterranean or as here by K.N. Chaudhuri on the Indian Ocean, is in its interplay with the land.
Over the great rivers- the Euphrates, Tigris, Indus, Ganges, Chao, Mekong, Hsi King, Yangtze
-the sea fingers inland drawing to itself people, trade, art, and ideas. And beyond the farthest reaches
of the rivers to Merv, Bukhara, Samarkand, Yarkand, Lop Nor, to Delhi, Agra, Lahore, Kabul
caravan routes extend the links. The monsoon winds and rains, product again of land and sea
interacting, gave the lands adjoining the Indian Ocean a unity of which contemporaries, both Moslem
and Chinese, were aware. The unity was not simple. Indeed, it was the diverse ecological niches,
deserts and tropics, arid plateaus and rain watered river plains made proximate by the Indian Ocean
that resulted in interaction.
Each area had specific locational and physical attributes which gave rise to a unique blend
of taste, culture, output and exchange. In Hangchou at the time of the Mongol conquest merchants
at the Rice-market Bridge and Black Bridge sold over seventeen varieties of rice. 1be rice consumers
of the Far East were as particular, not to say as snobbish, about the rice they consumed as the con-
sumers of wheat of the near East and India were about the bread they consumed. The vast areas of
rice production and consumption, nicely illustrated with maps in this text, drew to themselves the
spices of Indonesia and India; not so much the fine spices, nutmeg, mace, cloves, which moved
westward, but black pepper. The rice-producing areas of China and India, especially the provinces
of Fukien, Chekiang, and Kwantung in China, and the Ganges plain in India, because of the agri-
cultural surpluses, were centres of manufacturing and manufacturing export: porcelain, lacquerwork,
silk, steel, swords, ironware, chintz, raw silk and rough cotton goods.
1be monsoons themselves were not simple and did not facilitate a simple and complete voyage
across the southern sea from Aden or Basra to Malacca or Canton. Trade goods passed over the whole
distance but in stages corresponding to phases of the monsoon and through three regional centres
of trade centred on the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the South China Sea.
Chaudhuri's Indian Ocean, compared to Braudel's Mediterranean, is vast, open, with a lower
and less distinct profile. In part this is a reflection of the fact that his is a short work covering a thousand
years of history. Physical geography and its historical relevance is presented more often by frequent
and provocative allusions to geographical facts, than by systematic exposition. In part the less dis-
tinctive character mirrors the area itself. It is more vast and less enclosed by land and mountain ranges,
and opens on the Antarctic Ocean 3,000 miles to the south. To the east and northeast the limits are
uncertain. Sometimes the Straits ofMalacca and Sunda with the Timor Sea are taken as the eastern
boundary: at others the boundary is pushed to the Banda Sea. Chaudhuri's maps and his text suggest
he draws the limits at the eastern fringe of the Indonesian archipelago and Philippines. But, as he
notes, beyond the Straits of Malacca the gravitational pull of China becomes increasingly important
476 HISTOIRE SOCIALE- SOCIAL HISTORY

and Chaudhuri's history increasingly general and vague. For, generally speaking, Chaudhuri's Indian
Ocean is a Muslim Ocean.
After the opening chapter, which states and develops the thesis regarding the unity of the area,
four chapters follow on the rise of Islam, the Portuguese seaborne empire in the Indian Ocean, the
Dutch and English trade, and the emporia trade and the great port-towns in the Indian Ocean. This
last chapter includes material on the Far East. In Part Two, entitled "Structure and Ia longue duree"
six chapters describe seamanship, geography, navigation, ships and shipbuilding, caravan trade,
commodities and rnarlcets, and money and investment. While this material is not formally restricted
geographically or chronologically it is overwhelmingly drawn from the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and from the Western Indian Ocean.
His own background of work on the English East India Company, the availability of European
company sources and the historical reality of Islam's leading role in drawing together the civilizations
of the Indian Ocean easily account for this bias. On the other hand, by specific attention the trade
diaspora of the Hindu Chetti and Kling merchants in the Andaman Sea and Indonesia and the Bugis
and Chinese in the Java Sea and Malacca Straits a more substantive piecing together of non-Islamic
and non-European trade in the Far East might have been achieved. In an obiter dictum near the end
of his book Chaudhuri observes that the notion of trade diaspora does not have much to contribute
to this history of trade in the Indian Ocean, and so it does not. That it does not is a weakness- or
perhaps more fairly a limitation- of Chaudhuri 's excellent and provocative history and not one of
its strengths.

David P. McGinnis
University of Calgary

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David R. Colburn- Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877-1980.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Pp. xi, 258. Notes, index.
The medieval German proverb, "die Stadtluft macht frei," promised to the mindset of the
Middle Ages that urban residency would erase servile status. David R. Colburn's Racial Change
and Community Crisis traces the slow eradication of Jim Crow laws in a city where the air certainly
did not automatically make one free.
Because of St. Augustine's status as a target city by Martin Luther King, Jr, and the SCLC
in 1964, Colburn believes that it is important to review the history of race relations in St. Augustine
from the post-reconstruction period to the beginning of this decade. But he is especially concerned
with the civil rights movement and the critical events of 1963-65. Readers wishing a more detailed
analysis of the Jim Crow era or even the post-Voting Rights Act period will be disappointed by the
scant discussion here. Despite this flaw, however, Colburn's work is an excellent study of Southern
urban race relations and the conflicts emerging from black demands for economic and political
equality.
Colburn argues that contact between blacks and whites in America's oldest city was more
relaxed in comparison with other Southern regions because of the tourist industry which blossomed
around the tum of the century. White St. Augustinians depended on blacks to work the new service-
related jobs; blacks eager to escape rural poverty gladly accepted employment in tourism. This
interdependence not only eased racial tension, but also engendered the false impression that St.
Augustine would prove easy to integrate.
Colburn cites three major obstacles to desegregation: lack of moderate leadership; almost
complete apathy in the business community towards integration; and white civic and local government
leaders who had "no intention of surrendering their control of the political and social process" (p. 24).