Economic history, in France at least, sometimes suffers from rather shallow thinking, the result of a lack of communication with other human sciences whose concepts and fields of investigation it appropriates without reciprocation. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule as is seen in a number of studies based on the analysis of institutions and organisations, on discourse or representation analysis, or in some divergent field of economics inspired by conventional theory or the Regulation School, which is influential in France and Belgium but little known elsewhere.

This article examines the stance of J. P. Morgan & Co. and the House of Morgan in European affairs from 1933 to 1939. Within the firms, two conflicting themes were apparent. The first drew on the traditional involvement with Europe and sought solutions to problems in using an international approach. The second was a growing tendency to place the US perspective ahead of an internationalist outlook. The essay argues that in considering transnationalism and private bankers, emphasis needs to be placed on the centrality of personal ties.

Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003), 436 pp., £18.99 (pb), ISBN 0415196167.

L. J. Butler, Britain and Empire. Adjusting to a Post-imperial World (London: Tauris, 2000), 249 pp., £14.99 (pb), ISBN 186064449X.

Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 248 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0333791800.

Nicola Labanca, Oltremare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 569 pp., pb, €20.00, ISBN 8815089594.

Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 332 pp., $60.00 (hb), ISBN 0521386632.

Emanuelle Sibeud, Une Science Impériale pour l'Afrique? (Paris: EHESS, 2002), 356 pp., €32.00, ISBN 2713217849.

Mary Sutphen and Bridie Andrews, eds., Medicine and Colonial Identity (London: Routledge, 2003), 160 pp., £58.00 (hb), ISBN 0415288800.

This article takes the obvious link between war and political violence in twentieth-century Europe to ask three questions. Did the cause of such a massive upsurge in violence have roots extending beyond the technologies of modern warfare? What shapes the relative propensity of states and societies towards violence? And what is specifically ‘modern’ (other than the technology of destruction) about mass killing in the twentieth century? It finds answers in the use of popular sovereignty to justify unprecedented ethnic conflict, in a mix of ingredients linked to political culture and contested state legitimacy, and in the role of bureaucracy and technology in the orchestration of large-scale and state-sponsored violence.

As the Italian anti-fascist exiles reorganised after the establishment of a full dictatorship in 1925, they were confronted by a series of difficult issues that no longer could be dealt with in the national context. The overriding need to heal the divisions within the Italian left now would be conditioned by choices made on the international level. The abdication of the Western democracies at Munich meant to many on the left that the Soviet Union was the essential bulwark against fascism. Within the Italian Socialist Party Pietro Nenni defended the alliance with the Communist Party and support for the Soviet Union. Alternatives offered by Angelo Tasca questioned both the exclusive alliance with the Communists and unquestioning support for the Soviet Union. Tasca also developed a European perspective which tended to marginalise the Soviets both ideologically and diplomatically. These positions put him at odds with Nenni. Tasca's position was complicated by his parallel membership of the French SFIO, his French citizenship and, in 1940, his decision to support Vichy. Tasca's defection and Nenni's triumph made the Italian Socialist Party more hostile after the fall of fascism to new thinking on European unity and alternatives to unity of action with the Communists.

The time has come for researchers into innovative movements in art and literature in the first half of the twentieth century to break free from traditional investigative frameworks. The works reviewed here belong to different disciplines – art history, literary history, literary criticism, history – but all show a shift of perspectives in the history of culture. They point to a reassessment of the theoretical models we use to understand modern art and literature. Those models are – in this case as they relate to the avant-garde – nuanced, refined, developed and sometimes even invalidated. Though some of these works are not wholly devoted to the European avant-gardes, they do deal with the international circulation of modern art in, to or from Europe, studied here in its lesser-known aspects. Moreover, they all to some extent examine the artist’s responsibility to the community, or the state’s responsibility to art. This theme of responsibility runs through all these works, either in its ethical dimension or as an aspect of the social function of art, especially when art has to confront an entertainment culture or is roped in as part of cultural policy.

In his wide-ranging and thought-provoking analysis of war and political violence in twentieth-century Europe, Ian Kershaw contrasts the immense violence wrought in Europe in the first half of the century with its relatively pacific history in the second half. Resisting the temptation to think of the violence of the first half of the century as a dysfunctional interruption to an underlying tale of economic, social and political progress, the author poses three astute questions concerning: (i) the causes of state-sponsored violence; (ii) the reasons why some states presided over low levels of violence while others presided over levels that ‘soared into the stratosphere’; and (iii) whether there was something qualitatively new – or ‘modern’ – about that violence. Kershaw describes his piece as ‘thinking aloud’ and I read it in that spirit. I find myself in broad agreement with what he has to say, although we probably disagree over matters of emphasis – for example in respect of the significance of violence perpetrated by European states in their colonies, or the propensity for violence of liberal democratic states. I suspect that there is more principled disagreement about the salience of ‘ideology’ in fomenting the mass violence of the twentieth century. I have organised my responses according to the three stages of his argument; I end by considering the nature of ‘peace’ in Europe in the second half of the century and by offering a few reflections on the conceptualisation of political violence.

Isabel Vincent, Hitler's Silent Partners. Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice (New York: W. Morrow, 1997), 351 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0688154255.

Angelo M. Codevilla, Between the Alps and a Hard Place. Switzerland in World War II and the Rewriting of History (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000), 248 pp., $27.95, ISBN 089526238X.

Walther Hofer and Herbert R. Reginbogin, Hitler, der Westen und die Schweiz, 1936–1945 (Zürich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2001), 690 pp., €45.00, ISBN 3858239925.

Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War, Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War (Zürich: Pendo, 2002), 600 pp., €29.90, ISBN 3858426032.

Jakob Tanner and Sigrid Weigel, eds., Gedächtnis, Geld und Gesetz. Vom Umgang mit der Vergangenheit des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Zürich: Vdf Hochschulverlag, 2002), 380 pp., €29.90, ISBN 3728126586.

Neville Wylie, Britain, Switzerland, and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 394 pp., £55.00, ISBN 0198206909.

Youssef Chatani, Dissension among Allies: Ernest Bevin's Palestine Policy between Whitehall and the White House, 1945–1947 (London: Saqi Books, 2002), 156 pp., £25.00 (hb), ISBN 0–86356–999.

Moshe Gat, Britain and the Conflict in the Middle East, 1964–1967: The Coming of the Six-Day War (London: Praeger, 2003), 216 pp., £39.99 (hb), ISBN 0–27597–514–2.

Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East, 2nd edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 684 pp., £19.95 (pb), ISBN 1–86064–811–8.

Robert McNamara, Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East 1952–1967: From the Egyptian Revolution to the Six Day War (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 308 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0–71465–397–7.

Jonathan Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 252 pp., £52.50 (hb), ISBN 0–33398–451–X.

This article examines the politics of communication between British and West German protesters against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The interpretation suggested here historicises the assumptions of ‘transnational history’ and shows the nationalist and internationalist dimensions of the protest movements' histories to be inextricably connected. Both movements related their own aims to global and international problems. Yet they continued to observe the world from their individual perspectives: national, regional and local forms thus remained important. By illuminating the interaction between political traditions, social developments and international relations in shaping important political movements within two European societies, this article can provide one element of a new connective social history of the cold war.

I thank Steve Smith for his characteristically thoughtful and shrewd comments on my piece. And I am glad to note that he finds himself ‘in broad agreement’ with what I wrote.

In July 1945, Rabbi Leo Baeck remarked that the Third Reich had destroyed the historical basis of German Jewry. ‘The history of Jews in Germany has found its end. It is impossible for it to come back. The chasm is too great’. Heinz Galinski, a survivor of Auschwitz who led West Berlin’s Jewish community until his death in 1992, could not have disagreed more strongly. ‘I have always held the view’, he observed, ‘that the Wannsee Conference cannot be the last word in the life of the Jewish community in Germany’. As these diverging views suggest, opting to live in the ‘land of the perpetrators’ represented both an unthinkable and a realistic choice. In the decade after the Holocaust, about 12,000 German-born Jews opted to remain in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and comprised about half of its Jewish community. Rooted in the German language and typically married to non-Jewish spouses, they still had some connections to Germany. xSuch cultural and personal ties did not exist for the other half of West Germany’s Jewish community – its East European Jews. Between 1945 and 1948, 230,000 Jews sought refuge in occupied Germany from the violent outbursts of antisemitism in eastern Europe. Although by 1949 only 15,000 East European Jews had taken permanent residence in the FRG, those who stayed behind profoundly impacted upon Jewish life. More religiously devout than their German-Jewish counterparts, they developed a rich cultural tradition located mostly in southern Germany. But their presence also complicated Jewish life. From the late nineteenth century, relations between German and East European Jews historically were tense and remained so in the early postwar years; the highly acculturated German Jews looked down upon their less assimilated, Yiddish-speaking brothers. In the first decade after the war, integrating these two groups emerged as one of the most pressing tasks for Jewish community leaders.

Louis de Jong, who died on 15 March 2005, held a unique position as the official historian for the Netherlands during the Second World War. As head of the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (RIOD), de Jong effectively came to dictate the research agenda on his country’s recent history for more than forty years after the conflict was over. For the Dutch, his name was synonymous not only with RIOD but also with the history of the German occupation from May 1940 to the final liberation in May 1945.

-Your mother is a judge. It's her job to put a line through the past by passing sentence. I'm a historian. For me the past is a gold mine of surprises and possibilities.

-A gold mine?…A dunghill is more like it.

-Dunghills have their surprises too.

President Ion Iliescu [of Romania] has just announced the formation of an international expert commission charged with studying the history of the Holocaust in Romania between 1937 and 1951.

Historians are not judges. A historical commission is not a court of law.

In response to the pull of prospective membership of the European Union (EU), the states, societies and economies of the Balkan countries are undergoing unprecedented change. Their transformation has been shaped by a double legacy of communism and ethnic conflict, distinguishing their efforts from the transitional experience of their counterparts in east central Europe. How do these legacies interact with the goal of becoming a part of the EU? Is political and economic liberalisation a sufficient foundation for the Europeanisation of the Balkan states? How can the extent of their post-communist and post-conflict transformation and European integration be gauged? To tackle these questions, the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London, and the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University, Berlin, organised a two-day conference to examine the nature of transnational relations in the Balkans. With the financial support of Volkswagen Stiftung, the conference, entitled ‘Transnationalism in the Balkans: The Emergence, Nature and Impact of Cross-national Linkages on an Enarged and Enlarging Europe’, took place at the LSE in November 2004.

Werner Abelshauser, Jan-Otmar Hesse and Werner Plumpe, eds., Wirtschaftsordnung, Staat und Unternehmen. Neue Forschungen zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2003), 392 pp., €29.80 (pb), ISBN 3898612597.

Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis 1923–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0198208006.

Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Economic War against the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 268 pp., £27.50 (hb), ISBN 0521803292.

Reinhard Spree, ed.,Geschichte der deutschen Wirtschaft im 20.Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 232 pp., €12,50 (pb), ISBN 3406475698.

Hans Erich Volkmann, Ökonomie und Expansion. Grundzüge der NS-Wirtschaftspolitik (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003), €39.80 (hb), ISBN 3486567144

Iginio Ariemma, La casa brucia. I Democratici di Sinistra dal PCI ai giorni nostri (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 225 pp., €12.39 (pb), ISBN 8831773798.

Nicola Rossi, Riformisti per forza. La sinistra italiana tra 1996 e 2006 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 168 pp., €10.50 (pb), ISBN 8815084312.

Antonio Tatò, Caro Berlinguer, Note e appunti riservati di Antonio Tatò a Enrico Berlinguer. 1969–1984 (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 336 pp., €14.50 (pb), ISBN 880616595X.

Michele Salvati, Il partito democratico. Alle origini di un'idea politica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 138 pp., €8.00 (pb), ISBN 8815096647.