ways ‘in which women understood, negotiated and articulated their relationships to modernity’(p. 164).

Giles’ articulation of domestic modernity is persuasive; the chapter on the culture of domesticservice, alone, is worth the price of admission. The bibliography seems thin given Giles’ scope,and the discussion of second wave feminism in chapter 4, linking early twentieth-century domes-ticity to the later feminist critique ignores indispensable critical historiographies, including Cott’sThe Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale University Press, 1987), Kerber (Separate spheres,female worlds, woman’s place: the rhetoric of women’s history, Journal of American History 75(1988) 9e39), and Vickery (Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chro-nology of English women’s history, The Historical Journal 36 (1993) 383e414). Still, quibblesaside, Gile’s book is required reading for geographers interested to revise traditional feministunderstandings of early twentieth-century domesticity.

Phillip Gordon MackintoshBrock University, Canada

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.01.007

463Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 454e478

Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, Auckland, Penguin Books, 2003, 563 pages,NZ$29.95 paperback.

King’s Penguin History of New Zealand was the author’s last major work, in a distinguishedpublishing career, before his untimely death in a car accident in September 2004. The book beginswith the disclaimer that it is not written for an academic audience, but rather is directed at‘curious and intelligent general readers’ (p. 11). Consequently, the book’s contents representthe result of an engagement between King’s earlier works and orthodox New Zealand historio-graphy (these intellectual debts are laid out in the book’s acknowledgements, and stand in lieuof a detailed bibliography). The book, King states is not encyclopaedic, but rather seeks to pro-vide an overview of the millennium of human occupation of the New Zealand islands. In pursuingthis task King directs his gaze at the myths that have shaped the cultures of New Zealand’s peo-ples; and insofar as the book has a theoretical armature it is King’s belief that societies are shapedby the myths of past events, even more than the events themselves.

King’s exposition of these myths is reflected in the book’s structure, which comprises a small‘Prehistory’ section; three substantial sections: ‘Settlement’, ‘Consolidation’, and ‘Unsettlement’;and a concluding chapter which reflects on the two centuries of engagement between Maori andPakeha. In rough terms the balance of the book lies in the ‘Settlement’ and ‘Consolidation’sections which take the reader up until the 1950s. This balance reflects King’s sense that it isthe legacy of the nineteenth-century engagement between Maori and Pakeha that continues toshape contemporary New Zealand. A consequence of this structure, however, is that King’snarrative of New Zealand’s near history, for example of the changes resulting from the neoliberalreimagination of the stateesociety relationship, is less systematically explored.

464 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 454e478

King’s historical imagination is primarily framed around the evolving relationship betweenMaori and Pakeha, and to a lesser extent between the people(s) and the land. For King whathas made New Zealand’s Maori and Pakeha cultures distinctive is the mutual, albeit uneven, shar-ing of concepts and practices. Unsurprisingly, given King’s deserved reputation for his sustainedinterpretations of the Maori world it is in those discussions that the book shines. Here Kinghighlights the existence throughout most of New Zealand’s history of two very different, andproblematically connected worlds; and it is in highlighting the largely ignored Maori world ofthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the book challenges the assimilationistverities of Pakeha mythologising. Yet at the same time in constantly returning to the engagementbetween Pakeha and Maori as the defining relationship of New Zealand’s history, King forces hisanalysis into a bicultural frame from which it is difficult to unpack, for example, the implicationsof the recent, tentative intersection of Pasifika and Asian cultures with the core cultures heidentifies.

King’s narrative deftly weaves stories around individuals in order to illuminate wider socialmores. However, as interesting, and provoking, as these anecdotes are, they stand in lieu ofa deeper analysis of the fault lines of New Zealand society. Moreover, these tales are very largelyelite (especially political, cultural and military) stories. A point amplified by the seeming absenceof women, with notable exceptions such as Te Puea Herangi, as agents of historical change. It ishere that one of the book’s significant lacunas exists insofar as there is a certain narrowness ofhistorical agency. This is a common fault because of the resolution required from the general his-tory genre, but the construction of King’s narrative also takes little account of mundane, everydayhistories. Thus, for example whilst we learn something of the vicissitudes that faced NewZealand’s writers as they practised their craft, we learn almost nothing of their readers, and thecommunities of readers (rather than the literary community) that supported the dense networksof public, and commercial, libraries that characterised New Zealand’s towns and cities. Herethe famous stand rendered remarkable against the featureless background of quotidian life; butit is a background made featureless only by the failure to explain why, and how, everyday lifewas practised and experienced in different ways.

A secondary thread woven through the book is the relationship between New Zealand’s peoplesand the land. Here King takes the opportunity to point to a legacy of exploitation; a legacy whichencompassed both Maori and Pakeha; and a legacy which New Zealanders are confronting at themoment. The myth of the ‘clean green’ New Zealand is one worth challenging, and King ablypoints out the hegemony of instrumentalist considerations of nature, and of land use, well intothe twentieth century. For King it was the fight to stop the proposed raising of Lake Manapouri’swater level that crystallised opposition to a particular developmental ethos, and which morebroadly signalled a questioning of Pakeha relationships with the land, each other, and Maori.Yet in questioning one myth, the book seemingly misses the opportunity to question why Pakeha,in particular, attributed so much material and social value to land, a question that King answersin relation to Maori.

King’s history is a worthy addition to a widening vein of historiography. It is a generous,humane, and ultimately readable account of New Zealand’s emergence, and the relationshipsbetween its two core cultures. It effectively questions the myth of assimilation that occluded thetensions embedded in that relationship; and it sketches the cost to the natural environment occa-sioned by the peopling of New Zealand. Despite its strengths the book is not flawless. It shares the

465Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 454e478

problems of all general histories in terms of the constraints of scale. An issue that is amplified byKing’s stated goal of examining the stories of New Zealand’s becoming; a goal shadowed by thesense that in exposing one set of myths the book quietly inscribes another. In this sense the book’slegacy may well be as an historiographical object as much as it is an historical study. The book,then, is a fine, but not timeless, introduction to New Zealand’s history. An introduction whosearguments need to be used, and questioned, vis-a-vis the myriad little peaks of more specialisedscholarship that have emerged in New Zealand scholarship.

Matthew HenryMassey University, New Zealand

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.01.008

Sharon E. Kingsland, The Evolution of American Ecology, 1890e2000, Baltimore, Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2005, xþ313 pages, US$50 hardback.

Among scientific disciplines, ecology is one of the most interesting historically, because of itschronic difficulties of identity and standing, and because ecologists operate in an unusually com-plex intellectual and political terrain. (Geography is another such discipline.) There are as manyways of writing the history of ecology as there are ways of defining and delimiting the subject,making each new book on the subject something of an adventure.

Sharon Kingsland defines ecology in two not entirely compatible ways. On the one hand, sheleads readers to expect a history of a disciplinedits institutions, sources of funding and publicsupport, and agendas. But she also writes of ecology as an intellectual approach shared by a rangeof environmental disciplines, such as human geography, landscape architecture, urban planning,and public health, which also deal with the relation between organisms and environments.

Both definitions are valid and interesting. The trouble is that neither is followed through ina systematic way. Kingsland’s book is not a complete and coherent history of ecology in theUS. Rather, it is an idiosyncratic and one-sided view of some aspects of ecology’s ‘evolution’as a discipline. Nor is it a systematic and coherent account of the sciences that have been inspiredby ecological thought. Kingsland confines herself mainly to biological ecology, telling us little ofwhat geographers, landscape architects, and others actually achieved in human ecology.

The book is in fact a grab bag of topics. Some chapters grow out of Kingsland’s earlier work,on the botanist Daniel MacDougal; others review familiar topics in the history of bio-ecology.The first three chapters are devoted to the founding of the New York Botanical Garden andits early history. These will interest historians of botany and plant taxonomy, but they have littleto do with ecology. Although Kingsland claims (p. 4) that ‘in crucial respects New York was thebirthplace of ecology’, in fact the Botanical Garden was never very friendly to ecology, nor wasany scientific institution in New York City. The cultural hearth of ecology in America was theMiddle West, and it gets short shrift here.

Chapter 4 is an institutional history of the Desert Laboratory in Tucson Arizona, which was fora time a center of desert ecology, though hardly a satellite of the New York Botanical Garden, as