A note on the AHR's Note on Reviews

April 13, 2019

I love the academic book review, at least at its best. Getting to watch someone with a lifetime of expertise interact with the product of a decade-ish of research and writing, seeing a conversation between two of the few people in the world who know so much about a topic? What’s not to love! Worldviews meet, opinions and perspectives mingle or combust. For books outside of your field, a review is like being tourist, or like peeking into a different world where one knows entirely different things. For books in your own field, you can watch the politics of your own discipline play out in nearly real time, by academic standards. Anyway, they do a lot beyond their professional function they serve of disseminating news of new research.

So you can imagine my delight when the latest issue of the American Historical Review included “A Note on Book Reviews” explaining how the sausage gets made–and addressing an imbalance that is obvious in every table of contents of every issues of the journal. Why are so many of the books reviewed about North America and Early Modern/Modern Europe? Some data from the note: North America/Modern Europe account for 62 percent of books received at the AHR and 56.5 percent of books reviewed. The reviewing process is as follows: 2,200 to 2,500 books are received, about a third of them are reviewed, exclusion is usually because the books falls outside of what the AHR considers its purview. These include “documents and bibliographies, collected essays with numerous authors, works of syntheses, biographies of minor historical figures, works of art history or catalogues of artwork, books designed solely for undergraduate classroom use, fiction, current affairs, and the like,” with other self-published, popular, or nonacademic works also being excluded, but “at least four pairs of editorial eyes” review a book for review before it’s rejected.

The AHR identifies the lack of books on the “Global South” (the quotes are mine, the phrase is theirs) as a “pipeline problem,” says it is working to identify more books on topics other than North America/Modern Europe, and asks publishers and authors to send them more books from those categories. The publication has created a “Board of Associate Review Editors” to push new books on the “Global South” in front of the AHR, and it might consider “foreign consultants” to alert it to books that new books that fly under the radar in the U.S., specifically, it seems, to increase the number of books from foreign publishers (”smaller publishers and those based outside of the usual Anglo-American networks”) that might not send their books to the AHR automatically. They also urge authors of books outside of North America/Modern Europe to have their books sent to the AHR for review.

The idea that differences in where books were published would explain a large gap in how many books are reviewed was difficult to reconcile with my experience as a medieval Europeanist who has read modestly in sub-Saharan Africa, through a PhD exam field and two semester of teaching in the area. It’s true that publishers like James Currey or Lexington Books or Ohio University Press are particularly associated with writing on Africa, but the AHR already regularly reviews books by these major publishers. So, what books went unreviewed and were they published outside of the normal ambit of the AHR? To try to get at an answer to this question, I compared three years (2016-2018) of books reviewed in the AHR (vols. 121-3) and the Journal of African History (vols. 57-9), which would presumably have a similar remit (and similar constraints) in reviewing. Excluding North Africa-centric books reviewed by the JAH, the AHR did not (yet) review 107 books that were reviewed in the JAH in this period; the JAH did not (yet) review 35 books that were reviewed in the AHR; both journals reviewed 63 books (some of which appeared in the Middle East/North Africa, Comparative/World/Transnational, Europe: Early Modern and Modern, and Featured sections of the AHR reviews).

Looking specifically at the books reviewed in the JAH that were not reviewed in the AHR, it’s hard to pick out a publisher-related pattern to explain the discrepancy in number of books reviewed on sub-Saharan Africa. Only three books were published by African presses: Wits University Press, Mzuni Press, and Unisa Press. Of these, the AHR occasionally reviews books put out by Wits University Press. Another book came from the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, which is focused on Namibia/Southern Africa but based in Switzerland. Another subset of books that the AHR did not review came from smaller university presses, independent academic publishers, or popular publishers. Many of these publish books reviewed in or received by the AHR, including Casemate Publishers, Rowman & Littlefield, Uppsala University Press, and McFarland & Co. The AHR published African reviews of books from Hurst & Co. in the same period, and had reviewed or received books from Markus Wiener, Carolina Academic, Aarhus University Press in the past. A small number of books appeared from the (major) French publishers Karthala, Harmattan, Vendémiaire, Publications de la Sorbonne, and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, but only one from each. The remaining publishers were: Intellect Books, Pluto Press, Equinox Publishing House, Helion & Co, and Brethren Archivists and Historians Network, which each had one book reviewed in the JAH. Each of these publishers, accounts for a single book.

Most, 83, of the so-far unreviewed books were published or distributed by house that make up the bread and butter of the *AHR*’s reviews page: Brill (9 books), Oxford University Press (9 books), Cambridge University Press (7 books), Lexington Books (6 books), Berghahn (5 books), University of Minnesota Press (5 books), Indiana University Press (4 books), Duke University Press (3 Books), James Currey (3 books), University of Rochester Press (3 books), Routledge (3 books), Yale University Press (3 books), I.B. Tauris (2 books), Michigan State University Press (2 books), Ohio University Press (2 books), Palgrave Macmillan (2 books), Princeton University Press (2 books), Ashgate (1 book), Bloomsbury (1 book), Edinburgh University Press (1 book), Hackett (1 book), University of Illinois Press (1 book), MIT Press (1 book), Northwestern University Press (1 book), University of North Carolina Press (1 book), University of Chicago (1 book), University of Toronto (1 book), University of Virginia (1 book), University Press of America (1 book), University of Wisconsin (1 book), Zed Books (1 book). Glancing through the titles of these texts, it does appear that some focus on the history of art or communications, or that they have current events as at least part of their focus–reasons the AHR gives for excluding them. Others are archaeological or anthropological (with a historical bent). But perhaps part of making a more robust reviews page is reconsidering how strictly applied the selection criteria are, as is so often the case with pipeline problems. In any case, I merely wanted to do a quick-ish analysis to check my own intuition and experience. The solutions identified by the AHR would be positive steps that will bring interesting new work to the pages of the AHR, especially work by authors writing outside of North America and Europe, which is probably a more important aim than reviewing every signle book published in a subfield.

Caveats: This data set is more suggestive than exact. Since I used the three most recent years, many of the books in question could still be reviewed in either journal at a later date. This note was written before AHR 124.2 was released, which, serendipitously, contains a roundtable review of Michael A. Gomez’s African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, among reviews of other books. I also removed from consideration books in the JAH that appeared to be strictly about North Africa, which is, of course, a judgment call, usually not based on my familiarity with the book at hand. Perhaps it is unfair to expect the AHR to approach a field journal in comprehensiveness–though JAH is not an “African Studies” journal, which would be the problem with comparing, say, Speculum with the *AHR*’s medieval coverage. Reviews also have their severe downsides. They are often lifelessly descriptive. A strict but unspoken professional code of conduct prevents most reviewers, especially young ones, from writing too frankly. One suspects that reviews, like student evaluations, disproportionately affect scholars whose status has always been conditional.