Andrea L Stanton

Even scholarly readers may assume that a book on copyright law sounds most like a means of coping with insomnia. Michael Birnhack, however, has written a surprisingly engaging study that sets Mandate Palestine's encounters with British-imposed copyright law in the context of international concordances on copyright and late nineteenth-century imperial extensions of metropolitan copyright laws. He highlights how British officials used European concepts of creative work and authorship to justify colonialism's " civilizing mission " and denigrate local understandings of creative works, including how they were produced and by whom, and how to protect them. He then turns to Palestine as a case study, examining how both Jewish immigrants and local Arab Palestinians received British copyright law: first ignoring it but then employing it to assert the existence of a creative field in each community, with standards of production and authorship that fit British conceptions of the creative field. This densely researched, complex study engages with sociolegal studies as well as social history, while offering a highly readable account of the complexities of the subject.

... point the Israeli-Palestinian talks were stalled amidst the onset of renewed Israeli-Palestinian violence and ... is-sue affected—and been affected by—the overall, changing nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict? ... and ultimately end up as at best a marginal player in resolving the Arab ...

94 Spring 2009 Digest of Middle East Studies Empire of Difference: the Ottomans in Comparative Perspective Karen Barkey Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 342p. Pbk. $25.99. ISBN: 9780521715331. Review by Andrea A. Stanton, Ph. D. New York ...