Clulow, Adam The Company and the Shogun, The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan New York: Columbia University Press 352 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978 0231164283 Publication Date: December 2013
market specializing in used books, where she found a great number of autobiographies so great, in fact, that she identifies the practice of generating autobiography as a constitutive element of what it means to be an efendi. "Modern autobiographies," she writes, should be read "as travelogues of journeys towards middle class (efendi) modernity," especially when considered along with other sources (29) Ryzova weaves together autobiographies, fiction, and cinema from the period to show that efendis were not simply products of modernizing school curricula or a modernizing state. Rather, she contends that efendi subjectivity was the result of a range of novel social practices and experiences that created a shared generational sensibility; modern educational institutions and the colonial state sanctioned some of them, and others, such as political action and extracurricular reading, were frowned on or expressly forbidden yet, nonetheless, pursued with great vigor. This shared generational sensibility constituted, in Ryzova's view, an authentically modern Egyptian subjectivity a (selfconsciously) model subject for a new Egyptian community. Ryzova's careful work assembling her many sources is impressive. She provides a vivid picture of the efendiyya and their context. At times, however, the sheer volume of quality source material is a little overwhelming, making the text more appropriate for specialists than for a general reader or undergraduate audience. Some of Ryzova's finest moments come when she steps away from her sources and displays her analytical acumen. Toward the end of the book, she characterizes efendi subjectivity as "potentially both productive (as the engine of reform, independence, and middle class modernity) and destructive," with the transformative vocation representing "a violent act" that "necessitates the concentration of considerable power" (248) Here and there, Ryzova makes incredibly insightful points like these that relate in fundamental terms to present day Egypt, but these connections often remain unstated, and she depends on the reader to make the connections. These feel like lost opportunities to help the reader understand why her engaging account of the efendiyya is essential to understanding contemporary Egypt. Like Keith Watenpaugh's research on the emergence of middle class politics in Aleppo, work with which Ryzova is very much in conversation, The Age of the Efendiyya underscores that being middle class meant dreaming about a different and better future and having the certainty that humans could produce that future. Unfortunately, Ryzova's desire to articulate an authentically Egyptian modern subject has led her to downplay or exclude transnational connections (real or imagined) that informed what it meant to be modern. Curiously, Ryzova highlights this absence by opening the final chapter with an anecdote about an efendi who had just returned from Europe and was able to see his village again for the first time (as a site in need of transformation) Whether they are real or imagined, these transnational connections point to a broader referent modernity that has taken particular shape in Egypt. It is hard to imagine an Egyptian modernity without a category that is shared across contexts.