Invisible cities,hidden agendas

The Invisible City. Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastures in Asia and Europe, 1500–1900, by Frank Perlin. Aldershot: Variorum, 1993. Pp.xii + 366. £49.50. ISBN 086 078 342 1

This review article examines briefly the recent publication by Frank Perlin of a series of revised articles dealing with theoretical and methodological issues in South Asian history, in particular the period from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Perlin's approach to the problems he perceives is to analyse the ways in which the process of state formation is based on concentric and intersecting sets of social and economic relationships, which both establish the space for the evolution of state‐like political power and which can at the same time be themselves destroyed, transformed, constituted or reproduced by the existence of such powers. This approach also underlies his interest in the patterns and functions of local, inter‐local and international exchange of money‐media for roughly the same period. His purpose is at the same time to challenge the ‘substantivising’ assumptions about the bounded nature of both the historiographical problem and the object of study made by much modern historiography.