1040 EHR, CXXVIII. 533 (August. 2013) BOOK REVIEWS take such boasts with a pinch of salt. The Times ’s success in marketing itself as an academic resource, first through the index and now through this market-leading digital archive, has meant that historians have sometimes been too ready to accept its claims of influence and to use it as representative of ‘press opinion’. The modern Times has many strengths, notably its Westminster reporting and its business journalism, and several weaknesses, such as its coverage of the arts and culture and its metropolitan focus. Above all, though, it remains one voice in a crowded media environment, and it needs to be placed alongside other outlets—even if their archives are not so impressive. ADRIAN BINGHAM doi:10.1093/ehr/cet144 University of Sheffield The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2010; pp. 675. £85). This handbook is part of a series published by Oxford University Press which also includes volumes on the Holocaust (2010) and Fascism (2009). The handbook editors are two prominent scholars of a ‘younger’ generation of genocide scholars, and, with a few exceptions, all the contributors are part of that same generation which has transformed the field from its highly politicised and restricted ‘Euro-centric’ interest in a few select cases to a transnational and global endeavour (p. 4). Yet the transformation process is far from complete, as is demonstrated by the list of authors, most of whom are trained by and work at North American and European universities. While three come from Australia and one lives in Latin America, unfortunately no scholar from Asia or Africa could be recruited. With their introduction, the editors establish that genocide studies is indeed a field of study—they even call it a discipline (p. 2)—with its own journals, academic programmes and public impact. After exploring the way in which the field derived from a mainly non-historical approach and a marginal life to one which is global and diverse in nature, they explain how Holocaust and early genocide studies have been so deeply entangled, the former furthering the interest in, yet also hindering methodologically, the evolution of the latter. The editors call for a ‘historicisation’ of genocide studies by initiating more contributions from historians studying context and causes, processes and developments of mass violence, and by departing from the over-emphasis on ‘definitionalism’ (p. 7), which characterised many works up to the 2000s and still continues to do so. They also dispute the former notion that genocide is only an outcome of authoritarian regimes, since a historical conceptualisation reveals that democracy has triggered as much mass violence as have dictatorships. The editors make clear that not all of the thirty contributors share the ideas and concepts laid out in the introduction (p. 9). They then divide the handbook into five parts: the first two—‘concepts’ and ‘interdisciplinary perspectives’—cover more theoretical ground, while Parts Three to Five, the core of the book, deal with different historical periods from the ancient world to the twenty- first century. by guest on July 27, 2013 http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from