This volume derives from a conference held in Leuven, Belgium, in May 2012. It ostensibly addresses what new insights the critical rubric of ‘performance’ can yield for historical–sociological understanding of expertise. However, few of the authors here really engage with the idea. There is, for instance, little discussion suggesting that the experts under study fine-tuned their presentations to engage the interests, culture or psychology of specific audiences.

Graeme Gooday's chapter comparing American and British electrical experts Lewis Howard Latimer, William Preece and John Tyndall is perhaps an exception. Gooday begins with a discussion of the British milieu's distinction between paid specialist ‘experts' and the scholarly ‘authorities' who spoke on the basis of their disinterestedness and broad knowledge. These categories complement the contemporaneous American distinctions, discussed by Paul Lucier elsewhere, between craftsmen ‘experts’, paid ‘professionals’ and academic ‘scientists’ (then a new term meant to distinguish ‘pure’ scholarship). Gooday goes on to note how his specific subjects downplayed their ethnic heritage while adapting their performances to the courtroom, consulting work, journals or the lecture hall, as their talents and station permitted.

However, without a strong binding theme running throughout the book, its various chapters do not tie together very well. Even still, many chapters are individually quite informative, particularly those addressing historiographically neglected topics or milieus. Notably, Per Lundin and Niklas Stenlås's chapter on Swedish ‘reform technocrats' provides at least the beginnings of a prosopography of programme-builders in that country's rising welfare state. The authors' discussion nicely complements essays in the 2010 volume Science for Welfare and Warfare: Technology and State Initiative in Cold War Sweden, which they co-edited with Johan Gribbe. The chapter also usefully positions itself within an existing Swedish historiography that focuses on the politicians who backed state initiatives, such as in housing construction, but tells little of the professionals who proposed and built up those initiatives.

Joris Vandenriessche provides a comparison of how the place of medical expertise in public-health deliberations evolved during the nineteenth century in Brussels and Ghent. Early in the century, physicians affiliated with local medical societies provided advice to city officials – a model Vandenriessche labels ‘philanthropic’ expertise, though the terms ‘voluntary’ or ‘advisory’ might be more apt. Later, when new experts specializing in public health and hygiene began to work directly for government, members of medical societies had to find new roles. Many concentrated on academic research, others wrote for the public, and still others offered opinions on the scientific quality of public-health studies.

Katja Bruisch's chapter traces the complicated fate of agricultural research – a field split between natural-scientific and economic studies – over Russia's turbulent political history from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Agricultural reform was originally intended to aid landowners, but, following the emancipation of the serfs, it was enrolled in political projects to elevate the Russian peasantry. That work translated fairly seamlessly into communist modernization projects following the Bolshevik Revolution. However, agricultural experts' prior work with the tsarist regime, and new conflicts with Lysenko's work, became liabilities under Stalin and collectivization, when many were purged. The experts, or their legacies, were in turn rehabilitated under Khrushchev, who took a personal interest in their work. Bruisch's chapter complements the work of scholars such as Loren Graham and Alexei Kojevnikov.

Raf de Bont offers a compelling analysis of the role of zoology in transforming the protection of natural environments (Naturschutz) from a set of European nationalist projects focused on landscapes into an internationalist project focused on the conservation of wildlife. As a movement, Naturschutz was initially dominated by literary intellectuals and social reformers; plant geographers tended to reinforce connections drawn between a national homeland and its characteristic plant life. However, the habitation and movement of animals across boundaries soon entangled research and conservation in international conferences and diplomatic negotiations. In colonial Africa such discussions were tied to the conservation of big game, the eradication of ‘vermin’, and the protection and confinement of indigenous peoples (Naturvölker). Moreover, researchers argued that effective conservation had to be based on scientific knowledge and principles that recognized connections between animal species and between those species and their whole environment. De Bont notes how zoology would later yield to the new specialist disciplines of ecology and conservation biology.

David Freis discusses conservative German and Austrian psychiatrists' attempts to establish themselves as intellectuals capable of diagnosing the ills of the ‘national soul’. Following the First World War, Eugen Kahn cast the political zeal of revolutionaries as evidence of a ‘psychopathy’ related to the mental breakdowns suffered by soldiers. Others, notably Robert Gaupp, diagnosed a national nervous breakdown, requiring charismatic national leadership to resolve. Erwin Stransky advocated the extreme view that psychiatry should become a master science of governance that obviated the need even for jurisprudence. Freis does not pay extensive attention to Sigmund Freud, a liberal, but rightly insists that Freud's writing on mass psychoanalysis be read in this context.

I found the history in the remaining chapters to be less fully developed. Others may disagree, and, in any event, specialists in the relevant subject areas should consult them. Martin Kohlrausch's chapter discusses the ambitions of interwar architects and urban planners such as Le Corbusier to reform society. Martin Theaker's chapter examines the role of prominent scientists in advancing Britain's postwar nuclear research and development programme. Jennifer Karns Alexander's chapter analyses papers given at a 1927 international congress on scientific management and industrial rationalization. Margo De Koster and David Niget's chapter discusses the rise of juvenile reform institutions and experts in interwar and post-war Belgium. Frank Huisman's chapter surveys sporadic attempts by lawmakers and the medical establishment in the Netherlands, from the nineteenth century to the present, to establish medical practice laws that balance public safety with patients' freedom as consumers.

There is a great deal of useful information to be found in this volume, and I hope that it will find its way to scholars who can make good use of it.