This book, which is based on a doctoral dissertation of a similar title, provides a focused examination of the origins, development and social contribution of the burgesses of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and, later, the Latin kingdom of Cyprus. Nader begins his analysis by accounting for the emergence of the burgess in eleventh-century western European society, before turning to consider the involvement of non-noble classes in the First Crusade and subsequent western migration to the Levant. He argues that the burgesses of the Latin East constituted a ‘middle class’ of non-feudatories (‘merchants, market tradesmen, craftsmen, artisans, investors, money-changers, translators, fishermen and farmers’) who were lower in standing than the nobility but who were nevertheless distinguished in law and social status from the kingdoms' indigenous subject populations. A scrutiny of the evolution of burgess law and jurisdiction is at the heart of Nader's study, and his discussion of the evidence from charters and legal texts is detailed and thorough. At points the book would have benefitted from engaging with a broader range of modern scholarship (such as recent studies on the motives of the First Crusaders), and some of the sources are cited in older critical editions. The indexing might also have been more rigorous (there is not, for example, an entry for references to ‘Cyprus’). But such limitations do not detract from the fact that this work enhances our understanding of the institutional and social history of the Latin East, and contains important material on the reasons why those from non-noble backgrounds participated in the crusading movement and in the Latin settlement of the eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.