Presenting the researches of sixteen historians (and brief commentary from a half dozen others), this is inevitably a scattered work, the more so in that its subject matter ranges from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries. But two central themes nonetheless give the book a surprising degree of unity, and give it significance beyond the impressive empirical findings that it presents. The first theme is institutional. The book emerged from a 2002 roundtable mixing British and French historians, and it represents a serious effort to bring their two historiographical traditions into closer contact. Such efforts matter, because since World War II their relations have been asymmetrical: Anglo-Saxon historians have devoted much attention to France, French historians rather little to England, a neglect that contrasts sharply with French scholarly interest in Spain, Italy, and Germany. The essays themselves show the organizers’ concern for connection to have been substantive as well as sociable. Eleven of the sixteen essays are cross-channel ventures, with six British and five French scholars visiting their neighbors’ history, and four deal with the Anglo-Norman empires of the Middle Ages, a topic especially well suited to the project of historiographical reconnection. However, only one essay deals explicitly with comparison between Britain and France. If the process of scholarly encounter is well under way, this volume suggests, there are still few efforts to redefine the geographical boundaries within which historians write.

The second of the book's unifying themes is methodological: the essays all explore the “networks” and other “personal links” mentioned in the title, and this common focus makes the book relevant to a wide range of scholars. In a variety of contexts, the contributors seek to understand how the forms of groups’ interactions shaped the content of their behavior. Neither Lewis Namier nor Ronald Syme, who placed rather similar analyses at the center of mid-twentieth-century British historiographical debate, is cited here as an intellectual ancestor (though the medievalist K. B. MacFarlane does receive mention). Rather, the contributors have sought to apply conceptual tools derived from contemporary sociology, primarily in the form of Anglo-American network theory: the attempt, that is, to develop purely scientific ways of understanding and representing individuals’ connections with one another. As Julien Vincent's contribution notes, this claim to scientific status has been part of the appeal of network theory, allowing researchers to examine the mechanisms of attachment without a priori assumptions about how attachments affected behavior. Such a theory has obvious appeal in an era suspicious both of Marxism and of individualistic psychology.

Several of the contributions explore the complex interactions that network theory can bring to light by virtue of its orientation to mapping relations, rather than making assumptions about them. Michel Nassiet, for instance, shows that family connections did not necessarily produce closeness among fifteenth- and sixteenth-century nobles: in fact conflict might erupt with special intensity between a favored older brother and his disinherited siblings, or between wealthier and poorer branches of a family. David Hopkin shows how lived experience produced close connections within nineteenth-century Breton fishing fleets, even as deep economic conflicts persisted. The essays show network theory to be a supple, immensely productive intellectual tool.

They also point to some suggestive gaps in historians’ adaptation of the theory, visible first in the essays’ peculiar chronological distribution. Ten of the essays deal with the period before 1600, six with the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries—and none with the intervening centuries. The essays’ sociological distribution is equally striking, and overlaps closely with their chronology: all but one of those dealing with the medieval and early modern periods deal with nobles, and most of the modern contributions deal with intellectuals or with intellectually inclined politicians. To some extent, one assumes, these distributions reflect accidental “personal links” and “solidarities” among the contributors themselves. But these preoccupations also mean that the essays confine themselves mainly to times and places that have long been explored in terms of patronage, familial aggregations, and political parties, concepts at least loosely related to network theory. Only one essay in the collection explores what network theory would bring to the history of the working class. The challenge of applying the theory in more complicated settings remains open.

A further question concerns the place of individuals in this kind of analysis. Eight of the sixteen essays take an ego-centered approach to social networks, each reconstructing an individual's friendships and connections, and exploring how these shaped ideas and careers. These are remarkable papers, based on impressive research, but in them the analysis of “networks” and “personal links” tends to collapse into conventional biography and narrative. In them, we follow ambitious men (the book includes female authors but no female subjects) as they form and utilize the connections that will support their careers. These processes might be complex. Julien Vincent, for instance, brilliantly traces the friendships that undergirded John Neville Keynes's development as an ethicist and economist, showing how his career involved selection among several categories of networks. In the end, however, this and the collection's other ego-centered accounts follow the choices of apparently free subjects, understood more or less on their own terms. In this sense, network theory seems less an alternative social theory than an alternative to social theory. But if the collection reveals some of the theoretical puzzlement felt by social historians today, it also shows the field's vigor. The studies assembled here present excellent research, focused on a variety of times and places. They display a genuine renewal of French historians’ engagement with British history, and a new closeness of French and British historical thinking.