It is always a challenge to review a collection of academic essays, especially one that treats a key transnational human institution—marriage—in such a wide swath of national locations. The book comprises twelve chapters, an introduction, and a list of selected readings. The editors and most of the contributors are “contemporary” historians (late nineteenth-century to the present), but other contributors include disciplinary specialists in literature, social psychology, and sociology. Multidisciplinary might better describe the contents, rather than interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary.
The twelve authors investigate the “national anxieties” provoked by troublesome aspects of marriage practices in a wide variety of national (or quasi-national) settings: in order of appearance, prerevolutionary Russia, Brazil, the United States, India, Burma, Zanzibar, post–World War II France, contemporary China, Nigeria, Iran, Japan, and Egypt. Each chapter is well researched and thoughtfully written; some of them provide more salient backgrounds for non-specialists than others. In certain nation-states, marriage is...