Marten-Finnis, Susanne. Vilna as a Centre of the Modern Jewish Press, 1840–1928. Aspirations, Challenges, and Progress. Peter Lang, Oxford [etc.] 2004. 197 pp. 37.10

Abstract

[...]concepts relating to the poor and health were increasingly based on the idea that the population of Egypt represented the wealth and power of the country, and was therefore of concern to its rulers. [...]her colonial discourse on poverty also rings true and gives new insights into how imperialism justied its colonization of Egypt. [...]though she refers throughout her book to a rhetoric of poverty since the rise of the new elite at the end of the nineteenth century, she scarcely analyses it. [...]although her concept of managing the poor is an interesting substitute for the more totalitarian one of surveillance, one does have the feeling that this concept is still too loose and ambivalent.