LAUSR

near and distant urban centers. Even for the British, the corridor may have been a distinct unit but not selfcontained; its very danger lay in its liability to disturb imperial concerns to the north, east, and west. Likewise, Fletcher calls out gendered anthropological views of nomads, but does not explain his own gendered account. Fletcher rightly insists on Britons’ emotional investment in desert administration, and his monograph offers much new detail about its practical functioning. He also rightly urges the profit in studying seemingly minor frontier hostilities long ago, but we must enroll them in a structure hospitable to the uninitiated, perhaps more chronological than thematic. Rather than a chapter on the RCAS straddling the entire period, Fletcher might have begun at the beginning, showing us, with all his spectacular details, how desert administration grew up after the war, laying out each key institutional and human player. I have written several critical reviews of monographs organized topically; this will be my last. A highly empirical mode of scholarship with a light analytical touch has its advantages. But any work striving to persuade (rather than serve as a reference) eschews the full-throated simple power of narrative at our collective peril. It is indispensable to making a case comprehensible to those who most need to hear it; there is much at stake.