A wide-ranging and riveting book that offers much to those interested in post-medieval European history, particularly, but not only in the German-speaking lands, and which will be especially compelling to those concerned with educational history, specifi cally that of universities. The subject is the origins of the modern university, to whit the research university. This is traced not to intellectual developments, which indeed tend to receive relatively short shrift in the book, but rather to the processes of bureaucratization and commodifi cation. These were long-term and widely fl ung trends, but Clark focuses on a particular area and period: Protestant German lands from the 1770s to 1830s. In short, the modern university is an aspect of what has been termed the 'well-ordered police state'. This certainly captures the relationship between policy and applied knowledge in the multitude of German states, and, more generally, the sense of education as an aspect of competitive advantage, a theme that has recurred powerfully in the modern world, but was also seen, for example, in Britain where the regius chairs of modern history were founded under George I, a Protestant German, in order to help in the training of diplomats.Clark is at pains to demonstrate that this was not simply a topdown process but also one that was actively moulded by academics in pursuit of their individual and collective goals, to whit a defi nition of academic merit that gave them status in a dynamically changing world in which the public defi nition of merit helped provide valuable protection. His willingness to see both aspects of the process and his skilful discussion of their interaction helps make this a perceptive study.Indeed, Clark sees a very interesting interaction of the process he discusses with Romanticism. There was the cult of celebrity that Romantic example offered, but also a dangerous individualism that academic culture, processes and hierarchies could contain and shape. Thus, in the German Protestant system, as Clark points out, seminar directors came to police the system by assessing merit and setting
