{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.030857142857142857, 'fraction_numerical': 0.014285714285714285, 'mean_word_length': 4.648387096774194, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
William G. Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Pp. 480. $69.00 (ISBN 0-19-820447-7).

This study of the attempts to reform the laws on marriage and inheritance in late imperial Russia is a model monograph. On one level it is a magnificent work of descrip-tion. We learn how the legal institutions established by the Judicial Reforms of 1864 actually operated and what, in fact, the imperial Civil Code had to say about family and inheritance issues. We hear the voices of legal reformers and legal conservatives, as they debated the role of the law and its practitioners in helping or hindering Rus-sia's transition from a land-owning, agrarian society under an absolutist bureaucratic regime to a profit-oriented economy managed by professional experts sensitive to the opinions of a nascent civil society. To have made one's way through the thicket of con-fused and contradictory institutional structures and tangled laws is a major achievement. To have sorted and identified the multiple voices in the reform debate is no less a feat. The source base is prodigious. It is on this level, in the analysis of the underlying as-sumptions at work in the legal community and the political stakes of the debate, that Wagner adds most significantly to our understanding of the condition of late imperial Russia. This is a monograph with a thesis. It is also a fine example of "gender history" in the broadest sense: by tracking the fortunes of what were framed as "women's questions" (divorce, marital separation, inheritance rights), Wagner shows how central these issues were to the ways in which the public and the regime understood the power rela-tions fundamental to political and social life.