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Godfrey Baldacchino (2010) Island Enclaves: Offshoring Strategies, Creative Governance, and Subnational Island Jurisdictions, Montreal and Kingston, Canada, McGill-Queen's University Press, 301pp, ISBN: 978-0-7735-3716-3 (cloth) Can$/US$95.00; ISBN: 978-0-7735-3743-9 (paper) Can$/US$32.95.
The reviewer has just finished writing a book in which the acknowledgment section runs to just over half a page. That in Godfrey Baldacchino's Island Enclaves stretches to over eight pages. This unusual length reveals not only the author's well-developed networking, but also identifies the strength and development of the subject of island studies with which Baldacchino, the Canada Research Chair in Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, has been associated and is tribute to the number of people and institutions now working in the area.
The subjects for the book's wide range of issues are subnational island jurisdictions, ranging in scale from mighty Taiwan with its 23 million people to miniscule Pitcairn with under 50. Baldacchino starts the preface with a then contemporary situation, the fact that the regulations of the Chinese Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong facilitated that subnational jurisdiction hosting the equestrian events in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in preference to mainland China. It ends with the example of how Prince Edward Island, population about 140,000, makes use of the unusual historical and geographical circumstances that have given it the opportunity of being a full Canadian province with the same rights and opportunities as Ontario and Québec with their populations of millions. As Baldacchino had written earlier, any move to change this situation 'would be aggressively contested by Prince Edward Islanders' (p. xxvi).
In Chapter 1, Baldacchino counts 100 or more island subnational jurisdictions, place that are not states but have some governance functions greater than municipalities. This chapter demonstrates his comprehensive knowledge of islands and their activities, roles and uses throughout time and over space taking material from a variety of disciplines: natural sciences, social sciences, history, geography, literature, leading into political economy which he indentifies as the focus of the rest of the volume.
In the second chapter, the author recognizes that readers might take offence at some of the places he characterises as subnational island jurisdictions, given...