Historia de los balnearios de la provincia de Málaga

how a very different sense of time governed the way that the relations between the local West Indies naval bureaucracy and the central one in London were structured, with an order or explanation taking weeks or months to arrive, whilst nine months might elapse between the request for food or medicines and their arrival. Such time-lags encouraged a degree of local independence but all the major financial decisions were made in England with the result that the time taken to initiate projects such as the new hospital might appear very lengthy from a modern perspective. However, it seems from the surviving correspondence that delay in communications between the West Indies and England was not seen as a problem but that the "real time" delay in Jamaica in completing the building of the hospital was. At a less abstract level the book is full of nitty-gritty details, and the acrimonious quarrels between the naval commanders and the island governors and their assemblies over the pressing of men from merchant ships and over the navy's attempt to import rum without paying local duty provide entertaining reading as well as illustrating that the British state was not yet monolithic. Although the book is really one for the naval historian, other historians may well find that the rich store of empirical data which has been ably put into a coherent and informative narrative sets them thinking.