Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition. By Hendrik Spruyt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 305p. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

In his latest book, Hendrik Spruyt returns to a long-standing debate among scholars of twentieth-century decolonization: Why did some metropolitan governments withdraw from their empires fairly quickly, while other imperial powers waged a protracted struggle to retain their overseas possessions, sacrificing men and money in the process? Spruyt not only offers a sophisticated theoretical response to a question of historical significance but also applies it to more contemporary cases of dissolution by examining the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.