Sami Zubaida's Law and Power in the Islamic World is a fascinating politico-social history of the relations between Islamic law and the procession of political masters who have ruled the Middle East since the Prophet's death. One message is clear: the notion of an omnipotent shariءa, passed from caliph to caliph for fourteen centuries, is a myth held by both Islamist radicals and their Western critics.

Reproducing Empire is an invitation to reconceptualize gender, sex, and reproduction as an analytical framework for understanding Puerto Rico. In this complex and multivalent work, Laura Briggs repositions ideologies of family, sexuality, and reproduction as central to U.S. imperial enterprises. In so doing, she focuses a powerful lens on how discourses of sex, science, race, reproduction, deviance, and domesticity have shaped and propelled U.S. colonialism, in both form and substance.

That ’modernity' is not simply a Western export to the rest of the world has been much noted recently. Only rarely, though, has the relationship between local and global, colonizers and colonized, and the West and ’the rest' in the production of modernity been so rigorously explored as it is in Timothy Mitchell's new book, Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. With precise, careful analysis of such phenomenon as the economy, capitalism, and expertise, Mitchell illuminates how the world in which we live came to acquire its particular shape.

Twenty years ago a work entitled The Nations Within examined the political structures that keep Native polities embedded within the United States, and the legal armature that sovereignty principles might provide for future activism (Deloria and Lytle 1984). The Native nations are still “within,” in the political sense, but they are “out” in public discourses; activism has given sovereignty claims more standing that all but dreamers would have imagined in 1984. During the same period, however, federal Indian policies have alternatively buttressed and undercut the power of tribal leadership, just as they have on other continents where imperial powers have cultivated “Native authorities.” Such destabilizing shifts impel scholars of Native political, economic, and cultural histories to examine less visible violence and inequalities that underlie political institutions, particularly those that remain as evident constructions of power change.

An evidence-based time series on agricultural growth prior to 1850 only exists for very few German territories. Except for Saxony, there is no series available for the pre-1815 period. Based on sharecropping contracts from the estate of Anholt, we reconstruct the development of crop production for western Westphalia and the lower Rhineland c. 1740–1860. Our results show that parallel to Saxony, agricultural growth in this north-west German region was driven entirely by demand from a growing number of households engaged in proto-industrial and early industrial manufacture production. Fully commercialised land tenure systems dominated in Anholt from the beginning of the early modern period, and manorial institutions had little relevance for rural property relations. Hence, the radical French and Prussian agrarian reforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century had no effect on agricultural production. In a north-west European comparison, Anholt's sharecroppers performed rather well during this decisive formation period culminating in early industrialisation.

This article proposes a comparative, cross-border analysis of the sources of rural combustibility around the complex frontier between Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia and the states that emerged out of the fringes of the Ottoman Empire, Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Starting from the major peasant uprising that took place in 1907 in Romania, the article seeks to account for the fledgling country's explosiveness in contrast to its neighbours, given the structural and functional similarities of the systems around the frontier. It argues that, despite these skin-deep similarities, there were vital differences as regards the initial terms of peasant emancipation and the presence of a system of checks and balances, which could curb the impositions of the great landowners onto the peasants.

In the agricultural township of Rigton, ten miles north of Leeds, three-quarters of labouring households had recourse to poor relief at some stage between 1815 and 1861. The chronology of this microhistory straddles the end of the French Wars, the Sturges Bourne reforms, and, due to the existence of the country's largest Gilbert Unions, the region's laggardly application of the Poor Law Amendment Act. It seeks, by source linkage, to establish the contexts of labour, welfare and the life cycle within a northern community, and place the poor and their experiences of, and strategies against, poverty within that community. A demographic overview introduces the contexts of labouring families' lives, whilst a commentary on expositions of biographical reconstitutions of two generations of a labouring family, forms a major part of this exploration. This argues that whilst relationships with, and mitigation against, poverty were fluid and complex, as the century progressed labouring families had a decreasing interface with the Poor Law, and adopted and developed new economic strategies to add to their portfolio of makeshifts.1

A variety of plants were distributed across Jamaica from the island's botanical gardens during the second half of the nineteenth century. This work became increasingly important over the period dating from 1846 to the end of the century when succeeding superintendents (subsequently directors) eagerly promoted the scheme. Yet, each head differed in their reasons to send out this ‘useful’ flora. In this article I consider the three men in charge of the public gardens from 1846 to 1886 and the context in which they decided that local plant distribution was important to pursue. Diversification of economic crops occurred, despite the plantocracy arguing that sugar and a few other plantation plants were the be all and end all of the Jamaican agricultural economy. By contextualising this activity we can tentatively start to unpick the role of minor officials in colonial life and the development of an aim to enrol the island's petty agriculturalist in particular economies calibrated around ideas of free trade, class and ‘race’.

This article examines two opposing views on the role and presence of painters in post-Reformation rural England. The art historian William Gaunt concluded that painters simply ‘vanished’ from the local scene in their flight to London; the historical geographer John Patten saw non-agricultural workers in general flocking to the rural scene in the same era. Drawing on a database of over 2,600 working painters, the article explores the presence and role of the painters’ occupation in rural England between 1500 and 1640. It emphasises the painters’ accommodation to changing consumer demands; it offers a revised view of their geographic distribution over time; it shows that painters continued to serve the rural scene, albeit in somewhat different ways and from different locales than before.

In the 1970s and 1980s, two influential books, both entitled, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, were published (Holton 1985; Sweezy 1976). The titles were signs of the times: reflecting a concern with explaining a supposedly decisive shift in historic Europe economic systems. Today, “transition” language is likely to take the form of the title of this essay and the books reviewed here, employing some plural form of the principal nouns, and question marks. As the format indicates, current scholarship questions whether such a transition took place at all, and argues that if it did, it was regionally and historically specific.