The concept of the second slavery radically reinterprets the relation of slavery and capitalism by calling attention to the emergence of extensive new zones of slave commodity production in the US South, Cuba, and Brazil as part of nineteenth-century industrialization and world-economic expansion. This article examines the conceptual framework and methodological procedures that inform this interpretation. It reformulates the concept of the capitalist world-economy by emphasizing the mutual formation and historical interrelation of global–local relations. This open conception of world-economy permits the temporal-spatial specification of the zones of the second slavery. In this way, it is possible both to distinguish the new zones of the second slavery from previous world-economic zones of slave production and to establish the ways in which they are formative of the emerging industrial world division of labor. From this perspective, analysis of sugar production in Jamaica, Guyana, and Cuba discloses spatial-temporal differences between what would otherwise be taken as apparently similar historical-geographical complexes. This comparison demonstrates how world-economic processes produce particular local histories and how such histories structure the world-economy as a whole. This approach locates the crisis of slavery during the nineteenth century in the differentiated response to processes of world accumulation, rather than the incompatibility of slave production with industrialization and open, competitive markets. More generally, it calls attention to the continuity of forms of forced labor in the historical development of the capitalist world-economy and to the ways that processes of capitalist development produce social-economic differentiation and hierarchy on a world scale.

This article analyses the implications of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 on colonial labour policies for road labour carried out under chiefs in the Gold Coast. The British colonial administration implemented a legal application of the convention that allowed the continuation of the existing system of public works. In the Gold Coast, the issue of road labour was most prominent in the North, where chiefs maintained the majority of roads. Indirect rule became crucial in retaining forced labour in compliance with the convention. This article focuses on “hidden strategies” of British colonialism after 1930, contrasting studies of blatant cases of forced labour. The analysis is based on a close scrutiny of the internal discourse among colonial officials on the question of road labour and the Forced Labour Convention.

All militaries try to develop a “winning edge” in warfare. More often than not these attempts focus on new weapons systems and weapons platforms, on new ways of maximizing the offensive capabilities of a military through firepower. These attempts can also involve the training and development of soldiers, including performance enhancements to make them fight better, longer, and smarter than the enemy and to counter human frailty on the battlefield. These concerns and problems have long held the interest of the U.S. military. This article traces the development, rationale, and legacy of one such attempt to deal with human frailty and the “body problem,” a kind of military futurism devised at the peak of the Cold War. Dr. Marion Sulzberger envisioned creating soldiers who had their own kind of special “biological armor,” or what he termed “idiophylaxis.” In 1962, he presented a paper at the Army Science Conference at West Point titled “Progress and Prospects in Idiophylaxis (Built-In Individual Self-Protection of the Combat Soldier).” Sulzberger's call was for a radical rethinking of the combat soldier and the ways in which soldiers were imagined, designed, and developed. His goal was to “armor” the individual soldier both internally and psychologically through new forms of biomedicine and biotechnology. The interventions he detailed in 1962 live on today in the U.S. military's soldier performance enhancement research programs, including DARPA's recent “Inner Armor” program and desire to make “kill-proof” soldiers.

In July 2010, following a year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling, the French government passed a law prohibiting facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This article takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral politics as a site for articulating, rather than merely reflecting, social identities, I argue that the 2010 ban arose in significant part out of political parties’ struggles to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate politics in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. Specifically, I show that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France's major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the consensus thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It conceals ongoing conflict, both between and within political parties, over the precise meaning(s) of French republican nationhood. The findings thus underscore the relationship between boundary-drawing in the political sphere and the process of demarcating the cultural and political boundaries of nationhood in contexts of immigrant diversity.

The entry of a universal revelation into the mundane world of language threatens to be paradoxical: it must take a specific and local form. As such, it becomes implicated in nationalist, ethnic, linguistic, and other sources of community. This article centers on a small melodrama in late twentieth-century Indonesia, home to the largest number of Muslims of any country. After undergoing a mid-life spiritual awakening, H. B. Jassin, a modernist literary critic, editor, and ardent defender of freedom of expression, undertook two projects intended to convey the aesthetic power of the Qur'an to a non-Arabic speaking public. But if Qur'anic Arabic summons a transnational community of the faithful, standardized Indonesian was developed to address a nation of citizens. If scripture speaks in a divine, uncreated idiom, the national language is shaped by human efforts. Jassin's career had served a vision of literature and its public whose values and semiotic ideologies were dramatically at odds with Qur'anic traditions. Although this may appear at first glance to be a familiar story of progress and its opponents, this article asks whether Jassin's critics grasped something about signs and communities that his defenders did not. Examining the furor that resulted from his Qur'ans, it explores an array of conflicting assumptions about language, freedom, truth, and people's lives together in the late twentieth century.

This article analyzes representations of the Koli as aboriginal in colonial Bombay, and explores the ends to which various actors have narrated Koli aboriginality. It examines the relationship between the historical deployment of the concept of aboriginality and its mediating role in the power of capital and state-making practices in one colonial urban context. The article shows how the Koli, as Bombay's “aboriginals,” gained concessions that served as an alibi for the market-based dispossession of the remainder of the city's population, and also as a pretext for claim-making by peoples with competing collective identities who used the tale of Koli identity and history as a narrative resource to argue for their own nativity. The Koli case helps us understand the co-emergence of the powers of caste and capital in Bombay, and compels us to revisit important, broader questions about relationships between aboriginal or indigenous peoples, capitalism, colonialism, liberalism, and governance.

This essay focuses on the northeastern borderlands of the Central African Republic (CAR), an area that though formally part of a state is mostly left to its own devices. It has no single sovereign, but many people participate in the sovereign prerogative of enacting violence in such a way as to claim a right to determine how to live. These dynamics are particularly visible in the area's contests over armed conservation, my ethnographic and historical topic here. These sovereign claims take the form of denunciation: rallying people to take extreme measures against another whose egregious acts threaten fundamental values. In northeastern CAR, the value frequently fought for through denunciation is negative liberty—freedom from molestation for those who carve space for themselves by denouncing. In addition to excavating denunciation as a dynamics of sovereignty, this paper shows that the values motivating sovereign struggles can include not just autonomy—whether devoted to a principle of order or anarchy, as others have explored—but can also be devoted to creating exceptions for those who denounce, such that they are able to participate in projects and access terrains that extend beyond their place of residence without having to consistently abide by others’ rules. Denunciation is thus a dynamics of sovereign claim-making that can shape and mobilize solidarities that are in flux, rather than those calcified by the violent, exceptional decision of a unitary sovereign. Denunciation foregrounds relational and processual aspects of sovereignty and in so doing invites new comparisons.

This article offers the first large-scale analysis of the interlinked dynamics of integration and belonging based on perceptions of “ordinary” German-speaking migrants in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our analysis draws on a corpus of over a thousand letters from the North American Letter Collection held at the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha in Germany. Through computer-assisted text analysis, framed by research on transnationalism and immigrant integration, we explore patterns in integration and identities over time. We show how the migrants continuously redefine their identities vis-à-vis their homeland and the host society, and their letters thereby shape the image of the United States and the homeland for their recipients. Our analysis establishes more comprehensively than have previous historical and social science studies that integration into a host society is a non-linear process. Immigrant identities are influenced less by the time they have spent in the receiving country than by critical political events that affect both the country of origin and that of destination. Such events can reactivate migrant's identifications with their homeland. Immigrant networks filter this dual process in that they can facilitate migrants’ integration while also reminding them of people and places left behind.