The Grew Years. It is astonishing that CSSH, now entering its fortieth year, has had only two editors in its entire existence till now, our founder Sylvia Thrupp and Raymond Grew (with an assist from Eric Wolf for one year). Ray Grew's editorship was the longer, having begun with volume 16 in 1974. As he steps down and returns to the bosom of the Editorial Board against all entreaties to continue in the role he has performed so intelligently and with such grace for twenty-four years, we salute his editorship by dedicating this volume to him.

Unlike in Europe and the United States, where the writing of family history has become a growth industry over the past thirty years, only recently have historians of Greater Syria during the Ottoman period (1516–1917) started investigating this topic.Also referred to as the Levant, or Bilad al-Sham, Greater Syria for the purposes of this article is today's Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine-Israel. As of yet, there is not a single published monograph in the English language on this topic. Two useful overviews are Haim Gerber, “Anthropology and Family History: The Ottoman and Turkish Families,” Journal of Family History, 14:4 (1989), 409–21; and Judith Tucker, “The Arab Family in History,” in Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers, Judith Tucker, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1993), 195–207. For monographs related to family history in Greater Syria, see Linda Schatkowski-Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1985); and Annelies Moors, Women, Property and Islam: Palestinian Experiences: 1920–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Almost two years ago, Margaret L. Meriwether kindly shared with me the rough draft of her book manuscript, The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840 (forthcoming, University of Texas Press), which promises to be a pioneering contribution to this topic. Two important studies on family history in the Middle East outside Greater Syria—the first following the demographic approach of the Cambridge School and the second much more in the tradition of historical anthropology—are Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Martha Mundy, Domestic Government: Kinship, Community and Policy in North Yemen (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995). Of course, Jack Goody has written extensively on family history in the Middle East from a comparative perspective. See, for example, chapters one and two of his book, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Finally, some of the issues raised in this article were subjected to careful scrutiny by Vanessa Maher, Women and Property in Morocco: Their Changing Role in Relation to the Process of Social Stratification (Cambridge, 1974). Not surprisingly, this uncharted landscape is covered by a thick fog of generalizations about the “traditional Arab family.”It is perhaps not a coincidence that the equally glaring absence of family history in the field of South Asian Studies is also combined with ubiquitous generalizations about the “traditional Hindu joint family.” Indeed, Indian society, like Arab society, is said to begin with the family; but the Indian family, like the Arab family, is central to novels not to histories. Nor is it surprising that while the number of articles on the Arab and Indian families in the last twenty-odd volumes of the Journal of Family History are in the single digits, there is a plethora of studies on women's history. Perhaps, as Louise Tilly suggests, this is due to the fact that women's history is, in many ways, a movement history; while the family has long been viewed as the fundamental site of male oppression (“Women's History and Family History: Fruitful Collaboration or Missed Connection?,” Journal of Family History, 12:1–3 [1987], 303–15). That I make these comparative assertions with some confidence is due to the insightful and thorough bibliographical research of Ian Petrie, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, on the Indian family. Usually defined as a patrilineal, patrilocal, extended social unit, this family type is assumed to have remained the norm well into the twentieth century.Raphael Patai's definition is the one cited most often (Society, Culture, and Change in the Middle East, 3rd ed. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971], 21). For critiques of this view, see Mundy's erudite analysis in Domestic Governments, 89–92. See also the articles by Gerber and Tucker cited in note 1.

In recent years, approaches to legal pluralism have shifted dramatically. One shift comes from within a school of fieldwork-oriented anthropologists, historians, and sociologists known as the law-and-society movement.The Law and Society Review, and to a lesser extent, Law and Social Inquiry, are the main outlets of the movement. Studies of legal pluralism are published in these journals and increasingly so, since its founding in 1981, in the Journal of Legal Pluralism. Before the turn, law-and-society scholars viewed local, national, and transnational legal systems as coexisting but essentially separate. Criticisms of the inherent stasis of this formulation and its failure to explore interactions between the systems or power inequalities among them motivated the shift (Griffiths 1986; Starr and Collier 1994; Merry 1988, 1992). The new legal pluralism, as it is called, now includes an expanded range of normative ordering systems, often labeled private governance, found in all societies, not only those with colonial histories but also those produced by transnational processes (Galanter 1981; Merry 1992). It addresses the dialectic, mutually constitutive relations of these systems rather than their separateness (Arthurs 1985; Benda-Beckman andStrijbosch 1986; Fitzpatrick 1983; Henry 1985; Vanderlinden 1989).

On the evening of March 17, 1940, about 600 workers gathered together inside the Marievale Consolidated Compound on the far southeastern tip of the Witwatersrand goldmining crescent (see Figure 1). The workers demanded that the gates of the compound be opened, as they intended to march the forty miles to Johannesburg to present their grievances to Henry Taberer at KwaMzilikazi, the headquarters of the Native Recruiting Corporation. At about 8 pm, thirty-five policemen arrived from the nearby towns of Nigel, Springs, and Brakpan and demanded to know what was troubling the workers. After considerable discussion, the policemen discovered that the Marievale mine had run out of the regulation shift tickets normally used to record the labor of African workers and that older tickets were being used in their place. These tickets were printed with the higher wage rates received by workers during the early development of the mine: The mine officials had simply crossed out the 2 shillings and 6-pence rates and stamped the standard minimum of 2 shillings onto each slip of paper. The workers were suspicious about this conspicuous reduction of wage rates, arguing that they were due the original rate established by the Native Recruiting Corporation.

The colonisation of the tropical lowlands of South America was until fairly recently often portrayed by historians as a straightforward catalogue of genocide, epidemics, and forced catechisation.See, for example, the work of John Hemming: Red Gold (London: Macmillan, 1978), Amazon Frontier (London: Macmillan, 1983), “Indians and the Frontier” in L. Bethell, ed., Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 145–89. In its emphasis on the undeniable fact of the violent subjection of much of Amerindia, this orthodoxy obscured the vital detail of the varieties of historical experience in the Amazon and Orinoco basins and the Guianas, projecting an illusion of uniformity and direction to historical processes which were in fact much more complicated and open-ended.N. Whitehead, “Ethnic Transformation and Historical Discontinuity in Native Amazonia and Guayana, 1500–1900,” L'Homme, 126–8, 13:4 (avril–décembre 1993), 285–305. A particularly good example of the complexity of “conquest” from the Indian perspective in the period immediately prior to the Cabanagem is N. Farage, As Muralhas dos Sertões: Os Povos Indígenas no Rio Branco e a Colonização (Rio: Paz e Terra, 1991). Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have more recently emphasised the historically contingent nature of ethnic identity and traced out its empirical consequence, the interweaving of identity construction and ethnicity with colonialism, economic expansion and state formation from the sixteenth century onwards.General volumes covering all or most of the tropical lowlands are A. Roosevelt, ed., Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994); E.V. de Castro and M.C. da Cunha, eds., Amazônia: Etnologia e História Indígena (São Paulo: FAPESP, 1993); M.C. da Cunha, ed., História dos Índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras 1992) and G. Urban and J. Sherzer, eds., Nation States and Indians in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). For the Orinoco and Guianas, see chapters by Whitehead and Arvelo-Jímenez and Biord in Roosevelt, Amazonian Indians; Dreyfus, in Castro and da Cunha, Amazonia; and N. Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guayana, 1498–1820 (Dordrecht and Providence: Foris Publications, 1988). Price's trilogy on the Saramaka Maroons of Surinam, First Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), To Slay the Hydra (Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 1983), and Alabi's World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990) is an example of a similar approach to an Afro-American ethnic formation. As a result, in certain parts of the tropical lowlands—notably the Guianas—it has been possible to produce a much more sophisticated reading of regional history, a “thick description” which can relate the fluidity and specificity of local circumstances to wider historical processes and can thus serve as the basis for a properly comparative mapping of the past.

Why did Iran of the late 1970s with a thriving economy, wealthy middle class, repressive political system, massive military might, and powerful international allies go through an Islamic revolution, while Egypt of the early 1990s with similar international allies, but poorer economy, impoverished large middle classes, and a more liberal political system did not go beyond developing an Islamist movement?In 1978 the per-capita income in Iran was $2,400, compared to $660 in Egypt in 1988. During the 1970s, some 15 percent of Tehran's population lived in the squatter areas (and about 15 percent in slums), whereas this figure for Cairo in the early 1990s was 50 percent.

Perhaps the fiercest conflict within the social sciences today is one that is not even articulated as a recognizable “debate.” Nevertheless, this conflict has generated bitter divisions between academics who only a decade ago might have stood together on the left or the right and has forged equally strange alliances. I am referring, of course, to the split between epistemological and ontological positions which are usually described as radical constructivism and realist positivism. The recent debate provoked by Alan Sokal's article in Social TextSee Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries—Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text (Spring-Summer 1996), 217–52; and idem, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May-June 1996), 62–64. The key response is Stanley Fish's article, “Professor Sokal's Bad Joke,” in The New York Times (Opinion–Editorial page, May 21, 1996); see also the responses in the July-August 1996 issue of Lingua Franca; Michael Albert, “Science, Post Modernism, and the Left,” in Z Magazine (July-August 1996); Steven Weinberg, “Sokal's Hoax,” New York Review of Books (August 8, 1996), 11–15; and Tom Frank, “Textual Reckoning,” In These Times (May 27, 1996). I am grateful to Michael Rosenfeld for references to the latter two pieces. brought into sharp focus the growing sense of distrust and anger that divides these academic camps. And, yet, the heterogeneity of each supposed grouping suggests that the dichotomous model masks what is actually a much more complex, multi-dimensional field. On the one hand we find a motley assemblage of positions variously characterized as constructivism, culturalism, neo-Kantian idealism, and postmodernism; the other pole throws together a set of even stranger bedfellows, including rational choice theorists, survey researchers, and traditional historians alongside “realist” philosophers of various stripes.

Few subjects seem more obvious candidates for comparative historical treatment than Protestant evangelicalism, which has played a prominent role in the religious life of English-speaking nations since the eighteenth century. In spite of this fact, until recently historians have tended to ignore the transnational dimension of the evangelical movement and have focused instead on local, regional, and national studies. The contributors to Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 are therefore to be commended for ministering to a pressing need.

In the 1970s Irish historians were expected to look at the 1790s primarily through the lens of the contemporary Northern Ireland crisis: Did the alliance of Presbyterian radicals and Catholics in the events leading to the 1798 rebellion demonstrate that the Ulster Protestants were “really Irish” and reconciliation inevitable once “the British” stopped interfering? Or did the breakdown of that alliance demonstrate how ineradicable was the sectarian divide in Irish society? One benefit of the retreat of Northern Ireland from the headlines in the 1980s has been the liberation of historians from such loaded questions and the redirection of their attention to what was actually happening in the period.

Martin Warnke's book, The Court Artist, first published in German in 1985, could well be subtitled, “How the Bourgeoisie Stole Credit for the Liberation of Art from Craft,” for the author sets out to redress what he sees as an injustice wrought by the middle-class against history. According to Warnke, contrary to common opinion, the origins of the “autonomous consciousness of art and artists” lie not in the world of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commune but, rather, in that of the late medieval and early modern court. He suggests that the current misconceptions about the origins of “modern” attitudes towards art and artists derive from late eighteenth-century anti-monarchical sentiments which, building on an enduring middle-class suspicion of courtly culture, condemned that world as corrupt and repressive and therefore antithetical to the emergence of a truly free, creative artist. This position was philosophically reinforced in the nineteenth century by the creation of the concept of a Zeitgeist. It was argued that the emancipation of the artist could not have come from the perverse, retrograde world of the aristocracy but must have arisen from the people who were participating in a Renaissance spirit of optimistic freedom which was reflected in the revival of humanistic forms and the creation of a liberating culture.