The European conquest of Asia is one of the major historical movementsof our time. Pannikar calls this the age of Vasco DeGama, Parry writesof the rise of European Hegemony, and McNeill sees it as part of an evenbroader historical process that he calls the rise of the west. For all observers it was truly a conquest, a violent and bloody struggle in which Europe gained the ascendence through superior military might.

In the winter of 1861–62 there was a guerrilla uprising in WesternMissouri, directed in main against the Union Army and against localpro-Union sympathizers. The number of active participants was smallby more recent standards. At any given time the guerrillas in questionprobably numbered no more than 200 individuals. They had, however, an impact beyond that suggested by their size. In the ensuing three years the guerrillas managed to tie up more than 40,000 Union troops on stationary occupation duty. As in almost all classic cases of guerrilla warfare, the Union forces were rendered relatively immobile by the necessity to protect fixed points such as urban areas, supply depots, and lines of communication. In addition to their military effect, the guerrillas have become over time a fairly well known part of American folklore. Their leader through most of the period was William Quantrill. From their ranks came at least two of the more famous bandit gangs of frontier history—the James brothers and the Younger brothers. Their most famous exploit, the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, has been the subject of film and other commercial treatment.

There is an enormous social-scientific literature on the concepts of politicalviolence, internal war, and social conflict (e.g., Nieburg, 1969;Eckstein, 1964; Oberschall, 1973). These categories are intended toexclude conventional military conflicts between recognized states on theone hand and purely interpersonal violence on the other hand. But the theoretical treatment of one variety of violent social conflict is more limited, and it is this that I want to discuss: revolutionary terrorism. The use of terrorist tactics would seem to be more widespread today than in the past, if newspaper headlines are to be relied upon, and certainly public concern about it is greater. It is therefore incumbent upon social science to attempt to contribute to an understanding of it.

Overt ethnic conflict is frequently accompanied by the observation that the conflict is not essentially rooted in ethnic differences but is primarilyeconomic in origin. Examples are not hard to come by; it has been madein regard to the American Negro situation, the Catholics in NorthernIreland and the Ugandan Asians, to name but three instances. The claim that economic differences underlie ethnic conflict raises the questions of whether all interethnic conflict can be accounted for within the framework of a conflict theory of social stratification, and this in turn raises the broader question of whether all types of interethnic relations, of conflict and harmony, assimilation, integration, separatism and segregation can be subsumed under a more general theory of stratification.

Indian immigration into the West Indies generally during the nineteenthcentury, and in particular to British Guiana, forms a small portion of migrationmovements from one area to another in the world during thatperiod. But in terms of West Indian societies, this immigration representeda major influx and so had significant social effects, especially inBritish Guiana and in Trinidad. By 1917 when the system was terminated some 429,286 Indians had been introduced into the West Indies since 1838, of which 238,909 went to British Guiana, and 143,939 to Trinidad.