During the Cold War, economists utilizing mathematical methods in both the Soviet Union and the United States found they shared a common research project. After the Stalinist years in which they could communicate very little, they found that they had much to learn from each other. Mathematical economics came to bridge the divide between East and West even though the meetings and collaborations between American and Soviet colleagues were fraught with tension and misunderstanding. The Cold War excitement about mathematical economics and the East-West cooperation it allowed, however, dwindled with the end of détente, the global shift in economic science away from mathematical economics, and the end of state socialism in the East Bloc. To understand the rise and fall of this cooperation and convergence, we examine the case of the connection between Tjalling C. Koopmans, a Dutch economist living in the United States as a result of World War II, and Leonid V. Kantorovich, a Russian scientist living in the Soviet Union. These two men jointly won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1975. Their scientific connections reflect the broader experiences of East-West scientific collaboration during the Cold War. At the same time, they offer insights for scholars regarding struggles over scientific research priority and the potential for convergence between capitalism and socialism during the Cold War era.

When we think of the globalization of culture, we tend to think of the consumption of cultural goods produced in the West and the effects of these goods on the values and practices of non-Western consumers. The literature on the globalization of culture also tends to focus on how Western markets for non-Western cultural goods affect patterns of cultural production in the non-Western world.1 Naturally, this focus on markets tends to draw our theoretical interest toward questions of capitalism. However, when we look at societies without a history of capitalism, new questions come to light. That men wear Western-style suits in both Uzbekistan and Italy, that orchestras use polyphony in both Kazakhstan and Austria, and that King Lear is popular in both Turkmenistan and England cannot be explained by the dynamics of capitalism.

The rise of Hamburg as a global marketplace and financial centre in the seventeenth century was a significant sign of the bourgeoning integration of European markets. In the early seventeenth century, the urban staple function in northwest Europe was largely concentrated in Amsterdam, while in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries London and Hamburg rose to preeminence. Hamburg served as a hub for international trade, connecting markets in England, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean. Goods such as raisins, sugar, tobacco, salt, iron, and leather changed hands, with the transactions reflecting the widespread mercantile network in which Hamburg took part. Furthermore, the commercial development of Hamburg and the rise of the Prussian state were important steps in creating a well-ordered and integrated urban network in Germany long before political unification.

The origin and spread of money-based commodity markets is normally attributed to a natural evolution from barter and is usually seen as a solution to problems of exchange. I want to propose that markets to a considerable degree develop historically out of a different set of dynamics. These are concerned with the state-building tasks of territorial conquest and control, and are closely related to specific modes of war fighting. In this connection, markets develop not only to facilitate exchange per se but also to facilitate the mobilization of resources and their management across space and time. This need to manage resources geographically and temporally contributes not only to the spread of commodity markets but also to the development of markets in land and in labor.

In a recent study, I sought to analyze political and cultural patterns across mainland Southeast Asia during roughly a thousand years, from c. 800 to 1830.1 In brief, I argued that each of mainland Southeast Asia's three great north-south corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration. This process was territorial in the sense that some twenty-three small polities in the fourteenth century were assimilated, gradually or convulsively, fully or partially, to three overarching imperial systems by the early 1800s. Integration was administrative insofar as within each imperial system mechanisms of provincial control, economic extraction, and manpower organization became more penetrating, stable, and efficient. Integration was cultural in the sense that hitherto self-sufficient communities across each of the three principal zones came to accept linguistic, ethnic, and religious norms sanctioned by imperial elites.

Among French scholars and administrators during the French Protectorate of Morocco (1912–1956), especially prior to World War II, there was both a great belief in, and widespread suspicion of, a group's language as a reliable indicator of its ethnicity. Legend among the Ida ou Zeddout Berber people of southwestern Morocco holds that Captain Ropars, who ran the French Protectorate's Anti-Atlas mountain military post in Igherm from 1949–1954, not only spoke the Tashelhit Berber language, but also ordered the local men to do so under threat of imprisonment. “You're Ishelhin (Tashelhit speakers),” he allegedly told people in this collective memory as recounted to me. “You should speak Tashelhit, not Arabic.” The widespread eighteenth- and nineteenth- century idea of Volkgeist (‘soul of the folk’) that Ropars evoked has become commonplace today. A group's language is often considered to function as what Herder called the “treasury of the thought of an entire people” and “the mirror of its history, its deeds, joys and sorrows” (in Bauman and Briggs 2003: 169–70; see also Lorcin 1999: 44), and even what Abbey Condillac earlier called the “genius of each people” (Steedly 1996: 447). Captain Ropars followed Samuel Johnson's claim that identifying languages was the same as identifying “nations,” and, as Irvine and Gal paraphrase, “a logical first step in comparing, understanding, and ordering [nations'] relations to each other and to Europeans” (2000: 50). Yet, other French Protectorate administrators and scholars saw the link between language and primordial ethnicity as false, since histories of language use may be obscured or simply uninterrogated by a group's members.

Scholars of Russian-American relations in the late nineteenth century have long been concerned with the personalities and writings of university-based experts, journalists, diplomats, and political activists. We are well acquainted with the observations of various American commentators on the backward state of Russian state, society, economy, and politics. While the activities of prominent men such as George Kennan have effortlessly dominated the historical agenda, the negative discourses that they produced about Russia have subsumed other important American representations of the country. Since the period of early modern history, European travelers had seen Russia as a barbarous land of slave-like people, responsive only to the persuasions of the whip and the knout wielded by an autocratic tsar. Subsequently, Larry Wolff has shown that Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers created images of a despotic and backward Eastern Europe in order to validate the idea of a progressive, enlightened, and civilized Western Europe.

There was a time when Western political science was somewhat sensitized to the historical perspective from which “exploited men” might view the making of modern world order. During the Cold War, and with the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement especially, debates in the Western Academy made regular reference to what might be called the “development/security nexus.” Many political scientists claimed that the peculiarities of “Third World” development could engender security threats for the “First World.” But it was further acknowledged that Third World politicians (especially at the Bandung Conference in 1955) could see their post-colonial development threatened by a West that, still exhibiting racial hierarchies domestically, might wish to retain these hierarchies internationally.2

Theories of agency are central to any form of explanation or interpretation of human action in the social and behavioral sciences, including the study of history. In studies of religion, they appear to require even more reflection than usual, because of secular skepticism of religious understandings of agency, involving divine intervention or supra-human powers. The major problem with theories of agency is their immense range and complexity. They involve fundamental notions of emotions and intentions, of habits and social practice, of desire and passion, of passions and interests, of resistance and power, of freedom and un-freedom, of the distinction between subject and object, of interiority and exteriority. As such, they have complicated genealogies in different religious and philosophical traditions. Western philosophical traditions are among the many traditions that have wide-ranging theories about the self and agency and express them in a universalistic language.1 These universalistic claims are perhaps common, but the history of European expansion has implied a universalization of Western thought, so that despite its provincial origin Western thought informs both the understanding and the self-understanding of other societies. From the start, one of the tasks of anthropology and history has therefore been to critique universalistic assumptions about, for instance, agency, by examining other ways of life and traditions. Not only is universalism as such being questioned; the universalization of ideas is being critically analyzed.