CIVILIZING FOOD The civilizing process always seems to include a search for ever-more rare and exotic foodstuffs, complex dishes, and exquisitely refined table manners. We see this, for example, in the witty floor mosaic of a Roman dining room depicting the scraps of an elaborate feast, discussed by John D'Arms in “The Culinary Reality of Roman Upper-Class Convivia: Integrating Texts and Images” (2004: 428–50). The first essay, also on convivial feasting, is by another long-standing friend of CSSH.

Much history of the West has been dominated by the view that the seeds of modernity began in Greek Antiquity and that the birth of capitalism and the urbanization that created a bourgeoisie lay with the European communes of northern Italy in the Middle Ages. But from the wider perspective of world civilizations, did Europe in fact diverge significantly from the common Eurasiatic cultures of the Bronze Age, delineated by the Marxist Australian prehistorian, Gordon Childe, either in Antiquity or in the Middle Ages? Clearly there was a significant divergence in the nineteenth century, after the Industrial Revolution, and in certain respects after the Renaissance, but does that warrant the teleological search for what Wallerstein (1999) calls “civilizational” as distinct from “conjunctural” factors? I argue that the starting point for historical research into either Asiatic or European “exceptionalism,” as Marx called it, should be the convergences of the urban civilizations of the Bronze Age rather than the divergent paths of the nineteenth century.

During the year, the Museum has received from Dr. Haddon a gift of the first importance in the shape of his collection of several thousands of anthropological photographs, accumulated by him over a very long period and from every part of the world. In honour of Dr. Haddon's eightieth birthday these photographs had been put in order, prints made from the negatives, and the whole collection catalogued, uniformly mounted, and arranged in a cabinet specially made for them … The large number of photographs already in the Museum have now been incorporated in the collection, many hundreds have been added, chiefly by friends of Dr. Haddon, and it is hoped that the collection, which will be called the Haddon Photographic Collection, will steadily increase. It is already one of the most comprehensive in existence.

A tendency in studies of science in colonial Africa is to focus on the “big politics” of resource extraction, environmental control, and the governmentality of subject bodies. As a result, we now recognize that colonial science was a highly political enterprise in which the pursuit of knowledge was infused with the dynamics of starkly exclusionary societies and extractive regimes. Scientific improvements in medicine and agriculture yielded benefits that underwrote colonial projects and the construction of authoritative knowledge in medicine, racial biology, and social science created disciplinary power over Africans as scientifically objectified colonial subjects. It has been observed that the failure of science to heed indigenous knowledge led to a “misreading” of the landscape and inappropriate intervention. Recently, some historians have attempted to mitigate overly stark depictions of colonial science, making good cases that the practice of scientific ecology, agronomy, and medicine in colonial Africa had motivations and effects beyond the service of extraction and governmentality. They have rightly informed us that the assessment of applied sciences in colonial Africa cannot be reduced to their role in European domination. Clearly, these are critical issues that merit attention. Yet the focus on ways science did (or did not) support various colonial agendas may have impeded the development of a more representative understanding of Euro-American scientific pursuits in African colonies.

In the middle of fourteenth century in Western Europe, a turning point occurred in the modern inquiry into the nature of money. While political unification of the states made monetary standardization and centralization key issues (establishing the distinction which still exists today between authentic currency and spurious or quasi-currencies), some of the wisest minds of the period, such as Nicolas Oresme, speculated on the reasons and consequences of the rapid loss in the value of money. The Black Plague, which took lives but not goods, left an accursed legacy: inflation, fed by the excess of wealth in the hands of survivors, dedicated to a ‘sumptuous consumption.’

Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, the leading cities of the South Atlantic, experienced substantial growth in wealth holding during the first half of the nineteenth century. In this article, we argue that this growth is best interpreted in a broad, comparative framework, which examines these cities in relation to their internal demographic and institutional arrangements and to their external links to the Atlantic World. Our research emphasizes three major comparative findings. First, according to our samples, both Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires experienced substantial growth in wealth holding from the 1820s through the 1850s, well before their participation in the better-known global economic expansion of the late nineteenth century. Second, residents of both South Atlantic cities held wealth broadly similar in scale with their counterparts in comparable cities in North America. And third, wealth inequality was probably no greater in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires than in contemporary cities in the United States. Moreover, we believe that these increases in average wealth holding, as well as changes in the allocation of wealth across sectors, suggests economies that were growing rapidly while becoming more complex.

The global movement of Indigenous peoples has attracted the attention of a number of scholars, notably lawyers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists (Muehlebach 2003; Anaya 1996; Battiste 2000; Churchill 2003; Dei, Hall, and Rosenberg 2000; Independent Commission 1987; Jull 1999; Kingsbury 1998; Minde 1996; Passy 1999; Pritchard 1998; Radcliffe and Laurie 2001; Feldman 2002; Smith 1999; Ward and Smith 2000; Wilmer 1993). With few exceptions such as Niezen (2000; 2003) and Radha Jappan (1992), this growing interest has not extended to the origins and development of this movement. There are obvious reasons for this: as in other areas of the discipline, historians have seen indigenous movements as matters of national history. However, the growth of “world history” (Hopkins 2002a; Bayly 2004: 432–50) offers a mode of analysis in which varied and related indigenous histories can be considered fruitfully. Moreover, the success of indigenous actors in creating new institutional spaces and a discourse of “indigenous rights” compels historical research into the emergence of the global movement, not least in understanding how very different and dispersed communities have begun to self-identify with the category of indigenous peoples. This is especially so as the movement works toward the declaration of positive international law that can recognize and protect the diversity of first peoples under precisely that banner.

Driving past the strip malls of Hollywood, Florida, visitors know they have entered the Seminole Reservation when they approach blocks of modest houses punctuated by the thatched roofs of backyard chickees (from chiki, or home, in Mikasuki). On Seminoles' rural Big Cypress Reservation, chickees dot the landscape as storage sheds, front yard spots to sit and socialize, and shelters for taking lunch breaks away from the punishing Florida sunshine. Chickees also convey “Seminoleness” in some tribal casinos' interior design, as vendors' booths at Seminole festivals (figure 1), and even on the Seminole tribal flag, with its chickee logo (figure 2). More than any other element of the built environment, chickees mark space as distinctly Seminole.

In 1849, administrator-turned-historian Ganesh Das Vadhera completed Char Bagh-i-Panjab, a history of his native region in India, the Punjab. The Char Bagh was a Persian manuscript written as the Sikh Kingdom of Lahore was being dismantled and the Punjab incorporated into British India, and documented the establishment, decline, and fall of Sikh rule in the area. Vadhera's account was more than a political history of the Punjab, however; it also gave detailed descriptions of many of the towns, cities, and villages of the region leading some contemporary scholars to refer to it as a geography (Brand and Westcoat 2001). Guru Nanak Dev University recognized Vadhera's Persian text as being not only a historical account but a source of valuable “information on social, religious, and cultural life of the Panjab,” and published it in 1965 (Grewal and Banga 1975: 9). Two scholars of the region published a partial English translation a decade later (Grewal and Banga 1975).