Comparison is an indispensable technique of analytic scholarship. No analytic statement about empirical observation can be made without at least one comparison providing the contrast that permits either inductive generalization or deductive proof. Comparison is used for these purposes in all disciplines, but not always in the same way, or for the same reasons. Anthropology came to comparison because comparison was thrust on it by the rediscovery of classical antiquity and the opening of Africa, Asia, and the New World to a previously more isolated Europe. Indeed, anthropology was born as a response to the great cultural contrasts thus exposed. This philosophical child of comparison, however, pursued it in some very special ways. In the first place, the initial interests of anthropology lay in the reconstruction of an unknown human past, attempting to explain cultural variety through the reconstruction of events leading up to the present. In the second place, the comparisons drawn by anthropologists were usually extreme, prompted as they were by the shock value of new discoveries.

The sociological study of history has only recently achieved recognition in American sociology. Although historical research occupied an important place in the nineteenth-century European sociological tradition, American scholars long accepted a disciplinary division relegating the study of the past to historians, while reserving contemporary subjects for sociological investigation. The field of historical sociology first witnessed a revival in the 1950s with the publication of Reinhard Bendix's Work and Authority in Industry (1956) and Neil Smelser's Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959). During these years, a small chorus of voices called for a more historical approach to sociological problems and closer cooperation between the two disciplines.

Comparative history is not new. As long as people have investigated social life, there has been recurrent fascination with juxtaposing historical patterns from two or more times or places. Part of the appeal comes from the general usefulness of looking at historical trajectories in order to study social change. Indeed, practitioners of comparative history from Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber to Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moore, Jr. have typically been concerned with understanding societal dynamics and epochal transformations of cultures and social structures. Attention to historical sequences is indispensable to such understanding. Obviously, though, not all investigations of social change use explicit juxtapositions of distinct histories. We may wonder, therefore: What motivates the use of comparisons as opposed to focussing on single historical trajectories? What purposes are pursued—and how—through the specific modalities of comparative history?

This paper is an exploration of two models, “Anthropologyland” and “Historyland,” which exist in the practices and minds of anthropologists and historians. It is about how particular forms of knowledge are created, written and spoken about. It is about what historians and anthropologists do and say they do.

Discussion of the social aspects of industrialization in India has proceeded almost exclusively in terms of labor recruitment, factory conditions, and the development of trade unions. Although strikes have received detailed consideration, the industrial violence which formed a common and persistent feature of labor relations in colonial India has been largely ignored. Official reports of the period tended to play down the incidence of violence, not wishing to publicize the failings of government labor policies.' Or, where violence was acknowledged to have occurred, it was taken to indicate the immaturity and irresponsibility of Indian workers. Post-independence studies, drawing heavily on published official sources, have too readily equated labor history with a narrative of strikes, with union membership figures and labor legislation. A lingering Gandhian tradition has further influenced many Indian labor studies. Violence is regarded as too morally reprehensible and politically deviant to warrant serious analysis. Where admitted, it is attributed to communist politicians or other outside elements rather than to factors inherent within the labor situation.

The central question of this article is why the minority problem has remained under control in Israel but has led to an internal war in Northern Ireland. This question is explored within the analytic frame of the notion of a plural society.

One finds partition often mentioned but rarely discussed in any detail by authors of texts on world politics. Denned as the act of dividing into two or more units an area previously forming a single administrative entity, partition is firmly anchored in both the theory and practice of international statesmanship. Modern diplomatic history offers a classic illustration in the repeated partitioning of Poland in the late eighteenth century. More recent instances of territorial division are Ireland (1920), Germany and Korea (1945), India (1947) and Indochina (1954). Reinforcement for such political arrangements, moreover, derives from the teachings and insights of bargaining theory, negotiating strategies, crisis management and conflict resolution with their primary emphasis upon compromise. Partition is thus presented as being a traditional and accepted method for terminating disputes outstanding among nations without recourse to war.