Censorship notwithstanding, the final half-century of Spanish rule in the Philippines was a time of efflorescence in colonial print culture. Between the advent of typo-lithography in 1858 and the successive occurrence, in 1896 and 1898, of the Filipino revolution and the Spanish-American War, printing presses operating in Manila and beyond issued thousands of books and periodicals, the first public library, the Muséo-Bibliotéca de Filipinas, opened its doors in 1887, and the importation of books from Europe and America could scarcely keep pace with demand.

On 30 January 2004, after months of negotiations between Hizbullah and the state of Israel via German mediators, a major exchange of bodies and prisoners was completed. In return for a kidnapped Israeli citizen—alleged to belong to Israeli intelligence services—and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers captured three years previously, Israel released twenty-nine Lebanese and other Arab prisoners, the remains of fifty-nine Lebanese citizens, and, astonishingly, 400 Palestinian prisoners. The prisoner release was something of a coup for Hizbullah and its success led Hizbullah on 12 July 2006 to emulate the same capture operation hoping to precipitate the release of the last remaining Lebanese prisoners in Israeli prisons. In 2004, many from across the political spectrum in Lebanon and Palestine praised Hizbullah's achievement. In Beirut, the welcoming ceremonies for the released Palestinian prisoners were awash in both Palestinian and Lebanese flags. Among the celebrants were tens of thousands of Palestinians. The superior effectiveness of Hizbullah in comparison with then Palestinian leadership was not lost on observers. After all, in its most successful negotiations with the Israeli state the previous August, then Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen had been able to secure the release of only 338 Palestinian prisoners of Israel, most of whom had reached the end of their terms anyway. In his welcoming speech to his Palestinian and Lebanese audience, Hizbullah Secretary General, Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, further took a swipe at the Fatah-dominated Palestinian National Authority (PNA) by insisting that “We should not fall under any illusions and let ourselves believe that peaceful negotiations are an alternative to military resistance. Effective [military] resistance was the main factor behind our success” (Daily Star, 30 Jan. 2004, my emphases). One Lebanese analyst claimed that the Hizbullah success could not possibly be “a popular deal with Palestinian leadership” (Daily Star, 26 Jan. 2004), because it showed the relative effectiveness of Hizbullah compared to the Fatah-dominated PNA.

Since the overwhelming electoral victory of Algeria's main Islamist party, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), in 1990 and 1991, the annulment of the elections by the Algerian army in 1992, and a decade of apparently random killings that followed throughout the country, religion has been at stake in most contemporary debates on Algeria. Algeria has thereby entered the field of larger debates within the Western world about radical Islam, the rise of religion, the rejection of “Western models,” and other expressions of the putative “clash of civilizations.” At the same time, relatively little has been said about what “Islam” actually means in the Algerian context, even by more perspicacious authors and analysts who are keen to stress the economic and social causes for the success of political Islam in Algeria (e.g., Burgat 1988; 1995; Charef 1994; Martinez 1998). This is not to say that the variety of religious practices in Algeria has attracted no attention from researchers. Rather, it means that those writers who focus on ‘local’ religion, such as Andezian (1993; 2001) and Hadibi (1999; 2002), tend to produce local accounts of the veneration of saints and pilgrimages, without referring to broader cultural dynamics and political struggles, and without attempting to link their findings in more than superficial ways to the emergence of modern Islamism.

The historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1405), in his Muqaddimah (Introduction to history), explained historical change and the succession of dynasties as a function of the interactions between nomadic culture and urban civilization. His major contribution is usually considered to be his analysis of the correlation between ‘asabiyya, social cohesion or group feeling, and political power. He argued that the strong group feeling of tribal peoples enabled them to conquer urbanized regions and build regimes and civilizations, but that these conquests were undone by the tribes' gradual loss of ‘asabiyya in the urban setting, leading to new conquests by tribal peoples still strong in desert cohesiveness. Although power was the basis of rulership and royal authority was established through military might, the glue that held societies together was ‘asabiyya, based on kinship and religion and stronger in tribal than in urban society. Conquerors with strong group feeling could create greater and longer-lasting empires because they fielded larger armies and retained their own cultural dynamism for a longer time, and thus were able to defeat their rivals. Conquerors whose social cohesion was weak were soon overcome by the civilization of the conquered and gave way to a new conquering group. Strong group cohesion would also allow royal authority to pass to a second branch of the ruling family if the first was weakened, perpetuating its dominion. The ruler and his army were supported by the wealth of conquest, and returned the people's taxes in the form of gifts and public works. They would be successful only so long as they remained just; as the rulers' level of luxury increased so did their level of exploitation, and injustice soon produced division and “the ruin of civilization.”

Two rulers, one in Africa, one in Asia, are about to undergo the ceremony of baptism following first contact with the Portuguese maritime expansion—but they insist that the rite be conducted in secret. The African ruler is a regional governor (the Mani Soyo) of the Congo King Nzinga Nkuwu who has just converted in 1491. The high king's diplomatic exchanges with the sea captain Diogo Cão had not elicited any real sensation of vulnerability to Portuguese imperial designs, yet he had been happy to convert nonetheless. Now the Mani Soyo is about to follow suit, but he will not have any of his subordinates witnessing the ritual because he does not want them benefiting from the enhanced status and power that the ritual could bestow. In the highlands of Sri Lanka some fifty years later, the King of Kandy is equally intent on keeping his baptismal rites hidden from public view. But his reasons are strikingly different. He does this “lest his people should kill him.” When news of the baptism did leak out rioting followed, and the king had to spread the story that it had all been a ploy to deceive the Portuguese.

The overarching argument of this paper is not a new one; others have made it in various forms. The argument suggests, in Bernard Cohn's simple formulation, that metropole and colony should be treated in a unified field of analysis. Reconstituting the analytical frame in the manner Cohn suggests has a range of implications not only for the study of colonialism but also, and perhaps more importantly, for understanding current geopolitical conjunctures. The suggestion diverges from the conventional analytical approach that divides and demarcates the world into separable entities—whether they be described as the mutually exclusive categories of metropole and colony, Europe and its Others, a set of distinct nations, first and third world, or indeed of areas and regions—and studies these distinct entities in isolation from, or in comparison with, each other. In contrast, Cohn's proposition asks for an analysis of how such demarcations are produced and of how, rather than being discrete entities with autochthonous formations, they are co-produced through a complex array of related and relational historical events. It is a call, in other words, to shift the analytical framework from one that functions, implicitly or explicitly, on the basis of comparison, to one that operates on the basis of co-production. Such an approach, this essay demonstrates, is especially necessary for a thoroughly historicized understanding of nation-state formation, particularly since the nation-state constitutes a preeminent category of and for comparative analysis.

In the bleak spring of 1916, a military note expostulated about the slowness with which the Government of India was finding coolies and porters for British forces in Mesopotamia. At first, labor could be obtained only from tribals of the Santhal Parganas and Chota Nagpur and by tapping Indian jails: “Could there possibly have been a greater opportunity for India with millions of men not usable as soldiers, to take a larger share in the war, or even a larger share in helping its own Indian Army? From all accounts India was burning to get such a chance, yet what happened? The honour of India was upheld first by aborigines and then by convicts.”

“Iglesia me llamo” (“church is my name”) was the only phrase uttered over and over by numerous criminals during judicial interrogations that took place at various times throughout the Iberian kingdoms that ultimately became Spain, and their American colonies. This expression meant that even after committing heinous crimes, those outlaws received shelter at local churches and thereby felt entitled not to disclose any information to justice officials about their conduct. Such criminals were confident that it would not be easy to remove them from the church for punishment. Indeed, groups of wrongdoers turned churchyards, churches, their cloisters, and their adjoining cemeteries into permanent residences. They were alleged to move freely in and out of church buildings under cover of night and to bring friends, lovers, and liquor in for enjoyment. Their presence terrorized neighbors and passersby, and inconvenienced priests and parishioners alike.

Emile Durkheim assembled a team to promote his vision for sociology, but he and Mauss were in many ways a double act, like Marx and Engels. There was room for only one leader of the movement, so we speak of the Durkheimians and the Marxists. Mauss and Engels each assumed leadership of the movement they jointly founded after their partner's death, but the intrinsic inequality of the partnership was made worse in Mauss' case by age difference, kinship seniority, and his inability to write books of his own. The publication of an abridged English translation of Marcel Fournier's Marcel Mauss: A Biography (2006 [1994]) allows us to reconsider his historical relationship with Durkheim, as well as his legacy for anthropology, history, and the social sciences today. French scholarship on Mauss is, of course, much more advanced than its Anglophone counterpart and it is less confined to academic anthropology. Fournier's 800-page collection of Mauss' Écrits politiques (1997) remains virtually unknown to English-speakers and the collective organized in his name, the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales (with its journal, revue du MAUSS), continues the eponymous founder's commitment to integrating progressive politics and intellectual work over a wide range of issues. In both cases, The Gift (1990 [1925]) has iconic significance as Mauss' most discussed work; but, as Sigaud (2002) has already pointed out, the Anglophone academy, with assistance from one or two leading French anthropologists, has taken up its message in ways that depart seriously from the author's original intentions.