In 1899, Chilean workers discovered the mummified body of a woman in a copper mine in Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert. Chile's most prominent archaeologists were called to examine the body and they estimated it had been in the mine for more than four centuries. What most astonished both the public and the scholarly community was that the body had been preserved virtually intact, apparently by nothing but the environmental conditions surrounding it. José Toribio Medina, a central figure in Chilean archaeology at the time, discussed this finding in 1901:

Between 1780 and 1787 Samuel and Jeremy Bentham were asked to manage a large Russian estate owned by Prince Grigorii Potemkin, one of the closest advisors of Catherine II. They had to face two related but distinct problems: Russian peasants were unskilled, while British skilled workers and supervisors were hard to control. It was the problem of controlling skilled English workers in Russia (and not the Russian serfs) that led the Bentham brothers to reflect on the relation between free and forced labor, and then between labor and society. Before and after Foucault, the Panopticon has been seen as a response to social deviance, and in relation to prisons and the emergence of a global surveillance system in modern societies. According to Foucault, the Panopticon is not just a model for institutions, but something whose principles are those of power in society at large. I want to challenge this view by arguing that the Panopticon project actually was a system for controlling wage labor, which drew inspiration from a particular image of Russian serfdom and from the Bentham brothers' experiences in that country. Those experiences have been the subject of several papers and books. The first aim of this paper is not to recall these, but rather to integrate them into a broader intellectual debate. In particular, I will evoke the origins of the Benthams' experiences in Russian, British, and European debates of the period about the legal status of labor. The way that “western” thought conceived of labor in general and positioned itself vis-à-vis Russia necessitates a reexamination of the thesis that the principal schools of western thought were misunderstood in Russia. I will argue, instead, that Russian authors and reformers relied on ambiguities in western thinking about labor when they advanced their own images of serfdom and proposals for reform.

Malthus published his Essay on Population in 1798 and for the next century, as the new discipline of political economy incorporated his thought into its central tenets, population theorizing took place largely within a Malthusian framework. A stark simplicity marks his argument, especially as presented in the succinct first edition of the essay. He presents the reader with two self-evident natural laws: “that food is necessary to the existence of man,” and “that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state” (1798: 11). He then observes, “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man” (13), and contends that population, when unchecked, increases in a “geometrical ratio” while subsistence in only an “arithmetical ratio” (14). In this first edition, Malthus had the particular ideological goal of proving that “the advocates of equality and of the perfectibility of man” had an unattainable dream. Mr. Godwin could imagine a British Isle where all are equal, live in “airy” farmhouses, share “the necessary labours of agriculture” (182), and divide its fruits “according to their wants,” Malthus observed, but such a regime places no barrier to early marriage and large families. He calculated that in a hundred years the Isle's seven million people “would be one hundred and twelve millions, and the food only sufficient for thirty-five millions, leaving seventy-seven millions unprovided for” (23–24). Since “no possible form of society could prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind” (36), constructing a society of equals only ensures a society in which all will be poor. Any attempt to improve the conditions of the impoverished by granting them access to subsistence, such as the poor laws then in effect in England, simply works “in some measure to create the poor which they maintain” since they permit the poor man to “marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family in independence” (83).

Early modern observers rarely failed to comment on the perceived diversity of peoples, customs, and languages of Mediterranean societies. This diversity they sought to capture in travel narratives, costume albums, missionary and diplomatic reports, bilingual dictionaries, and a range of other genres of the “contact zone.” Modern scholars, too, have celebrated the early modern Mediterranean's ostensibly multiple, diverse, and even “pluralist,” “cosmopolitan,” or “multicultural” nature. At the same time, in part thanks to the reawakened interest in Braudel's seminal work and in part as a much-needed corrective to the politically current but analytically bankrupt paradigm of “clash of civilizations,” recent studies have also emphasized the region's “shared,” “connected,” “mixed,” “fluid,” “syncretic,” or “hybrid” sociocultural practices. Of course, these two analytical emphases are far from mutually exclusive, as recently underscored by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell's comprehensive, longue durée model of diversity-in-connectivity. Yet, neither Horden and Purcell's structuralist “new thalassology,” nor other studies of the early modern Mediterranean have offered a systematic account of how “diversity” and “connectivity” as both the flow of social practices and the categories for speaking about them have been articulated through specific institutions and genres.

My objective is to examine an intriguing and heretofore unrecognized convergence in the history of bookkeeping. The story revolves around an extraordinary parallelism in the evolution of bookkeeping and the philosophical and ethical principles underlying the practice of accounting between southern Europe and Andean South America during the two centuries or so prior to the Spanish invasion of the Inka Empire in 1532. The event of the European invasion of the Andes brought these two similar yet distinct trans-Atlantic traditions of “bookkeeping” and accounting into violent confrontation.

Julya paces the parquet, blond hair coiled severely, hands clasped atop padded buttocks encased in a boxy gray, ill-fitting suit. She sputters abuse at her audience: fifteen classmates sprawled on the floor, their teacher seated in a chair, and a video camera. Moscow, November 2002. The Americans prepare to invade Iraq, Putin serves his third year as president, and these students begin their first term at the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts (RATI/GITIS). Inside its walls, Julya depicts the head of her high school, an older woman in a town two hours north. She yells: “I REQUEST that TODAY at the meeting with ZhshzhshshzhshuGAnov you ALL be there!” (Zjuganov is the leader of the Russian Communist Party.) Some students slap the parquet laughing. Their teacher is less impressed.

It seemed to me a simple question. “What happens in this dance-drama? What is the storyline, the narrative?” I am met by puzzlement. The dancer explains that each such dance has its own set of instruments, its own special costumes and masks. For this one they use a simple, one-man marimba and the costumes come from the nearby town of Chichicastenango.

What is Africa's place in the nuclear world? In 1995, a U.S. government report on nuclear proliferation did not mark Gabon, Niger, or Namibia as having any “nuclear activities.” Yet these same nations accounted for over 25 percent of world uranium production that year, and helped fuel nuclear power plants in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Experts had long noted that workers in uranium mines were “exposed to higher amounts of internal radiation than … workers in any other segment of the nuclear energy industry.” What, then, does it mean for a workplace, a technology, or a nation to be “nuclear?” What is at stake in that label, and how do such stakes vary by time and place?