PERFORMING HISTORY History performed is always tendentious, and unable to cloak itself in the dress of the impartial judge while being the zealous advocate. The first three articles seek to understand how exactly these advocacies are constructed, by, respectively, the warring churches of a Sicilian town, the commodification of Jordanian hospitality, and a coronation ceremony in Zambia.

Serge Gruzinski (1996), in an analysis of the Feast of Corpus Domini in the colonial Mexico of the modern era, notices the extreme importance that the protagonists of the events that he studied gave to the tiniest details of the ritual procedure. Because he is interested in understanding the political sense of these and other “baroque” ceremonial moments, Gruzinski implicitly rejects all functionalist readings and prefers to examine the connections between power and the elements within the ritual mechanism. He notices, for example, how the Corpus Domini was in no way a moment of controlled expression of the political tensions in colonial Mexican society. On the contrary, the ritual seems to him to be an occasion in which and by means of which the various Corpora constituting that society could publicly display and negotiate status, power, and prerogatives (Gruzinski 1996:150–51). The concrete ceremonial performances establish and contribute to “redefining the status quo” (ibid.:151). This explains the attention to what may seem to us to be insignificant details of the ceremony, but certainly they were not so for the protagonists (ibid.:142).

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan evokes a simpler time, a sense of place and a cherished way of life. A visit to Jordan brings a return to respected and hallowed tradition. Immediately upon arrival, the visitor is aware of the inherent hospitality of the Jordanian people as exemplified by the Arabic “Ahlan wa sahlan” (“I Welcome You”), heard at every turn.

During the last week of July, the people of the lower Luapula Valley in northern Zambia gather in the village of Mwansabombwe to celebrate their Lunda traditions and their paramount, Mwata Kazembe. For days prior to the main event, pubs serve bottled beer, much of it imported from nearby Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to quench the thirst of guests who have arrived in the hot, dusty village; women from different village sections deliver pots of millet beer to Mwata Kazembe's palace; and the youth organize special sports competitions and cultural events. Toward the weekend when the main festivities are to take place provincial, and on occasion national political and military dignitaries dressed in their suits and ties arrive. On Saturday afternoon, following the performance of certain rituals in the morning, chiefs, headmen, state dignitaries, and the villagers crowd together in a stadium on the outskirts of Mwansabombwe. A dignitary delivers a speech that highlights the importance of culture and tradition for progress, development, and national well-being. Listening to the national leadership's calls for the preservation of these traditions are chiefs and headman, who appear in the traditional Lunda garb of long imikonso skirts (sing. umukonso), leather inshipo belts and ututasa crowns (sing. akatasa). After the speeches, on the instruction of Mwata Kazembe, selected aristocrats and members of the royal family dance. The day's events culminate in Mwata Kazembe performing the Lunda dance of conquest, the Mutomboko.

In recent years, eugenics has emerged as a major topic in the history of science. As a mixture of science and policy, as a discipline and social movement, eugenics lies at the interface of biological science and society. The primary feature of “eugenics,” a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883, is the conviction that human traits of character, for good or evil, are genetically transmitted. This so-called science, therefore, seeks to regulate human procreation by encouraging the fecundity of allegedly genetically superior groups in society, while discouraging “defectives” from producing children since they would replicate their deficiencies.

It is commonplace to treat the 1860s and 1870s as a crucial period in the making of modern South Africa. These two decades saw the beginnings of the mineral-led industrial revolution that so dramatically transformed the political economy of the region; they marked a decisive moment in the assertion of colonial political hegemony over regional African kingdoms; and they witnessed a secular intensification in imperial involvement in the sub-continent. In light of their importance in understanding the history of white supremacy in twentieth-century South Africa, these social, economic, and political processes have been extensively analyzed. Yet, settler power and authority were not expressed only in terms of economic control or political conquest: in order to achieve the mature form of colonial proprietorship that distinguishes South Africa from most other nineteenth-century settler societies in Africa, cognitive as well as physical mastery had to be established over indigenous peoples and the natural environment. It is surprising, therefore that so little attention has been devoted to the conspicuous display of intellectual curiosity that accompanied growing colonial and imperial engagement in the African subcontinent at this time. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance.

Ethnicity is increasingly central to analysis of war.Michael Brown et al., eds., Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); David Lake and Donald Rothchild, eds., The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Cf. John Mueller, “The Banality of ‘Ethnic War,'” International Security 25, 1 (Summer 2000), pp. 42–70. Whether conceived in essentialist or constructivist terms, ethnicity is often accorded explanatory primacy in accounting for the organization and use of violence in wartime settings, in part due to the utility of processes of othering for group mobilization. Both the political and ideological context of hostilities as well as the motivations of combatants in the actual making of wartime violence are frequently conceptualized in ethnic and racialized terms.Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); John Dower, War Without Mercy (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). In a word, wartime violence is domesticated; it is seen as arising from the identities of, and commitments to, homelands.

The break-up of empires was the most profound geo-political phenomenon of the twentieth century. In 1900, except in the Western Hemisphere, most of the world's people lived in polities which readily described themselves as empires. These polities were territorially vast, or at least far-flung, and each of them ruled a multitude of peoples who differed enormously in the usual markers of ethnicity such as language, religion, and culture. Over the course of a century, however, most of these empires disappeared. The territorial empires of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans fell apart in the aftermath of the First World War, the colonial empires of the Germans, British, Americans, Dutch, French, Belgians, Spanish, and Portuguese gave way to a combination of nationalist and international pressures, the wartime conquests of Germany, Japan, and Italy came to nothing, and finally the Soviet Union fragmented into a multitude of new, independent states at the end of the Cold War. Smaller polities such as Yugoslavia and Ethiopia fractured into still smaller ones.

In the 1970s and 1980s, two influential books, both entitled, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, were published (Holton 1985; Sweezy 1976). The titles were signs of the times: reflecting a concern with explaining a supposedly decisive shift in historic Europe economic systems. Today, “transition” language is likely to take the form of the title of this essay and the books reviewed here, employing some plural form of the principal nouns, and question marks. As the format indicates, current scholarship questions whether such a transition took place at all, and argues that if it did, it was regionally and historically specific.

This book answers a challenging question: what is the importance of nationalism as a source of identity in the era of globalization? The question is explored through various case studies of the inscription of nationalism in Papua New Guinea (PNG). PNG's experience of nationalism, Foster argues, is revealing because nationalist discourse has been imported to the country first by weak attempts at state-building and second from international non-governmental sources. He follows theories that contend that nationalism is created through mundane, everyday practices that bolster the control of productive forces through the state. What Foster finds interesting about PNG is that there the mundane practices involve engagement with private institutions of international scope as much as, if not more than, state institutions. Each chapter presents a case study in which nationalist discourse is a subtext to the institutions, practices, and messages associated with economic development and the international division of labor. Through these cases, Foster shows how people are placed in nation-like collective identities in their everyday engagement with the global order of production and consumption. Further, the mass culture of the nation-state is useful for creating subjects of new kinds of political power.

The relationship between philanthropy and women is a much-discussed topic in women's studies and history of the welfare state. Women have played a major role in philanthropic endeavors. They were personally involved in caring for the sick, the poor, and other destitutes, and took part in establishing and organizing philanthropic societies that catered to a host of social problems. Both books under consideration address this subject anew, though in very different ways. Elliott's book is about nineteenth-century England, McCarthy's volume includes articles on the development of women's voluntary work in various countries all over the world up to the present time.

One of the key narratives of political modernity is that of the emergence of human agency in constructing the social order, with theories of divine origins giving way to the notion of humans as lawmakers. While such narratives often center on the death of God and the wresting of sovereignty from monarchs, Reconfiguring Modernity reminds us that they also tend to establish another adversary: nature. Modernity is commonly thought of as a linear movement away from nature or as a dialectical overcoming of nature, which establishes human agency and freedom over and against nature. The prime example for Thomas is Maruyama Masao, a renowned political philosopher who attributed Japan's militaristic nationalism to its failure to establish the primacy of invention or human agency over nature. Thomas questions this conception of modernity based on an opposition between human agency and nature. It is not by negating or overcoming nature that modern political freedoms emerge, she argues. Rather political freedoms come of specific ideological configurations of nature (cosmos) and society (polis). Reconfiguring Modernity thus turns to the history of the idea of nature in Japanese political thought to reconsider the formation of modernity in Japan.

While the mildness of the colonial encounter in the European edges of empire is belied by intractable political standoffs in Northern Ireland and Cyprus, such locations traditionally have been of only secondary interest to scholars of colonialism. This book valuably documents the complexity of one such “sideshow in the great game of European imperial expansion” (p. x), the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands (1815–1864), which now form a part of Greece.