LANDSCAPES AND HISTORIES The relations of landscapes to the histories that take place upon them are not easy to specify, but attempting to do so seems worth the effort and the risk. It is better than ignoring the shaping effects of landscapes, as historians so often do, and treating them as blank slates upon which histories inscribe themselves. The first essay is distilled from a multivolume book-in-progress on the economic history of the Indian Ocean under Islam.

It is widely acknowledged that Orientalist notions of political economy were marred by geographic determinism. From Marx to Wittfogel, generic concepts such as the “Asiatic mode of production,” the “hydraulic state” or “Oriental despotism” involved simplistic observations relating to climate and, particularly, the presence of large rivers and alluvial plains which were invoked to explain essential and persistent differences with the West.See R. Inden, “Orientalist Constructions of India,” Modern Asian Studies 20,3 (1986):422–23. Considering its overwhelmingly important role in this earlier literature, it is remarkable that the historical geography of the rivers and riverplains of the Indian Ocean has not yet been explored in any depth. It is perhaps to avoid being stung by charges of determinism that historians of India and the Indian Ocean area in recent decades have, if anything, downplayed the importance of geography. And, as W. A. McDougall has recently argued, it appears as if current thinking in general has become “suspicious of a subject [geography] that emphasizes distinctions among regions, invites unflattering comparisons and hierarchy among nations and cultures, and has been used in the past as an intellectual tool of empire.”W. A. McDougall, “You Can't Argue with Geography,” essay excerpted from a paper commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation as part of the History- Geography Project for publication in the Middle States Yearbook 2001. On the neglect of geography, see also E. W. Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York 1971); E. G. Genovese and L. Hochberg, eds., Geographic Perspectives in History: Essays in Honor of Edward Whiting Fox (Oxford, and Cambridge, Mass. 1989). By and large, what K. N. Chaudhuri observed in 1978 still holds true: “There can be few aspects of Indian studies more neglected than that of historical geography.”K. N. Chaudhuri, “Some Reflections on the Town and the Country in Mughal India,” Modern Asian Studies 12,1 (1978):77. In two later works, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge 1985) and Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge 1990), Chaudhuri made some attempts to remedy this situation, but they are faint. The aim of this essay is to re-introduce a geographic dimension in the history of the Indian Ocean area—one that is not overly deterministic and helps to account not only for continuities but also for changes in social and economic organization over an extended period of time.

In 1606, Bernardo José de Aldrete,Sometimes spelled “Alderete;” b.1560 Malaga, d.1641 Cordoba. (See Mondéjar Cumpián 1974 for discussion of the confusion over these dates and places.) Spanish cleric and humanist antiquarian, published the first history of the Spanish language, On the origin and beginnings of the Castilian language or Romance, which is used in Spain today.Henceforth “Origin.” Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.Aldrete argued that Castilian—also known at the time as Romance and now commonly known as Spanish—had been derived from Latin over centuries of use, with the Visigoths playing a key role in creating the linguistic change.Throughout this paper, “Castilian” and “Spanish” will be used interchangeably to refer to the language in question.

In 1893 a Welsh poet with the bardic name Glan Elsi uttered a remarkable vaticination that seemed to unite the fate of the Welsh language and the Welsh slate quarrier:

Dearest old Welsh, if ever it dies,

From the lips of a quarrier, I think, will come the final word.John Owen (Glan Elsi), “Y Chwarelwr” [The quarrier]. Cymru 5, 1893, p. 112.

What is immediately remarkable is that such an identification of a modern proletariat (as opposed, for example, to a vanishing traditional peasantry, as would be so common elsewhere in Europe), as a linguistic kulturträger of the Welsh language was by this time so unremarkable. Even more extraordinary, perhaps, is that this was a by-product of the slate-quarriers' own self-mythologizing.

In July of 1860 the intra-mural Christian quarter of Damascus was looted and burned and thousands of its inhabitants were massacred. This horrific event, which arrived on the heels of sectarian bloodshed in Ottoman Mount Lebanon a month earlier, was all the more significant in light of the massacre of Christians in the northern city of Aleppo in 1850 and the blood-libel accusations against the Damascene Jewish community in 1840.The events of July 1860 lasted a week during which the largely Greek Catholic (Uniate) inner-city Christian quarter of Bab Tuma was attacked. Although historians disagree over the number of Christians killed by the mob, up to ten thousand men, women, and children may have perished. The attackers also targeted Christian businesses, churches, and foreign consulates, and what could not be carried away was set ablaze. In the wake of those events, and in order to forestall European intervention on behalf of its minorities, the Ottoman government quickly moved to re-establish order and to punish the perpetrators. The 1840 blood-libel accusations—the first of their kind in Damascus—were leveled against several Jews when a Capuchin monk and his Muslim servant disappeared and their bodies were allegedly found in the Jewish quarter. The shocks of the 1860 “event” (or al-haditha as the local court records refer to it) and the 1840 Damascus Affair were heightened not only by their suddenness, and indeed, novelty, but also because their targets—the Christian and Jewish communities of this Ottoman provincial city—were small in number and appeared to have led a life of relative historic obscurity.The Christians comprised Greek (Syrian) Orthodox, Armenian, Maronite, and Catholic communities. Among the Jews there was a Karaite community. For an informative discussion of the Christians of the Arab East, see Robert M. Haddad, Syrian Christians in Muslim Society: An Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). In the absence of reliable (official) figures, a rough average based on population estimates provided by European observers will have to suffice: in 1787 Volney estimated the Damascus population at eighty thousand people, twelve thousand of whom were Christian (M. C-F. Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte pendant les annee's 1783, 1784, 1785 [Paris: Mouton, 1787; repr. 1959], vol. 2, p. 250). Half a century later, Porter reported that the population of the city totaled around 108,000 among whom 14,000 were Christians and 4,600 were Jews (J. L. Porter, Five Years in Damascus Including an Account of the History, Topography, and Antiquities of that City with Travels and Researches in Palmyra, Lebanon, and the Hawran [London: John Murray, 1855], vol. 1, p. 139). These figures closely approximate the estimates of the Bowring Report of a decade earlier (John Bowring, Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria [London: William Clowes and Sons, 1840; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1973], p. 8). In 1890 Cuinet put the total population at 165,000 and estimated the Christians at 54,000 and the Jews at 5,000 (Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine: Ge'ographie administrative statistique, descriptive et raisonne'e [Paris: E. Leroux, 1896], p. 386). Despite their comparative importance in the socio-economic life of Damascus (and for reasons that relate to that city's interior location, among other factors) neither community had risen to particular regional or empire-wide prominence along the lines of, say, the Maronites in Mount Lebanon or the Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities of Istanbul. Historians have in general considered the two communities noteworthy, if they considered them at all, on account of the two events mentioned above, events that have since come to define much of their nineteenth-century history. As a result, narratives of these events are plentiful, found alongside accounts that focus on the wealth and fortune of a handful of Jewish and Christian men.There is a large number of published Arabic-language accounts of the 1860 riots. See, for example, Hasr al-litham ‘an nakabat al-Sham (Cairo, 1895); Iskander ibn Ya‘qub Abkarius, The Lebanon in Turmoil: Syria and the Powers in 1860, trans. J. F. Scheltema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920); Muhammad Abu'l Su‘ud al- Hasibi, “Lamhat min tarkikh Dimashq fi ‘ahd al-Tanzimat,” ed. Kamal S. Salibi in al-Abhath, 21 (1968) and 22 (1969); Mikhayil Mishaqa, Murder, Mayhem, Pillage, and Plunder: The History of Lebanon in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 244–68. For a list of unpublished manuscripts dealing with these events, see Fritz Steppat, “Some Arabic Manuscript Sources of the Syrian Crisis of 1860,” in Les Arabes par leurs archives, eds. Jacques Berque and Dominique Chevallier (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1976). For more recent scholarly analyses of the 1860 riots, see Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), pp. 87–106; Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 78–100; Kamal Salibi, “The 1860 Upheaval in Damascus as seen by al-Sayyid Muhammad Abu'l-Su‘ud al-Hasibi, Notable and Later Naqib al-Ashraf of the City,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, eds. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “New Light on the 1860 Riots in Ottoman Damascus,” Die Welt des Islams 28 (1988): 412–30. On the blood-libel, see A. M. Hyamson, “The Damascus Affair—1840,” Transactions: Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1945–1951); L. Loewe, ed., Diaries of Sir Moses Montefiore, 2 vols. (Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co., 1890); Salo Baron, “The Jews and the Syrian Massacres of 1860,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 4 (1932-1933); Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the Jewish community in general, see Moshe Ma'oz, “Changes in the Position of the Jewish Communities of Palestine and Syria in the mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1975); Thomas Philipp, “The Farhi Family and the Changing Position of the Jews in Syria, 1750–1860,” Middle Eastern Studies 20 (Oct. 1984); 37–52. See also al-Maghribi, “Yahud Dimashq mundhu mi'at ‘am,” al-Majma‘ al-‘Ilmi al-‘Arabi 9 (1929): 641–43; and Yusuf Nu‘aisa, Yahud Dimashq (Damascus: Dar al-Ma‘rifa, 1988); both of which are hostile to their subject matter. Although those two facets of non-Muslim (dhimmi)The status of non-Muslims is inscribed in Islamic law in the form of a contract (dhimma). The contract is historically anchored in the so-called Pact of ‘Omar, which spells out the rights and obligations of non-Muslims, including the right to the free practice of religion. life are important (and no doubt partly correlated), they hardly tell the whole story. If anything, they punctuated the course of a relatively undramatic everyday life at a time when the history of the city and the province of which it was the capital were undergoing socio-economic and political transformation.

From the middle of the nineteenth century until recently, the only acceptable way to discuss political developments in early modern Europe was in terms of the rise of absolutism. “Absolute monarchy” was the political theory of early modern states formulated by ideologues of their respective regimes. Later historians accepted this ideology as the way these monarchies operated and formulated a model called “absolutism,” which posits a monarch who accrues power at the expense of the nobility. During the last three decades, however, a number of historians, whose studies focus on elite politics, have undermined this historiographical model. Through their archival research on the operation of regimes in early modern Europe, these historians have instead described an interlocking relationship between ruler and nobility in which the ruler acted as legitimizer of the nobility and adjudicator of differences among its members.Adamson has described the emerging pattern of understanding this way: “At the most ‘absolutist' of courts, the exercise of authority was always in some sense a negotiation founded, in the final analysis, upon the community of interest between the crown and the noble elites. The court, far from being an instrument whereby monarchs could weaken the nobility, as was once supposed, provided the forum in which that compact could be subjected to a regular process of revision and renegotiation.” John Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court 1500–1700,” in The Princely Courts of Europe 1500–1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 39. Then, in a strongly argued book, The Myth of Absolutism, Nicholas Henshall delivered what many specialists consider to be the coup de grâce to the absolutism model as a worthwhile way of discussing early modern European governments.Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London: Longman, 1992). See also Henshall “The Myth of Absolutism,” History Today 42 (June 1992): 40–47. He pointed out that “absolutism” is a term coined in 1823 to apply to the contemporary ruler Ferdinand VII of Spain, and argued that it is an anachronism for us to apply it to earlier centuries.

Critical studies of visual culture have established profound connections between capitalism, state power and the “scopic regimes of modernity” (Jay 1988). As the dominant philosophical leitmotif of the European enlightenment, visuality characterized the domain of reason and truth, modeling both the clear and distinct ideas of Continental rationalism and the sense-based epistemology of British empiricism. Compelling in its “given” transparency, the rhetoric of vision continually conceals the historical conditions of its production. Indeed, as Marx first stated in the 1844 manuscripts, the history of seeing belongs to that political economy of the senses so deeply embedded in historical materialism (Marx 1978:89). Critical models of visuality and spectacle, however, remain largely overdetermined, either as bourgeois forms of consumption and display (Debord 1977; Richards 1990), strategic stagecraft serving political ends (Edelman 1988; Falasca-Zamponi 1997; Scott 1998), or as hegemonic forms of objectification incorporating citizens and subjects into the discursive armature of modern states and empires (Crary 1990; Diehl 1986; Foucault 1995; Morris 1982; Mitchell 1988; Coombes 1994:63–108).I do not mean to reduce these theoretically rich and innovative studies to such banal and simplistic propositions, but rather to characterize the dominant orientations within which they fall. For a nuanced collection of perspectives on scopic regimes of surveillance and desire, see Brennan and Jay (1996), with special reference to de Bolla's (1996) discussion of Adam Smith's theory of spectatorial subjectivity. For a more dialectical approach to visual economy, applied to visual images in the Andes, see Poole (1997).

Decades after the Chinese Communists successfully ousted their Nationalist Party rivals and radically remolded the political economy of the countryside, an elderly resident of Guangdong's Zhongshan municipality recounted the onerous burden of taxes imposed under Nationalist rule. In addition to the twenty-six types of taxes exacted from residents by central state authorities, and the twenty excises collected by the provincial administration, he recalled that the local tax office levied fourteen taxes, including a commodity tax imposed on human excrement.

Over the past three decades, writings on modernity and post-modernity have emanated from both the social sciences and humanities. In this context, the voluminous works of Niklas Luhmann and his interpreters (Lee 2000; Rasch 2000) have had a lasting impact on how social theory and various expressions of modernity are interconnected. Yet, one of the finest and most critical understandings of modernity and its totality is still found in the writings of Georg Simmel, who is barely referred to in most recent analyses. Now, through the brilliant interpretations and translations by David Frisby and his colleagues over the past two decades, the interest in Simmel and his intellectual efforts has achieved a position which ranks him with Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Although Simmel (1858–1918) is classically labeled a sociologist, the depth and breadth of his interests simply cannot be limited to any one discipline. Rather, it is best to approach Simmel as a cultural philosopher, one who used the essay format to address a number of subjects, issues, and problems. Simmel wrote some ten to fifteen books of which only a few have been translated into English, The Philosophy of Money (1900, 1907) being the most visible.

Intellectual practice is marked by a central asymmetry: we explain the beliefs of others with social scientific theories of causation, but do not seek similar causes for our own (self-evidently more reasonable) ideas. So the “fundamentalist” writings of martyred Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb are normally analyzed as outgrowths of anti-colonial struggle, eroding economic opportunity, official corruption, and changing patterns of education and migration. But the thoughts of Daniel Bell, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre are examined for their keen insights into the malaise of late modernity. The ideas of Western cultural critics, in other words, have meaning, while those of Muslim cultural critics have only function.

This path-breaking book describes how the Qing state dealt with jian, a Chinese term which the author translates as “illicit sexual intercourse.” Emblazoned on the jacket of the book is the Chinese character for jian, an ideograph most commonly encountered today in the compound word “qiangjian,” or rape. The sight of this character is so shocking (and suggestive) to modern Chinese sensibilities that I had to take the jacket off while on a recent train-trip through China in order to defuse the inevitable prurient questions from fellow travelers. My ruse worked, and by the end of my journey I was rewarded with a clear, compelling analysis of how the judiciary in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century China attempted to regulate the mores of an increasingly marketized and unruly society—a story with no small relevance to the changes taking place in China today.

What happens when an ancient city, the former capital of two world empires, becomes subject to a new wave of global flows? How does a populist third-world state negotiate transnational networks that challenge its authority, but also create new resources to control? How do heterogeneous residents of a metropolis negotiate their locality when they imagine their city in a global market?

In the past decade, studies on the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire have taken an “archival turn.” Scholars, such as Engin Deniz Akarli, Suraiya Faroqhi, Hasan Kayali, Süevket Pamuk and Zeynep Celik, have begun reassessing the Ottoman archives in order to challenge the sweeping historical narratives of an earlier generation of scholars, like the theses about the inevitable demise of the empire or about the radical break in political culture with the emergence of the Turkish Republic. This is also the case with Selim Deringil's The Well- Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909, which considerably revises our understanding of Sultan Abdülhamid II's centralization program.

This book is a meticulous reconstruction of a little over a decade in English Medieval History. Its author, Graeme White, holds the chair of the faculty of History at University College, Chester. Yet rather than fitting comfortably within the traditional niche of interpretation of the accomplishments of kings Stephen and Henry II, as his position might suggest, he shares the perceptions of the late W. L. Warren and of Emilie Amt that Stephen was no nincompoop, and that his successor was not the ingenious monarch once imagined. White, like Warren, does not merely make connections between reigns, he follows the processes that flow through and beyond them.

What happened to the racism that flourished during the “war without mercy” after the Pacific War ended? This is the question tackled by this ambitious book. Racial prejudices and hatreds of all types persisted and even flourished, at times with a vengeance. Beneath the constructed and mutually acceptable post-war cooperative relationship that seemed to characterize United States-Japan relations, racial animosities on both sides of the Pacific festered, threatening to disrupt the official reconciliation and apparent new amity between the former belligerents.

Until recently, studies of Islamic jurisprudence usually began and ended with the texts of medieval Islam. Apart from the Islamic modernists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the reasoning and writings of jurists of the last five hundred years failed to attract interest in their own right. Colin Imber's study of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Sheikh al-Islam, Ebu's-Su‘ud, the preeminent jurisconsult of the Ottoman Empire, is an illuminating and timely addition to a sparse, but growing, literature dedicated to this more proximate inheritance of the contemporary Islamic world.