Knowledge has become a central problematic in recent work on cross-cultural encounters and the processes of empire building. In an array of contexts—from Spanish America to colonial South Africa, from Ireland to occupied Egypt, the American West to British India—anthropologists and historians have highlighted the ways in which “colonial knowledge” facilitated trade, the extraction of rent and taxes, conversion, and outright conquest. This scholarship has demonstrated how these new forms of understanding produced on imperial frontiers facilitated the actual extension of sovereignty and the consolidation of colonial authority: for Tzvetan Todorov, Bernard Cohn, and Nicholas Dirks alike, colonialism was a “conquest of knowledge.” Scholarship on empire building in the Americas has placed special emphasis on the place of literacy in the dynamics of conquest. Walter Mignolo in particular has argued that European understandings of the power of literacy encouraged Spaniards in the New World to discount the value of indigenous graphic systems and disparage Mesoamerican languages as untruthful, unreliable, and products of the Devil. For Mignolo, the dark side of the new knowledge orders born out of the Renaissance was a new interweaving of literacy, knowledge, and colonization in a new cultural order he dubs “coloniality.” In the North American literature, too, literacy has been seen as a crucial element in imperial intrusion and conquest. James Axtell, for example, has argued “The conquest of America was in part a victory of paper and print over memory and voice. The victors wrote their way to the New World and inscribed themselves on its maps.”

At first glance, there is nothing unusual about the fact that, in 1790, a woman went to a magistrate in Mexico City to request money from her husband while their divorce case was pending. Everything about the lawsuit seems ordinary, even down to the litigant's name, Doña María García. Decades of historical scholarship on gender have familiarized us with women just like her, women who tactically employed the courts of the Spanish empire in the larger “contest” that made up gender relations in the era. Histories of women veritably brim with female litigants who used the justice system to win small victories in their battles for autonomy from marital obligations or to rein in philandering, shiftless, or abusive lovers.

Common sense commodifies the secret, alienating the value of its content from its social context. But a secret perfectly kept dies in its circle of initiates. Few secrets, however, are dead on arrival, since their seduction lies precisely in their revelation. Most things said to be hidden are in fact nurtured through the processes of calculated concealment, allusion, and revelation, the secrets propagating themselves through circles of conspiracy, rumor, and gossip. As Tim Jenkins observed, “What is concealed, and the reasons for its concealment, serve to distract attention from the dynamic of the secret: what at first sight appears to be static and indeed dead, possessed by and known to only a few, kept in some dark place, in fact has a life and movement of its own; the secret propagates itself through a structure of secret and betrayal” (1999: 225–26).

In late 1832, a small religious sect, the Children of Peace, completed their second place of worship, a temple, in the village of Hope in the sparsely settled northern reaches of Toronto's rural hinterland. Called by a vision to “ornament the Christian Church with all the glory of Israel,” the Children of Peace rebuilt Solomon's temple as the seat of their New Jerusalem (Schrauwers 1993; 2009). As William Lyon Mackenzie, newspaper editor, mayor of Toronto, and member of the elected assembly for the riding enthused, this three-tiered building was “calculated to inspire the beholder with astonishment; its dimensions—its architecture—its situation—are all so extraordinary” (CA 18 Sept. 1828). The Children of Peace, having fled a cruel and uncaring English pharaoh, viewed themselves as the new Israelites lost in the wilderness of Upper Canada; here they would end sectarianism and rebuild God's kingdom on the principle of charity. It is important to stress both the symbolism and the intended function of this, their second church; the highly symbolic temple was intended solely for their monthly alms sacrifice for the poor “Israelite fashion.” The Charity Fund they collected there was utilized for “the relief of the poor of the contributors, and others” (Sharon Temple n.d.: 11), as well as the support of a shelter for the homeless (Schrauwers 2009: 47). Targeted recipients included victims of a cholera epidemic in Toronto and starving pioneer settlers in the outlying districts (CA 23 Aug. 1832; Constitution 4 May 1837).

Three years after the global financial crisis started academic and popular publications assessing its origins, consequences and wider implications are starting to emerge. The origins of the crisis are generally explained as stemming from the rapid increase in subprime mortgage lending in the United States and the credit default swaps banks and other financial institutions traded amongst themselves based on these loans. As homeowners found it increasingly difficult to make their repayments and housing prices in the United States started to drop, a downward spiral ensued. In this cycle ever-growing numbers of homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, unable to meet interest payments or to re-mortgage, and banks foreclosed on the houses even as their own assets and investments were exposed to the losses stemming from defaulted mortgages. With the foreclosures devaluing house prices further and the exposure of banks making them less willing and able to refinance mortgages, the situation quickly spiraled downwards. The complex global trade in credit default swaps and other derivatives meant that the problems were amplified and spread beyond the United States until ultimately many national governments decided to intervene with financial assistance mainly aimed at the financial institutions.

South Africa's liberation, marked by the first democratic elections of 1994, ushered in an unprecedented expansion of large-scale redistributive arrangements. In the post-apartheid period, the collection of money into a central fund administered anonymously and bureaucratically has gained social and political importance, particularly for poor and lower-middle-class Africans. This is most evident in a rapid expansion of government social assistance—from 1997 to 2006 the number of beneficiaries of social grants increased from three to almost eleven million, and today at least a quarter of South African households receive welfare payments. Social assistance “has been the fastest-growing category of government expenditure since 2001, and now amounts to R70 billion [almost US$7 billion in 2006] a year, about 3.4 percent of gross domestic product.” The centrality of redistribution is clear in current debates over the establishment of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) for all South Africans. Political liberation has also brought an increase in redistribution through development projects such as the National Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) grants.

Not all spirits have retreated to metaphor, even in the very public sphere of U.S. electoral politics. As we learned during the last presidential campaign, Governor Sarah Palin enlisted the help of Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee during his 2005 visit to Alaska to cast out the spirits that hindered her career. The New York Times elaborated, “Ms. Palin has long associations with religious leaders who practice a … brand of Pentecostalism known as ‘spiritual warfare.’ Its adherents believe that demonic forces can colonize specific geographic areas and individuals.… Critics say the goal of the spiritual warfare movement is to create a theocracy” (Goodstein 2008, my emphasis).

History often reveals itself at the margins. Hegemony becomes tangible at its peripheries, claims to legitimacy are most emphatically articulated where challenged, and rules are best observed in their breach. For this reason, historians have long been drawn to the study of border zones where sovereignty was contested or subverted rather than tacitly accepted. This work by historians is complemented by, although rarely integrated with, research in other disciplines—most notably in anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science. Social scientists have been particularly interested in the question of economic organization, of how individuals and groups structure commercial exchanges in conditions of insecure property rights and unreliable recourse to official contract enforcement. Such research is frequently motivated by public policy concerns, especially the complex issue of institution-building in transition economies and so-called crisis states. While generally more circumspect about the prescriptive powers of their discipline, historians will nonetheless recognize that the defining characteristics of a contemporary crisis state—limited authority of a central government, weak institutions, ineffectual bureaucracies, widespread corruption—also apply to most, if not all pre-modern polities. Therefore, the study of actors on the fringes of political and legal regimes holds the potential to produce important theoretical insights into the construction of alternative, private-order institutions that are of significance beyond a particular period, region, or methodology.