ECONOMIES AND STATES The two strong forces that regulate the modern world are in tension with one another: The nation-state divides the world into a couple hundred units, comparable and different; while the economy integrates the world into a single system of exchange and, in doing so, penetrates and overwhelms national boundaries. Can the nation survive the economy, we wonder? The first pair of essays probe the uneasy relations of economies and states in the last two centuries.

Are democracies more likely to pursue free trade than autocracies? Turn-of-the-last-century liberals believed that democracies were more likely to engage in trade than absolutist monarchies (Doyle 1986:1161; Thomson 1966:462). “The majority consists of bread eaters,” wrote the French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1862: 102–3). The argument according to which democracy is less bellicose than autocracy does sometimes rest on the assumption that democracy is more prone to commercial intercourse than autocracy. For a criticism of this line of argument, see Gowa (1995: 519). The electioneering work of the Anti-Corn Law League in Britain in the 1840s confirmed English radicals' belief that the franchise would mitigate corruption and rent seeking. However, subsequent history falsified these expectations. The simultaneous moves of autocratic France toward free trade and of democratic United States toward protection confounded any simple association between regime type and trade policy. No one has found a straightforward relation between democracy and trade. With one recent exception. Geoffrey Garrett and Peter Lange (1995) argue that democracies are quicker to adjust to changes in their economic environment than autocracies because of the popular constraint. The present essay revisits the liberals' insight.

Our present historical moment is marked by a complex interlocking between processes of globalization and the proliferation of nationalisms. Contemporary processes of globalization have attenuated the institutional capacities of nation-states to regulate their national economies See Harvey (1989), Held (1990, 1995), Hirsch (1995), Sassen (1991, 1996). and challenged the spatial correspondence between nation, state, economy, culture, and people that has long defined the nation-state. See Agnew (1994), Appadurai (1996, 1997), Gupta and Ferguson (1992), Malkii (1992), Robertson (1992). The inherited hyphenization of nation and state, forged during the late-nineteenth century, now appears “less as an icon of conjuncture than an index of disjuncture.” Appadurai (1996:39). The increasing visibility of the strains in the union between nation and state has been matched by a remarkable burst in analyses of nationalism and the nation-state. In particular, the territorial bases of nationhood has emerged as a major theme in studies of nationalism. This essay seeks to extend and broaden this line of enquiry through an analysis of the historical production of a national space and economy in late nineteenth century colonial India. My discussion of the nationalization of conceptions of economy and territory at once engages with and departs from received approaches to national territory.

Elias Canetti, in a brief passage of his Crowds and Power (first published in German in 1960), argued that neither language, nor territory or history are at the heart of what today we would call national identity. What nations can not do without, however, and what has contributed most to turning different individuals into conscious members of a particular nation, is a national “crowd symbol.” Canetti then went on to show that most European nations possessed one such symbol around which a popular feeling of national belonging could be generated and sustained. In the case of England, he maintained, it was the sea that took this function; while for the Germans it was the forest. In France, on the other hand, it was the Revolution that came to play this very role. And in Switzerland—the case Canetti probably knew best from his own experience—it was the mountains (see Canetti 1960:191–203).

Perhaps the most vexing problem in philosophy and social theory concerns the relative importance of material and ideal factors for social action. Karl Marx, for instance, with his notion of base and superstructure and his materialistic interpretation of the dialectic process, made a clean break from the idealism of his Hegelian heritage (McLellan 1977:390; Swingewood 1991:62–63). Nevertheless, idealism proved resilient and later came to inform the thinking of both actor-oriented (that is, phenomenologist, ethnomethodologist, symbolic interactionist) and structure-oriented (that is Functionalist, Structuralist) theorists.

The reasons for the recent and simultaneous appearance, or rise in influence, in much of the world of “fundamentalist” or doctrinally and socially conservative religiopolitical mass movements have been analyzed for individual groups but rarely in a way that compares all the main religions and the regions in which they are strong. Most comparative volumes on fundamentalism are collections, with most authors discussing one area. Exceptions are Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989). Useful collections include the five volumes of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby and published by the University of Chicago Press (Chicago, 1991–95; full reference in note 3); Richard T. Antoun and Mary Elaine Hegland, eds. Religious Resurgence: Contemporary Cases in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987); Lionel Caplan, ed., Studies in Religious Fundamentalism (Albany, SUNY Press, 1987); John Stratton Hawley, ed., Fundamentalism and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Contention, 4:2, 3, and 5:3 (1995, 1996), sections on comparative fundamentalism. Rarer still have been analyses of why such movements have expanded in most areas only since the 1970s, what causes exist in areas where these movements are strong and why they differ from those regions where they are weak or nonexistent, and what, aside from religion, produces different types of movements. Here we will try to see if there are common factors in time and in space that help explain these movements and will look for causes of their similarities and differences. Explanations presented here will stress differences between religious nationalism (or communalism) directed primarily against other religious communities and conservative religious politics directed primarily against internal enemies. Differences between types and levels of preexisting religious beliefs will be examined to suggest why some areas have such movements and others do not. World-wide factors that help to account for the recent rise of religious politics will also be explored.

Was bedeutet die Bewegung? What does this movement mean?

Bringt die Ost mir frohe Kunde? Goethe, cited from “West-östlicher Divan,” on title page of George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (New York: Knopf, 1968). Sansom, of course, was certain that the West did not need to learn anything from the East. Does the East bring me glad tidings?

An analogy comparing Shin Buddhism—the largest, most active, and most liberal of Japan's traditional Buddhist institutions—to Protestant Christianity has existed for a long time, beginning with the sixteenth century Jesuit encounter with Japan. See Galen Amstutz, Interpreting Amida: Orientalism and History in the Study of Pure Land Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). The analogy has always been distinctly limited in scope and in important respects has also always—in the context of all world history—remained primarily confined to the Shin-Christian encounter. Apparently, the kind of evolution of consciousness it indicates is historically rare. Notably, the notion of protestant has never developed into a systematic comparative term even in religious studies. See Amstutz, Interpreting Amida, 180–1.

It has been nearly a decade since Linda Gordon published her influential review of the “new” feminist scholarship on the welfare state. Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in L. Gordon, ed., Women, the State and Welfare (Wisconsin, 1990). In the essay, Gordon traced the contours of the then-blossoming feminist literature on the welfare state and encouraged feminists to move beyond a critique of gender-blind welfare analyses to construct their own, less deterministic historiographies of state formation. In the last ten years, feminists have not only heeded this call but have largely surpassed it, developing a voluminous literature that now addresses gender and the welfare state. Feminist historians have written new origin stories to reveal how female reformers, motivated by both maternalism and professionalism, participated in the building of Western welfare states. For an excellent review of feminist work on maternalism and motherhood, see Lisa Brush, “Love, Toil, and Trouble: Motherhood and Feminist Politics,” Signs (1996), 21:21. For feminist analyses of maternalism and the origins of the welfare state, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (Oxford, 1991); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Harvard, 1992); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, 1995); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (University of Illinois, 1994); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and Origins of Welfare States (Routledge, 1993); Gisella Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (Routledge, 1991); Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in Nineteenth- Century United States (Yale, 1990); and Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945 (Yale, 1993). They have also unearthed the gendered scripts adhered to by male politicians, policy makers, and class-based movements. In addition, feminist social scientists have explicated the re/distributive outcomes of welfare states to illuminate how states allocate resources in gendered and racialized ways. For feminist analyses of the gendered underpinnings of state re/distributive practices, see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minnesota, 1989); Linda Gordon and Nancy Fraser, “Dependency Demystified: Inscriptions of Power in a Keyword of the Welfare State,” Social Politics, 1:14–31; Virginia Sapiro, “The Gender Bias of American Social Policy,” Political Science Quarterly (1986), 101:221–38; Barbara Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workman's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in L. Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Wisconsin, 1990); and L. Bryson, Welfare and the State (Macmillan, 1992). For studies of the racialized undercurrents of state re/distribution, see Gwendolyn Mink, Wages of Motherhood (Cornell, 1994); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford, 1994); and Eileen Boris, “The Racialized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States,” Social Politics, 2:16–80.