SLAVERY AND AFTER Slavery and its after-effects continue to shape our world. The first two articles deal with the making of slavery in a world of free trade, and the remaking of labor and citizenship following emancipation.

Planter, statesman, and economic reformer Francisco Arango y Parreño (1765–1837) was the spokesman for Havana's emergent planter elite and was also among the major architects of Cuba's sugar boom during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1792, in the midst of the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue, Arango, Apoderado General of the Havana ayuntamiento, addressed a series of memorials to the Spanish Crown culminating in Discurso sobre la Agricultura de la Habana y Medios de Fomentarla (Arango 1793a:114–75). These documents at once articulated the interests of the Havana planter class and formulated Arango's program for the transformation of Cuban economic life. Widely regarded as key texts of Cuban history, they provided the theoretical framework for the development of Cuba into the world's leading sugar producer from the 1820s into the twentieth century. At the same time, they express the creation of new zones of slave production as part of the political and economic restructuring of the world economy that I have elsewhere called the “second slavery” (Tomich 1988). An examination of these works thus calls attention to the continual re-formation of slavery and other forms of compulsory labor as part of the historical development of the capitalist world economy and to the ways that highly specific local actions at once shape and are shaped by global processes.

Four important new books, two by established scholars, two by recent Ph.D.s, cast significant new light on a watershed in modern history—the transition from slave to free labor. In different ways, these works all probe how and why the transition occurred, what consequences it had for slaves and postemancipation societies more broadly, and what freedom would come to mean in the modern age. Three of the books focus on the creation of new labor regimes following emancipation in areas of capitalist investment and production far from the centers of the capitalist order. They show how ideas about work and other aspects of culture developed at the center were inscribed onto colonized and other marginal peoples, and how the resistance of such peoples prompted a reformulation of metropolitan thinking about race that justified denying former slaves and many other workers basic rights of citizenship, in the interest of teaching them civilized values. The books reviewed here all illuminate in provocative new ways discourses about work and freedom, race and citizenship, colonialism and nationalism, and gender and domesticity—among the most fundamental problems of the modern era.

A polarization has emerged in the field of colonial studies. On the one hand, many writers describe colonialism as a direct, inexorable product of Orientalist or precolonial racial discourse and pay little attention to “social” phenomena such as capitalism, the state, and social class. Other analysts assume that cultural discourse is the product of supposedly more foundational economic or material factors. Historians in the second group explain colonial policies in terms of imperialist economic and political interests, strategies of resistance and collaboration among the colonized, precolonial social structures in the periphery, or other “quasi-objective” phenomena. Both schools tend to ignore the role of properly psychic processes in the constitution of colonial regimes, although this has been the focus of Homi Bhabha's psychoanalytic interventions in (post)colonial theory (1994). The lack of integration of materialist, culturalist, and psychoanalytic approaches in the colonial literature echoes broader oppositions that structure the human sciences today.The essays in Steinmetz (1999) exemplify some attempts to overcome the artificial separation between culturalism and materialism in studies of the state. Landmark theoretical interventions that reintegrate the social and cultural levels include Bourdieu (1977), Bhaskar (1979), and Laclau and Mouffe (1985). The need for a reintegration of the psychic into social theory has been argued forcefully by Zizek (1989, 1991) and Elliott (2000).

The following lesson on pepper appeared in the third edition of Elizabeth Mayo's Lessons on Objects (1832): “Lesson I. Pepper. Qualities of Pepper. It is hard, vegetable, foreign. It is a tropical production, wrinkled, spherical, rough, black, conservative, dry, dull. It is sapid, pungent, odorous, aromatic, medicinal, wholesome, useful, stimulating.Elizabeth Mayo, Lessons on Objects, as Given to Children Between the Ages of Five and Eight, in a Pestalozzian School, At Cheam,, Surrey, 3d ed. (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1832), 68.

The international campaign to control human fertility has inspired a vast inter-disciplinary literature, but only in recent years has it become a subject for historical study and debate. New archives have opened, especially among the largest donors during its early, heroic phase. And scientists and activists are increasingly willing to be reflexive about their lives' work. Most importantly, with rates of fertility declining in every region of the world, it is now possible to begin to see the end of the story. As the period of unprecedented growth in world population draws to a close, international efforts directed at limiting that growth—as opposed to safeguarding reproductive rights and health—will inexorably pass from the domain of policy to history.This distinction suggests the nature and limits of the term “population control,” which is itself fast becoming a historical artifact. As will be discussed anon, while it now denotes a shrinking subset of the “family planning” agenda, population control can be seen as encompassing the once wide-ranging efforts to shape the quality as well as the quantity of population. On this point see also Dennis Hodgson and Susan Cotts Watkins, “Feminists and Neo-Malthusians: Past and Present Alliances,” Population and Development Review 23 (1997):471. The latest U.N. projections are presented in “World Population Prospects: The 2000 Revision,” http://www.un.org/esa/population/wpp2000.html.

An important part of the by now enormous literature on nationalism has focused on its conditions of possibility, on what we may call the processes of pre-formation that underlay the explosive rise of those “imagined communities” in the modern era. How indeed has modernity (however defined) impacted on the mechanisms by which identities—including national ones—are formed, felt and enacted? This question has frequently been addressed in recent decades, especially as studies of nationalism have broadened their ambit to take in the non-Western world. This expansion has certainly generated major works—most famously, of course, the first edition (1983) of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities which made the stimulating suggestion that print capitalism was a central pre-formative institution for incipient nations.

In Morocco, as in every other developing country, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and Western governments have pushed for liberalization of the financial sector, efficiency and transparency in state management and corporate governance, independent functioning and monitoring of the judicial system, reduction in poverty and illiteracy rates, and greater labor market flexibility—namely less of a ‘work tax' on employers. Uniform and universal in their nature, these policies of market reform in principle fortify the boundaries of a monolithic global economic structure.

The distinction between state and civil society is deeply rooted in both sociology and political theory (Barkey and Parikh 1991:525; Bobbio 1999:115; Habermas 1989:19). Even thinkers who argue that civil society and the state ‘interact' often retain the basic conceptual opposition between the terms. Barkey and Parikh go so far as to characterize recent work on the state as “the state-society literature” (1991:524). Within sociology, however, there is less theoretical discussion of what connects state and society—political society—or the way that interests in civil society are constituted as claims on the state. But as the Sardinian Marxist Antonio Gramsci pointed out in his Prison Notebooks, and the German sociologist Max Weber is his essay on class, status and parties, political society is reducible neither to interests in civil society, nor to the state (Gramsci 1971:138–40; Weber 1946:194; see also Poulantzas 1976: 95; Przeworski 1985:67; Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 1991:1153; Wright 1978: 103, 222).

“What makes a certain people a ‘diaspora?’” and “Where is the homeland?” are principal questions Axel asks in The Nation's Tortured Body. Axel chronicles the formation of Sikh communities and the fight for Khalistan, an autonomous Sikh nation, and questions whether sharp distinctions can be made between diasporas and homelands. In fact, he argues, the limitations of some contemporary scholarship theorizing diasporas has been the tendency to treat the homeland as a point of origin. Such work is flawed, he asserts, because the paradigm in which it operates requires one to reduce the diaspora to that which is inauthentic, a replica. Challenging this logic, Axel inverts the paradigm and asserts that it is through the diaspora that the homeland is constituted. In this regard, he restores a sense of motion to theorizing the circulation of ideas, information, and, yes, bodies between diasporas and homelands. Yet, despite his criticism, Axel firmly insists that there are limitations to questioning the categories diaspora and homeland. In this way, Axel attempts to distance his work from scholars who have argued that homelands and diasporas are “imaginary”—work that he argues has resulted in an odd spatiotemporal duality, wherein the homeland is understood to be a lost relic of a past time, and the diaspora a present configuration—while also disputing the utility of constructing such firm distinctions.

The ways that sexual activity, ideas about race, and the construction of class sensibilities influenced each other are the central concerns of Kirsten Fischer's Suspect Relations. Focusing on the experiences of ordinary people rather than the colonial elite, she uses court records and travel literature to study how the sexual conduct of Native Americans, Anglo-Americans, and African Americans, and public responses to that conduct influenced the construction of race and class consciousness in northeastern North Carolina during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Few, if any, countries in modern history have been as willing as Turkey to adopt Western forms and life-styles without external colonial force. Beginning in the final days of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, and continuing with increasing intensity during the early decades of the Turkish Republic, local elites were committed to importing Western modernity while nationalizing it. In Modernism and Nation Building, Sibel Bozdoğan traces the active role played by state-employed Ottoman and Turkish architects in this process as they literally “built the nation.” By bringing together rich historical and archival resources—from architectural styles of buildings to curricula of architecture schools, and from ceremonial building competitions to popular magazines—the author presents an innovative approach to the social, cultural, and political relevance of architecture, especially in a non-postcolonial nationalist project.

One has to admire Circe Sturm's courage to undertake what is undeniably the most volatile and sensitive issue in American Indian communities today. An anthropologist, Sturm conducted her fieldwork in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, where she solicited tribal members to speak about how identity politics work within the Cherokee Nation. To outsiders, “Cherokee” must seem a simple term, but Sturm shows that it is multitudinously complex. Cherokees whom Sturm talked to or heard others talk about were often categorized under rubrics denoting family heritage or phenotype (“white-Cherokees,” “full-bloods,” “mixed-bloods,” “black freedmen”). But as Sturm learned, these genealogical and racial labels simultaneously serve as metaphors describing how people behave and live.