At an exhibition in 1992 at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration,” one room among the four devoted to Ming China was called “Lamaist Art.” In the coffee-table book produced for the exhibition, with reproductions and descriptions of over 1,100 of the works displayed, however, not one painting, sculpture, or artifact was described as being of Tibetan origin. In commenting upon one of the Ming paintings, the well-known Asian art historian, Sherman E. Lee, wrote, “The individual [Tang and Song] motifs, however, were woven into a thicket of obsessive design produced for a non-Chinese audience. Here the aesthetic wealth of China was placed at the service of the complicated theology of Tibet.” This complicated theology is named by Lee with the term “Lamaism,” an abstract noun that does not occur in the Tibetan language but which has a long history in the West, a history inextricable from the ideology of exploration and discovery that the National Gallery cautiously sought to celebrate. Lee echoes the nineteenth-century portrayal of Lamaism as something monstrous, a composite of unnatural lineage, devoid of the spirit of original Buddhism (as constructed by European Orientialists). Lamaism was a deformity unique to Tibet, its parentage denied by India (in the voice of British Indologists) and by China (in the voice of the Qing empire), an aberration so unique in fact that it would eventually float free from its Tibetan abode, an abode that would vanish.

Demographers have often lamented their field's reputation as one of “all methods and no theory.” Pushed by advances in computer technology and pulled by the appeal of being the “hardest,” most scientistic of the social sciences, the field has grown ever more sophisticated in mathematical technique. At the same time, theory has languished, becoming increasingly narrow and divorced from the realities of a rapidly changing post-Cold War world (McNicoll 1992). Leading members of the field routinely bemoan this state of affairs, though proposals for remaking the discipline are rarely offered (Preston 1993; Keyfitz 1993).

It is frequently said that, while historians are theoretically naïve, sociologists are insensitive to the particularities of specific historical situations; and that this insensitivity can seriously affect the usefulness of theory. What follows is an attempt to marry the critical insights of sociologists on a central issue, the state, with the sensitivity of historians to the modalities and particularities of the exercise of political and social power in a particular context, seventeenthcentury England. The result, it is hoped, is an account that benefits from the strengths of both.

Recent writing on political development in Africa has shown a marked tendency to de-privilege the state. We might discern three broad, related, reasons for this trend. The first is the deepening political crisis involving what Crawford Young has described as “shrinkage in the competence, credibility and probity of the state.” The second is the growing dissatisfaction among scholars with the narrow analytical focus of state-centered scholarship on state structures and elites. The third is the re-emergence of civil society as an analytical concept (sparked by political crises in Eastern Europe) and a renewed emphasis on market institutions as appropriate arbiters of social provision.Many scholars, despairing of the political and economic decline of African countries and seeking more compelling explanations, have moved the state out of the explanatory spotlight. They have stressed the fragmentation of politics, processes of economic disengagement from the realm of state control, and expanding areas of social life that fall outside of the ambit of state authority. For some, the relationship between the state and civil society has offered a more appealing focus for analysis.2 Society-centered research has even suggested that the state is not (or is no longer) the main organising principle of politics in Africa.

Debates in constitutional conventions in the United States in 1787 and Australia in 1897 reveal similarities and differences that illuminate the process by which nations became increasingly meaningful forms of social organization. Although the tone of these debates tended to be technical and pragmatic, focusing on specific concerns about the machinery of “good government,” convention delegates showed in their assumptions, their omissions, and in the claims and comparisons they repeated, what they were coming to perceive as commonalities. Claims about what identified the new nations were part of the repertoire of debate used by delegates as they addressed their tasks. So the conventions distilled ideas available to political elites about what was taken to be distinctive about and shared by prospective citizens.