In an age of crumbling empires, when many former colonial territories are becoming politically independent, it may still be instructive to study the processes by which empires and nations have been built up. What political forms have been involved and how have they been modified and developed? The new nations of Africa and Asia now emerging have political structures that bear a generic resemblance to the established democracies and dictatorships of Europe. These forms of organization seem to be a necessary requirement for membership of the United Nations, and are widely held to be essential if there is to be a flexible industrial and commercial economy, centralized administration and widespread literacy. None of the United Nations enjoys an entirely subsistence economy or relies only on communication by word of mouth. They all have courts of law, standing armies and at least the beginnings of a bureaucracy.

British imperial policy during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century was increasingly dominated by men of business and industry who prided themselves upon their clear-headed devotion to sound economic principles. The world in which they lived had no place for maudlin sentimentality. The industrial system which had made Britain the wealthiest and most powerful state in the world must not be trammeled by artificial restrictions nor should its expansion be slowed by uneconomic burdens. Their religion was Material Progress, and its high priests – Cobden, Bright, Merivale, and others – preached that the Empire was an anachronism, an expensive relic of a by-gone day. Few were disposed to sever the bonds between Britain and its colonies; but these colonies must be made to pay their own way.

The student of Aztec “aristocracy” in its colonial period (1519–1810) confronts an historical situation of which the abstract conditions are familiar from other (and often much better known) instances of conquest and long-term adaptation. Romans and Barbarians, Moslems and Christians, Whites and Negroes, and additional examples will immediately suggest themselves. The situation is one wherein a given society, previously independent, suffers subjugation under an external society to the extent that its whole hierarchy of class stratification is subordinated to a new and foreign upper class. The society is demoted as a whole, and whereas for lower classes this entails only a further degradation, for ruling classes the change is absolute, from a dominant to a subordinate rank. Theoretically, at least, one could expect stimulus and response in greatest degree and greatest incidence in the group whose position is most seriously affected.

The characteristics of nobilities vary considerably. However, they share the attribute which permits their identification. This quality is deference; and the nobility in any society are those who are deferred to most in most fields. A community without gradations of rank, formal or informal, is virtually inconceivable. Doubtless, the primitive tribe whose distinctions of rank are limited to specific situations and dissolve with them does not have an identifiable nobility. This, however, is best regarded as part of their lack of specialisation. Once division of labour emerges, so also does a nobility. The variable characteristics can be considered as symbols which indicate that their wielder is to receive deference, and which change with changing circumstances. Such characteristics are, for example, birth, rank and title. In studying the nobility of a community our problem is to identify the conditions which are associated with the various characteristics.

One of the most serious problems facing the post-revolutionary Indonesian political élite has turned out to be the maintenance of mutual understanding between themselves and the mass of the peasant population. The attempt to build up a modern national state out of a plurality of distinct regional cultures has been hampered by the difficulty of communication between people still largely absorbed in those cultures and the metropolitan-based nationalist leadership more oriented to the international patterns of intelligentsia culture common to ruling groups in all the new Bandung countries. On the one hand, the activist white-collar nationalists of the large cities are attempting to construct an integrated Indonesian state along generally western parliamentary lines; on the other, the peasants of the Javanese, Sundanese, Achenese, Buginese, etc. culture areas cling to the patterns of local community organization and belief with which they are intimately familiar.

“Unity and variety” in the Islamic cultural tradition has recently been made the centralizing theme of a number of essays by eminent orientalists in a volume edited by Professor von Grunebaum. Another important recent book by Professor W. C. Smith has a similar theme, though it is more concerned with the contemporary adjustment of Islam to new political and social conditions in a number of Muslim countries. Social scientists, however, as opposed to orientalists, have tended to disregard the unifying aspects of classical Islam and have concentrated upon the particular variety of Islam practiced in a particular place or that practiced by a particular group of people. Perhaps the only social area where both “unity” and “variety” are brought close enough for examination by the social scientist is in the study of the organization, the social and political role, and the ideology of the recognized learned man of Islam: the alim, mullah, akhund, or kijaji.