Amidst the disruption of rapid social and economic change in contemporary developing nations, political order has been a fragile commodity. The simultaneous, urgent demands of integrating nations, constructing states, institutionalizing participation, and satisfying revolutionary expectations have overwhelmed most third world regimes, and liberal democratic ones in particular. The dependence of constitutional democracy on moderation, tolerance, and restraint in political behavior has been especially difficult to reconcile with the desperate, consummatory character of politics in nations where public agendas and personal expectations grossly exceed available resources and rewards.

The cartoon had a considerable influence on the political life of Mexico in the period immediately prior to the Revolution. This influence continues in contemporary Mexico, but with a completely different character. This brief essay proposes to examine the causes of this change of attitude in the Mexican cartoon, for its measure reflects the transformation of the country. To do this, let us begin with a summary analysis of the nature of the cartoon in independent Mexico.

The islands of Puerto Rico and Jamaica, which lie roughly at the same latitude and less than 600 miles apart at their nearest points, share a number of remarkable similarities in general physical environment. Strikingly in contrast to the similarities in topography, climate, flora and fauna are the differences in the cultures of the two islands. One of the reasons for this cultural disparity has to do not with the cultures of the colonial powers, but with the persistence of a strong peasantry in one island (Jamaica), and a relatively weak peasantry in the other (Puerto Rico). This difference stems in large part from the individual histories of the two islands, histories predominantly determined by the colonial aims and policies of, in one case, Spain and Great Britain; in the other, Spain and the United States. The present paper purports to treat principally one brief period (1800–1850) during which a sharp divergence in the colonial objectives of the respective controlling powers affected the cultures of Jamaica and Puerto Rico accordingly. It was during this half-century that Puerto Rico repeated a historical experience which Jamaica had undergone nearly 150 years earlier: the development of a sugar plantation economy.

In recent years, discussion of technology in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century colonial world has moved away from earlier insistence on the centrality of imperial agency and the instrumentality of empire's technological “tools” of conquest and exploitation. There has been a broad shift from diffusionist preoccupations with a one-way traffic in “technology transfers” that privileged Euro-American innovation and entrepreneurship, to consideration of the “social life of things” within the colony. This has corresponded with a move away from understanding technology through European representations of machines as the measure of the imperial self and colonized other, to rethinking technology's role in reconfiguring social hierarchies and cultural practices in colonized or semi-colonized non-Western societies. Without ignoring empire's importance in facilitating change or restricting the socio-economic parameters within which innovative technologies might operate, there has been a growing tendency to identify colonialism as a conduit for technological modernity rather than its primary embodiment. The colony is understood as a locally constituted, rather than merely imperially derivative, site for engagement with techno-modernity and its discontents. Scholars now commonly eschew emphasis on the implanting of “big technologies” such as railroads, telegraphs, steamships, modern weaponry, major irrigation works, and electrification systems (capital-intensive, often state-managed technologies that figured proudly in the rhetoric of imperial achievement), in favor of the ways in which these were understood, assimilated, and utilized by local agency. There has also been growing interest in small-scale, “everyday technologies,” from the sewing machine, wristwatch, and radio, to the typewriter, camera, and bicycle. Colonial regimes were unable to monopolize or disinclined to control these, and they passed with relative ease into the work-regimes, recreational activities, social life, and cultural aspirations of colonized and postcolonial populations.

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.

Households everywhere are staging areas for social life: places where individuals sleep, store personal belongings, and refurbish themselves, physically and psychologically, for the day ahead. The fire and simple shelter of the Australian Mardudjara (Tonkinson 1978), the sections within farming compounds of the Ghanaian Tallensi (Fortes 1949a), and the rooms in Manhattan hotels rented by poor, elderly, or mentally disturbed men and women (Sokolovsky et al. 1978) are each examples of this basic aspect of household life. How then should households be compared in order to understand the ways in which ethnographic cases differ?

It has lately become commonplace to suspect that most household and family structures in history were much the same. Under the pugnacious influence of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, historians have grown wary of drawing attention to apparently abnormal household structures, and perhaps weary of reiterating the predominance in northwestern European societies of the simple or nuclear family household. Ireland, however, was not easily squeezed into the Cambridge standard model as generated for preindustrial England. Not only were Irish households before the First World War uncomfortably large, but their bulges appeared in the wrong places. Admittedly these divergences were not great; yet to students following the path of Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball they betokened a more fundamental divergence between the underlying structures of English and Irish families.

Recent scholars of the Middle East have implicitly and suggestively noted similarities between contemporary Muslim activists and sixteenth-century Protestant reformers. A more explicit and rigorous argument comparing Protestantism and contemporary Sunni movements in Egypt can yield insights into both movements.

This paper is concerned with developments in Hinduism in British Guiana. The Hindus of this country are the descendants of immigrants from India who were recruited during the period 1838–1917 to serve as labourers in the sugar plantations. I discuss the effects on religion of changes initiated by immigration.

Urbanization may be viewed as a particular manifestation of social change. As such, it is often defined as a process leading originally distinct social systems to a common destination. As an example, it is supposed to facilitate the universal emergence of a European type of nuclear family. In this perspective, many scholars have been eager to determine the extent to which African patterns of familial behavior lose their traditional specific properties. These researchers have in fact equated the problem of measuring urbanization with the problem of measuring the relative decline and persistence of traditional affiliations. Taking as examples the familial systems of two Ivory Coast peoples, the present paper intends to show some of the limitations of this type of analysis.

“You have given India,” Secretary of State Sir Samuel Hoare once told his officers, “justice such as the East has never known before.” For most Englishmen, having established therule of law” on the Indian subcontinent was probably the proudest achievement of the British raj. They believed that they had substituted legal security for disorder, predictability for uncertainty, and impartiality for whim and nepotism.

In this paper I critically examine the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explore the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examine Turkey's relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I show how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, Turkish and German anti-Semitism, and Turks and Jews are. Bringing together the histories of individual Turkish citizens who were Jewish or Dönme (descendants of Jews) in Nazi Berlin with the history of Jews in Turkey, I argue the categories “Turkish” and “Jewish” were converging identities in the Third Reich. Untangling them was a matter of life and death. I compare the fates of three neighbors in Berlin: Isaak Behar, a Turkish Jew stripped of his citizenship by his own government and condemned to Auschwitz; Fazli Taylan, a Turkish citizen and Dönme, whom the Turkish government exerted great efforts to save; and Eric Auerbach, a German Jew granted refuge in Turkey. I ask what is at stake for Germany and Turkey in remembering the narrative of the very few German Jews saved by Turkey, but in forgetting the fates of the far more numerous Turkish Jews in Nazi-era Berlin. I conclude with a discussion of the political effects today of occluding Turkish Jewishness by failing to remember the relationship between the first Turkish migration to Germany and the Shoah.

Convergence theorists enjoy an almost unique intellectual position: they are supported by both academics and non-academics without really having been subject to a comprehensive analytical examination. Theirs is an hypothesis encompassing many, if not all, spheres of so-ciology, and applicable to the whole of the industrialised world. By implication it also involves the future of all the industrialising nations. It is this very breadth of scope which has denied it the enquiry it deserves.

The object of this article is to explore a familiar paradox of folklore studies: the promotion of powerfully localist readings in the service of an inclusive national entity. In the logic of European nationalism, this might seem an irresolvable paradox. The object of the nation-state is to unify all potentially divergent cultural and social entities within a single framework, so that localist sentiment ceases to represent the threat of political separatism. In some nation-states, the most harmonious symbiosis of localism with nationalism appears in those regions that are stereotypically regarded as culturally and politically marginal and are consequently subjected to the double-edged opprobrium of being both “simple” and yet also corrupted by a vast range of allegedly foreign elements both culturally and “racially.” A study of these tension-laden matters must dodge among several levels in order to go beyond the limitations both of purely local ethnography and of national-level historiography. If the former too easily occludes the effects of larger events on local perceptions, the latter can, and often does, fail to account for the success of nationalist ideologies in securing loyalty unto death even—or perhaps especially?—from populations that are notoriously unwilling to accept state rule in more mundane matters of law and order.

In 1931, the Chinese minister of finance, Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong), reached an agreement with the League of Nations on a Program of Technical Cooperation with China. The program was intended to provide the Nationalist government—the republican government that ruled China from 1927 to 1949—with much-needed technological and financial aid in support of its nation-building effort. As a result, the League sent a number of experts to China. The first group focused mostly on public health, education, water conservation, and transportation (Zhang 1999). In 1933, however, the original agreement was revised and expanded to include economic development, with special emphasis on agriculture. In this context, a new group of League specialists visited China. Among them were three experts in rural cooperative societies: the Briton William Kenneth Hunter Campbell, the Italian Mario Dragoni, and the German Max Brauer.

The contemporary occupation of portering in mountain regions has largely been structured through transcultural contact, contact between two groups historically symbolized by the oppressive dialectic of power relations: master/ servant, “sahib”/“coolie,” trekker/porter, “him who rides”/“him who carries.” The relative position of these groups within the power relations that characterize adventure tourism has altered through time. The oppression exercised by the superordinate group has likely lessened, while the status enjoyed by the subordinate group has likely increased.Here I refer to portering, the carrying of person or baggage for others, specifically as it relates to the adventure travel industry (trekking, mountaineering, and so forth). There are, of course, circumstances in which the lot of the porter has not increased significantly over the past two centuries. A case that springs immediately to mind is the use of forced labour in the construction of a physical infrastructure in the interior of Burma. Nonetheless, these two groups still operate within radically asymmetrical relations of power. Invariably, “the porter” occupies the lower position; “the employer,” the upper. In this essay, I investigate the historical constitution and evolution of these relations in a region of the Karakoram mountain range of what is now northern Pakistan.Many of the insights upon which this essay are based stem from time spent in villages of the upper Braldu valley of Baltistan. These villages, particularly that of Askole, are strategically situated in relation to the adventure tourism industry. Askole, for example, is the last permanently inhabited village on the trail to K2 (8,611 meters). Despite a recent expansion in tourism, many Baltis have long been familiar with the hardships of carrying the baggage of others along mountain trails.

Through the Eastern Alps runs one of the great cultural frontiers of Europe, the zone of contact between the cultural sphere of the Mediterranean and the transalpine cultures to the north. This frontier has shifted back and forth over time, as have the boundaries of language and of various dominant political units. One of the present foci of culture contact in a zone of dispute and discord is the present-day Italian region of Alto Adige or Tiroler Etschland (still called the South Tirol by unreconstructed defenders of the traditional unity of the Tyrol) and the Trentino. Unified in the first part of the 13th century under the Counts of the Tyrol, the region passed into the hands of the Habsburgs in 1363, where it remained until 1918 but for a brief interlude during the Napoleonic period. The Napoleonic occupation divided the region, yielding to Bavaria the largely German-speaking province of Bozen (Bolzano), together with the North Tyrol, while grouping the Romancespeaking portions with Italy. This division became the prototype of later efforts to divorce the Romance Tyrol from the German Tyrol, a division effected again in the provincial separation between Province Bozen and Province Trento after the entire region was yielded by Austria to Italy at the end of World War I. Except for a brief period near the end of World War II (1943 to 1945), when both provinces were grouped as Operationszone Alpenvorland with Gau Tyrol of the Greater German Reich, the region has remained politically part of Italy. It remains also, however, an area of conflict in which Italian political hegemony and cultural influence has been combatted by the German-speaking population, impelled by a desire for greater autonomy or complete separation from the Italian state.

This article seeks to come to terms with the extraordinarily swift demise of the debtors' prison in multiple countries during the nineteenth century. While focusing primarily on the reform debate in England, I argue that the debtors' prison quickly came to be seen as a barbaric aberration within the expanding commercial life of the nineteenth century. By turning to a copious pamphletic literature from the era of its demise, I show how pamphleteers and eye-witnesses described the debtors' prison in the idiom of ritual; it was seen as a dangerous sanctuary that radically inverted all capitalistic economic practices and moral values of the world outside its walls. Reformers claimed that, inside these shrines of debt, citizens were ritually guided and transformed from active members of society into “knaves” or “idlers,” or both. As such, the debtors' prison needed to be eradicated. To do so, reformers mobilized at least three critical discourses, all of which sought to mark the debtors' prison as a zone of barbarism that threatened the civility of the state and its citizenry. By focusing on the debtors' prison as a powerful and transformative ritual zone, the article provides a counterintuitive history of this institution that was so crucial to the regulation of credit and debt relations for centuries. In so doing, the article contributes to a broader literature on the spatiality of debt.

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.