A century ago the phrases “darkest Africa” and “the dark continent” were encountered often in European and American literature. The darkness, one would suppose, was in the minds of the writers, signifying their general ignorance of African geography and ethnography. Yet I doubt if many who spoke of darkest Africa thought of it in quite those terms. For most of them, the darkness was in the minds of the Africans themselves; a metaphor for their moral backwardness and for their ignorance of the higher arts of civilization. African darkness thus contrasted with European and American enlighten-ment—and the contrast provided moral justification for Europe's mission civilisatrice.

By examining three historical stages between 1914 and the late 1950s in the development of African political ideology in Francophone West Africa, this essay will explore the problem represented by the category of the colonized.1 This category, first formulated in 1961 by Frantz Fanon, has increasingly been used to revise understandings of African ideologies formed before 1960 in terms of political economy. Indeed, ever since Fanon published his polemical, The Wretched of the Earth (1968), the rage of the colonized has been naturalized in academic literature as the reaction to colonization. Yet in arguing that the rage of the peasants did not characterize the reaction of the “most completely” colonized (the elites and merchants), Fanon acknowledged that rage did not define the position of his elite predecessors. Fanon's work appeared in the twilight of the colonial era not as a dispassionate analysis but as a call to action. He intended to awaken the peasant's rage, which he considered the legitimate and local reaction to colonialism, within the elites, who did not share this attitude towards the colonizer.

Nineteenth-century European colonialism produced a textured and uneven legal terrain rather than homogeneous imperial units. The fragmentation of sovereignty between empires and subordinated states created frontier zones that unsettled the workings of governance. This article views the developing landscape of power in high colonial South Asia from the loosely controlled frontier zone between Hyderabad, a Princely State ruled by sovereign Muslim dynasts titled Nizams, and the Bombay Presidency, part of Britain's Indian Empire, or Raj. I argue that the heterogeneous legal terrain along the border was a useful resource for administrators and subjects. State officials of both Hyderabad and Bombay justified various projects there; subjects of the two states shopped forums in a legal pluralist environment; and populations on either side of the border whose livelihoods and political agendas ran afoul of social pressures or the economic and cultural imperatives of state projects fled there from adversity. I examine cases of alleged cattle rustlers, bandits, and prostitutes and their engagements with police and courts to explore the political challenges and possibilities the frontier offered different groups. Colonial attempts to extend racialized policing practices across the frontier were frequently met by machinations of marginal people trying to avoid imprisonment or extricate themselves from oppressive social structures. Such figures could use the ambiguity of frontier legal authority to their advantage. The picture that emerges is one of a brute and often-arbitrary colonial power offset by alternative malleable sovereignties that resourceful subjects could play against one another.

Lord Cromer, British Consul-General in Egypt and virtual ruler of the country, was fond of arguing that Egypt could never become a homogeneous, unitary nation state, like Britain or France. Because of its location astride the Suez Canal and at the meeting point of Africa and Asia, the country, Cromer believed, would always attract large foreign populations and would be of vital importance to foreign powers. Its institutions must take account of diverse interests and peoples. To be sure Cromer used this vision self-seekingly, denying Egyptian nationalists many of their demands for increased self-government. But he had to heed the foreigners in Egypt, for they had become an influential group in the nineteenth century. A booming economy, peace and political stability, uninterrupted except for the short-lived ‘Urābī revolt (1879–1882), the fashioning of European law courts, called the Mixed Tribunals, administering French law through foreign judges, and then the presence of British troops and administrators from 1882 onwards all conspired to make Egypt seem an attractive Middle Eastern country to British, French, Belgian, Italian, Greek, Armenian, and Syrian immigrants.

The history of the pictorial cartoon is a very recent one in Egypt, dating from the late nineteenth century when the popular press was established. Like many newspapers founded at the time, the 1870s, the cartoon began as an expression of growing feelings of antagonism towards the ruler, in the hands of a few men who formed the intelligentsia of the day. They set about to create and direct a public opinion which was then nonexistent, but which they hoped to mould into an instrument to use against a corrupt and autocratic administration. Very little work, if any at all, has been done on the sociology of the Egyptian cartoon, and I will not here undertake such a monumental task for which I am ill qualified; but within the limits of this article I can give the reader an historical background of the cartoon in Egypt.

The Industrial Revolution transferred both food production and home based manufacture from the family to larger nonkinship corporations. But, contrary to what is said by historians of the family, industrialization has not brought about the demise of ‘home-based’ family labor. Probably the most often cited premise in the study of the Western family is that ‘A fundamental characteristic of the world we have lost was the scene of labour, which was universally supposed to be the home’ (Laslett 1971: 13). Those who study the transition of the family from a peasant type of production to wage-labor production unquestioningly accept this view of post-peasant family labor (for example, see Mendras 1970: 238).

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.

In the course of the inter-war period, a particular empirical model of national social structure emerged in the official census publications of both Britain and the United States. In the postwar period the essential characteristics of this model subsequently became almost second nature for many English-speaking social and policy scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. This “professional model” of social structure took the following form when it was adopted in the United States in the 1930s:

I. Professional

II. Proprietors, Managers, Officials

III. Clerical, Salespersons

IV. Skilled Manual

V. Semi-skilled Manual

VI. Unskilled Manual

The Registrar-General of England and Wales had used the professional model since the 1911 census and has continued its use, with minor variations, to the present day.

Two decades after the abolition of slavery, fear-inducing stereotypes of black men emerged in the U.S. South and Cuba that had not been pervasive before emancipation or in its immediate aftermath. Simultaneously, white antiblack violence reached unprecedented levels with the lynching of more than twenty-five hundred blacks in the U.S. South between 1884 and 1930, and the massacre of several thousand blacks in Cuba in 1912.Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence. An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 48–49; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 19–44; Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share. The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 197, 225. Yet beyond this common trajectory toward racial stereotyping and violence, important differences existed in the ideas of these two former slave societies about the place blacks should occupy in freedom, the kinds of images that were applied to them, and the nature of the violence exercised against them.

Phanariots were an Ottoman Christian elite which, despite structural impediments, imperial ideology, and religious doctrine that would preclude their participation in Ottoman governance, ascended to power in multiple political arenas between the 1660s and 1821. Their rise came about just as the larger imperium was undergoing profound military and political crises precipitated by both internal threats and periodic invasions by the Russian and Habsburg Empires. While some Phanariots were stalwart servants of the sultan, others exacerbated these crises, allying with Russian officials and planning a secessionist uprising that would later unfold into the Greek War of Independence. Their ascendancy, however, is an Ottoman story—a specific outcome of Ottoman responses to the dilemmas of empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The ‘revolution’ from 1944 to 1954 prompted important changes in rural communities in Guatemala. The extension of many government services to rural areas for the first time, the involvement of political parties in village politics, and the growth of a rural labour federation all altered the political, economic, and social organization of rural Guatemala irrevocably. Changes became even more dramatic and more significant after 1950 with the growth of a national peasant league and the passage of a comprehensive agrarian reform law in 1952. Despite its importance, the changes that came to rural Guatemala with the revolution are not well understood and the shape of the‘revolution in the countryside’continues to be debated.

Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese state launched onto a course of development that seemed to resemble the process in early modern Europe that Charles Tilly and others have called state making (Tilly 1975). The phenomenon of an expanding state structure penetrating levels of society untouched before, subordinating, co-opting, or destroying the relatively autonomous authority structures of local communities in a bid to increase its command of local resources, appeared to be repeating itself in late imperial and republican China. The similarities include the impulse toward centralization, bureaucratization, and rationalization; the insatiable drive to increase revenues for both military and civilian purposes; the violent resistance of local communities to this inexorable process of intrusion and extraction; and the formation of alliances between the state and local elites to consolidate their power (Duara 1983).

Many of the blood dyscrasias show more or less distinct inheritability and the familial character offers no new problem. But the racial specificity [of sickle cell anemia] is unique. If found to hold true, this would indicate that the primary basis for the disease must be laid in conditions far removed from any possible accident of the environment…. [W]e must assume that "the disease depends primarily on some fundamental racial peculiarity of the blood forming tissues.

—G. S. Graham (1924)

Because in retrospect we know that fascism never took in the United States, we are likely to overlook aspects of the American experience that nurtured what might well be described as protofascist proclivities: our hardy nativist tradition, from the Know-Nothings to the second Ku Klux Klan, cultivated attitudes that strikingly paralleled many of the characteristics of European fascism during the interwar period. American nativism, one would have been tempted to argue, should have served as a seedbed for the growth of an aggressive American fascism during the crisis of the 1930s. Yet it did no such thing.

The lobbying activities of private groups had an important redistributive influence on national economic policies in both England and France; however, the different organization of government in the two nations gave a particular shape and structure to the redistributive character of national politics. In England, Parliament's role in the legislative process made gaining economic concessions from the government long and difficult. During the eighteenth century, the English government's role was increasingly limited to adjudicating the claims of influential but conflicting groups. In France, by contrast, the government's economic decisions were neither subject to parliamentary scrutiny nor to open public discussion. Whereas the rules of the redistributional game in eighteenth-century England were increasingly public knowledge, the administrative and political process that allowed the French government to pursue its mercantilist programs was private. Furthermore, the rules changed according to ministerial whim. As one historian put it, public law was a forbidden domain, “a mystery reserved to the king and his ministers,” permitting select members of privileged clans, rather than broadly defined interest groups, to enjoy the benefits of government patronage. Although the creation of sophisticated interests and competitive lobbies allowed the English Parliament to provide special favors to particular industries during the eighteenth century, unlike the French executive, neither Parliament nor the English executive had the discretionary authority to distribute monopoly rents to particular ministerial or royal favorites. In England the government's distribution of spoils followed procedures more open to the English political elite as a whole; still, corruption was more pervasive in English public administration than in France, where executive supervision of central government agents was more comprehensive.

During the Cold War, economists utilizing mathematical methods in both the Soviet Union and the United States found they shared a common research project. After the Stalinist years in which they could communicate very little, they found that they had much to learn from each other. Mathematical economics came to bridge the divide between East and West even though the meetings and collaborations between American and Soviet colleagues were fraught with tension and misunderstanding. The Cold War excitement about mathematical economics and the East-West cooperation it allowed, however, dwindled with the end of détente, the global shift in economic science away from mathematical economics, and the end of state socialism in the East Bloc. To understand the rise and fall of this cooperation and convergence, we examine the case of the connection between Tjalling C. Koopmans, a Dutch economist living in the United States as a result of World War II, and Leonid V. Kantorovich, a Russian scientist living in the Soviet Union. These two men jointly won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1975. Their scientific connections reflect the broader experiences of East-West scientific collaboration during the Cold War. At the same time, they offer insights for scholars regarding struggles over scientific research priority and the potential for convergence between capitalism and socialism during the Cold War era.

In the April 1979 issue of CSSH, Karen Leonard has advanced a new explanation for the decline and eventual collapse of the Mughal empire in India. She argues that “indigenous banking firms were indispensable allies of the Mughal state” (p. 152), and that the great nobles and imperial officers “were more than likely to be directly dependent upon these banking firms.” (p. 165) Thus, when in the period 1650–1750 these banking firms began “the redirection of [their] economic and political support” (p. 164) toward nascent regional polities and rulers, including the British East India Company in Bengal, this led to bankruptcy, the ensuing series of political crises and the “downfall of the empire” (p. 152). On first consideration, this theory does offer a plausible means to explain some of the more puzzling aspects of the period of Mughal decline, circa 1690 to 1720. Certainly the faltering, after more than a century of steady increase, of the flow of resources toward the imperial center in the last decade of the seventeenth century, and the inability of the empire to pay its highest ranking cadre of officers, the amirs or nobles, and their followers are manifest. A coterminous erosion of authority, the loss of morale and confidence of badly isolated imperial officers stationed throughout the subcontinent, and the loss of fighting spirit amongst imperial armies bogged down in an interminable war against the Marathas in the Deccan are also well known.

African newspapers published in vernacular languages, particularly papers sponsored by colonial governments, have been understudied. A close reading of their contents and related archival sources provides insights into diverse ways in which the colonized framed and made claims. New kinds of claims were mediated by the government-sponsored vernacular press no less than by nationalists. Just as vernacularism was not nativism, African aspirations that posed no direct challenge to the colonial order did not necessarily entail mimicry. I show also how Europeans who debated a newspaper for Africans in the 1930s Zambia voiced diverse approaches to print culture, addressing a variety of objectives. The newspaper that emerged, Mutende, was replaced by provincial newspapers in the 1950s, and I focus on one of these: the Chinyanja-language Nkhani za kum'mawa, published under African editorship in Eastern Province between 1958 and 1965. Its modes of addressing African publics were neither nationalist nor colonial in any straightforward senses. Its editors and readers deliberated on what it meant to be from the province in an era of labor migration, how African advancement and dependence on Europeans were to be envisaged, and how relationships between women and men should be reconfigured. To hold divergent views on a world in flux, they had to keep something constant, and the order of governance itself remained beyond dispute. But this did not preclude emergent possibilities. The newspaper's columns and letters to the editor reveal claims on novel opportunities and constraints of a sort that mainstream nationalist historiography, with its meta-narrative of anti-colonialism, has rendered invisible.