This article focuses on the jurisdictional conflicts that emerged at the juncture of the transplanted legalities that followed the Caucasian expulsion in the 1850s and 1860s, the proclamation of the proto-constitution known as the Ottoman Reform Edict of 1856, and the internationally enforced ban on trading in African slaves in 1857. Starting with the Caucasian expulsion, it traces how legal practices were carried over with Caucasian refugees to the Ottoman domains and how the judicial management of slavery-related conflicts determined not only the limits of slavery, but also how such liberal “fictions” as freedom or equality before the law were vernacularized by local agents in the Ottoman Empire. Navigating within a set of what were labeled as freedom suits (hürriyet davaları), I examine how enslaved refugees built their claims in relation to different legal terrains, problems, and concepts. I argue that while Caucasian-Ottoman slavery was economically marginal, it nonetheless posed serious challenges to the new political order the Ottomans aspired to establish, and the abolition that never came continued to bend categories of ethnicity, race, and gender in the decades after expulsion.

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.

In March 1534, the residents of Cuzco, the capital and sacred centre of the Inca empire, witnessed the last ceremony of royal inauguration and triumph to be celebrated in their city by an Inca ruler, Manco Inca Yupanqui.Pedro Sancho, An account of the Conquest of Peru (tr. P. A. Means, New York 1917), chapter 12, 111; Diego de Esquivel y Navía, Noticias cronólogicas de la gran ciudad del Cuzco (Lima 1980), vol. 1, 83. The author of this work belonged to a family of Cuzco notables, on whom see Bernard Lavallé, Le Marquis et le Marchand. Les luttes de pouvoir au Cuzco (1700–1730), Paris (1987). Eight months earlier, in July 1533, the Spanish invaders of the Inca empire, led by Francisco Pizarro, had executed Manco's brother, the Inca Atahuallpa. Shortly thereafter, they named Manco as the next ruler, while at the same time occupying the capital. Although, therefore, the victory being celebrated had been won under Spanish tutelage, some part of the traditional ceremonial was performed on this occasion, and affords a glimpse of the functioning of Cuzco as an imperial capital, of political relationships among the Inca elite, and of the vision of the past that gave meaning to these relationships.

Slash-and-burn cultivation—the practice of clearing temporary fields in forests by chopping and firing the natural vegetation, planting crops for a brief time, and then allowing these fields to revert to forest—is a well-known type of agriculture in the world's tropical environments. Anthropologists, agronomists, and geographers have demonstrated that slash-and-burn cultivation, once regarded as a primitive and wasteful practice, can be an efficient adaptation to tropical forests, where the soils are highly leached, and the bulk of the nutrients available is locked up in the forest vegetation in a nearly closed cycle. By clearing and burning the forest vegetation in a field, slashand-burn cultivators release nutrients accumulated during many years of forest growth in order to fertilize a few years of cultivated crops. When the crop yield in such a field begins to decline, the cultivators abandon it to natural long-term fallow, allowing it to return to forest. The continued success of slash-and-burn cultivation depends on maintaining a high ratio of fallow land to cultivated land to allow for the gradual restoration of forests and nutrients.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in Tamilnadu state became India's centerpiece in the export of cotton knitted garments. Between 1986 and 1997, Tiruppur's export earnings skyrocketed from $25 million to $636 million, the number of garments exported increased more than nine-fold, and Tiruppur shifted from basic T-shirts to diversified multi-product exports of fashion garments. This industrial boom has been organized through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of the Gounder caste from modest agrarian and working-class origins. In effect the whole town works like a decentralized factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant-worker origins at the helm. What is more, these self-made men hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to ‘toil’: the word ulaippu is distinct from the conventional Tamil word for work. How did Gounder peasant-workers remake the dynamics of work through their toil, to make Tiruppur a powerhouse of global production?

It has been long pointed out that the destinies of the various sections of mankind began to be interrelated long before the twentieth century, with its global wars and cold wars; or even the nineteenth century, the century of European world hegemony. Here we will study certain of the historical ways in which these destinies were intertwined; in this way we may distinguish more valid modes of tracing large-scale history and of comparing the societies involved in it, from a number of popular but unsound modes of trying to do so. I shall speak mostly of the ages before modern times, noting only briefly at the end of the paper certain crucial ways in which modern interrelations among human societies have been different from earlier ones.

Disembedded capitals are urban sites founded de novo and designed to supplant existing patterns of authority and administration. While a controversial topic in New World archaeology, there is ample evidence from ancient Western Asia and Egypt to demonstrate that disembedded capitals were a well-understood and frequently used option in developed state systems. Ethnohistoric examples from Egypt and Mesopotamia are presented to show the common organizational, ideological, and ecological features of disembedded capitals, and their varying historical and imperial contexts. Disembedded capitals were typically founded by new elites, either usurpers or reformers, as part of innovations designed to simultaneously undercut competing factions and create new pattterns of allegiance and authority. But while intended to break away from existing power relationships, in order to function disembedded capitals were necessarily reembedded back into those structures, In an evolutionary sense disembedded capitals were short-lived phenomena which tended to create long-term societal problems.

“Mining is no ethnographic playground,” Chris Ballard and Glenn Banks warned in their 2003 review of the anthropology of mining. The deep conflicts that characterize the industry find echoes in “a parallel war of sorts …waged within the discipline about the nature and scope of appropriate forms of engagement” (p. 289). This review essay examines how authors of recent ethnographic studies of large-scale, capital-intensive mining projects in Papua New Guinea, South Africa, and the United States have politically positioned themselves as researchers, and the insights into mining companies that derive from these situated perspectives.

In 1639 Manuel Bautista Pérez, along with ten others, were executed by order of the Spanish Inquisition's Lima office for secretly following Jewish beliefs.The classic study of the Inquisition in the viceroyalty of Peru is José Toribio Medina's Historia del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima, 2 vols. (Santiago, 1956). For a summary of the auto-de-fe where Manuel Bautista Pérez was executed, see vol. 2, 45–146. More recent studies of the Inquisition in Peru include Paulino Castañeda Delgado and Pilar Hernández Aparicio, La Inquisición de Lima, (Madrid, 1989); Gabriela Ramos, “La privatización del poder: Inquisición y sociedad colonial en el Perú,” in H. Urbano, ed. Violencia y Poder en los Andes, (Lima, 1991), 75–92; Idem, Gabriella Ramos, “La fortuna del inquisidor: Inquisición y poder en el Perú (1594–1611),” Cuadernos para la historia de la evangelización en América Latina, (1989), n. 4, 89–122. See especially Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “Recent Works on the Inquisition and Peruvian Colonial Society, 1570–1820,” Latin American Research Review 31:2 (1996), 43–63, for a current and comprehensive bibliography.Analyses centered on Peru's New Christian population include Boleslao Lewin, El Santo Oficio en América 1950; Alfonso Quiroz, “La expropiación inquisitorial de cristianos nuevos portugueses en Los Reyes, Cartagena y México (1635–1649),” Histórica 10 (1986), 237–303; and Gonzalo de Reparaz, Os Portugueses no Vice-Reinado do Peru: Seculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon, 1976). Lewin describes the Inquisitorial processes against New Christians with a focus on anti-Semitism; Reparaz presents information from various sources about the Portuguese in Peru; Quiroz relates the indictment of New Christians to the Inquisitors' need to acquire funds to support their operation. In prison for over five years, Pérez was under considerable pressure to confess to “Judaising”: had he admitted to being a crypto-Jew and repented, his life would probably have been spared. Yet he refused. As a result of Pérez's “obstinacy,” so the Inquisitors declared, he was condemned to die.

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, it has been difficult for anthropology to avoid the fact that its own discourse is ever entangled in a whole Western archive. What became clear, of course, was that the categories through which anthropology constructs descriptions and analyses of the social discourses and practices of non-Western peoples are themselves participants in a network of relations of knowledge and power. Interestingly enough, however, whereas the general import of this Foucauldian thesis has now been quickly assimilated, its challenge has hardly been taken up in terms of tracing out the lines of formation of specific anthropological, or, let us say, anthropologized, concepts.

As the French conquered Muslim lands in their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century quest for empire, they encountered multiple and sometimes mixed judicial systems among the native populations. In many places, legal codes were shaped by either fiqh, meaning Islamic law, one component of which is customary law, or by non-Islamic custom, or some combination of the two. To administer native justice in French colonies and protectorates, officials sorted through this multiplicity in order to standardize procedures, principles, and punishments. The standardization of customary law codes, whether written or oral prior to submission to the makhzan (the central Moroccan government, lit. “storehouse”) under the Protectorate, required that French officials both maintain pre-contact codes and create new institutions to administer and monitor them. Through new judicial bureaucracies, the French transformed indigenous law. Customary law was a “residual category” in the sense that it consisted of what remained after colonial powers ferreted out what they considered morally offensive and politically objectionable. Legal codification involved what Vincent calls “a compromise between those recognized as leading elements in indigenous societies and the colonial administrators who co-opted them.” Yet customary law, “if understood as allowing local people to do their own cultural ‘thing,’ should also be understood to have been a carefully restricted fragment of ‘tradition.’” This tradition when manifest as customary law “implies that there is a different kind of law with which it can be contrasted,” making customary law “the ongoing product of encounters between subordinate local political entities and dominant overarching ones.” In such encounters the distinction made between custom and law has long preoccupied legal historians, as well as anthropologists, colonial administrators, and importantly, lay people. Throughout French African colonies and protectorates, this distinction was key to the French usurpation of social institutions, as was true in British overseas territories as well.

The apparent mobilizing power of ethnic sentiment in recent African history has been the subject of vigorous debate. Studies that emphasize the centrality of colonialism and the instrumental use of ethnicity have been criticized by a scholarship arguing that the affective power of ethnicity is culturally rooted through longstanding experience and practice, and that both manipulation and invention are constrained by this. This paper contributes to that debate through a discussion of the history of the Mijikenda, one of the “super-tribes” of modern Kenyan politics. It suggests that there were indeed “limits to invention,” but that there was nonetheless substantial entrepreneurship and creativity in the politics of Mijikenda identity. This drew heavily on the productive, discursive tension between tradition and modernity that lay at the heart of colonialism and was drawn into vigorous debates over legitimacy and representation in the “critical juncture” of the final years of colonial rule.

Extant South Asian histories of race, and more specifically biometrics, focus almost exclusively upon the colonial era and especially the nineteenth century. Yet an increasing number of ethnographic accounts observe that Indian scientists have enthusiastically embraced the resurgent raciology engendered by genomic research into human variation. What is sorely lacking is a historical account of how raciology fared in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, roughly the period between the decline of craniometry and the rise of genomics. It is this history that I explore in this article. I argue that anthropometry, far from being a purely colonial science, was adopted by Indian nationalists quite early on. Various distinctive shades of biometric nationalism publicly competed from the 1920s onward. To counter any sense that biometric nationalism was teleologically inevitable, I contrast it with a radical alternative called “craftology” that emerged on the margins of formal academia amongst scholars practicing what I call “vernacular anthropology.” Craftology and biometric nationalism continued to compete, contrast, and selectively entangle with each other until almost the end of the twentieth century.

In Latin America missions have traditionally played a large role in conquering and incorporating native populations into dominant society. Most studies of the missionary enterprise have focused on the colonial period, when the missions reached their high point. The Jesuit missions in Paraguay and the Franciscan missions of central and northern Mexico, for example, ruled over vast territories and thousands of Indians. Although these institutions and their leaders have been widely studied because of their importance and visibility for colonial Latin America, it is not often recognized that missions continued to play a crucial role in the frontier development of the region even after the Spanish and Portuguese had been driven from the continent. Throughout the republican period, missionaries from many orders and creeds became critically important actors who, to a large degree, determined the shape of relations between native peoples and national society. This is quite clear even today in the Amazon basin, where missionaries often provide the natives' first exposure to Europeanized society.

Problems of periodization have received but limited attention in Burmese historiography. Precolonial, that is to say, pre-nineteenth-century history, is said to be of a piece, without significant institutional or social transformations. Dynasties and rulers changed, of course, sometimes with stunning rapidity; but it is always assumed that these oscillations occurred within a static framework. Lamenting the failure of the early Kon-baung kings to move their capital to the coast, G. E. Harvey, whose history remains the standard work on the precolonial era, observes, “Their ideas remained in the nineteenth century what they had been in the ninth. To build pagodas, to collect daughters from tributary chiefs, to sally forth on slave raids, to make wars for white elephants—these conceptions had had their day, and a monarchy which failed to get beyond them was doomed.” In the same vein, it has recently been argued that no “significant transformations” occurred between the origins and collapse of monarchical Burma. The entire precolonial royal era “should be viewed as one entity,” for from the mid-ninth to the late nineteenth century “the major features of [Burma's] political, economic, social, administrative, and religious systems were also virtually identical.”

This essay highlights the role of thousands of nineteenth-century Alexandrian residents with multiple extraterritorial legal identities. The manner with which extraterritoriality was practiced in Egypt effectively gave Western consulates legal jurisdiction not only over their citizens but also over all those able, through whatever means, to acquire protégé status. Many Alexandrians acquired legal protection from multiple consulates, shifting their legal identities in order to maximize their immediate social and economic interests. These legal realities present historians with the dilemma of how to account for and “classify” this highly flexible and syncretic society. I strive to answer this question through the use of a borderland lens. Realizing that the heart of Egypt's borderland society was legal has led me to consider the concept of “jurisdictional borderland” as a productive method for examining the complexity of Egypt's nineteenth-century heterogeneous population. I define a jurisdictional borderland as a significant contact zone where there are multiple, often competing legal authorities and where some level of jurisdictional ambiguity exists. Jurisdictional borderlanders have their own unique and independent agenda that often conflicts with many of the competing “national” or imperial positions. Without an allegiance to any single government—be it Egyptian, Ottoman, or Western—and living in a peripheral environment with multiple, separate, and often competing “national” institutions, these borderlanders thrived in the jurisdictional spaces created in between multiple authorities. I conclude by suggesting how a jurisdictional borderland lens is useful for globally investigating other colonial and precolonial cities, many of which had similar extraterritorial legal systems.

In 1606, Bernardo José de Aldrete,Sometimes spelled “Alderete;” b.1560 Malaga, d.1641 Cordoba. (See Mondéjar Cumpián 1974 for discussion of the confusion over these dates and places.) Spanish cleric and humanist antiquarian, published the first history of the Spanish language, On the origin and beginnings of the Castilian language or Romance, which is used in Spain today.Henceforth “Origin.” Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.Aldrete argued that Castilian—also known at the time as Romance and now commonly known as Spanish—had been derived from Latin over centuries of use, with the Visigoths playing a key role in creating the linguistic change.Throughout this paper, “Castilian” and “Spanish” will be used interchangeably to refer to the language in question.

Since Fiji's independence in 1970, a chiefly establishment drawn largely from the eastern regions of the island group has dominated the government there and, through the Alliance Party, has managed, in one way or another, to retain power in successive electoral contests until its outright defeat in the general elections of April 1987. The new government comprised a coalition of the National Federation Party (NFP), supported largely by the Fiji Indian community, and the Fiji Labour Party, which was essentially multiracial. Before the elections, Dr. Timoci Bavadra, the Labour leader, had been chosen to head the coalition. An indigenous Fijian “commoner” from the western region of Fiji, Bavadra's victory in April 1987 represented a break in a long history of eastern chiefly political predominance established and consolidated under colonial rule, and carried forward into the modern context of post-independence politics.

For Catholic missionaries in the early twentieth century, the only way to achieve true conversion of Timorese ancestral ritualists was the deliberate destruction of sacred lulik houses. Although Timorese allegedly participated enthusiastically in this destruction, lulik (a term commonly translated as sacred, proscribed, holy, or taboo) remains a key part of ritual practice today. This article offers a dynamic historical analysis of what may be described as a particular form of Southeast Asian animism, examining how people's relationships with sacred powers have changed in interaction with Catholic missionaries. It links the inherent ambivalence of endogenous occult powers to religious and historical transformations, teasing out the unintended consequences of the missionaries' attempts to eradicate and demonize lulik. Comparing historical and ethnographic data from the center of East Timor, it argues that, contrary to the missionaries' intentions, the cycles of destruction, withdrawal, and return that characterized mission history ended up strengthening lulik. Inspired by anthropological studies of “taboo” and “otherness,” especially the work of Mary Douglas and Valerio Valeri, this article makes visible the transformation of the sacred in relation to outside agents: when relations with foreign powers were productive, the positive sides of lulik as a source of wealth and authority were brought out; yet when outsiders posed a threat, the dangerous and threatening aspects of lulik were accentuated. This analysis allows us to highlight the relational dimensions of sacred powers and their relation to ongoing social transformations.