Revolutions have been studied for many different reasons—some involving the scholarly task of understanding the transformations of societies, and some involving the pragmatic problems of promoting or preventing revolution. However, the contributions to the study of either orientation and of the social sciences as a whole remain quite unimpressive. Analytical talent and availability of information are not in question here. On the contrary, few fields in social science have produced a comparable array of theories and findings. Some practitioners are even asking how the embarrassment of riches can be reduced: a veiled recognition that perhaps something has gone wrong.

Those who view Rome from the perspective of modern empires have been struck by Rome's longevity (for example, Brunt 1965:267; Doyle 1986:81–103; Syme 1958:1). Attempts to explain this phenomenon, however, have given little if any consideration to why movements of national independence have occurred in modern times, but not in Roman antiquity. This is the more striking inasmuch as nationalist rebellions against imperial rule typically accompanied the dissolution of direct imperial control over native populations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Certainly the decisions of modern imperialists to give up their empires have been influenced by political idealism or by calculations of economic self-interest unique to their historical situations (Liithy 1964:34). Nonetheless, the role of their subjects must also be taken into consideration, because it was the initiative of the colonial natives, not that of the imperial masters, that typically has resulted in the first calls for independence and, most often, in the nationalist rebellions that provoked imperialists into dismantling their empires. Idealistic impulses and calculations of economic self-interest alike have taken place within the context of that initiative and cannot help but to have been colored by it. It would be a mistake to identify nationalist sentiment and rebellion as the only reasons for the collapse of modern empires, but they must be included among the decisive reasons.

In two landmark essays published in 1973, the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz offered an early assessment of what he termed “The Fate of Nationalism in the New States,” referring to the newly independent nation-states of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Ranging with characteristic ease and flair across Burma, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, and Nigeria, Geertz argued that an “Integrative Revolution” was under way, but one complicated and compromised by the inherent tension between “essentialism” and “epochalism,” between “Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States.” Geertz argued:

In the spring of 1878 male political prisoners in the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersburg went on hunger strike to protest against the oppressive conditions in which they were held by the tsarist regime. After three days, news of the strike reached the prisoners' families, who appealed for relief to the director of military police, General N. V. Mezentsev. The director dismissed their pleas and reportedly declared of the hunger strikers, “Let them die; I have already ordered coffins for them all.” It was a volatile period of repression and reprisal in the Russian revolutionary movement. The tsarist regime had cracked down on the revolutionary populists, the narodniki, and the era of terrorism had just begun in St. Petersburg that January, when Vera Zasulich shot and seriously wounded the city's governor. The hunger strikers were among a group of 193 revolutionaries who had been recently tried for treason and sentenced to various forms of punishment, including hard labor and imprisonment in Siberia. In these circumstances the news of Mezentsev's response spread quickly beyond the strikers' families, soon reaching a would-be terrorist and former artillery officer, Sergius Kravchinskii. Kravchinskii killed Mezentsev with a dagger on a city street, then fled Russia and made his way to Great Britain, a haven for Russian revolutionaries since Alexander Herzen had arrived in 1852 and established the first Russian revolutionary press abroad. Kravchinskii likewise wrote against the tsarist regime, under the pen name Sergius Stepniak, and in 1890 he became the editor of a new, London-based periodical, Free Russia. Its first number chronicled a dramatic series of hunger strikes led by female revolutionaries imprisoned at Kara in the Trans-Baikál of eastern Siberia. These strikes had culminated in the death of one woman after she was flogged and in five suicides by female and male political prisoners who, after the death of their comrade, had ended their hunger strikes to eat poison. Having been inspired to terror by his sympathy for revolutionary hunger strikers, Stepniak, like other Russian exiles, believed that the hunger strike would win sympathy and support for Russian revolutionaries in Britain.

This article traces the conceptual lineage of a statement, made by Mao Zedong and published in 1975, describing the contemporary economic system in the People's Republic of China as a commodity economy. Any surprise we might feel in the face of this verdict says more about our own narrow understanding of the (capitalist) commodity than it does about the political economy of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). As I detail in this study, the continued existence and necessity of commodities under socialism had long been an important topic of conversation in Communist circles, with important ramifications for economic planning and political movements. This article focuses on the impact of Stalin's theory of the socialist commodity, as articulated in 1952, on Chinese political economy in the 1950s; Mao's particular engagement with Stalin's work in the context of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960); and the emergence of a new, less benign view of the socialist commodity in the 1970s. I argue that political economic theory and its study were in fact critical to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution as mass mobilization campaigns, calling into question much of what we think we know about modern Chinese history and Chinese socialism. The essay is intended to unsettle enduring and uncritical associations between the commodity-form and capitalism. How might we, following on the heels of the theorists I discuss, imagine the commodity otherwise?

It is widely acknowledged that Orientalist notions of political economy were marred by geographic determinism. From Marx to Wittfogel, generic concepts such as the “Asiatic mode of production,” the “hydraulic state” or “Oriental despotism” involved simplistic observations relating to climate and, particularly, the presence of large rivers and alluvial plains which were invoked to explain essential and persistent differences with the West.See R. Inden, “Orientalist Constructions of India,” Modern Asian Studies 20,3 (1986):422–23. Considering its overwhelmingly important role in this earlier literature, it is remarkable that the historical geography of the rivers and riverplains of the Indian Ocean has not yet been explored in any depth. It is perhaps to avoid being stung by charges of determinism that historians of India and the Indian Ocean area in recent decades have, if anything, downplayed the importance of geography. And, as W. A. McDougall has recently argued, it appears as if current thinking in general has become “suspicious of a subject [geography] that emphasizes distinctions among regions, invites unflattering comparisons and hierarchy among nations and cultures, and has been used in the past as an intellectual tool of empire.”W. A. McDougall, “You Can't Argue with Geography,” essay excerpted from a paper commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation as part of the History- Geography Project for publication in the Middle States Yearbook 2001. On the neglect of geography, see also E. W. Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York 1971); E. G. Genovese and L. Hochberg, eds., Geographic Perspectives in History: Essays in Honor of Edward Whiting Fox (Oxford, and Cambridge, Mass. 1989). By and large, what K. N. Chaudhuri observed in 1978 still holds true: “There can be few aspects of Indian studies more neglected than that of historical geography.”K. N. Chaudhuri, “Some Reflections on the Town and the Country in Mughal India,” Modern Asian Studies 12,1 (1978):77. In two later works, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge 1985) and Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge 1990), Chaudhuri made some attempts to remedy this situation, but they are faint. The aim of this essay is to re-introduce a geographic dimension in the history of the Indian Ocean area—one that is not overly deterministic and helps to account not only for continuities but also for changes in social and economic organization over an extended period of time.

In this article I examine gratitude and ingratitude as valuable analytical tools for determining how social inequalities inform kinship practices. Accusing one's kin of ingratitude reveals the edges and fault lines of kinship, as well as closely related expectations about what should be given, how it should be given, and how it should be received. As such, this essay follows in an esteemed anthropological tradition of unifying analyses of the gift and of kinship. It argues that expressions of and talk about gratitude and ingratitude closely index dimensions of social relations such as gender, generation, and social class, and simultaneously reveal tensions within kinship relations where duty and obligation are contested. Ethnographic examples are drawn from fieldwork in Ayacucho, a small city in the Peruvian Andes, where informal fostering and the fraught relations between grown children and their aging parents provide two related arenas for expressions of ideas about gratitude and ingratitude. Analyzing these two examples, I argue for gratitude and ingratitude as analytical heuristics, useful to identify and focus upon dimensions of relations understood to fall within the domain of kinship, and potentially useful in other settings as well.

For much of the last seventy-five years African combatants, especially in wars of their own making, have not been seen as masters of the guns they shoot. In Kenya in the 1950s, for example, captured Mau Mau were humiliated: they were taken to shooting ranges where they failed to hit a target with their guns. More recently, rebels in southern Sudan considered guns poor, if effective substitutes for more embodied weapons like spears, while young men in Sierra Leone fought with the weapons at hand such as knives or machetes, because they were too poor to obtain guns. When the armies of Ethiopia and Eritrea fought well and hard with sophisticated weapons, it was said to be the result of Cold War rivalries or national agendas gone berserk. Rhodesia's bush war, Zimbabweans' liberation struggle, suggests something else, a space shaped by technology and clientelism in which guns, most especially guns in guerrilla hands, exemplify very specific European ideas about Africans, that they are skilled and sophisticated.

“The red, red blood splatters the cities and plains,” cried the national anthem of Democratic Kampuchea. “The blood spills out into great indignation and a resolute urge to fight,” it “liberates us from slavery.” The image in the anthem was not simply symbolic. Upon taking power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and towns of Cambodia, initiating a three-year regime of terror that leveled the country economically, culturally, and physically. In this typhoon of tragedy, nearly two million people died, swept aside in a whirlwind of social upheaval.

With ongoing consequences for American Indians, the New World Indian has been a pervasive figure of constitutive exclusion in modern theories of money, property, and government. This paradoxical exclusion of indigenous peoples from the money/property/government complex is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, modern theories of money. What is more, it haunts the cultural politics of indigenous peoples’ economic actions. In Part I, I establish that, and how, indigeneity has been constitutively present at the foundation of modern theories of money, as Europeans and settlers defined indigenous peoples in part by the absence of money and property (of which money is a special form). In turn, and more to the point here, they defined money and property in part as that which modern non-indigenous people have and use. These are not solely economic matters: the conceptual exclusions from money/property were coproduced with juridical ones insofar as liberal political theory grounded the authority of modern government in private property (and, in turn, in money). To show how this formation of money and indigeneity has mattered both for disciplinary anthropology and for American public culture at several historical moments, Part II traces how the dilemmas expressed by these texts haunt subsequent debates about the function of wampum, the logic of potlatch, and the impact of tribal gaming. Such debates inform scholarship beyond the boundaries of anthropology and, as each case shows in brief, they create harms and benefits for peoples in ways that perpetuate the (il)logics and everyday practices of settler colonialism.

It is generally accepted that declining birth rates in most Western countries after the late 1870s2 were preceded by declining marital fertility among the middle classes. Though some scholars have suggested that the general decline was due partly to the working classes' later emulation of the middleclass family size “ideal,” no hypothesis has been presented to explain satisfactorily the downward trend in middle-class fertility. The most widely accepted explanation is that the “great depression” of 1873–96 lowered the middle-class standard of living, which in turn led to a concomitant decline in the birth rate as middle-class couples tried to retain or improve levels of consumption and status. However, recent research indicates that the great depression may not have been anywhere near as severe as earlier scholars have implied. But even if the middle classes believed that they were experiencing a declining standard of living, surely many years of supposed deprivation would have been necessary to jolt their class psyche to the realization that the future was to remain forever gloomy. And when some authorities who promoted the great depression hypothesis also claim that the middle-class fertility decline commenced in the early 1870s, before the onset of the great depression, then the argument becomes even more suspect. If the work of other authorities, who have received less coverage in demographic literature, is considered, then it is not the great depression but the 1850s and 1860s—the period of mid-Victorian prosperity—that should be supported as heralding the decline in fertility.

One of the most frequently encountered representations of West Papuan people internationally today is a photographic or video image of a Korowai or Kombai treehouse (Figure 1). Circulation of these images first exploded in the mid-1990s. In 1994, an Arts & Entertainment Channel film about Korowai was broadcast in the United States under the title Treehouse People: Cannibal Justice, and in 1996 National Geographic published a photo essay titled “Irian Jaya's People of the Trees.” Korowai and Kombai treehouses have since been depicted in dozens of magazine and newspaper articles and twenty television productions, made by media professionals from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Vietnam, and recently West Papua itself. Some representations have had mass global distribution through programming partnerships and satellite transmission agreements, and international editions of major magazines. Recently, several reality television programs have been produced about white travelers' stays in treehouses with Korowai or Kombai hosts. These include an episode of Tribe broadcast on BBC and Discovery in 2005, the six episodes of Living with the Kombai Tribe shown on Travel Channel and Discovery International in 2007, and an episode of Rendez-Vous En Terre Inconnue televised to much acclaim on France 2 in 2009. Treehouses were widely seen by Australian audiences in 2006 in the Sixty Minutes segment “The Last Cannibals,” and during a subsequent media firestorm that surrounded a rival show's unsuccessful effort to film their anchor accompanying a supposedly endangered Korowai orphan boy to a safer life in town. In 2009, a BBC film crew filmed Korowai house construction for the forthcoming blockbuster series Human Planet, and in 2010 National Geographic began researching a possible second story on Korowai treehouses. In late June and early July 2010, photos of Korowai treehouses were published by newspapers in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Paraguay, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Turkey, Finland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and other countries, to illustrate stories reporting the Indonesian census bureau's announcement that it had counted Korowai thoroughly for the first time (e.g., Andrade 2010; most stories drew their content from Agence France-Presse). In August 2010, production began for a feature-length Indonesian film about physical and romantic travails of Javanese protagonists who sojourn with Korowai in their jungle home; no filming is being carried out in the Korowai area or with Korowai actors, but treehouses figure prominently in the film's early written and visual publicity.

In May 2019 we launched a special exhibition at the Uganda Museum in Kampala titled “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin.” It consisted of 150 images made by government photographers in the 1970s. In this essay we explore how political history has been delimited in the Museum, and how these limitations shaped the exhibition we curated. From the time of its creation, the Museum's disparate and multifarious collections were exhibited as ethnographic specimens, stripped of historical context. Spatially and organizationally, “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin” turned its back on the ethnographic architecture of the Uganda Museum. The transformation of these vivid, evocative, aesthetically appealing photographs into historical evidence of atrocity was intensely discomfiting. We have been obliged to organize the exhibition around categories that did not correspond with the logic of the photographic archive, with the architecture of the Museum, or with the experiences of the people who lived through the 1970s. The exhibition has made history, but not entirely in ways that we chose.

Implicit in the hegemonic “civilizing” discourse of nineteenth-century British imperialism was the assumption that Great Britain was a model to be followed by backward societies. Included in the British characterisics to be emulated was the status of their women. In this article I turn this assumption on its head by arguing that the capital accumulation permitting the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain was furthered not only by primogeniture, as many scholars have correctly argued, but also by a marriage regime in which wives and widows had few rights to property, for husbands were usually sole owners of all marital property and had full testamentary freedom. This arrangement permitted property to concentrate in male hands. In contrast, the marriage system based on Portuguese and Brazilian law was one of full community property, which gave wives veto power in the sale or mortgaging of all real estate and assured widows rights of succession to one-half of the marital property. This system was combined with limited testamentary freedom and equally partible inheritance for both sons and daughters. I argue that, though it was more equitable than the British system, it worked against the accumulation of capital.

To explain causality between ethnic consciousness and indigenous political activism in the Andes, scholars have proposed two perspectives. Some argue that ethnic consciousness was pre-existing; others claim that it was the product of political organizational processes. In this study, I demonstrate that the ethnic consciousness of Ecuadorian indigenous Andeans has been a dialogical work-in-progress that has hinged significantly on the emergence of self-conscious cultural performance. I analyze the trajectory from submission to assertiveness of Ecuadorian indigenous Andeans and compare it with the Peruvian and Bolivian cases, focusing on the ways in which performance and performativity have constructed indigeneity as a social reality. Performance implies a bounded act done by a subject who consciously performs, whereas performativity refers to the construction of the subject by the reiteration of norms. The research investigates three interrelated fields that are crucial in the constitution of indigeneity: the performativity of racial and ethnic hierarchies, the performance of indigenous culture during protest, and the performance of indigenous festivities. Considering that social hierarchies are iteratively constructed and that cultural performance is part and parcel of the political redress of cultural difference, I argue that through cultural performance Ecuadorian and Bolivian indigenous Andeans have been able to undermine the ways in which performativity has constituted them as subaltern subjects. This transformation has not happened in the Peru, where indigenous Andeans still feel that indigeneity is a stigmatized condition.

Planter, statesman, and economic reformer Francisco Arango y Parreño (1765–1837) was the spokesman for Havana's emergent planter elite and was also among the major architects of Cuba's sugar boom during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1792, in the midst of the slave insurrection in Saint Domingue, Arango, Apoderado General of the Havana ayuntamiento, addressed a series of memorials to the Spanish Crown culminating in Discurso sobre la Agricultura de la Habana y Medios de Fomentarla (Arango 1793a:114–75). These documents at once articulated the interests of the Havana planter class and formulated Arango's program for the transformation of Cuban economic life. Widely regarded as key texts of Cuban history, they provided the theoretical framework for the development of Cuba into the world's leading sugar producer from the 1820s into the twentieth century. At the same time, they express the creation of new zones of slave production as part of the political and economic restructuring of the world economy that I have elsewhere called the “second slavery” (Tomich 1988). An examination of these works thus calls attention to the continual re-formation of slavery and other forms of compulsory labor as part of the historical development of the capitalist world economy and to the ways that highly specific local actions at once shape and are shaped by global processes.

The ‘modernizer’ is a special species of the genus ‘innovator’ and one which only in the last century has appeared in large numbers on the human scene. There have, to be sure, been groups and individuals at many moments in world history who would qualify under the definition of the modernizer which I propose to use: ‘one who seeks the transformation of his own society or segments of it in imitation of models drawn from another country or countries’. Those Japanese court officials of the seventh century who tried to remould their country on the model of T'ang China are a case in point, and one could probably find many examples on the fringes of the great empires of the past. But it is only in the last century of Western colonialism and rapid technological change that this has become a world-wide phenomenon. It is also only in the last century that the doctrine of human progress has achieved such implicit world-wide acceptance that the imitated models have been seen not simply as ‘superior’ but also as ‘more advanced’—further ahead, that is, in some imputed scale of linear progressive development. The consciousness of backwardness, the concept of underdevelopment, are relatively new.