Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe's empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers' prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined. Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.” This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.

Revolutions have provoked not only important social changes and bloody civil wars, but a huge literature. There is controversy and confusion on how to integrate seemingly disparate modes of explanation into a coherent analysis: social structure, the decisions and policies of key actors (be they leaders or organized entities like parties and assemblies), and the choices made by ordinary people. Structural theories have proven useful for describing revolutionary situations; choice theories are useful in clarifying the revolutionary process; how to integrate the two to explain revolutionary outcomes remains contentious.

Similar forms of subsistence and social organization have emerged in different parts of the world in response to similar ecological, technological, and demographic factors. For example, moldboard plow agriculture evolved in many places as the result of high population density, availability of large domesticable animals, presence of wet and heavy soils, and such staples as wheat, barley, rye, and buckwheat, which required extensive land preparation and “considerable surface area to produce the food calories necessary to feed a family” (Pryor 1985:732). Wolf long ago (1957) noted that the colonial experience had helped to promote the development of closed, corporate communities in rural societies of Mesoamerica and Indonesia.

In one of the twenty lines it allocates to a description of Hungary, the nearly 300-page edition in 1877 of A Satchel Guide for the Vacation Tourist in Europe summarizes the architectural and aesthetic worth of the country's capital city for sightseeing American visitors by pronouncing that, in Budapest, “the churches and the public buildings are of no particular interest” (Satchel 1877:194). Twenty years later, the 1897 edition of that same guidebook takes a more amiable but scarcely enthusiastic pitch, allowing that “some of the new public buildings are elegant in their way” (Satchel 1897:184). Twenty-seven years later—following a world war, two revolutions, and a foreign military occupation resulting in the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy—the presence of what has remained of Hungary is noted by an increase to eighty-one lines (Satchel 1924). Except for a one-sentence reference to a Danubian steamboat trip downstream from Pressburg (Bratislava, Pozsony), the entire description remains restricted to Budapest. Nearly two generations after the pronouncement of the disparaging opinion above, the 1924 text notices that Budapest's “picture at sunset is one of the most striking in Europe” (Satchel 1924:272) and that “it is not only the most considerable city of Hungary, but is probably to be numbered among the four most beautiful capitals of Europe” (1924:273).

The Kraton religion of 15th century Java is complex, sophisticated and syncretic, and is generally characterised by the name Shiva Buddha, an expression implying a syncretic blending of Shivaism and Buddhism. Within less than two centuries, however, this religion had been displaced from its dominant position, many of its holy books were destroyed, and Java was under the exclusive rule of Muslim kings. A study of this period of transition from one dominant religious tradition to another involves the consideration of many important questions, perhaps the most significant of which is: how much was involved in the change of religion?

When the British first became involved officially in the Malay States in 1874 they were represented there by a very small and oddly assorted group of men quite separate and different from, and only loosely controlled by, the official colonial establishment in the Straits Settlements. By the time of the Japanese occupation this had grown to a group which was very large by normal British colonial standards and had become much more homogeneous, conformed much more closely to general Colonial Office type, and also ruled in the Colony. It is the aim of this paper to trace this development, with an eye to the part played by the M.C.S. (as the Malayan Civil Service was always called) in Malayan history during the early twentieth century. I would myself contend that the corporate role of the M.C.S. was so important that this period of Malayan history, and especially the events of the 1920s and 1930s, cannot be understood without it. But I shall not here have time to explore this role fully, merely to indicate the sphere in which it was important and how it came to be so. The main themes will be the growth in numbers, the emergence of a distinctive esprit de corps, and the efforts, largely successful, to maintain a certain degree of independence–or at any rate internal self-government–which sometimes led it into disputes or open clashes with Whitehall, with the High Commissioner in Singapore, or with the rest of the European community in Malaya itself.

Nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed since the revolution in Cuba. Yet there is little consensus about its accomplishments. Evaluations of the effect of the sociopolitical transformation range from uncritical admiration to passionate criticism. It is surprising that no study has compared developments in postrevolutionary Cuba with developments during the same time period in the rest of Latin America, even though such a comparison would contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which the disruption has altered Cuban prospects for development.

Until fairly recently, grain riots were viewed as spontaneous reactions of the poor to hunger, not worthy of detailed analysis. Over the past twenty years, partially as a result of pioneering studies by George Rudé and Edward Thompson with reference to France and Britain, a considerable body of scholarly writing about these disturbances has appeared. Consistent cross-cultural patterns have emerged from this research. Grain riots were not necessarily a product of hunger, although they were a facet of struggles over the control of food. They have normally taken one of two forms. One was the market riot, where the crowd protested against the price or lack of availability of grain. Such disturbances often commenced with the offer to buy grain at a “just” or “customary” price. If this demand was not met, more drastic action was taken. Sometimes rioters seized grain and sold it to the crowd for a just price, and then turned the receipts over to the owners of the grain. More often grain was strewn about, destroyed, or stolen. The second main form of grain riot was the blockade. In times of shortage, people prevented the export of grain from a town or district because they believed that merchants and landlords should not benefit from scarcity and that such exports would drive up the price locally. Sometimes retributive action accompanied or followed both types of protest, meting out punishment to traders, landlords, or others who were perceived as wrongly profiting from food shortages. Such action usually took the form of wholesale looting. In general, grain rioters avoided serious violence.

When religious institutions engage the secular emotively and publicly, they can foster an affective atmosphere of religiosity, which potentially has motivational power, even for non-believers, because it shapes the sensorium of those who circulate in public space. When individuals appeal to “places animated with prayer” for the transformative energy that resides there through ritualized practices, they reaffirm an affective atmosphere of religiosity. In Orthodox Eastern Europe and elsewhere, a confessional tradition is allied with state borders, further normativizing this affective atmosphere and giving it pronounced political implications. When an affective atmosphere of religiosity inspires practices that are intentionally designed to prompt experiences rendered meaningful in otherworldly terms, over time such performativity can create mimetic instincts that become second nature. This is an essential step to religion becoming an expedient political resource and to the emergence of religious nationalism or a confessional state.

In January 2012, a new derdé (traditional leader) of the Teda in northern Chad was officially appointed. Held in the Tibesti, a remote, notoriously unruly but strategically important part of the Sahara, the investiture ceremony was attended by Teda from throughout the country and neighboring Libya and Niger, as well as by an impressive number of Chadian civil servants and international diplomats. Yet the ceremony itself was short and messy. Similarly, the historical underpinnings of the institution of the derdé and the selection process were unclear, leaving much room for debate. This uncertainty appears to lie at the heart of the institution of the derdé. Far from a resurgence of “traditional authority” to make up for “state failure” or to partake in the restructuring of postcolonial states—as observed elsewhere on the African continent—the investiture ceremony confirmed the decentralized nature of Teda social organization and the absence of even attempted governance, both with regards to the Chadian state and local political institutions. What mattered from a local point of view were not long-term strategies of power and control, but rather the immediate and gloriously wasteful distribution of wealth. Admiring eyes were turned not toward the derdé or the state officials who appointed him, but instead toward high-ranking military officers, well-dressed urban Libyan Teda, and trans-border smugglers, models of rapid but often short-lived success. This provides a counterexample to the current emphasis on governance and power in the analysis of African states and politics.

It is a great tribute to the late Norbert Elias that Hans-Peter Duerr has embarked upon a four-volume critique, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess, of Elias's original two volumes of The Civilizing Process (recently reissued in a single-volume edition). Duerr's volumes may initiate a major intellectual debate and thus lead to the wider recognition of the importance of Elias—whom Duerr himself rates as “perhaps the most influential and stimulating sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century” (Duerr, vol. 3:11).

Space does not permit us to examine here the wealth of empirical detail which Duerr deploys, so we shall concentrate on discussing the main theoretical issues at stake. We cannot help noticing, however, a certain double standard in his handling of evidence. Duerr is a very severe judge of the way that Norbert Elias handles his historical evidence in documenting medieval customs and sensitivities, and his keen eye in this regard is to be applauded. However, whereas every item used by Elias to support his point of view is subjected to extremely rigorous criticism, all the items that can be used to contest Elias's views are accepted at face value.

The colonisation of the tropical lowlands of South America was until fairly recently often portrayed by historians as a straightforward catalogue of genocide, epidemics, and forced catechisation.See, for example, the work of John Hemming: Red Gold (London: Macmillan, 1978), Amazon Frontier (London: Macmillan, 1983), “Indians and the Frontier” in L. Bethell, ed., Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 145–89. In its emphasis on the undeniable fact of the violent subjection of much of Amerindia, this orthodoxy obscured the vital detail of the varieties of historical experience in the Amazon and Orinoco basins and the Guianas, projecting an illusion of uniformity and direction to historical processes which were in fact much more complicated and open-ended.N. Whitehead, “Ethnic Transformation and Historical Discontinuity in Native Amazonia and Guayana, 1500–1900,” L'Homme, 126–8, 13:4 (avril–décembre 1993), 285–305. A particularly good example of the complexity of “conquest” from the Indian perspective in the period immediately prior to the Cabanagem is N. Farage, As Muralhas dos Sertões: Os Povos Indígenas no Rio Branco e a Colonização (Rio: Paz e Terra, 1991). Historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have more recently emphasised the historically contingent nature of ethnic identity and traced out its empirical consequence, the interweaving of identity construction and ethnicity with colonialism, economic expansion and state formation from the sixteenth century onwards.General volumes covering all or most of the tropical lowlands are A. Roosevelt, ed., Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994); E.V. de Castro and M.C. da Cunha, eds., Amazônia: Etnologia e História Indígena (São Paulo: FAPESP, 1993); M.C. da Cunha, ed., História dos Índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras 1992) and G. Urban and J. Sherzer, eds., Nation States and Indians in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). For the Orinoco and Guianas, see chapters by Whitehead and Arvelo-Jímenez and Biord in Roosevelt, Amazonian Indians; Dreyfus, in Castro and da Cunha, Amazonia; and N. Whitehead, Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guayana, 1498–1820 (Dordrecht and Providence: Foris Publications, 1988). Price's trilogy on the Saramaka Maroons of Surinam, First Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), To Slay the Hydra (Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 1983), and Alabi's World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1990) is an example of a similar approach to an Afro-American ethnic formation. As a result, in certain parts of the tropical lowlands—notably the Guianas—it has been possible to produce a much more sophisticated reading of regional history, a “thick description” which can relate the fluidity and specificity of local circumstances to wider historical processes and can thus serve as the basis for a properly comparative mapping of the past.

This article uses an analysis of discussions of the November 1970 Portuguese attack on Guinea as a window into issues that continue to be raised concerning the country's first post-independence regime (1958–1984). We analyze ongoing debates among Guineans regarding the legacy of the former president, Sékou Touré, and whether or not there is a need for truth-telling and/or justice for abuses committed under his rule. One strand of this discussion focuses on legitimate political tactics and another on the politics of ethnicity in contemporary Guinea. The frequent assertion by Guinean interlocutors that “history is stubborn” points to both the perceived power of truth-telling and the ethno-political stakes with which these debates have become imbued. Debates among Guineans often focus on the uses and abuses of “truth and reconciliation” testimony, which for some Guineans is essential to breaking past cycles of violent state repression and for others is a kind of Pandora's box that could fuel not reconciliation but retribution. We show that Guineans are also engaged in a third order of analysis, of the status of “imported” notions of justice, agency, and culpability in an African setting.

The garment industry is a good example of the relative autonomy of academic fields. Two histories of the industry are being written simultaneously but separately. One is a history of women; the other, a history of immigrants. Two types of workers have indeed come to the sweatshops, and each have had distinct reasons for doing so. The nineteenth century saw the shift from tailormade to ready-made garments, from the (hand-held) needle to the sewing machine, from tailors and dressmakers to garment workers, and from more to less skill in the making of clothing. The ready-to-wear revolution was also accompanied by a global shift in the sewing labor force, from men to women and from natives to immigrants. The story is a complicated one, yet one which has most often been told in parallel fashion.

Ethnicity is increasingly central to analysis of war.Michael Brown et al., eds., Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); David Lake and Donald Rothchild, eds., The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Cf. John Mueller, “The Banality of ‘Ethnic War,'” International Security 25, 1 (Summer 2000), pp. 42–70. Whether conceived in essentialist or constructivist terms, ethnicity is often accorded explanatory primacy in accounting for the organization and use of violence in wartime settings, in part due to the utility of processes of othering for group mobilization. Both the political and ideological context of hostilities as well as the motivations of combatants in the actual making of wartime violence are frequently conceptualized in ethnic and racialized terms.Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); John Dower, War Without Mercy (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). In a word, wartime violence is domesticated; it is seen as arising from the identities of, and commitments to, homelands.

It is a basic truism that the past influences the present, but the key questions concern which past and how its impact occurs. In this paper we seek to understand how legacies of the past affect the pathways and experiences of contemporary immigrants. Our specific concern is with the present-day impact of two momentous historical ethno-racial traumas: the Holocaust in Western Europe, and slavery and ensuing legal segregation (“Jim Crow”) in the United States. At first blush, their legacies seem unrelated to immigration today, and these pasts are rarely central to discussions about it. But in fact memories of and institutional responses to the sins of the Nazi genocide, on the one hand, and of slavery and legal racial segregation, on the other, have played a role in shaping public perceptions and policies that affect contemporary immigrants and their children.

Censorship notwithstanding, the final half-century of Spanish rule in the Philippines was a time of efflorescence in colonial print culture. Between the advent of typo-lithography in 1858 and the successive occurrence, in 1896 and 1898, of the Filipino revolution and the Spanish-American War, printing presses operating in Manila and beyond issued thousands of books and periodicals, the first public library, the Muséo-Bibliotéca de Filipinas, opened its doors in 1887, and the importation of books from Europe and America could scarcely keep pace with demand.

When a generation ago G. W. J. Drewes brought to a close his trailblazing study of Javanese millenarian concepts he predicted their decline. As a propaganda device in the arena of modern politics they might perhaps retain some value, he believed, but their inherent strength and uniqueness would gradually diminish. Perhaps Drewes' philological pre-occupation led him to neglect the anthropological dynamics of the messianic currents that he studied in the Javanese religious records. In any event his prediction seemed to assume that the efficacy of the millenarian expectations as propaganda could be independent of the enduring cultural matrix of which these expectations are an inseparable part. Far from losing their inherent vitality the messianic ideas of the Javanese have, as the following pages will argue, remained strong and influential; only the cultural forms by which they are nowadays expressed have changed. In this analysis attention will first be paid to the traditional cosmology of the Javanese as it is reflected in their major cultural motifs. Next the impact of Hindu-Indian, Islamic and Western (both religious and secular) influences on this cosmology will be considered. Finally, the nature of the messianic expectations in the Javanese experience will be described, also in terms of their contemporary manifestations.

Recent concern with the process of modernization has heightened interest in the origins of bureaucracy in societies which have succeeded in modernizing. Relatively little attention, however, has been directed to territorial governing elites as an element of bureaucratic development. In what sense did governors in premodern societies resemble modern bureaucratic officials? Did the resemblances increase as the societies approached the modern period; or (as Marion J. Levy suggests) did the bureaucratic elements tend to degrade in the particularistic environment?