The spread of manufacture in the European countryside initiated the formation of vital and complex rural laboring groups that defy neat classification. The nature of livelihood in these rural settings furthered an integration of diverse productive involvements rather than the creation of narrow occupational niches. In the course of their labor careers, men and women moved between agrarian and industrial pursuits—weaving linen cloth, spinning silk, raising livestock, digging potatoes, tending vineyards, making bricks, mining coal, casting iron, and forging steel. In this context, livelihood was not merely an individual concern; rather, it was part of a broader household strategy, rooted in a family-based agrarian holding. The maintenance of bonds to peasant agriculture fostered familial solidarity over working-class identity. These laborers saw their destinies in the immediacy of flesh-and-blood relationships among family and kin and not in more abstract social and political identifications.

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?

Most contemporary theories of revolution are derived from the analysis of conflict between social classes in racially homogeneous societies, and they may not be very illuminating when applied to situations of revolutionary struggle between racial groups. This is the problem I discuss in the present paper, and my purpose, in general, is to raise some questions concerning the applicability of theories of class revolution to racial revolution.

We consider here what has happened to one segment of South African capital since the demise of apartheid, of the Indian businessmen of KwaZulu Natal, and especially of its principal port city, Durban. During the long nightmare of apartheid, South Africa's Indians, a small minority constituting only three percent of the national population, suffered many restrictions on their development.

Three years after the global financial crisis started academic and popular publications assessing its origins, consequences and wider implications are starting to emerge. The origins of the crisis are generally explained as stemming from the rapid increase in subprime mortgage lending in the United States and the credit default swaps banks and other financial institutions traded amongst themselves based on these loans. As homeowners found it increasingly difficult to make their repayments and housing prices in the United States started to drop, a downward spiral ensued. In this cycle ever-growing numbers of homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, unable to meet interest payments or to re-mortgage, and banks foreclosed on the houses even as their own assets and investments were exposed to the losses stemming from defaulted mortgages. With the foreclosures devaluing house prices further and the exposure of banks making them less willing and able to refinance mortgages, the situation quickly spiraled downwards. The complex global trade in credit default swaps and other derivatives meant that the problems were amplified and spread beyond the United States until ultimately many national governments decided to intervene with financial assistance mainly aimed at the financial institutions.

Social mobility in traditional China, particularly during the last two dynasties, Ming (1368–1644) and Ch'ing (1644–1911), for which ample data are available, deserves systematic study by both Chinese and Western historians and social scientists. It is remarkable to observe that in a meticulously “regulated” society such as traditional China's, there was probably a greater amount of vertical mobility, both upward and downward, than is usually found in pre-modern and modern societies of the West. What makes this more striking is the fact that it occurred in a society which for twenty-five centuries believed in the inequality of men. For this reason alone the question of social mobility in traditional China should be of more than usual interest to theoretical sociologists with a comparative approach to their subject. Owing to the author's limited knowledge of Western sociology and also because of limitations of space, this article deals mainly with China, although brief comparisons with pre-modern and modern Western societies will be attempted at certain points.

Segismundo's services [as notary at the registry office] had, indeed, been admirably suited to the time and place. … He cheerfully registered all the children that ap-peared before him as having been born in the County of Ilheus, State of Bahia, Brazil. … How could one be bothered with such miserable legal details as the exact place and date of a child's birth when one was living dangerously in the midst of gun fights, armed bandits, and deadly ambushes? What did it matter, really, where the little Brazilian about to be registered was born? … He simply took the word of these friendly immigrants and their witnesses—respectable men whose word was worth more than any legal document—and accepted their gifts. … By that venerable hand, on a certain afternoon many years ago, little Nacib [a Syrian immigrant] was turned into a native-born Brazilian.

My goal in this paper is to revisit a classic text that raises the most contemporary of issues: Marco Polo's stereotyped, highly influential, and highly prejudicial description of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” a text of virtually mythic status and power. Having invoked the category of “myth,” however, in a context where it is not commonly applied, it is useful to indicate how I use this term and why it seems appropriate. To begin, I would reject three widely accepted notions. First, myths are not sacred narratives. Although many myths claim sacred status, in this they misrecognize their own nature, for they are human stories, like any other. They simply make more exaggerated claims to a more elevated kind of authority. Second, myths are not collective narratives or the speech of any group as a whole. Rather, they are stories that are told and retold in countless variants. Often the authorship of these variants is unacknowledged, forgotten, or deliberately hidden, but in its details each variant advances the specific interests of those responsible for its production, revision, and circulation. These anonymous agents and absent authors misrepresent themselves—and those for whom they speak—as the group as a whole. Third, myths are neither false stories, nor true, but simply stories that claim to speak with authority about issues of deep importance. Sometimes these claims succeed and sometimes they fail, and the same story can change its status over time from myth to fable and back again, since such status is a function of reception.

Students of modernization commonly assume that, whatever else from the West may be rejected or modified to fit particular cultural and political preferences, science and technology are essential for any conscious effort to transform a traditional society. Indeed, despite the Western origins of modern science, would-be modernizers in Asia and Africa can reasonably claim that science is now universal. The degree to which it is possessed and practiced in various countries may differ, but in principle the spirit, methodology, and fruits of modern science are cosmopolitan, not bound to any particular culture. They are the legitimate property of all men aspiring to be modern. And from Tokyo to Nairobi all such men have passionately sought to possess them.

There has been an overriding if not always explicit tendency to see Britain as the prototype of industrial revolutions wherever they have appeared. In one sense this tradition is not incorrect. An industrial revolution does require, generally speaking, a common set of basic preconditions and, as it proceeds, does generate a rather common set of general consequences. Nevertheless, the variety of possibilities are, within limits, substantial. As Professor Gerschenkron has reminded us, the very timing of the process of industrialization in one country as related to others is in itself very likely to produce different paths by which industrialization is achieved. This is partly the result of exposure to previous industrializations, the consequence of a “demonstration effect”, and partly the consequence of the changed international economic environment that succeeding economies face as a result of the industrialization that has gone before. Moreover, preexisting social institutions will to some extent modify the path and character of each nation's industrial development.

This paper engages in a microhistory of international law, grounded in the contests surrounding the Muscat Dhows case brought by Great Britain against France in 1905. At the heart of the case was the question of whether the French consul had the right to grant flags and navigation passes to dhows from the southern Omani port of Sur that were suspected of transporting slaves. The case became foundational to studies of the law of the sea, and the ruling is still cited in footnotes in law school textbooks. Buried in the case's proceedings, however, are a series of petitions by the dhow captains that give historians a window into the legal imaginaries of Indian Ocean mariners in an age of empire. Through a close reading of the petitions, I explore how captains located themselves within an imperial legal geography, and appropriated legal technologies—passes and flags—to help them shape the legal possibilities of a changing political and economic seascape. I argue that the claims the captains articulated and the practices they engaged in at sea reveal a maritime legal culture at work, one animated by a long history of encountering regional and global empires at sea. Their documentary practices illuminate how they engaged in and domesticated a body of international law, and illustrate how the regime manifested itself in an ocean that ran thick with legal idioms.

This article proposes a comparative analytical framework to study changes in Islamic law during the post-Mongol period, particularly the rise of the official school of law (or state madhhab). Taking as my case study the Ottoman adoption of a particular branch within the Sunni Hanafi school of law, I suggest that this adoption marks a new chapter in Islamic legal history. In earlier periods, while rulers appointed judges and thus regulated the adjudication procedures, they did not intervene, at least theoretically, in the structure and doctrine of the schools of law, which remained the relatively autonomous realm of the jurists. The Ottoman adoption of the school, by contrast, was not merely an act of state patronage, since the dynasty played an important role in regulating the school's structure and doctrine. To this end, it employed a set of administrative and institutional practices, such as the development of an imperial learned hierarchy with standardized career and training tracks and the appointment of jurisconsults (muftis). Some of these practices were found in other polities across the eastern Islamic lands in the post-Mongol period, but these similarities have not been treated comparatively in modern historiography. They suggest that the Ottoman case was part of a broader legal culture that spanned several polities across the region. This article outlines a framework that will enable historians of Islamic law to treat these similarities in a more coherent manner. The framework raises key issues in the historiography of Islamic law and its nineteenth-century modernization.

On September 14, 1991, when the National Peace Accord was signed in Johannesburg, the cream of South Africa's political elite was there: future President Nelson Mandela, then President F. W. De Klerk, Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, and other luminaries, new and old. But amid the politicians stood a different kind of figure, looking slightly out of place: a chubby, balding, middle-aged businessman named John Hall. Yet to the surprise of no one present, Hall was chosen unanimously to head the National Peace Committee they had just created in a bid to end the political violence blazing across the country. Although this moment was a turning point in South Africa's transition to democracy, it has been almost forgotten. Indeed, despite the acres of print dedicated to democratization in South Africa, commentators have largely ignored a crucial factor in its success: business.

Among French scholars and administrators during the French Protectorate of Morocco (1912–1956), especially prior to World War II, there was both a great belief in, and widespread suspicion of, a group's language as a reliable indicator of its ethnicity. Legend among the Ida ou Zeddout Berber people of southwestern Morocco holds that Captain Ropars, who ran the French Protectorate's Anti-Atlas mountain military post in Igherm from 1949–1954, not only spoke the Tashelhit Berber language, but also ordered the local men to do so under threat of imprisonment. “You're Ishelhin (Tashelhit speakers),” he allegedly told people in this collective memory as recounted to me. “You should speak Tashelhit, not Arabic.” The widespread eighteenth- and nineteenth- century idea of Volkgeist (‘soul of the folk’) that Ropars evoked has become commonplace today. A group's language is often considered to function as what Herder called the “treasury of the thought of an entire people” and “the mirror of its history, its deeds, joys and sorrows” (in Bauman and Briggs 2003: 169–70; see also Lorcin 1999: 44), and even what Abbey Condillac earlier called the “genius of each people” (Steedly 1996: 447). Captain Ropars followed Samuel Johnson's claim that identifying languages was the same as identifying “nations,” and, as Irvine and Gal paraphrase, “a logical first step in comparing, understanding, and ordering [nations'] relations to each other and to Europeans” (2000: 50). Yet, other French Protectorate administrators and scholars saw the link between language and primordial ethnicity as false, since histories of language use may be obscured or simply uninterrogated by a group's members.

The idea that the British colonial administration of Malaya systematically excluded non-Malays from rice cultivation has gained some currency in writings on Malaysian history and has become an important part of a model of colonial exploitation. According to this model, the British administration of Malaya undertook to maximize revenue and to serve the needs of British capital by pursuing a policy of ethnic division of labor, with Chinese working in the mines and Indians on the estates of Malaya and with the indigenous Malay population producing food for the mine and estate workers. Immigrant labor, the argument continues, was denied the opportunity to build an economic base in Malaya in order to keep wages low, while the indigenous Malay population was discouraged from growing export produce (particularly rubber) in order to stimulate rice cultivation, thereby creating a cheap supply of food. This model is attractive but in several particulars it is wrong, and taken as a whole it oversimplifies and seriously distorts the situation in colonial Malaya.

Once it was thought that kinship was the preeminent subject of anthropology, one about which considerable progress was possible. “Kinship” itself was, for some, fairly unproblematic. Thus Radcliffe-Brown (1952: 46) asserted that, “if any society establishes a system of corporations on the basis of kinship … it must necessarily adopt a system of unilineal reckoning of succession,” and Fortes (1959: 209) announced that, “Kinship, being an irreducible factor in social structure has an axiomatic validity.” However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s one leading figure of anthropology after the other declared that there really was no such thing as kinship. “The process of making kinship into a single theoretical entity seems to me no better than the invention of ‘totemism’” (Terray 1969: 135–36; 1972: 140–41). “There is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory” (Needham 1971: 5). “‘Kinship,’ like totemism, the matrilineal complex and matriarchy, is a non-subject since it does not exist in any culture known to man” (Schneider 1972: 59). “The whole notion of ‘a kinship system’ as an isolable structure of sentiments, norms, or categorical distinctions is misleading because it assumes, or seems to assume, that the ordering principles of a society are partitionable into natural kinds only adventitiously connected” (Geertz and Geertz 1975: 156). For various political and intellectual reasons, “kinship” appeared to many to have died out as an area of analytic interest within anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s, despite many indications to the contrary. Now Godelier has made a major effort to revive attention to matters usually bunched under the phrase “kinship,” and, at least as concerns French popular taste, seems largely to have succeeded. For him kinship has not died, but instead transformed itself both in fact and “theoretically.”

Although wage work has been present in the third world for some time, more people in that world are selling more of their labor today than ever before. Anthropologists and other social scientists have dealt with this increase in the amount of wage labor by using a variety of concepts, including urbanization, migration, and proletarianization. Recently, the concept of the peasant-wor-ker has appeared in the literature with greater frequency and a new meaning. This study examines one current use and discusses some of the problems associated with it.

This study examines the conception of nationhood developed by a political movement referred to as Ulusalcılık (nationalism), which emerged at the turn of the century. We focus on ways in which the Ulusalcı movement makes use of nation-building techniques to establish and propagate its own version of Turkish nationhood as one that is primordially secular and patriotic. This is expressed in its opposition to Islamism, Ottomanism, and what it sees as imperialist Western powers. We argue that the most significant technique Ulusalcı nationalists use to rebuild Turkish nationhood is a relocation of the nation's founding moment, from the official Kemalist one marked by the founding of the Republic in 1923 to the War of Independence fought against the European powers between 1919 and 1922. Our premise is that nationhood is ultimately the product of storytelling, and that the politics of nationhood involves the contentious production, dissemination, and negotiation of different stories and their corresponding founding moments. We analyze the story of Turkish nationhood told in the bestselling book Those Crazy Turks, which became the bible of the Ulusalcı movement. We argue that the Ulusalcı narration of Turkish nationhood interpellates a new national subject that is primordially secular, militaristically patriotic, and adamantly anti-Western. These are projected as essential qualities that must, at all cost, be upheld and defended against Islamist, Ottomanist, and Western powers that are conspiring to bring Turkey down.

The expansion of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had brought Europeans, primarily English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, into contact with the lands, peoples and civilizations of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In Asia the effects of the European discoveries had been less far-reaching than had been the case in Africa and the Americas where barter had soon given way to slavery, peaceful proselitization to forced conversion, trade and commerce to extortion and monopolies, and coexistence to armed domination by the European intruders. Whereas in New France, Brazil, and the British colonies agricultural and commerical considerations had predominated, in counterdistinction to Spanish America where the initial emphasis had been militaristic, nevertheless the results of European settlement had been remarkably similar throughout the Americas.

In recent years, eugenics has emerged as a major topic in the history of science. As a mixture of science and policy, as a discipline and social movement, eugenics lies at the interface of biological science and society. The primary feature of “eugenics,” a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883, is the conviction that human traits of character, for good or evil, are genetically transmitted. This so-called science, therefore, seeks to regulate human procreation by encouraging the fecundity of allegedly genetically superior groups in society, while discouraging “defectives” from producing children since they would replicate their deficiencies.