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.

Irrigation systems were the first source of great abundance that stemmed from the Agricultural Revolution. They were also humanity's first great environmental curse. Long before issues of global warming and freshwater shortages haunted the modern world, irrigation systems blessed and bedeviled humans with their promise and peril. While a well-ordered functional irrigation system provided inhabitants with seed-to-yield ratios that were the envy of any dry-farming regime, these same irrigation systems could collapse in toto, bringing disaster on a scale never seen in rain-fed agricultural systems.

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.

This article uses the death and burial of one of the most important political leaders in twentieth-century Africa, and Nigeria's first and only ceremonial president, Rt. Hon. (Dr.) Nnamdi Azikiwe, to reflect on how and why the deaths and burials of significant persons in Africa represent occasions for the (re)production and management of cultural crises. It argues that the extant literature on the death of consequential persons in Africa either understates or overlooks the generalizability of the “essential contestability” of the material and immaterial relations of the past, present, and future provoked by such deaths. This is particularly visible when these relations are disturbed or challenged by the absence of the person and the process of their burial or reburial.

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.

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.

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.

During the last nine years, while Western feminists were directing critical attention to what they described as “the curious courtship,” the “unhappy marriage,” and the “uneasy hyphen between marxism-feminism,” Western students of Middle Eastern women were pushing the field toward a serious consideration and adoption of Marxian social and economic theories. In two very important articles, Nikki Keddie and Judith Tucker argued that the field can expand its understanding of the different worlds of women by studying their roles in production and social reproduction. This new materialist approach promised to overcome what both said was a serious idealist bias in the literature that derived the status of Middle Eastern women from the major Muslim religious and legal texts and/or relied on the culturally biased Western/Orientalist conceptions of these women.

As most tell the story, the mysterious and fearful twilight of Sukarno's Indonesia began in Jakarta sometime after sundown on the last day of September 1965. That night and in the early hours of October 1, a group led by leftist, middle-ranking military officers calling themselves the September Thirtieth Movement kidnapped and killed six generals in an attempted putsch. In its radio broadcasts the following morning, the movement announced its loyalty to President Sukarno and claimed that it had acted in order to thwart a coup planned by a ‘Council of Generals.’ In the year leading up to the putsch, the president's hold on power had been strained by the increasing polarization between the army and disaffected Muslims on the one hand, and Sukarno and the PKI—the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Kommunis Indonesia)— on the other. Sukarno's ill health, factionalism within military ranks, and the shadow of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) only added to the anxiety and uncertainty. It is unclear whether this Council of Generals had anything more than a phantom existence. What is clear is that the head of the strategic reserve command in Jakarta, Major General Soeharto, was quick to manipulate the situation and bring the movement to a halt within hours. In an evening radio broadcast on October 1, Soeharto described the putsch as a counter-revolutionary movement and told listeners that the army and police under his leadership had regained control.

What is the experience of a racial subaltern on becoming an employee of a postcolonial state? Latin America has undertaken widespread multicultural state reform, often in response to pressure from nation-wide social movements and transnational human rights activism. This provides us with a window into ways in which subaltern individuals negotiate their place in a historically exclusionary state with norms of whiteness, European codes, and literal and metaphoric distance from marginal populations. Previous research has emphasized the cooptation of subaltern actors by neoliberal postcolonial states, but we argue that a close reading of subaltern accounts yields important insights into their experiences of ambivalence, ambiguity, and agency. Neoliberal state restructuring entrained a parallel, and in many cases interconnected process that generated ambivalence among civil servants. We draw on interviews with state employees associated with multicultural educational reforms in Chile to document the registers through which indigenous subalterns position themselves regarding the politics of interculturalism and the costs of serving the state.

This article explores the social and political context of the Ottoman Armenian massacres during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II focusing on the empire's tax regime. Although important research has been done on the massacres of 1894–1897, little has been written on the role the tax regime and collection practices played in preparing the context for increased state and communal violence in the “six provinces” (vilayat-ı sitte)—Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Mamretülaziz, Sivas, and Diyarbekir—where the great majority of Ottoman Armenians lived. Political and social historians have paid little attention to the Ottoman state's administrative practices in Eastern Anatolia, particularly its tax collection practices, as part of the larger context of the “Armenian Question.” Perhaps Ottoman economic and financial historians have been reluctant to consider tax collection as politics. In any case, key linkages between the tax regime and the social and political catastrophe it helped to create have been missed. In this paper I establish a bridge between social and political history and fiscal history. I analyze tax collection as everyday politics to offer a new window into the political disturbances in the empire's six provinces populated mostly by Armenians and Kurds. The study of the Ottoman tax system as an instance of state administrative practices at the quotidian level, rather than as merely a legal and institutional apparatus, illuminates the complicated realities of the late Ottoman state and society, and the “Armenian Question.”

Present-day political systems in the nation states of Southeast Asia can be classified in accordance with various criteria; they can, for example, be politically grouped on a spectrum ranging from parliamentary democracy to totalitarian dictatorship. The focus of the present inquiry is the sociology of political elites rather than the forms of polity which these elites have created or helped to create. It deals exclusively with the ruling “national” elites, leaving out of consideration secondary groups, such as territorially- or ethnicallybased local and regional elites, religious leaders, and other traditional elites. Two kinds of “national” elite can be discerned in contemporary Southeast Asia, which we shall call “intelligentsia elites” and “modernizing traditional elites”. Disregarding for the time being the constitutional frameworks and the degree of popular participation of each individual state, it may be said that both elites are in many respects oligarchies.

The decline of Iberia in the sixteenth century shook the foundations of world trade and politics, undermining Spain's Asian and American trade monopolies and creating the international opening that spurred other European states and merchants in the contest for overseas markets. After the waves had subsided in the seventeenth century, the world system had been reconfigured. The United Provinces of the Netherlands had become the first truly global commercial power—the first hegemon. The rise of the Netherlands to the position of world hegemony is at first glance startling. The seven provinces had a relatively small population (some 1.5 million inhabitants in 1600, compared to 10 million in Spain and Portugal, and 16 to 20 million in neighboring France), and had formed part of the Low Countries, an uneasily aggregated group of seigneuries, cities, and provinces under Spanish rule until the 1570s.

This paper has two aims. The first is to remark about a book: E. C. Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society; the second is to restate, with particular reference to Southern Italy, some common principles of social organization and structure. The success of Banfield's book is attributable to a number of factors. The author has a high reputation in the discipline of political science. For a long time it was the only sociological book about Southern Italy in English; in default of other works it has been taken up by American and British universities as an introduction to the sociology of South Italian peasantries. Finally, there is its appeal to practical men, such as social workers and community development experts, who find that the attempt to explain individual bits and pieces of behaviour sets up sympathetic harmonies in their hearts. The book is, however, subject to criticism on several grounds: first, on the basis of inadequate method; second, on the grounds of inadequacies of formal argument; finally, on the grounds of omissions and commissions in the presentation of the material itself.

Students of drama, magazine fiction and novels know that virtually every nationality and minority group has been represented by a stereotype in print and on the stage. Social scientists generally discuss stereotypes as components of prejudiced beliefs accompanied by strong, unexamined reactions of dislike or approval. Historians and specialists in literature do not equate stereotyping with prejudice. Instead, they emphasize the origin of stereotypes as routinized, crude or at least oversimplified classifications of multifaceted characters and situations.

How far were China's prewar economic institutions the product of its particular history and traditions—that is, the product either of the nature of its premodern society or of its later status as a semicolony—and how far can they rather be seen as answers to problems common to the stage of economic development which the country had reached at that time?