The rise of Hamburg as a global marketplace and financial centre in the seventeenth century was a significant sign of the bourgeoning integration of European markets. In the early seventeenth century, the urban staple function in northwest Europe was largely concentrated in Amsterdam, while in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries London and Hamburg rose to preeminence. Hamburg served as a hub for international trade, connecting markets in England, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean. Goods such as raisins, sugar, tobacco, salt, iron, and leather changed hands, with the transactions reflecting the widespread mercantile network in which Hamburg took part. Furthermore, the commercial development of Hamburg and the rise of the Prussian state were important steps in creating a well-ordered and integrated urban network in Germany long before political unification.

Almost everyone who has investigated the subject agrees that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries a great social transformation occurred, primarily in England and France, but to a lesser extent in other European countries and America as well. In sociopolitical terms this change is generally characterized as the rise of liberalism and is linked with the English, French and American Revolutions. The socioeconomic factors are summarized under the general heading of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. Finally, there are several cultural dimensions to these changes, most notably the Protestant Reformation, but also the great advances in science, the declining status of the patriarchal family, new trends in philosophy, etc. It is generally felt that these dramatic events, which have shaped the course of Western civilization for four centuries, are, in some way, linked together.

This article explores the mimesis of indigenous “customs and law” as a theory of and strategy for colonial government in the period of late imperialism. I draw on the case of colonial administration in the Portuguese colony of Timor during the second-half of the nineteenth century. I introduce the concept of “mimetic governmentality”: the art of governing the Other through the productive inclusion of institutions, symbols, cultural materials, or social forms understood as other than one's own. In Timor, the imperial establishment was characterized by fragility and isolation, and a pragmatic style of colonial action thrived. In Europe, modern doctrines of colonial law rejected assimilationist policies and advocated “specialization.” In this context, between 1860 and 1910, administrators on Timor devised a system of colonial justice that required the colonizers to slip into the indigenous world and govern others from the others' position and perspectives. To efficiently govern the “natives” and apply colonial justice in courts—the so-called justiças—Europeans had to release themselves from European principles and embrace indigenous law, as they understood it. The essay uses the case of Timor to assert the analytic importance and potential of mimesis for the comparative study of colonial administrations during the period of imperial expansion.

The costs of poor health conditions are difficult to estimate for the Middle Ages. It is possible to establish in a tentative way a normal distribution by age and sex and to define what additional damage pestilence and plague did. One possible index is the number of able bodied persons (assuming persons of a definite age to be able bodied) compared to children, a dependency index. A second index is of the relative number of persons dying before they completed their life as able bodied persons. A third, not related to age, might be the number of persons too poor to pay certain taxes before and after the plague. Such persons were presumably too poor in part because of age or ill health.

Amid its human and material tolls, the Vietnam War has given rise to a curious enterprise—the complex process of recovering and repatriating the remains of U.S. service members Missing In Action (MIA) and presumed dead. In this trade, the bones that “count” are American and the aims underwriting the forensic efforts to return them are rooted in an ideology of national belonging.The resultant exchange of both knowledge and physical remains has developed through two historically intertwined ventures: state-sponsored casualty resolution efforts; and the much smaller, informal trafficking of skeletal remains, identification media, and information about American MIAs. This article examines how these sought-after bones tack between roles as objects of recovery, sale, or barter, scientific study, ritual burial, and public commemoration. Through their mutable worth, MIA remains illustrate the dynamic symbolism of war dead that evokes differing sensibilities about familiar or foreign soil, about care and belonging. Like the reliquiae of medieval Christianity, remains of missing service members, even in the most fragmentary form, are replete with the suggestion of power. Their pursuit depends on reciprocity. Indeed, more than just powerful symbols, these bones manifest and confer power itself, as caring for war dead demonstrates authority, and such authority falls to those who control access to the desired object, whether through formal or informal channels. Furthermore, power requires authentication, and the remains of missing American war dead become, in this system of circulation and exchange, a means to demonstrate knowledge, perform certainty, or exploit ambiguity.

Stone Age Economics is the most important book in the field of economic anthropology produced by an American cultural anthropologist since M. J. Herskovits published The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples in 1940. Its theoretical and analytical superiority to that earlier book should cheer those of us who feel depressed because of the slow and tortuous course of progress in this sub-field of anthropological inquiry. While Sahlins’ book is original and provocative, however, it is not likely to revolutionize thinking in the field as much as the recent work by Godelier (1967). Even though it lacks the theoretical scope and scholarly judiciousness of the latter work, it should nevertheless become a minor classic in the literature dealing with ‘primitive’ (or tribal) economic life.

In the United States, the technological optimism that accompanied the birth and diffusion of the magnetic telegraph between 1844 and 1880 had few predecessors-if any. Commercial telegraphy was barely a year old in 1847 when the telegraph was seen as “facilitating Human Intercourse and producing Harmony among Men and Nations\….[I]t may be regarded as an important element in Moral Progress.” “The telegraph system is invaluable,” a business journalist declared twenty years later, “and when the missing links shall have been completed of the great chain that will bring all civilized nations into instantaneous communication with each other, it will also be found to be the most potent of all the means of civilization, and the most effective in breaking down the barriers of evil prejudice and custom that interfere with the universal exchange of commodities.”

The persistent vitality of groups that are neither traditional nor modern nor transitional poses one of the most stubborn conceptual and practical problems of political development. An examination of the political-religious sects of South Vietnam from the perspective of the paradox of non-modern and untraditional institutionalization questions the common hypothesis of unilinear development. It is facile to assume that such groups as tribes, castes, or millenarian movements will conveniently wither away under the onslaught of modernity or to condemn them as causes of the lack of development in the new states. Far from being aberrant vestiges of a past that is being overcome, the sects are but particular manifestations of historic and contemporary factionalism. What South Vietnam lacks is not a vigorous development of sub-national groups but a central government with responsive and directive capacity. Without such a center the concept of a system becomes meaningless and the sects have little reason for seeking security in interaction rather than incapsulation.

The Nordic countries differ from other Western societies in their long histories of premarital sexual permissiveness. Yet, in spite of this general permissiveness, there are enormous variations in the frequency of illegitimacy and in the tolerance of it, both among the five Nordic countries and within each of them. Iceland is an exception; here the rate of illegitimacy is high throughout the country, and so is tolerance of it. Sweden appears to be moving in this direction, but the historical situation is more complex.

When historians turn to the social sciences for help with the task of ordering their data or making their sources speak more clearly, the results can be rewarding in unexpected ways. So it is if one applies the twin concepts profession and professionalization to the German context-in particular, to the history of German engineers in the nineteenth century. At first sight, an idea like the “professionalization of the German engineers” seems straightforward enough. In tandem with the growth of Germany's science-based industries and unparalleled system of technical education, it suggests the emergence of the men who occupied the critical positions in these institutions and embodied technological progress. A notion such as the “rise of the German engineering profession,” therefore, stirs visions of a grand metamorphosis, in which the land of poets and thinkers—and of Junkers, bureaucrats, and mandarins—turned into the world of Siemens, Porsche, Mannesmann, Bosch, Diesel, Daimler-Benz, etc.

Edward Said's Orientalism has received both praise and criticism. Among the criticisms leveled is the charge that Said's neglect of German scholarship misses an important part of Orientalism in the West. Robert Irwin, for example, notes that German Biblical scholarship was critically influential as a “motivating force for the study of Islam” and that the “German form-critical techniques” developed to study the Old Testament influence on the way “Western scholars interpret[ed] the Koran and the early Islamic community.” Bernard Lewis claims that Said's neglect of German scholarship calls into question his entire project and likens it to writing a history of European music without a discussion of the German contribution. See Robert Erwin, “Writing about Islam and the Arabs,” Ideology and Consciousness, 9 (1981–82), 108–9; Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 108. More generally, critics have noted that the presence of an influential Orientalist scholarship in Germany, as well as the absence of any significant Germany colonies in the Orient, calls into question Said's claim that there is a confluence between scholarship and political power in Orientalist discourse. Neither critics nor supporters, on the other hand, have given much attention to Said's claim that there is a similarity between Orientalism and anti-Semitism. Said states this in his introduction, where he notes that in “addition and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism, and as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch Orientalism resemble each other is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood” (1978:27–28). Elsewhere, Said has faulted critics of his work on Orientalism for seeing “in the critique of Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism . . . and launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism,” instead of giving attention to the similarity “between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism” (1985:9).

In a manner somewhat unusual in anthropological discourse, most writers on the Maa-speaking peoples of Tanzania and Kenya include an early section or chapter on what is often called “Maasai traditional history.” For example, in his pioneering work, “An Administrative Survey of the Masai Social System,” Henry Fosbrooke (1948) devotes a leading and major section to Maasai history and, in a later publication, he deals explicitly with what he calls a “tribal chronology” of the pastoral Maasai (Fosbrooke 1956a). Similarly, Thomas Beidelman, in an equally pioneering article, pays considerable attention to the historical connections of the Ilparakuyo (Baraguyu) section of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania (1960). It is among the Ilparakuyo that I have carried out most of my work in Maasai studies, and they are the primary focus of the present discussion (Rigby 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981).

English cheeses—Cheddar, Gloucester single or double, Cheshire, Stilton, and others—are familiar throughout the Anglo-American world, whether consumed after dinner in English homes or as key ingredients of American tex-mex or vegetarian cuisine. These famous cheeses originated long ago but in most cases reached a zenith in quantity and in reputation during the last century. Little is known about the history of English cheese dairying, despite its fame and its importance to agriculture past and present. Its economic background has received only slight attention, and its social history is almost entirely unexplored; yet clearly the social structure of English cheese dairying has historically exerted a major influence on the industry, because it traditionally depended upon a distinctive sexual division of labor. The history of women's work in English cheese dairying has implications for a broader historiographical question: When and why did women gradually disappear from many kinds of agricultural work in Western societies?

This article deals with an important chapter in the economic history of Mexico. Throughout its history Puebla was an industrial center. Well into the 19th century it was the prime center of the country's chief manufacture — textiles. The city became the commercial and industrial capital of New Spain within a few years of its foundation. I shall concentrate on the ways in which the several branches of the textile industry were organized, comparing their development with that of the textile industries of medieval and early industrial Europe.

The scholarly interest in emerging nations in the post-World War II period had its anthropological and sociological focus on the development of cities in these areas. Nationalism seems to be connected with industrialization and with urbanization. In West Africa much of the attention spent on study of developing cities has concentrated on the importance in such situations of the voluntary organization. It seems quite clear now that voluntary organizations are one of the most often used and most effective techniques for softening the shock of transplantation from the certainties of tribal life into the uncertainties of city life. The formation of voluntary organizations in cities is not restricted to Africa, however. In Central and South America, in Southeast Asia, and in India the voluntary organization has grown and developed and been studied. Most attempts to compare voluntary organizations in these places seem to have assumed that they were a natural or inevitable result of a process called “urbanization”. It does not seem to me to be necessary to compare these social phenomena in the context of such a process. We should compare voluntary organizations in different times and places and under different circumstances in order to enhance our understanding of more general social and cultural processes. This paper attempts two things: the delineation of the history of the formation of voluntary organization of one immigrant group in one West African city; and a comparison between the voluntary organizations of this group and of some other groups. It is hoped that the former will contribute to the body of knowledge we have about voluntary organizations, and that the latter will suggest hypotheses about social and cultural processes in general. It is not sufficient to describe the voluntary organizations of the Ibo in Calabar. It is necessary to trace the history of the town itself; to compare the reaction of the Ibo to the urban environment with that of the Efik, the indigenous inhabitants of the town; and to show in what ways the culture of the Ibo and the Efik predispose them to react in the ways they do.

In October 1898, the Italian vice-consul in Alexandria charged a group of Italians with participating in an anarchist plot to attack German Emperor Wilhelm II during his planned tour through Egypt and Palestine. This collective arrest produced unexpected outcomes, left a trail of multi-lingual documents, and illuminated specific forms of late nineteenth-century Mediterranean migration. Anarchists were among those who frequently crossed borders and they were well aware of and connected to what was happening elsewhere: they sent letters, circulated manifestos, raised and transported money, and helped fugitive comrades. They maintained nodes of subversion and moved along circuits of solidarity. Similarly, diplomats of Europe, Cairo, Istanbul, and local consular officials operated across borders and cooperated to hunt anarchists down. By following people who were on the move on boats, in post offices, and in taverns, I make a methodological and historiographical argument. First, I examine the Mediterranean as a space of flows and show how the Maghreb/Mashreq divide in Middle Eastern history has concealed webs and connections. Because anarchists and authorities acted on multiple fronts simultaneously, so must scholarship of this part of the world take account of several histories at once. Second, I look beyond the micro-macro binary to emphasize the interconnections and mutual implications of the micro, the macro, and everything in between. I highlight competing, intersecting, and even contradictory trajectories of some of these anarchist migrants’ belonging. As the affair of the bombs unfolded, all of these contradictions and scales of analysis became visible at once.

The economic, social, and political development of newly independent nations depends upon the prior or concurrent strengthening of public administration. To be sure, the path of national development is a circular one as it traces a spiral ascent in which a step forward in one kind of development makes possible the next step in another. The administrative arc of this circle is here emphasized not because it is more basic than the others, but because it has often been slighted. New governments, often on the recommendation of technical-assistance advisors, adopt excellent programs in health, agriculture, education, and industry, but then fail to translate these programs from paper to action. The fault is not lack of earnest intent but the burden of an unresponsive and weak administrative system.

Ratu Kidul is a legendary spirit queen who plays a significant role in Javanese political ontologies and has come to be an icon of Indonesian public culture. In this paper, I trace the history of her mediation as image via paint, photography, television, film, and the Internet in order to ask how this queen of the unseen world came to be so visible a feature of the postcolonial landscape and to interrogate the nature and effects of this visibility. I argue that becoming accessible via the image was necessary to her continued political agency within a mass-mediated national public sphere in which visibility and circulation are preconditions of political recognition. Yet popular reception of images of Ratu Kidul as auratic conduits of her spiritual power reveal the continued presence of a visuality within Indonesian national modernity that runs counter to dominant logics of transparency. I offer an ethnographic examination of images of Ratu Kidul across a range of media, attending to their material qualities as mediums by which the spirit queen appears and circulates. Broadly, the essay argues that national political orders and their public spheres cannot be understood apart from a history of visual mediation.

In an influential essay, Arnaldo Momigliano has identified an extremely important but perhaps little remarked oddity of ancient Greek historical writing and political thought.

The study of overseas Chinese has continued for some time as a series of somewhat unrelated monographs with little comparative analysis. One of the few important attempts at sociological generalization about Chinese communities in Southeast Asia was made by Maurice Freedman in an article entitled ‘Immigrants and Associations’, which appeared in this journal in 1960. In this article, Freedman suggested that ‘the associations which in a small-scale and relatively underdeveloped settlement express social, economic and political links in an undifferentiated form, tend, as the scale and complexity of the society increase, to separate into a network of associations which are comparatively specialized in their functions and the kinds of solidarity they express’ (Freedman, 1960: 47 f.). He proposed a continuum of types of overseas Chinese urban communities. At one end stands Kuching, Sarawak, ‘as the model of a simple and relatively small-scale overseas settlement’, while ‘Later Singapore is … the model of the most developed form of immigrant Chinese settlement in Southeast Asia’ (ibid.: 45). Singapore exhibits a great number of associations, based on criteria of recruitment that allow memberships to overlap to a great extent; the urban Chinese community in Sarawak includes fewer associations and consequently less overlap among memberships. Other studies in Southeast Asia suggest that this continuum might be a useful way of looking at the development of Chinese communities.