In a famous issue of Times Literary Supplement (TLS) focusing on the state of historical scholarship, Moses Finley called for “Unfreezing the Classics” through “serious history” and lamented that, “Less than a generation ago the profound disagreement between Hugh Last and (now Sir) Ronald Syme about Augustus was . . . serious. But today? While our colleagues engage in polemics over the Tudor Revolution in government, the rise of gentry, the roots of Industrial Revolution or the causes of the First World War, what excites us to debate?”Finley 1966:290. Less than a generation later, the field of classical scholarship had been so transformed that Keith Hopkins, one of Finley's successors as the chair of ancient history at Cambridge could report without much exaggeration that, “Ancient economy is an academic battle ground where the contestants campaign under various colours—apologists, Marxists, modernizers, primitivists . . . Even within schools, there are sects. Besides, new strategies, new alliances, new compromises are repeatedly devised. Fresh contingents of scholars arrive, new tactics (such as underwater archaeology) are developed . . . But no new weapon is finally decisive. The war continues.”Hopkins 1983:ix.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Argentina and Canada experienced unprecedented economic growth. In the period stretching from 1890 to 1914, Argentina and Canada played host to millions of migrating Europeans and became the largest borrowers on the world's capital markets. The infusion of foreign labour and capital helped to convert the empty grasslands into bread baskets for the world.

The expansion was propelled by crops in the export sector, mainly cereals cultivated on the Argentine pampas and the Canadian prairies. By the early years of this century, wheat became the premier export for both countries, and eventually ranked among the world's top cereal exporters. After World War I, both countries combined to supply around 60 percent of the world's total wheat export trade.1 Argentina and Canada exemplified what was beneficial about export-led development.

The growth of the professions in the nineteenth century occurred as a process of specialization; distinct functions separated out of certain broad categories of activity. The church, the law, and medicine were the matrices from which new professions emerged and became differentiated in response to the growing needs of an increasingly complex society. The reasons for that complexity were in the main economic and stemmed from the industrialization of the first half of the century.

The basic operation in the comparative method is an arrangement of social or cultural conditions observed among existing peoples into a series that is then taken to represent a process of evolution. This procedure has been used to depict the whole sweep of human history, a limited period of development, or the growth of a particular social or cultural element or group of elements. The method has been applied most commonly, perhaps, in a search for origins of specific cultural items.

It is an anthropological truism that ethnic identity is “other”-oriented, such that who we are rests on who we are not. Within this vein, the development of Yoruba identity in the late nineteenth century is attributed to Fulani perspectives on their Oyo neighbors, Christian missionaries and the politics of conversion, as well as Yoruba descendants in diaspora reconnecting with their West African homeland. In this essay, my aim is to both complement and destabilize these externalist perspectives by focusing on Yoruba concepts of “home” and “house” (ilé), relating residence, genealogy and regional identities to their reconstituted ritual frameworks in Cuba and Brazil. Following Barber's analysis of Yoruba praise-poetry (oríkì) and Verran's work on Yoruba quantification, I reexamine the semantics of the category ilé in the emergence of Lucumí and Nagô houses in order to explain their sociopolitical impact and illuminate transpositions of racial “cleansing” and ritual purity in Candomblé and Santería. More broadly, the essay shows how culturally specific or “internal” epistemological orientations play an important if neglected role in shaping Atlantic ethnicities and their historical trajectories.

Discussion of the social aspects of industrialization in India has proceeded almost exclusively in terms of labor recruitment, factory conditions, and the development of trade unions. Although strikes have received detailed consideration, the industrial violence which formed a common and persistent feature of labor relations in colonial India has been largely ignored. Official reports of the period tended to play down the incidence of violence, not wishing to publicize the failings of government labor policies.' Or, where violence was acknowledged to have occurred, it was taken to indicate the immaturity and irresponsibility of Indian workers. Post-independence studies, drawing heavily on published official sources, have too readily equated labor history with a narrative of strikes, with union membership figures and labor legislation. A lingering Gandhian tradition has further influenced many Indian labor studies. Violence is regarded as too morally reprehensible and politically deviant to warrant serious analysis. Where admitted, it is attributed to communist politicians or other outside elements rather than to factors inherent within the labor situation.

In 1893 a Welsh poet with the bardic name Glan Elsi uttered a remarkable vaticination that seemed to unite the fate of the Welsh language and the Welsh slate quarrier:

Dearest old Welsh, if ever it dies,

From the lips of a quarrier, I think, will come the final word.John Owen (Glan Elsi), “Y Chwarelwr” [The quarrier]. Cymru 5, 1893, p. 112.

What is immediately remarkable is that such an identification of a modern proletariat (as opposed, for example, to a vanishing traditional peasantry, as would be so common elsewhere in Europe), as a linguistic kulturträger of the Welsh language was by this time so unremarkable. Even more extraordinary, perhaps, is that this was a by-product of the slate-quarriers' own self-mythologizing.

This paper examines the emergence and character of popular religious groups and considers their implications for long-term cultural change in Latin America. Particular attention is given to the link between religious change and the creation of a popular subject, a set of confident, articulate and capable men and women, from hitherto silent, unorganized, and dispirited populations. I argue here that creation of such a popular subject is nurtured by transformations in key expressions of popular religion, by the way these take form in new patterns of community organization and group solidarity, and by efforts to rework the ties that bind popular groups to dominant institutions.

This article uses gift-giving practices in early nineteenth-century Iran as a window onto statecraft, governance, and center-periphery relations in the early Qajar state (1785–1925). It first demonstrates that gifts have a long history in the administrative and political history of Iran, the Persianate world, and broader Eurasia, before highlighting specific features found in Iran. The article argues that the pīshkish, a tributary gift-giving ceremony, constituted a central role in the political culture and economy of Qajar Iran, and was part of the process of presenting Qajar rule as a continuation of previous Iranian royal dynasties. Nevertheless, pīshkish ceremonies also illustrated the challenges Qajar rulers faced in exerting power in the provinces and winning the loyalty of provincial elites. Qajar statesmen viewed gifts and bribes, at least at a discursive level, in different terms, with the former clearly understood as an acceptable practice. Gifts and honors, like the khil‘at, presented to society were part of Qajar rulers' strategy of presenting themselves as just and legitimate. Finally, the article considers the use of gifts to influence diplomacy and ease relations between Iranians and foreign envoys, as well as the ways in which an inadequate gift could cause offense.

The political prisoner is a figure taken for granted in historical discourse, with the term being used broadly to describe any individual held in captivity for oppositional activities. This article argues for understanding the political prisoner, for whom prison becomes a vehicle of politics, as the product of modern states and political movements. The earlier practices of the “imprisoned political,” for whom prison was primarily an obstacle to politics, gave way to prisoners who used the category creatively against the regimes that imprisoned them. Using the cases of Polish socialists in the Russian Empire, Fenians in Ireland, suffragettes in Britain, and satyagrahi in British South Africa, this article explains how both regimes and their prisoners developed common practices and discourses around political incarceration in the years 1865–1910.

The public and professional significance of precolonial History as a discipline has declined markedly across much of sub-Saharan Africa over the last forty years: History has been both demonized—depicted as deeply dangerous and the source of savagery and instability—and portrayed as irrelevant when set alongside the needs for economic modernization and “development.” This paper explores this trend in the context of Uganda, with a particular focus on the kingdom of Buganda, chosen for its particularly rich oral and literary heritage and the thematic opportunities offered by its complex and troubled twentieth century. The paper aims to explore how “the past”—with a focus on the precolonial era—has been understood there in several distinct periods. These include the era of imperial partition and the formation of the Uganda Protectorate between the 1880s and the 1910s; competition for political space within colonial society to the 1950s; decolonization and the struggle to create new nationhood in the mid-twentieth century; and political crises and partial recovery since the 1970s. Ultimately, the paper seeks to assess the role of History in a modern African society vis-à-vis the developmental agendas and notions of economic growth against which African “progress” and prospects for “stability” are currently measured.

This article traces the shift in demographic thought from the Malthusian framework that predominated in English-language political economic writings of the nineteenth century to demographic transition theory, which prevailed by the mid-twentieth century. An analysis of demographic theory offers particular insights onto the intellectual history of development because the question of population served as the point of departure for various development theories. While the scholarly literature on U.S. development ideas and projects has grown increasingly rich and sophisticated in recent decades, it remains wedded to the notion that there was a stark rupture between American development theory and the conditions in and relationships to the underdeveloped world that it sought to describe. This belief threatens to trivialize the significance of violent economic, environmental, and political circumstances that made development a useful lens of interpretation. Focusing especially on ideas about India, this article examines how, in an era of economic crises, intellectual and political exchange between British colonial, Indian nationalist, and American thinkers concerning the problems of disease, famine, and immigration enabled a transformation in demographic thinking. The concept of development did not simply diffuse from the West to the Rest. Global conflict and dialogue—both between and within empires—enabled its emergence such that, by the early 1950s, peoples in various parts of the world had already taken the ideal of development for granted.

The thirty–fourth chapter of the Greater Bundahišn, which is the fullest eschatological account within this important Middle Persian text, ends on an extremely peculiar note. Its final verse states:

This also is said [in the Avesta]: “The earth becomes flat, without a crown and without a seat. There are no mountain peaks nor hollows, nor are ‘up’ and ‘down’ preserved.”

The Levantine business community—the Sursuqs, Bustruses, Tuenis, Khuris, Debbases, Trads, Tabets, Naggiars, and Farahs—created large agricultural estates in the Levant and established company branches in Beirut, Alexandria, Haifa, London, Liverpool, Paris, and Marseille in the mid-nineteenth century. Against both culturalist and new institutional paradigms, I argue that the trajectories of the Levantine firms were much like those of their European counterparts; Dutch and English capitalism—what came to be recognized as modern forms of capitalism—developed out of long-distance trade and relied on forms of coerced and semi-coerced labor as well as other so-called “non-capitalist” or “precapitalist” elements. Beirut-based companies relied on tenant contracts, sharecropping, and other forms of labor control rooted in the Ottoman social formation. Drawing upon the unexplored private papers of these business families in Beirut and a diverse collection of documents from Istanbul, Beirut, Jerusalem, London, Liverpool, and Marseille in Arabic, German, Ottoman Turkish, and French, this paper examines the parallels and the links between the business practices of the Levantine joint-stock companies and their European partners. It contends that the development of nineteenth-century capitalism relied on several different institutions and relations of production formulated and articulated on both sides of the Mediterranean and in the competition between them. Only after World War I, because of settler-colonialism, the settlement of nomads, and large-scale European capital investment backed by imperial power, did Levantine capital accumulation begin to take a form that was subordinate to Europe.

The phrase liberal capitalism has occasionally been used in contemporary political criticism to lump together the ideological approaches of nonsocialist political parties and to suggest that there are few significant differences among those who generally support a market-based political economy. C. B. Macpherson, in an influential essay entitled The Real World of Democracy (1965), argues that “by admitting the mass of the people into the competitive party system, the liberal state did not abandon its fundamental nature; it simply opened the competitive political system to all the individuals who had been created by the competitive market society.” As a first approximation then, liberal capitalism appears to stand for a combination of rational contractualism, utilitarian individualism, and the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith.

Although only a minority of harvest workers in California are covered by union contracts, jobs in some nonunionized industries are becoming increasingly stabilized and internally stratified in ways and to extents that are largely unnoted. These conditions result from an augmentation of the labor market structure (Fisher 1953), that is, from policies evolving within agricultural industries that partially insulate their job markets from external market forces.

All history is comparative. The judgments historians make are derived from some explicit or implicit standard of comparison. Thus, when historians describe the antebellum South in the United States as technically backward, rural, nonindustrial, socially retrograde, and paternalistic, they mean to say that it was so in comparison with the North. When historians of nineteenthcentury Brazil describe it in the same terms, they compare it either to the hegemonic capitalist areas of that period, including the United States North, or to Brazil itself at later periods in its history.

In each of the three cases presented, the changing role of the folk saint as well as the development of the movement indicate that a four-stage transformation is in operation:

(1) The ‘call’ by means of a supernatural experience or ‘vocational struggle’ occurs in the future folk saint's life and initiates his career.

(2) Offering a practical religion with solutions to physical and personal problems, the saint attracts individuals who are seeking such solace and remedy. Common purpose, journey and encampment near the curer foster group identity.

(3)Myths about the miracle worker grow in the group and circulate abroad, intensifying group solidarity and attracting new adherents. Administrators and would-be exploiters enter. A transcendent ideology is introduced with social, political, and religious ramifications. These may be at once restorative and innovative. The success of the folk saint spawns other saints who also attract followers.

(4) External, traditional power structures are threatened, and retaliate by applying political pressure, so that the last stage sees the decline and eclipse of the movement, and the loss of its innovative elements. The saint, no longer a potential secular power, devotes himself to curing, thus reemphasizing the culturally defined, traditional role of curandero or hitolio.

In a closed and stable society, innovation is likely to be rather feared than welcomed; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was sometimes used as a synonym for ‘revolution’; in an open society like our own, innovation is considered a virtue. In discussing the present condition of art, I want to strip innovation of its value connotations and to consider the search for the new as an historical condition of modern art, but not one that makes it either better or worse than the more stable arts of the past. I suggest a biological metaphor as a guide: in the evolution of species, innovation is not necessarily advantageous. If the conditions of the environment are stable, it is likely that mutants in a species will be selectively eliminated. Conversely, in a changing environment, the appearance of new characters better adjusted to the new conditions will improve the adaptation of the species and be favored by the selective process.

The rise of working-class movements has recently been subjected to a great deal of historical scrutiny. Although this literature treats a variety of topics, much of it is devoted to different aspects of socialism: the radical, reformist, or utopian nature of socialism, the sociological roots of the movement among artisans and industrial workers, and the creation of an alternative, or socialist, subculture. One reason socialism has been investigated so intensively is that historians have assumed that socialism represented the authentic working-class ideology. Implicitly or explicitly, scholars have conveyed the idea that socialism alone promoted class consciousness, that socialism led workers to realize that they formed a distinct group and had to act together to defend their interests. Other movements among workers have been considered to be conservative and, as such, have been discounted as unrepresentative of workers' interests.