In China there is less inequality in the fortunes than in the conditions of men. Property in land has been divided into very moderate parcels, by the successive distribution of the possessions of every father equally among his sons. It rarely happens that there is but one son to enjoy the whole property of his deceased parents; and from the general prevalence of early marriages, this property is not often increased by collateral succession. These causes constantly tend to level wealth; and few succeed to such an accumulation of it as to render them independent of any efforts of their own for its increase. It is a common remark among the Chinese that fortunes seldom continue [to be] considerable in the same family beyond the third generation.

Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an immense body of morality literature emerged in the Ottoman Empire as part of a widespread turn to piety. This article draws upon the anthropology of Islamic revival and secularism to reassess this literature's importance and propose a new view of the history of political thought in the empire. It does so through a close analysis of a fundamental concept of Ottoman political life: “naṣīḥat, ” or “advice.” Historians have used “advice books” to counter the presumption that the Ottoman Empire declined after the sixteenth century, but in doing so they have overlooked the concept's broader meaning as “morally corrective criticism.” I analyze two competing visions of naṣīḥat at the turn of the eighteenth century to reveal how the concept was deployed to politically transform the empire by reforming its subjects’ morality. One was a campaign by the chief jurist Feyżullah Efendi to educate every Muslim in the basic tenets of Islam. The other was a wildly popular “advice book” written by the poet Nābī to his son that both explicates a new moral code and declares the empire's government and institutions illegitimate. Both transformed politics by requiring that all subjects be responsible moral, and therefore political, actors. The pietistic turn, I argue, turned domestic spaces into political battlegrounds and ultimately created new, individualistic political subjectivities. This, though, requires challenging functionalist conceptions of the relationship between religion and politics and the secularist inclination among historians to relegate morality to the private sphere.

Resurgent scholarly interest in the state has focused attention on the growth and decline of state power: Samuel Huntington's emphasis on the importance of state making and state decay, James O'Connor's anticipation of the financial crises of large states, Immanuel Wallerstein's identification of strong states with core areas of the world economy, Charles Tilly's accounts of European efforts to create more powerful states, and Theda Skocpol's analysis of revolutions as attempts to restore the strength of weakened central regimes.

Bùi Minh Quốc left for the border in late 2001. His clandestine trip, which took nearly a month to complete on a 50cc Honda Cub motorcycle, retraced the perimeter of Việt Bắc, the name for the mountainous region that stretches across ten provinces in northeastern Vietnam. Quốc, a poet of considerable repute, documented the highpoints of the ride in verse. But the region’s rugged beauty, which holds a prominent place in official histories of the anti-colonial struggle against the French and those who collaborated with them, was not the real reason for his quest. Nor was the region’s more recent reincarnation as a socialist battleground during the Third Indochina War with the People’s Republic of China, a conflict that killed and wounded an estimated one hundred thousand people in the space of a month. Instead, Quốc’s self-appointed task was to find the current location of “Kilometer Zero” (Cấy số không) along the Sino-Vietnamese border—a difficult proposition since it appears nowhere on official maps of the country. Nonetheless, the toponym is commonly used to refer to the precise spot in Lạng Sơn Province where National Highway 1A, the only paved road to traverse the entire length of Vietnam, begins its long journey south.

In this essay I propose to examine an hypothesis about dowry payments in the light of certain evidence from Ireland. The sources of this evidence are, first, my own data collected during fieldwork in the small community of Beaufort, County Kerry, Ireland, and, second, the work of writers who have studied the question of dowry payment in Ireland, notably Conrad M. Arensberg, Solon T. Kimball, and K. H. Connell. The intent here is to draw attention to some of the deficiencies in Jack Goody's definition and discussion of dowry payments, and to offer alternatives to them. In particular I shall argue that Goody's discussion of dowry is centrally flawed by a discrepancy between the generality of the variables he uses to explain the geographical distribution of the practice, and the specificity of his definition of it. It is the unwarranted detail involved in the latter that leads him to obscure certain crucial variations within dowry systems more broadly defined, and to confuse the issue of the relationship between dowry and bride wealth.

In primitive and nonindustrialized societies the typical (and in many cases, the exclusive) tasks of religious elites have revolved chiefly around the creation, modification, and maintenance of the symbolic universe of society. Such work invariably implied privilege and various kinds and degrees of political power. But with the expansion of the modern world order, the situation of religious elites has altered dramatically. For one, religious-knowledge workers make up a very small percentage of the ranks of a much larger knowledge sector. For example, while the percentage of religious-knowledge workers (including clergy) relative to the entire economically active population in the United States has remained relatively constant since 1870, the percentage of religious workers to the knowledge workers has declined by one half in the period between 1950 and 1970—a period of dramatic growth of the knowledge sector (see Table 1). By 1970, the percentage of religious-knowledge workers to knowledge workers generally had shrunk to one sixth of its proportionate size a century earlier. Between 1970 and 1984, this proportion has leveled off somewhat. In Western Europe and Japan the same patterns have become firmly established as well.

This paper examines convergence theory in relation to welfare-the institutional pattern of a society concerned with meeting needs. In contemporary industrial societies needs are met through a variety of patterns, viz. social services, tax rebates, fringe benefits provided by enterprises, mutual-aid, and voluntary and charitable assistance. The question is whether in the course of transition from early to advanced industrialization, Western and communist societies have become more alike in respect of such institutional patterns.1 The proposition has been examined in relation to evidence drawn from one communist and one Western country and the underlying theory criticised in the light of evi-dence.

The break-up of empires was the most profound geo-political phenomenon of the twentieth century. In 1900, except in the Western Hemisphere, most of the world's people lived in polities which readily described themselves as empires. These polities were territorially vast, or at least far-flung, and each of them ruled a multitude of peoples who differed enormously in the usual markers of ethnicity such as language, religion, and culture. Over the course of a century, however, most of these empires disappeared. The territorial empires of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans fell apart in the aftermath of the First World War, the colonial empires of the Germans, British, Americans, Dutch, French, Belgians, Spanish, and Portuguese gave way to a combination of nationalist and international pressures, the wartime conquests of Germany, Japan, and Italy came to nothing, and finally the Soviet Union fragmented into a multitude of new, independent states at the end of the Cold War. Smaller polities such as Yugoslavia and Ethiopia fractured into still smaller ones.

On December 14, 1821 the rebelliously faithful partisans of Louis XVIII, quand meme, finally assumed the office to which their uncontaminated past and heavenly justice entitled them. The power that had at last been gathered into the hands of an ultra ministry resided most of all in the apparatus of the centralized administrative state so often criticized by its new masters. This paper will examine the role and functions of the prefect as the most important local police official and political agent of the ministry at a time when the national administrative machine was operated with authentic Napoleonic rigor by former advocates of decentralization and local autonomies.

As demonstrated by the above lyrics, the Shakers (known officially as the “United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing”) were not favorably disposed toward the bonds of marriage, family, and kinship. Started as a Quaker splinter group under the charismatic leadership of Ann Lee in Manchester, they emigrated to the United States, gathered further adherents there, and became a communal sect in 1787. Within the next sixty years, they grew to more than 4,000 members in sixteen villages in New England and the Midwest.Stein 1992:87–89. True to their view of God as androgynous, and their founder as the female equivalent of Jesus Christ, women had a comparatively strong position in the sect, and there were equal numbers of male and female office holders on all hierarchy levels.The question of how much gender equality existed among the Shakers is subject to some debate. The division of labor as well as many gender stereotypes remained conventional (Brewer 1992), and after the death of the initial leaders Ann Lee and Lucy Wright, male members dominated the leadership (Stein 1992:132–33, Brewer 1986:51) until they became a small minority in the later years (Stein 1992:339). Brewer concludes that true gender equality was not achieved, nor even aimed at (1992). Compared to their female contemporaries, however, “Shakeresses” were able to keep their private lives free from male interference to a considerable degree (Humez 1991). Besides, male Shaker complaints about “pettycoat government” do not only suggest a patriarchal striving for power, as Humez argues (1991), but also the imperfect realization of these tendencies. Female Shakers also made important contributions to the early women's rights movement (Stein 1992:258–68, 310–12). Genders, however, were strictly separated, and celibacy was obligatory in the “gospel relations” between members.Brewer 1986; Stein 1992.

The terms poruka (suretyship or collective responsibility) and poruchnik (surety, guarantor) rarely appear in pre-Mongol Russian texts. Formal poruka seems to have expanded enormously only after the Mongol invasion. The institution clearly flourished in Muscovite Russia, where q“surety bonds” (poruchnye zapisi) were drawn up to cover debts and contractual obligations, military and administrative service, payment of fiscal levies, obligatory labor, trial procedure, personal conduct, public safety, political allegiance—and even matters of conscience and orthodoxy (“spiritual suretyship”). In all those areas, individuals or groups of people could, as “sureties,” be held responsible for the conduct of others, the “principals.” Sureties faced harsh penalties—fines, forced labor, corporal punishment, and worse—for their principals' misconduct or failure to fulfill certain obligations.

A large body of research conducted over a period of many years has demonstrated the enormous contribution that Scottish thought made to early America. Curiously enough, the evidence for this important influence accumulated gradually without attracting widespread attention until 1978, when Garry Wills published a book on the Declaration of Independence, orienting that document within the context of Scottish thinking. All of a sudden, eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy was being discussed in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and all the major relevant professional journals. Wills' work aroused a storm of controversy, and by now it appears certain that his discussion of the philosophical issues underlying the Declaration was garbled. Nevertheless, his book proved to be a landmark of a certain kind: It focused attention on the relevance of the Scottish Enlightenment to the American Revolutionary generation. Sometimes a forceful statement, even if wrong, can have a constructive effect, and so it seems to have been with Garry Wills's account, Inventing America.

This essay outlines research that has occupied much of my time for the past several years. It concerns regional associations in traditional China, or what is known as hui-kuan or tung-hsiang-hui. When I began this research, inspired in part by Ho Ping-ti's masterful survey (1966), I believed, as did Ho, that most of the stones on this particular field of knowledge had been turned.What remained to be done, it seemed to me, was to record the vicissitudes of these traditional associations in the modernizing atmosphere of early twentieth-century China. But the more I began to look into these associations—into the way they operated, what they implied about Chinese society, and how they seemed to put the countryside into the city—the less I felt I knew and the less I was satisfied with previous generalizations made about them.

The experience of modernity is one that cuts across national boundaries. Regardless of where it occurs, modernization—defined here as the nexus of changes that includes technological innovation, economic rationalization, demographic change, the bureaucratization of the state, and the triumph of science—has certain inevitable consequences. To live in a modern society means to live in a constantly changing world, in which the forces of modernity have dissolved old forms of community, altered traditional notions of work, undermined social hierarchies, produced new social spaces, and transformed the sights, sounds, and even smells of everyday life. Modernization also engenders its own response. Societies in the throes of rapid modernization inevitably have their critics: individuals who for a variety of reasons object to the myriad of changes that accompany this process. Recoiling from the present, these antimodernists take refuge in an often idealized past, longing for what they believe to be a simpler, purer way of life.

During the early Meiji period of the 1870s and 80s, Japanese leaders were in the process of constructing a new state. The old regime of the Tokugawa shogunate had been overthrown in 1867, and its “feudal” ways were to be replaced with institutions that valued another, “Western” set of priorities—including applied science and industrial capitalism, constitutional law and deliberative assemblies. This program of institutional change, called “civilization” or “enlightenment” by its proponents, enlisted a range of foreign consultants, from engineers and military officers to teachers and legal experts. Equally important were Western books, the translation of which had begun under the old regime. Among the works that made a powerful impression on Japanese readers at the start of the Meiji period were William and Robert Chambers' Political Economy, Samuel Smiles' Self-Help, and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. The “liberal” tradition defined by these authors provided an introduction for the works of Herbert Spencer. Although his reputation today most often places him among conservative or libertarian political philosophers, it was Spencer's liberal defense of natural rights that initially interested Japanese readers in the 1870s. For Spencer's appearance coincided with a growing advocacy of “people's rights” in Japan, as private citizens pressured the authoritarian oligarchy ruling Japan to grant them the rights to freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and to participation in governmental process through the institution of a national assembly.

Jerrold E. Levy's comments on my article on the Sanni Demons in the April 1969 issue of this journal betrays serious misconceptions regarding the nature of Ayurvedic medicine. Levy says that Ayurveda makes no distinction between mental and physical illnesses, that it has little preoccupation with symptoms, and that it has little actual efficacy. The first is concerned with the doctrine of Ayurveda; the second with its practice; and the third with its effects. I shall demonstrate that these three views of Ayurveda are false.