One morning in the middle of May 1558, the chief constable of the Governor of Rome led a detachment of his police to Monte Rotondo, a rural town some twenty miles north of the capital. There was nothing unusual in his mission, which was to capture two outlaws, who, though banished from the papal states for homicide, had returned to live under the shelter of the local lords. Nor was there anything extraordinary in the first response of the villagers, who, caught between their signori on the one hand and the state on the other, did their best to lend the police a very feeble hand. What was more unusual was what happened next, when, half by design and half by mischance, the village rose up in arms against the police and, for much of the day, held them hostage. In this essay, we will study the tangled events of that day, not so much as an example of a rural insurrection as, rather, a handsome illustration of a particular style of negotiation. Thus, settlement as much interests us here as does conflict, for it illustrates well the dense interplay of liberty and constraint. The burden of our exposition is that, to extricate themselves from a perilous impasse, the villagers, their magistrates, and the city's police could all bargain cannily with all sorts of risks, not only their adversaries', but also their own. Not only did they threaten one another, but, to their own profit, they pointed out external dangers and cited the perils they themselves faced.

The study of material culture and geography is relatively new and underdeveloped in most fields of history, but this underdevelopment is particularly acute for the history of the Middle East since the rise of Islam. Although, for most historians, the period when nearly everything in Middle Eastern history was ascribed to Islam has passed, and there is a new awareness of socioeconomic factors, discussions of these factors often overstress trade or center almost exclusively around dependent relations with the West, virtually ignoring specific internal developments in Middle Eastern material culture and ecology that help explain Middle Eastern history. This essay will suggest what may be learned from such studies by drawing attention to some of the relevant conclusions of works written on these subjects. It will also show how study of material culture can illuminate phases of development and decline in the Middle East and suggest some reasons why the West overtook and passed the Middle East economically.

On the morning of 4 April 1877, estate agent Arthur Brooke drove his carriage up to the gate of Cashel Farm, the residence of John Magroarty in Carrick, a small market town in the mountainous hinterland of southwest Donegal. Brooke had brought sheriff McCrory along with him, but his bailiffs emerged from their nearby homes a bit more reluctantly than usual. It was clear to Brooke that tenant Magroarty would not submit mildly to the impending eviction, for, although warned of the sheriff's intention several days earlier, he had not budged a parcel and a large crowd was gathering to witness the proceedings. Agent Brooke had never been so loath to perform his duty, for Magroarty was not the average evictee. He was the owner of several cows and was a reliable and even “improving tenant.” Most of all, however, he was the parish priest. It was Father Magroarty Brooke and his henchmen had come to toss into the streets of Carrick.

It is a distinguishing feature of modern Western historical thought that it has striven self-consciously to free itself from the use of non-historical categories of explanation in order to consitute itself as an autonomous, self-explanatory and self-justifying form of thought. Croce believed this movement to be a late phase of humanism and identified it as the main ingredient in the Western intellectual tradition. In his view, the history of historiography in the West has been one long struggle to expel the category of transcendence from historical analysis, that is, a struggle of history against philosophy of history.

Unlike modern historical thought with its value free orientation, most previous historiography has been informed, either consciously or unconsciously, by a specific set of social values and has used historical materials as either a mine of examples for support of the position pre-chosen (like Cicero) or as evidence for the study of phenomena the noumena of which lie just outside the range of history proper (like Marx). The former approach never really arrives at history, the latter passes through it too rapidly to the goal which it believes lies beyond it. In so far as most previous historiography has been governed by these two tendencies, it has always been philosophy of history rather than history proper.

This article juxtaposes representations of Indonesia’s tobacco control as temporally backwards with a counter-discourse defending its clove-laced cigarettes—called kretek—as a form of distinctive cultural heritage. These opposing discourses, which I characterize as public health evolutionism and commodity nationalism, structure clashes over Indonesian tobacco regulations. Public health evolutionism can take the form of voyeuristic, exoticizing, and Othering representations, but it can also be used to argue for more equitable access to global tobacco control knowledge and practices. Commodity nationalists insist that the kretek industry should be a source of pride rather than shame, depicting tobacco control as a neocolonial plot to destroy an indigenous industry that benefits small farmers, factory workers, and home industries. This subaltern emphasis obscures the fact that a few large companies dominate the industry, which is increasingly foreign-owned and mechanizing to increase production while reducing employment. The cigarette industry takes advantage of both discourses by marketing supposedly safer products to consumers alarmed by public health messaging, while also promoting the cigarettes-as-national-heritage narrative and undermining regulations. The stakes of these debates are high in the world’s second largest cigarette market, with over three hundred billion sticks smoked each year and more than two hundred thousand tobacco-related deaths.

This article seeks to place lament in the context of Asian modernities, theorize memory in relation to genres of performance, and introduce the notion of social technologies of forgetting. Evidence suggests that Bangladeshi culture is changing in ways congruent with some models of globalizing modernity. Indeed, my data indicate that displacing certain performance genres may be key to modernist transformation. Yet, several persons I describe here endured hardship over several years to continue performing genres their neighbors deemed dated or sacrilegious. This problematizes teleological visions of the progress of a monolithic modernity stamping out older expressive forms.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, European metropolitan powers succeeded in overcoming the dominance that Yemen had hitherto exercised over the world coffee supply. Two colonies of the New World stood out in this transformation, both employing African slave labor on a large scale: Suriname, owned by the Dutch, and Saint-Domingue, the main French colony in the Caribbean. However, Suriname’s growth was short-lived, and it was soon surpassed by the productive leap of Saint-Domingue. The article explores the divergent trajectories of these two colonies, focusing on the environmental conditions of the operation of coffee plantations. Rather than taking the specific combinations of land, labor, capital, and political power as an independent and locally determined set, the article examines how the coffee trajectories of Suriname and Saint-Domingue were mutually formative through the specific evolving relationships that each space had within the world-system.

The once well-defended border between legal history and social history has been overrun. The assault has been carried out on two fronts. In part, it occurred through internal subversion by legal historians actually interested in the nature of societies whose laws they studied. The attack has also been launched externally by researchers who persistently employed records generated by the operation of the legal system to shed light upon various aspects of contemporary social structure. This union of interest between disciplines with widely divergent research skills, a phenomenon somewhat similar to what French political commentators have termed cohabitation, has been soundly applauded. Conferences have been convened; journals have been founded; monograph series have been established. All of these have facilitated methodological and substantive dialogue between legal and social historians.

The history of Muhammadan Law in India falls naturally into three periods: (A) The period of Muslim domination (1206 A.D.–1857 A.D.); (B) The British period (1661–1951); (C) The Republican period (commencing with the promulgation of the Constitution of India on 26 January 1950). The dates are in such cases somewhat misleading and not mathematically “neat”. They may overlap, as in the British period, or, be ambient, as during the Muslim Sultanate. On the other hand they indicate with some degree of clarity the historical evolution and the time sequence of each system of jurisprudence. It will thus be seen that the Muhammadan law in India is one more instance of law being a function of society, thus being in a continuous state of flux. It is hardly necessary for me to add that the above classification must be read culliert to itc natural limitations.

In the past few decades, there has been an explosion of literature concerning the changes taking place in American art music. In many cases, this literature is the work of the very people who are making those changes, the composers of new music. Much of their commentary is written in a manifesto style reminiscent of avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. The dominant topic concerns the changes composers feel are needed to revolutionize American music.

“It is one thing to be one of the Great; it is another to be noble.” The first are perhaps nobles as defined by locality, but they are not loved nor recognized by the People or by the Prince; the others are “well regarded and appreciated,” their nobility being linked not only to their birth but also to the recognition of their titles and merits. According to Bartolo, the Florentine jurist Lap da Castiglionchio attempted, around 1370, the difficult exercise of combining the rival definitions of nobility that circulated in the Italy of his times, and the justification of his own nobility. He wanted very much to be noble, but not “great”. Who then are these great people from whom these nobles mean to distinguish themselves?

The expansion of the Ford Motor Company into Soviet Russia has been understood as part of a unidirectional spread of American economic power and cultural forms abroad following the First World War. This essay looks beyond the automobiles and manufacturing methods sent from Ford facilities in Detroit to the emerging Soviet automobile industry to examine multidirectional migrations of workers between Russia and the United States that underlay but sometimes collided with Ford's system. Workers, managers, engineers, and cultural, technical, and disciplinary knowledge moved back and forth between factories in Soviet Russia and the United States. Efforts to define, track, and shape workers in both countries as Americans, Russians, or Bolsheviks were integral to the construction of the products and methods that Ford sold. But many workers fell in between and contested these classifications and they often defied company attempts to create an efficient and homogeneous American workforce. In Russia, too, more than Soviet and American automobiles were produced: people and ideas were created that crossed and blurred boundaries between “American” and “Soviet.” There, “Fordizm” became a popular watchword among Soviet commentators and workers as a near-synonym for industrialization, mass production, and efficiency. Many saw it as a potentially valuable component of a new socialist world. These multidirectional movements, recorded in Ford Motor Company archives and related documents, suggest that rather than separate and alternative projects, Ford's burgeoning system to transform manufacturing and workers' lives in Detroit was linked to the Soviet revolutionary project to recreate life and work.

Jewish cosmopolitanism has long assumed a central place in the ideology of anti-Semitism. Well before the publication of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the idea of international Jewish solidarity served as an argument against Jewish emancipation. In Britain, Sir Robert Inglis famously opposed granting the Jews political rights because “[t]he Jews of London have more sympathy with the Jews resident in Berlin or Vienna than with the Christians among whom they reside.” Likewise, in 1840, the ultramontane Univers saw international lobbying on behalf of Jews accused of ritual murder in Damascus as proof that “the Hebrew nationality is not dead … What religious connection is there between the Talmudists of Alsace, Cologne or the East, and the Messrs. Rothschild and Crémieux?” That L'Univers saw this cosmopolitan fellow-feeling as an expression of Jewish national identity is irrelevant. The point is rather that for anti-Semites Jewish ‘nationalism’ was an inherently international force.

This article analyzes efforts by Soviet and present-day scientists in Russia to “rationalize” and ultimately automate the diagnostic techniques of Tibetan medicine. It tracks the institutional and conceptual histories of designing a pulse diagnostic system, a project that began in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. It has recently been re-enlivened in Buryatia, an ethnic minority region in Southeastern Siberia, in efforts to mobilize indigenous medical practices in response to local and national public health concerns. I focus on the translational ideologies that informed efforts to develop the pulsometer as a medical imaging technology, and analyze obstacles to these efforts found at the core of the device. Scientists working on the pulsometer have systematically tried to discern whether their measurements indicate sustained bodily pathologies, or instead reflect only technological white noise, and they still recruit and rely on the embodied expertise of practitioners of Tibetan medicine to validate their findings. In so doing they reaffirm claims that Tibetan medicine in Buryatia is inextricable from the forms of knowledge and practice that their projects work to standardize. I show how the apparent failures at perfect mechanization have made the pulsometer a surprisingly productive site for creating new kinds of expert communities and forms of knowledge making.

Twentieth-century wars of decolonization were more than simple diplomatic and military affairs. This article examines how the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) relied upon technology to drive state-making and to make war during the struggle against the French (1945–1954). Wireless radios, in particular, provided embattled nationalists a means by which they could communicate orders and information across wide expanses of contested space in real time. Printing presses, newspapers, stationary, and stamps not only circulated information, but they also served as the bureaucratic markers of national sovereignty. Radios and telephones were essential to the DRV's ability to develop, field, and run a professional army engaged in modern—not guerilla—battles. The Vietnamese were victorious at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 in part because they successfully executed a highly complex battle via the airwaves. Neither the Front de libération nationale (FLN) fighting the French for Algeria nor the Republicans battling the Dutch for Indonesia ever used communications so intensely to drive state-making or take the fight to the colonizer on the battlefield. Scholars of Western states and warfare have long recognized the importance of information gathering for understanding such matters. This article argues that it is time to consider how postcolonial states gathered and used information, even in times of war.

In 1962, the recently established Peace Corps announced plans for an intensive field training initiative that would acclimate the agency's burgeoning multitude of volunteers to the conditions of poverty in “underdeveloped” countries and immerse them in “foreign” cultures ostensibly similar to where they would be later stationed. This training was designed to be “as realistic as possible, to give volunteers a ‘feel’ of the situation they will face.” With this purpose in mind, the Second Annual Report of the Peace Corps recounted, “Trainees bound for social work in Colombian city slums were given on-the-job training in New York City's Spanish Harlem…. New Mexican Indian reservations and Spanish-speaking villages make realistic workshops for community development trainees. Puerto Rico provides experience in living in a Latin American environment. The Island of Hawaii, with its multiracial population, remote valleys and varied rural economy, performs a similar function for volunteers headed for Southeast Asia.”1 Local communities throughout the United States were chosen for their apparent similarities to locations abroad such that they might serve as a staging ground for President John F. Kennedy's vaunted Cold War diplomatic venture.

In late 1837 and early 1838 the British imperial government was preparing for an empire-wide transition from bonded to nominally free labor. This article builds upon recent scholarship that promotes a holistic, global approach to this transition, by narrowing the temporal frame and expanding the spatial. We emphasize interconnectivity and simultaneity rather than chronological succession, and we analyze the governance, rather than the experience, of this transition. Our approach is founded upon analysis of correspondence passing from every British colonial site through the Colonial Office in 1837–1838. We suggest that this hub of imperial government sought to reconcile the persistence of different conditions in each colony with the pursuit of three overarching policy objectives: redistributing labor globally; distinguishing between the moral debts owed to different kinds of bonded labor, and managing tradeoffs between security, economy, and morality. We conclude that the governance of the transition to free labor is best conceived as an assemblage of material and expressive elements of different spatial scales, whose interactions were complex and indeterminate. Through these specific governmental priorities and a particular communications infrastructure, these elements were brought into critical alignment at this moment to shape a significant transition in relations between people across the world.

Post-World War II reconstruction in Europe and Asia is a topic of growing interest, but relatively little attention has been paid to the relief and rehabilitation effort in China in the immediate post-1945 period. This article reassesses the postwar program implemented by the Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) government and the UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), not just in terms of humanitarian relief, but also as part of a process that led to new thinking about the nature of the postwar state in Asia. It focuses on the ideas and actions of Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), head of the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that worked with UNRRA. Chinese ideas for reconstruction in China were simultaneously statist, international, and transnational, and were shaped by high modern ideas drawn from Soviet and American examples. They were also influenced by China's poverty and wartime vulnerability, which made locally directed solutions more relevant in areas such as public hygiene. Success was unlikely because of the incipient Chinese Civil War and the huge demands of reconstruction on a state that was near-destitute, with a destroyed infrastructure. Nonetheless, its characteristics still bear examination as a first, tentative chapter in a longer story of post-imperialist and Cold War state-building that would shape countries in Asia and beyond.

The theory, practice and origin of sacral kingship have provided a source of lively controversy ever since enthusiasm for the ancient history of the Near East was first kindled in the early nineteenth century by the expedition of Napoleon to Egypt, but the discussion has been more fruitful following the publication of the pioneer anthropological work The Golden Bough, which suggested new lines of approach. It is now generally accepted that, when incipient communities larger than the clan or family group came into existence, a priest or warchief would emerge set apart to some extent from the people, and regarded as possessing supernatural powers of magic through his contact with the elemental forces or deities believed to surround human life on every side. Such beliefs were too widespread and durable for it to be possible to seek a common geographical area of origin.