Eugène Sue's novel Les Mystères de Paris created a stir when it appeared in 1842–43 in serial form in the daily Journal des Débats and in ten one-volume installments, plus a number of truncated and pirated editions. This rambling episodic work comprises over a dozen melodramas held together mainly by the direct or indirect involvement in them of the hero-savior Rudolph Grand Duke of Gerolstein, the miserly notary and arch villain Jacques Ferrand, the vulnerable sullied virgin Fleur-de-Marie, and the well-meaning aristocratic lady Clemence Marquise d'Harville. Longer than most serial novels, Les Mystères maintains its readers' interest with lurid exposés of Paris low life, heart-rending descriptions of the sufferings of the deserving poor, diabolical intrigues, knick-of-time rescues, and scenes of sex and violence at all social levels. Periodically the author interrupts his narrative with moralizing commentaries and proposals for social reform. Contemporary observers claimed that everyone from duchesses to house porters read Les Mystères de Paris for its sensationalism. It has also been argued that the book's working-class readers wrote so many letters to Sue urging him to stress the high moral qualities of his fictional workers—epitomized by the craftsman Jérome Morel—that their “collective constraint” transformed it from a book about the “dangerous” classes into a book about the laboring classes, and converted the author himself into a champion of their cause.

Traditionally a considerable gap has existed between social anthropologists, on the one hand, and political scientists and historians, on the other, in their analysis of events. Archetypically, social anthropologists have concentrated upon enduring social structure and have tended to steer clear of more recent events in the society under study; yet this suggests that the anthropologist is avoiding the question of how the social structure that he enshrines in the ethnographic present is derived. ‘Social structure’ is a composite of the anthropologist's own observation of native behaviour and native exegesis, the latter in turn being the result of a dialectic between their (the indigenous people's) present perception of events and their idea (or image) of what their society has traditionally been and perhaps ought to be. This is particularly so in those societies that, in Lévi-Strauss' words (1966a:233–4) seek “by the institutions they give themselves, to annul the possible effects of historical factors upon their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi-automatic fashion,” that is, in those societies in which “their image of themselves is an essential part of their reality.”

At first sight there seems to be little in common between Zionism and the national movements of the Third World, and more particularly of Africa. The diplomatic and economic links established by the State of Israel with the new states of the Black Continent were impressive partly because they looked as if they were created ex nihilo. The speed with which the Israelis entered the ‘African game’ in the sixties and the equal speed with which they found themselves ejected from it in the seventies tended to underline the superficiality of these links. There were, of course, interested rationalizations of this newly found ‘brotherhood’: the historico-mythological relations between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were stressed to give an historical dimension to a very new cooperation; the role of the Zionist and Messianic African churches and sects, and the possible latent influence of Jewish lore on certain African tribes, such as the Poeul or the Ashanti of Ghana, were dusted off and used in many ambassadorial speeches.

The relationship between social structure and the emergence of democracy has long intrigued social scientists. In an early statement of the modernization perspective on this topic, Lipset (1960) postulated that a strong association exists between the degree of socioeconomic development and democracy. As economic development rose, so did wealth, income, and education, but income inequality declined, resulting in a population of moderate upper and lower classes and an expanding middle class, all of which favored the development of democratic political institutions. Subsequent quantitative studies found that a strong correlation can indeed be demonstrated between socioeconomic development and democratic institutions (Bollen 1983; Bollen and Jackman 1985). Despite significant contributions, these studies have not paid sufficient attention to either social agency or the mechanism of democratization during transitional periods. This essay will examine both of these factors by focusing on the role played by entrepreneurs in ousting dictatorial regimes.

That the Meiji Restoration marked Japan's proruption as a modern industrial nation-state has become a commonplace among those who study Japanese political history. The event may lack the romantic drama and mythology of the French revolutionary upheaval of almost a century before, yet the Restoration has remained a source of fascination for scholars seeking patterns in the events that transcend national boundaries to form the seamless web of human history.

The bells tolled early on the morning of the 28th of January 1867, summoning the peasants from Agró and the surrounding areas on the island of Kerkyra. The bailiffs employed by the local landlords and the constables ordered to protect them were to arrive that day to collect the current year's rent. Most peasants in the area around Agró were sharecroppers cultivating the land of absentee landlords and bound to these plantation owners both by contracts and forms of quasi-feudal obligations. The annual collection of the rents was always a tense affair because under Ionian law and custom, if a sharecropper failed to pay his rent, he was subject to summary seizure and detention in prison until someone settled the debt. And from this law, there was no right of appeal.

In the shadow of the Historikerstreit over the meaning of the Nazi era, West German historians are conducting a less highly publicized but similarly politicized debate about the role of ethnography in social history. The following analysis of local club life, based on ethnographic and archival research in Boppard on the Rhine, is offered as a contribution to and comment on this debate from the viewpoint of interpretive cultural anthropology. I contend that “local knowledge”—to employ the phrase by Clifford Geertz—is indispensable to broader historical syntheses, though for different reasons than have been suggested by either critics or advocates of cultural anthropology among West German historians.

‘Peasant revolution’ is an anomalous concept. The oppressed in past class societies have been predominantly peasant,1 and this situation continues in the contemporary world, if the definition of ‘peasant’ includes the dependent agricultural producers of the Third World. However, the distinction between humanistic sympathies and political realities led Marx, and subsequent theorists, to a negative view of the capacity of peasants to carry out successful revolutions. According to this reasoning, the parochialism of peasant life precludes the scope of comprehension, organization, and program required to overthrow the existing class structure. These limitations have led, over and over, to abortive revolts, to the impossibility of purely peasant revolution.

Historians who have studied French primary education during the nineteenth century, Maurice Gontard, Jacques and Mona Ozouf, and Peter Meyer, have noted the great gains made by the instituteurs and their growing professional-ization from the time of the law of 1833 to the law of the 1880s. Improvements in the quality of teaching derived mainly from the introduction of a national system of normal schools (écoles normales primaires) by the Law on Primary Education of 1833. This article will discuss the history, programs, and organization of these schools and the origin and backgrounds of their students. It will also examine 280 essays written by schoolmasters in 1861 on the state of primary education in the towns and villages of France; these mémoires, written for the most part by graduates of the normal schools, provide first-hand insight into the teacher himself, his professional goals and sense of mission, and how he viewed the world around him in the middle of the last century.

In late 1832, a small religious sect, the Children of Peace, completed their second place of worship, a temple, in the village of Hope in the sparsely settled northern reaches of Toronto's rural hinterland. Called by a vision to “ornament the Christian Church with all the glory of Israel,” the Children of Peace rebuilt Solomon's temple as the seat of their New Jerusalem (Schrauwers 1993; 2009). As William Lyon Mackenzie, newspaper editor, mayor of Toronto, and member of the elected assembly for the riding enthused, this three-tiered building was “calculated to inspire the beholder with astonishment; its dimensions—its architecture—its situation—are all so extraordinary” (CA 18 Sept. 1828). The Children of Peace, having fled a cruel and uncaring English pharaoh, viewed themselves as the new Israelites lost in the wilderness of Upper Canada; here they would end sectarianism and rebuild God's kingdom on the principle of charity. It is important to stress both the symbolism and the intended function of this, their second church; the highly symbolic temple was intended solely for their monthly alms sacrifice for the poor “Israelite fashion.” The Charity Fund they collected there was utilized for “the relief of the poor of the contributors, and others” (Sharon Temple n.d.: 11), as well as the support of a shelter for the homeless (Schrauwers 2009: 47). Targeted recipients included victims of a cholera epidemic in Toronto and starving pioneer settlers in the outlying districts (CA 23 Aug. 1832; Constitution 4 May 1837).

For all the attention the rural insurrection of 1789 has received, there is still a great deal to learn. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has suggested that the revolts provide us with a window into a great transformation of the French countryside. He is struck by the contrast with the great seventeenth-century movements of violent resistance to the fiscal pressures of the growing state. After a long interval in which the defeated peasantry raised no major challenge, the distinctive target of the rural upheavals of the early revolution had switched from the claims of the state to those of the lord. Understanding this shift, Le Roy Ladurie suggests, should illuminate the rural history of France in modern times. Why do peasants rise against one target rather than another? To date there is little scholarly consensus on the forms and significance of the rural insurrection.

This paper proposes an ethnographic theorization of the relationship between naming, translation, and subject constitution via the analysis of forms of interpellation in colonial Angola. It engages critically with systemic/structural renderings of colonial society that portray social positions as oppositional to argue for a deconstructive approach attentive to historical disjunctions between naming and social positioning. Dwelling on core signifiers in Portuguese and Umbundu, the paper describes the iterative chain of substitutions through which subjects have been constituted, that is, reduced and transformed. For instance, how are the Umbundu status signifiers ocimbundu and ocindele reduced in their respective translations as “black” and “white”? How can translation both re-enact and challenge the constitution of racialized and ethnicized categories of difference? How is this related to transformations in Angolan history? The argument put forth challenges the conventional understanding of social categories in the context of Portuguese colonialism in Angola by arguing that the performativity of naming and translation constitutes subjects via both fixation and displacement. Therefore, the possibility of transformation does not lie in the intentional action of subjects, but in their capacity to operate within the fractures of the relationship between language and society by drawing on disjunctions between signifier and signified, names and social positioning, subjective constitution and sociopolitical context.

Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.

This article examines the political role of Confucian ritual in early Japanese history. New research on early Chinese ritual has recast it as a deliberately transformative social tool, a manufactured “as if” realm in which ideal relations are played out in full knowledge of their disjunction with the real world, in an attempt to order it. This article uses this understanding of ritual to analyze Confucianism in the practice of sacred kingship in early Japan, and by contrast in Tang China. I reexamine a number of well-known primary sources of early Japanese history in comparison with parallel Chinese sources of the Tang dynasty. Placing that comparison within the context of new developments in the historiography of China, Korea, and Japan, I argue that Confucianism's comparatively weak ritual positioning in Japan disabled its capacity to legitimate imperial rule there. The early Japanese state thus lacked one of the primary ritual tools employed in other parts of premodern East Asia to legitimate the power of new emperors and kings. I thus unpack one component in a wider process of East Asian cultural reproduction, which in the case of Japan contributed to the emergence of a state ultimately not ruled through imperial institutions or the emperor for most of its premodern history. The bifurcation of ritual and political power in sacred kingship, a seemingly geographically and temporally widespread phenomenon currently studied in various global histories, is explained in this article in terms of complex processes of cultural reproduction and transmission.

Serge Gruzinski (1996), in an analysis of the Feast of Corpus Domini in the colonial Mexico of the modern era, notices the extreme importance that the protagonists of the events that he studied gave to the tiniest details of the ritual procedure. Because he is interested in understanding the political sense of these and other “baroque” ceremonial moments, Gruzinski implicitly rejects all functionalist readings and prefers to examine the connections between power and the elements within the ritual mechanism. He notices, for example, how the Corpus Domini was in no way a moment of controlled expression of the political tensions in colonial Mexican society. On the contrary, the ritual seems to him to be an occasion in which and by means of which the various Corpora constituting that society could publicly display and negotiate status, power, and prerogatives (Gruzinski 1996:150–51). The concrete ceremonial performances establish and contribute to “redefining the status quo” (ibid.:151). This explains the attention to what may seem to us to be insignificant details of the ceremony, but certainly they were not so for the protagonists (ibid.:142).

Are democracies more likely to pursue free trade than autocracies? Turn-of-the-last-century liberals believed that democracies were more likely to engage in trade than absolutist monarchies (Doyle 1986:1161; Thomson 1966:462). “The majority consists of bread eaters,” wrote the French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1862: 102–3). The argument according to which democracy is less bellicose than autocracy does sometimes rest on the assumption that democracy is more prone to commercial intercourse than autocracy. For a criticism of this line of argument, see Gowa (1995: 519). The electioneering work of the Anti-Corn Law League in Britain in the 1840s confirmed English radicals' belief that the franchise would mitigate corruption and rent seeking. However, subsequent history falsified these expectations. The simultaneous moves of autocratic France toward free trade and of democratic United States toward protection confounded any simple association between regime type and trade policy. No one has found a straightforward relation between democracy and trade. With one recent exception. Geoffrey Garrett and Peter Lange (1995) argue that democracies are quicker to adjust to changes in their economic environment than autocracies because of the popular constraint. The present essay revisits the liberals' insight.

Why do some states fail to establish the capacity of legal regulation among significant sections of their population, and instead allow alternative norms of social order to take the place of those promoted by the state? Existing models of state building in the sociological literature treat the building of modern bureaucratic authority as a political process in which weak state authority results from a state's inability to defeat rival bases of power. On the other hand, neo-institutionalist theory highlights the significant effects that institutional environments have on organization building, but its elaborations of state building have mainly emphasized processes of the diffusion of world society models as central to the making of the modern nation-state. Both models fail to explain how limitations in new states' capacities to govern populations emerge in cases when states fulfill conditions specified by each model. I use the case of state building in the Albanian highlands to show that jurisdictional struggles and resistance that emerge out of distinct cultures of legality are key to understanding why organizationally capable states may fail to establish durable mechanisms of governance among marginal social groups.