The nature of the relationship between ideas and the social conditions in which they develop has long been among the central concerns of fields like the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals, and the social history of ideas. For generations, scholars in these areas have hotly debated the proper way of characterizing the form of this relationship and how it should be conceptualized and studied. With few exceptions, however, there has been an astonishing consensus on one matter: fundamental intellectual reorientations have almost invariably been seen as the product—whether simple or complex—of one or more major social changes. As far as it has gone, this perspective has led to extremely important conclusions, but except among the psychoanalytically inclined, it has remained strangely and regrettably silent on the specific micro-level processes by which macro-level social changes actually translate into changes in ideas.

In Victorian England, the phrase “little stranger” was used to refer to the unborn child one had not yet met. Though it has fallen out of use today, the expression is not inapt for describing the children who enter new families, new ethnic or cultural identities, new social classes, and new nations via international adoption. Over time, and through a series of social practices designed both to “kin” the child and parents, siblings, and other relatives and to explain the child's presence to an inquisitive public, the “little stranger” comes to be more or less incorporated and acculturated: less strange, more familiar. Because international adoption makes those processes visible through its very unfamiliarity and its recourse to legal and cultural strategies, it has become a centerpiece of recent writing on kinship, reproduction, and childhood (Yngvesson 2010; Marre and Briggs 2009; Kim 2010; Wade 2007; Howell 2006; Marre and Bestard 2004; Dorow 2006; Bowie 2004; Volkman 2005; Howell 2009; Leinaweaver and Seligmann 2009; Hübinette and Tigervall 2009; Briggs 2012).

Early on the cold morning of Wednesday, December 2, 1885, a crowd beganto gather in the forecourt of a handsome brick church on the outskirts ofDetroit. The church, only recently blessed, was the Polish Roman Catholicchurch of Saint Albertus; the crowd, eventually numbering perhaps eighthundred, were Polish immigrants. Most of them were women. Shortly after 6:00, seven policemen marched into the convent opposite the church and soon emerged escorting two Polish priests. The group moved toward the church, but at the church steps the crowd—“the women,” according to witnesses—began to jeer at and jostle the priests, and even pelted them with gravel. The police responded vigorously, but they and the priests were pushed from the door several times before they were finally able to enter.

Throughout the past two millennia or more the Jews of Diaspora have persistently maintained their religious and cultural identity in spite of many vicissitudes. Also, as manifested in Jewish history, where favorable conditions exist, politically and economically, Jewish communities have rarely experienced what may be described as a complete assimilation into their surrounding sociocultural milieu. An exceptional case, however, has been noted in China, where a once prosperous and burgeoning community of Jews did indeed experience that fate.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as slavery was disappearing elsewhere in the New World, slave-based plantation production of sugar in Cuba reached remarkable heights of technological sophistication and output. In 1868 Cuba produced 720,250 metric tons of sugar, more than 40 percent of the cane sugar reaching the world market in that year. Yet just as production reached these levels, the abolition of slavery in Cuba was initiated, beginning a process of slave emancipation that was to last nearly twenty years. Yet just as production reached these levels, the abolition of slavery in Cuba was initiated, beginning a process of slave emancipation that was to last nearly twenty years. This concurrence of events raises the question, What was the relationship between slavery and the development of sugar production, and why did emancipation in Cuba take place when and as it did?

Sociologists and anthropologists who have studied millennial movements in a comparative perspective have almost completely ignored the movements among Jews in the Diaspora. Historians have studied particular Jewish messianic outbursts and have also provided general surveys of Jewish millennial expectations and ‘false’ messiahs, but none have offered a systematic analysis of possible social causes and few have made any comparison with non-Jewish millennial movements. Gershom Scholem, the author of Sabbatai Sevi, by far the most outstanding work on Jewish messianism, puts the weight of explanation on the immanent development of ideas in Judaism and tends to discountenance possible social causes.

Since taking the editorial helm of CSSH in 2006, I have watched several intellectual trends shift and gather momentum. Postsocialist and postcolonial studies are merging into a more generalized interest in the politics of empire. Critical impulses once associated with the “post” approaches have found their way into studies of secularism, conversion, translation, and state effects. Increasingly, these topics are analyzed as transregional processes that operate across religious and political logics. In 2009, our first CSSH Conversation dealt with matters of tolerance and conversion in the Ottoman Empire, and in 2010 we filled an entire issue with essays on secularism (52-3). In each case, the ground we explored was contested, but themes of governmentality and moral transformation were central, and the terms of debate were broadly shared.

In July 2010, following a year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling, the French government passed a law prohibiting facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This article takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral politics as a site for articulating, rather than merely reflecting, social identities, I argue that the 2010 ban arose in significant part out of political parties’ struggles to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate politics in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. Specifically, I show that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France's major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the consensus thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It conceals ongoing conflict, both between and within political parties, over the precise meaning(s) of French republican nationhood. The findings thus underscore the relationship between boundary-drawing in the political sphere and the process of demarcating the cultural and political boundaries of nationhood in contexts of immigrant diversity.

This essay explores the intersecting socio-material and ethical demands that engineers confront in adapting sea defenses to climate change in Guyana. It focuses on the tensions in climate adaptation that create the possibilities for theorizing innovation as a key theme of counter-modernities in the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and archival research, I show that engineers’ decision-making regarding whether or not to innovate sea defenses is a fraught process dependent upon processes of erosion and the ontological (in)stability of specific infrastructures known as groynes. To cope, engineers produce what I call “innovation narratives” to describe how obstacles to climate adaptation are created by combinations of neocolonial empire, shapeshifting ecologies, inconsistent maintenance programs, and fiscal debt. At the same time, their efforts signal an emerging global politics of credibility that is reinforced by desires for more inclusive forms of governance rather than brute power or capitalization.

To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called “native prisons” in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana), this essay shows how birthing, impregnation, and menstruation shaped West Africa penal practices, including the selection of the captives, the duration of their time in prison, and how the prison factored into the legal infrastructure around tort settlements for debts and crimes. The term “prison of the womb” is used here to describe how the West African prison held bloodlines captive, threatening the impregnation of a female kin member as a ticking clock for tort settlement. Furthermore, it will be shown that this institution was imperative to the spread of mercantile capitalism in nineteenth-century Gold Coast.

Assimilation makes new members of a group by changing particular characteristics of non-members to reflect the fundamentals of collective belonging. Gaining the qualities for inclusion in one community typically involves losing at least some features that confer acceptance in another. However, scholars have generally not acknowledged assimilation as a process of loss. In part, this gap bespeaks a larger tendency to overlook the influence of emigration on national identity in population-exporting states (compared to the vast literature on immigration and national identity in population-receiving countries). This article analyzes discourses of assimilation concerning Japanese emigrants as a case study of how the ways in which members are understood to leave the national community delimits the bases of belonging for those who remain. Historically, Japanese ideologies of assimilation have been most contested in Brazil, where the largest Japanese diaspora in the West sought to reconcile patriotism and the expectations of the Japanese government with local nation-building agendas. After World War II, many emigrants and their descendants in Brazil refused to acknowledge Japan's surrender. This crisis inspired the first study of the Japanese diaspora ever conducted by a Japan-based social scientist. Izumi Seiichi's work in cultural anthropology helped to build Japan's new identity as a “peace state.” Subsequent generations of Japanese scholars continued to study the assimilation of the diaspora, recategorized as “Nikkei,” as a foil for “Japaneseness.” Their ethnic conception of national membership remains influential today, even as Japan transitions from a population exporter to a land of immigrants, including the Nikkei.

Forced branding, tattooing, and bodily inscriptions were linked to a complex intersection of meanings and uses in nineteenth-century Iran. Drawing on insights from studies of bodily inscriptions in other world historical contexts, this paper discusses branding as a marker of ownership, both of human slaves and of animals; Islamic attitudes toward bodily inscription and its symbolic significance in the afterlife; and associations between branding and human or divine love in Persian poetry. From this semiotic foundation, it turns to judicial uses of branding in nineteenth-century Iran: as torture for the extraction of incriminating admissions, and as punishment intended to shame (symbolically casting the criminal from society, stigmatizing their crime) and identify (tracking convicted criminals). Throughout the paper, branding’s legal place is understood in relation to silence and speaking, writing and reading, pain, humiliation, and the inversion of branding’s meaning by its victims, in Iran and a number of other societies.

This article argues that we need to move beyond the “Atlantic” and “formal” bias in our understanding of the history of slavery. It explores ways forward toward developing a better understanding of the long-term global transformations of slavery. Firstly, it claims we should revisit the historical and contemporary development of slavery by adopting a wider scope that accounts for the adaptable and persistent character of different forms of slavery. Secondly, it stresses the importance of substantially expanding the body of empirical observations on trajectories of slavery regimes, especially outside the Atlantic, and most notable in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, where different slavery regimes existed and developed in interaction. Thirdly, it proposes an integrated analytical framework that will overcome the current fragmentation of research perspectives and allow for a more comparative analysis of the trajectories of slavery regimes in their highly diverse formal and especially informal manifestations. Fourth, the article shows how an integrated framework will enable a collaborative research agenda that focuses not only on comparisons, but also on connections and interactions. It calls for a closer integration of the histories of informal slavery regimes into the wider body of existing scholarship on slavery and its transformations in the Atlantic and other more intensely studied formal slavery regimes. In this way, we can renew and extend our understandings of slavery's long-term, global transformations.

Little is known of the private worlds of working people in the growing cities of nineteenth-century India, still less of the space women occupied in them. Historical documentation is almost silent on information about their everyday lives. An exception perhaps are certain legal records, such as the proceedings on petitions of insolvents. From the early nineteenth century onwards, many humble citizens of metropolitan cities were able to petition the courts for protection from their creditors. It is here that we find the striking record of the personality and concerns of Ayesha, mother of an insolvent butcher in nineteenth-century Bombay. This article draws upon the documentation generated by the hearings on Ismail Sobhan's petition to the High Court of Bombay for protection.