The newly awakened interest in the comparative study of politics is part and parcel of a silent revolution that has taken place in the social sciences during the last decades. Such a re-orientation in turn is in part due to the radical social and political transformations in this era of total wars and revolutions. Because as Aristotle knew all too well, and peaceful periods in history all too often tried to forget, the social sciences are disciplines of “ethics”, spelling out man's deep involvements and demanding decisions at critical turning points of history.

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.

At the beginning of the long reign of George III, a new mass media outlet for political expression surfaced in England: the colored political and social print. These prints were first carried as a sideline at stationers and bookstores, but from the middle 1770s on their popularity was great enough to justify setting up special print shops.

The Georgian print after 1760 was different in more than color from those that had preceded it, though the use of color was indicative of the change. Artistically they were less representational, more free in line, and made heavier use of caricature in both face and body action. In content their appeal was more populist and urban than aristocratic and rural. They were also more journalistic; they focused their comment increasingly on current and often trivial political and social events and were published soon after the event occurred. In an earlier period, comment was in response to events. After George III, the commentators became established professionals seeking out events which they could make the theme of their weekly or so caricature comment. The prints also continued to be unrestrained in ridicule, attacking not only political leaders, but royalty itself. If possible, they became more unfair and calumnious than the prints of the period of the first two Georges. The prints were a part of what was evolving, I will argue, as a new democratizing force in the politics of England: a stream of mass media criticism of current political practices.

Recent transitional justice scholarship has explored the role of emotions during periods of political transition. Scholars have taken negative emotions as both legitimate responses to past crimes and as supports to the pursuit of justice in the present. This paper argues that feelings circulate across a wide array of individuals, things, and processes that often sit apart from the formal, judicial spaces of transitional justice. To make this argument, I consider the Tunisian campaign Manich Msamah (I Do Not Forgive) and its articulation of an affect of unforgiveness in resistance to the proposed Economic and Financial Reconciliation Law. Formed in 2015, the campaign came about in response to the law and efforts, under the pretext of “reconciliation,” to return to public life figures from the repressive regime of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Drawing on affect theory, I argue that unforgiveness was stuck to particular individuals (figures from the old regime and circulated between a community of unforgiving activists), things (public spaces, posters, T-shirts and the ephemera of protest) and processes (accountability and substantive forms of justice). I argue that an affect of unforgiveness thus aided activists not only in their resistance to state-led reconciliation but also helped imagine alternative paths to justice in Tunisia.

Revivals of public interest in the Neolithic Near East have generally coincided with the emergence of powerful imagery, such as the discovery of Çatalhöyük’s striking wall paintings in the 1960s. Now, sixty years later, the sculptures of Göbekli Tepe are ensuring the period’s widespread appeal. The capacity of these well-preserved buildings to carry such imagery until today has made them, in turn, an image of the supposed achievements of Neolithic sedentism. But the popularity of these images depends on their decontextualization. This modernist notion that permanent architecture represents the conquest of spatial forms over time is in contradiction with the early Neolithic experience of settled life, which had more to do with the unstable duration of places than with an emancipation from motion. This essay explores the Neolithic preference for earth architecture over more stable construction materials such as stone, its influence on visual culture, and how it contributed to building new living relations to the inhabited landscape. Instead of the sense of fixity and completeness that we, moderns, desperately seek in plans, reconstructions, and monumentality, it is the very transience, repetitiveness, and cumulativeness of earth that determined the transformations of the archaeological record. In other words, rhythms are key to understanding Neolithic sedentism in ways that differ wildly from the static images we have substituted for it.

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 tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations.

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.

British Cochin was a port in southwestern India surrounded by princely states. This article uses a dispute surrounding its limits to interrogate the role international law played in generating novel forms of political claim-making among European and non-European powers at the turn of the twentieth century. Cochin was located in an area where both physical and political boundaries were hard to define. Situated at the tip of a narrow coastline surrounded by water, it was also lodged amid territories belonging to two princely states—Cochin State and Travancore. Its ever-shifting coastline and proximity to princely states forced colonial authorities to adopt a flexible approach to the port’s boundaries, allowing the tiny princely state of Cochin to become progressively more involved with the British port’s development over the nineteenth century. The article starts by examining the forces that shaped these entanglements, and then explores a territorial dispute involving British Cochin to illuminate the ways in which, during the twentieth century’s first quarter, both the colonial administration and the Cochin State deployed the language of international law to try to extend their powers over the port. By highlighting the Cochin State’s partially successful attempts at claiming sovereignty over the waters surrounding the harbor in order to become involved with the development of a port in British India, this article shows how international law emerged as a site through which semi-sovereign territories began testing and even extending the limits of their sovereignty.

Every subject of the state, Immanual Kant reasoned in a discussion of “civil equality” in 1793, “must be able to attain the social rank [Stufe eines Standes] … to which his talent, his effort, and his luck can carry him” without hindrance by any “hereditary prerogative.” A year later Kant's former disciple Johann Gottlieb Fichte likewise imagined a society in which “the choice of a Stand” would be “a choice through freedom” to which no “particular action” or “general institution” could pose a legitimate barrier. The two philosophers offered variations on the radical social principle of “careers open to talent,” extending the promise of upward mobility to talented children of the underprivileged. Proclaimed by the French National Assembly in August 1789, the principle also had a German lineage and, in the first decade of the next century, was to figure prominently in the official program for national revival in Prussia.

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.

This paper deals with some relationships between Javanese modernization, a Javanese ritual called slametan, and a Javanese folk-show called ludruk. I shall illustrate how slametan and ludruk play complementary roles with respect to Javanese modernization.

For more than forty years now, the French state has produced, legitimized, and supported local identities through national policies of historic preservation and public discourses about heritage. Rather than simply replaying the old, anxious, and nostalgic tune of national identity, the advent of heritage in France marked a singular moment of cultural transformation and rupture. The national past became articulated, in public speech and political practice, with the cultures and identities of local and regional territories. Given France's centralist tradition, and its political culture that is often cast as the archetype of “an ideology concerned with boundedness, continuity, and homogeneity” (Handler 1988: 6), this historical transformation presents a puzzle, to which this paper provides answers through historical and theoretical inquiry.

Les Chinois de Madagascar ont une vie sociale particulière et très caractéristique. Ils ont adapté et transformé leurs coutumes, adopté des habitudes qui leur étaient étrangères en les modifiant à leur gré, ce qui en fait une communauté spéciale, curieuse et intéressante. Pour citer quelques exemples, les Chinois continuent à manger de la cuisine chinoise exclusivement, mais ils ont presque totalement abandonné l'usage des chop-sticks; ils utilisent la cuiller et la fourchette, mais pas de couteau, la cuisine chinoise étant présentée découpée dans les plats. Hommes et femmes s'habillent à l'européenne, et ce n'est que très rarement, lors de certaines fêtes, que quelques jeunes filles portent la robe chinoise fendue sur les cotés (ch'i-p'ao).

This essay is essentially a historical survey of the whole career of civilized societies. It seeks to list major probabilities and possibilities and to identify ascertained fact. It takes stock of the present state of knowledge after a long period, almost a century, of study.