The emergence of one-party political systems among the new nations of Africa, now an unmistakable trend, has been disconcerting to social scientists for at least two reasons: first, this trend was not clearly foreseen during the period leading to independence; and, second, now that it is clearly discernible students of Africa are uncertain as to how the trend should be interpreted and evaluated. This question was discussed in a recent article by D. E. Apter from the viewpoint of political science. The present paper deals with the same problem, but from an anthropological viewpoint. It considers only the new nations in Africa south of the Sahara; these were also Apter's main concern, though he includes in his discussion some of the new nations in other parts of the world as well.

Roger Daniels' comments (CSSH 1983:401–404) pertaining to my paper on assimilation of the Chinese in Peru and the U.S.A. (CSSH 1978:335–358) contained several misrepresentations which need to be corrected lest readers of this journal who may be unfamiliar with my paper be misled.

Duncan Salkeld's study of madness in the age of Shakespeare is conceived of as being against the grain of both traditional literary criticism and historiography. Noting that the critical contemplation of the inner life of Shakespearean character has been central (as far back as Coleridge) to previous approaches to the study of madness in Shakespeare, Salkeld argues instead that the “inner worlds of the mind of Shakespearean characterization are largely represented by external appearance, in language describing corporeal states.” Thus, the towering constructs of personality in Lear and Hamlet, for example, are turned inside out when critical attention is focused on the “materiality” of madness and its forms. This privileging of “external appearance” and “corporeality” over the imagined inner life of character is licensed by Salkeld's thesis that personal crises in the dramatic lives of Shakespeare's tragic heroes and heroines must invariably be read qua political crisis. The author writes that any “discussion of the internal life of a character then becomes a second order issue, and considerably more problematic when the historical specificity of these conditions is addressed” (p. 2).

In 1919, when Carlos Gagini penned this two-sentence definition of hulero for a dictionary of “Costa Rican-isms,” he matter of factly specified murderousness, slaving, terrorism, and Nicaraguan nationality as intrinsic characteristics of rubber tappers. Few other entries in Gagini's compilation reveal so tellingly a key implicit objective of the country lexicons that Central American intellectuals (for example, Membreño 1982 [1895]) began to publish in the late nineteenth century: the specification, through Spanish dialectology, of a still emergent national identity vis-è-vis neighbors who—until recently—had not been clearly distinct Others but simply fellow subjects first of one or another province of the Spanish Captaincy General of Guatemala and later, briefly, of the Mexican Empire (1821–23) and the independent Central American Federation (1823–38). And none of the other generally concise entries in Gagini's dictionary hints so directly at the links between processes of commodity creation, physical and cultural death, and the construction of nations.

This paper reexamines African socialism, the Ghanaian political economy under Kwame Nkrumah (1957–1966), Nkrumah’s intellectual genealogical heritage, and African intellectual history as a genre that transcends the bounds of the Atlantic world. First, I sketch the lives of Black Marxists—Nkrumah, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and Bankole Awoonor-Renner—from Africa and the Americas, to the Soviet Union, to England and Ghana, to rethink Black bodies not merely as theorists of racial and decolonial questions but also as sites, carriers, and manipulators of political-economic theories. In constructing connected and overlapping histories, I demonstrate how controversial and contested Soviet ideas became key sites of interrogation among global Black Marxists. By reframing travel as an intellectual process, I reconceptualize the movements of Black Marxists to the USSR, the United States, England, and Ghana as critical intellectual and historical processes in their understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. Second, I revisit the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah to argue that combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, I argue that we must situate African political ideologies not solely within a romanticized Afrocentric origin but as ideas that emerge out of contemporaneous global political and ideological struggles. I draw on global Black Marxists’ correspondence; newspaper and magazine articles; British and American espionage files; and Ghanaian, American, and British state and inter-state departmental documents in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial British, Ghanaian, American, and Russian archives.

In the nineteenth-century South Caucasus, hundreds of local farmers and nomads petitioned Russian authorities to allow them to become Christians. Most of them were Muslims and specifically requested to join the Armenian Apostolic Church. This article explores religious conversions to Armenian Christianity on Russia's mountainous southern border with the Ottoman Empire and Iran. It demonstrates that tsarist reforms, chiefly the peasant reform and the sedentarization of nomads, accelerated labor migration within the region, bringing many Muslims, Yazidis, and Assyrians into an Armenian environment. Local anxieties over Russian colonialism further encouraged conversions. I argue that by converting to Armenian Christianity many rural South Caucasians benefited from a change in their legal status, which came with the right to move residence, access to agricultural land, and other freedoms. Russia's Jewish communities, on the other hand, saw conversion to Armenian Christianity as a legal means to circumvent discrimination and obtain the right to live outside of the Pale of Settlement. By drawing on converts’ petitions and officials’ decisions, this article illustrates that the Russian government emerged as an ultimate arbiter of religious conversions, evaluating the sincerity of petitioners’ faith and how Armenian they had become, while preserving the empire's religious and social hierarchies.

European expansion from the fifteenth century produced much writing on, and sometimes in, non-European languages that served a broad array of imperial interests. Most European ventures into what one scholar has termed “colonial linguistics” were based on investigations among speakers of native tongues in the regions in which those speakers normally resided, twining language studies with observed “native” cultural qualities and setting out territories of colonial interest defined by local language and culture. Fewer colonial linguists ventured into plural societies to study the linguae francae of trade and labor that enabled communication across broad cultural and language differences, in part because such zones were considered dangerous and unstable, or lacking in mother tongues. Fewer still elected destinations of forced migration such as slave societies or freedmen's towns and villages to examine the mother tongues of persons who had come coercively from afar, though many such settings in certain periods offered a rich menu of languages for study. Those interested in the linguistic characteristics of slave societies tended to concern themselves more with the emerging European creoles, languages they could more easily understand than the native tongues of slaves or the contact languages of non-European provenance that sometimes coexisted with or preceded widespread use of European creole speeches in such locations. Today, most linguistic studies in the former slave colonies are focused exclusively on European creoles. Even recent monographs on African culture in the Americas only mention the speaking of African languages in passing, though language is a fundamental element of culture and linked in key ways to the continuity of ethnic ideas and practices. Together with the relative paucity of colonial documentation on slaves' lives and languages, the sited and topical hierarchy of colonial linguistics continues to powerfully structure historical studies of language in the former slave colonies.

Twenty years ago, in Cooking, Cuisine and Class, Jack Goody trained his sights, those of a social anthropologist, on the conditions prerequisite for the emergence of differentiated cuisine—a high and a low cuisine—in societies and cultures. Sweeping boldly over Europe, Asia, and Africa, and traversing a period of time which extended from the fourth millennium B.C.E. in Egypt to two contemporary societies in northern Ghana, Goody could find space for only a few pages on ancient Rome; these may conveniently serve as my point of departure.

This article develops a typology of historical and archival gaps—physical, historiographical, and epistemological—to consider how non-existent sources are central to understanding colonial law and governance. It does so by examining the institutional and archival history of a court known as the Chaudrie in the French colony of Pondichéry in India in the eighteenth century, and integrating problems that are specific to the study of legal history—questions pertaining to jurisdiction, codification, evidence, and sovereignty—with issues all historians face regarding power and the making of archives. Under French rule, Pondichéry was home to multiple judicial institutions, administered by officials of the French East Indies Company. These included the Chaudrie court, which existed at least from 1700 to 1827 as a forum where French judges were meant to dispense justice according to local Tamil modes of dispute resolution. However, records of this court prior to 1766 have not survived. By drawing on both contemporaneous mentions of the Chaudrie and later accounts of its workings, this study centers missing or phantom sources, severed from the body of the archive by political, judicial, and bureaucratic decisions. It argues that the Chaudrie was a court where jurisdiction was decoupled from sovereignty, and this was the reason it did not generate a state-managed and preserved archive of court records for itself until the 1760s. The Chaudrie’s early history makes visible a relationship between law and its archive that is paralleled by approaches to colonial governance in early modern French Empire.

In the 1690s, Ottoman bureaucrats reformed the sprawling postal system, a vital communications infrastructure that undergirded imperial power. Despite the expanding monitoring capacity that resulted, a constant shortage of horses regularly left couriers stranded for days and delayed official correspondence. This essay investigates this paradox and draws on a series of fifty-one Ottoman imperial decrees and reports from 1690 to 1833 to make three arguments. It first shows how bureaucrats perceived and tried to fix the problem by rationing horse usage and strengthening enforcement of rules. Second, it reveals that a range of official and non-official actors were diverting horses toward profit-making ventures in what I call a “shadow economy.” Third, it explains why Ottoman bureaucrats were unable to recognize the existence of this shadow economy. Like contemporary administrators in Qing China who found it hard to synthesize intelligence from different frontiers, Ottoman bureaucrats treated multiple reports of missing horses as discrete, unconnected events rather than connected evidence of a competing market demand for horses. Compounding this problem of a blinkered informational order, profound economic and social changes meant that bureaucrats in the capital were slow to realize that long-held official entitlements regarding horse usage for personal uses were aiding the growth of the shadow economy. I conclude by considering some social consequences of commercial forces in Ottoman society and contemporary France, and the stakes of this study with respect to the rise of anonymity in market exchanges, a property of capitalism.

The growth of English Nonconformity during the era of the demographic revolution (circa 1750–1850) has long been regarded as an impediment to the reconstruction of reproductive behavior. Historical demographers have relied heavily on Church of England registers of baptisms, burials, and marriages, while treating Protestant dissenters from the Church of England secondarily, as a factor of underestimation in the Anglican record. Such treatment suggests that religious culture played no independent role in determining population growth. This assumption seems problematic, however, considering the central role that social historians have assigned evangelical dissent to the emergence of modern English society and the somewhat greater place that religion has occupied in demographic studies of populations in continental Europe, the United States, and the third world.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Mel'gunov, the son of a well-to-do landowner, was born in 1804 in the province of Orel, south-west of Moscow. He was educated largely at home by private tutors and was well read at an early age. When Mel'gunov was still a boy the family moved to Kharkov and soon thereafter their home became a center of intellectual and social life. Among those who participated in the gatherings at the Mel'gunovs were professors from the newly-established University of Kharkov as well as government officials.

The Company of the Apostles at Aiyetoro is a settlement unique in Nigeria. It is a prosperous community with a high standard of living and excellent amenities. Its reserves of capital, or rather cash, are obviously very large indeed. The people look healthy and content. Their way of life is wholly communal and they claim that it is based on the precepts of the early Christian Apostles. The varying views expressed about it by visitors have contributed to the great interest which it undoubtedly rouses.

In the 1970s, Italy's economy grew faster than all in the industrialized world but Japan's. Its growth rates of up to 5 percent, although lower than in the 1960s, compared favorably to the relatively flat figures from Britain, Germany, and the United States, most strikingly in the two years after the second oil shock of 1979. Following its first “economic miracle” in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote The Economist, Italy's “second, lesser miracle” was how the country continued to thrive in the 1970s despite a “bumbling bureaucracy,” ineffective governments, high inflation and public debt, terrorism, and “the left-wing unions’ greedy, if understandable, reaction to the headlong development of the 1960s.” Italy's rapid growth was all the more impressive in light of the ongoing economic stagnation of the South and a general crisis in the big corporations of Lombardy and Piedmont, which had been dragged down by high oil prices, recession abroad, and indexed wages.