Economists have increasingly recognized that one of the main sources of economic development is technological change. Since it is much easier to borrow than to invent new technology, an important source of technological change has been the diffusion of new technology from its place of origin to subsequent users. When such diffusion involves movement between two countries, it is usually referred to as technology transfer.

The primary interest in this study is to make some contribution to the elaboration of a theoretical problem: What are the relations between certain forms of ideology and the social formations in which they are, or can be, realized? The consideration of ideology as a sociological category is of continual and growing concern (e.g., Moskvichov 1974; Bétaille 1978; Gellner 1978), despite the attempts of bourgeois social science to kill it off during the 1960s (cf. Lipset 1960; Bell 1960; Waxman 1968). But my present interest in it arises out of a particular historical question: Why did the Christian missions fail so signally in their efforts to evangelize and convert East African pastoralists, most conspicuously the various sections of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania and Kenya?

All history is comparative. The judgments historians make are derived from some explicit or implicit standard of comparison. Thus, when historians describe the antebellum South in the United States as technically backward, rural, nonindustrial, socially retrograde, and paternalistic, they mean to say that it was so in comparison with the North. When historians of nineteenthcentury Brazil describe it in the same terms, they compare it either to the hegemonic capitalist areas of that period, including the United States North, or to Brazil itself at later periods in its history.

In the April 1979 issue of CSSH, Karen Leonard has advanced a new explanation for the decline and eventual collapse of the Mughal empire in India. She argues that “indigenous banking firms were indispensable allies of the Mughal state” (p. 152), and that the great nobles and imperial officers “were more than likely to be directly dependent upon these banking firms.” (p. 165) Thus, when in the period 1650–1750 these banking firms began “the redirection of [their] economic and political support” (p. 164) toward nascent regional polities and rulers, including the British East India Company in Bengal, this led to bankruptcy, the ensuing series of political crises and the “downfall of the empire” (p. 152). On first consideration, this theory does offer a plausible means to explain some of the more puzzling aspects of the period of Mughal decline, circa 1690 to 1720. Certainly the faltering, after more than a century of steady increase, of the flow of resources toward the imperial center in the last decade of the seventeenth century, and the inability of the empire to pay its highest ranking cadre of officers, the amirs or nobles, and their followers are manifest. A coterminous erosion of authority, the loss of morale and confidence of badly isolated imperial officers stationed throughout the subcontinent, and the loss of fighting spirit amongst imperial armies bogged down in an interminable war against the Marathas in the Deccan are also well known.

In recent years, a number of anthropologists have come to recognize that missionaries, who play a central role in many of the social systems that anthropologists study, have yet to receive the ethnographic and theoretical attention they deserve. Often, when anthropologists discussed missionaries at all, they treated them as part of the setting, much like rainfall and elevation: matters one felt obliged to mention, but peripheral to the real object of social anthropological description and analysis. There were, to be sure, exceptions, notably the body of anthropological literature that has dealt with the effects of missionaries on various areas of native life.

How far were China's prewar economic institutions the product of its particular history and traditions—that is, the product either of the nature of its premodern society or of its later status as a semicolony—and how far can they rather be seen as answers to problems common to the stage of economic development which the country had reached at that time?

Historians have long recognized that the large body of periodical literature surviving from the eighteenth century, along with the smaller amount preserved from the seventeenth century, is an important source of insight into the early development of modern society in the West. Newspapers and other periodicals—magazines, reviews, and a miscellany of other publications difficult to characterize precisely—provided eighteenth-century readers with fundamental information about their world and with news of the ways in which it was changing. It is not surprising that this voluminous printed record also yields evidence to those seeking to understand that world from the vantage point of a subsequent era.

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.

One night five years after completing my first field work I had a disturbing dream. In it I returned to my original field site in the Bosavi region of Papua New Guinea to discover that the vast tropical forest with its patches of gardens and isolated longhouses had disappeared. In its place was a sprawling development with rows of tract houses, paved roads, and motels. The whole was dominated by an impressive mission complex with airstrip, schools, dormatories, and a huge church.

Although only a minority of harvest workers in California are covered by union contracts, jobs in some nonunionized industries are becoming increasingly stabilized and internally stratified in ways and to extents that are largely unnoted. These conditions result from an augmentation of the labor market structure (Fisher 1953), that is, from policies evolving within agricultural industries that partially insulate their job markets from external market forces.

In the April 1979 issue of CSSH I proposed a theory: The financial services of leading indigenous banking firms were indispensable to the Mughal state, and the diversion by these firms of resources, both credit and trade, from the Mughals to other political powers in the Indian subcontinent contributed to the downfall of the Mughal empire (p. 152). John F. Richards's article in the present issue takes exception to that theory, challenging the evidentiary basis for my assertions. While stating that further research was admittedly necessary to test and fully substantiate the theory, I certainly offered evidence that these banking firms supplied working capital to the empire and its officials for military campaigns, trade, construction, karkhanah (workshop) production, and personal loans. I also discussed the bankers' regulation of the valuation, exchange, and circulation of currency, and particularly the hundi system of bills of exchange. The political potential of these financial services – of their performance or nonperformance, and on what terms – is obvious. Indeed, I cited instances of political interactions between bankers and officials.