For much of the last seventy-five years African combatants, especially in wars of their own making, have not been seen as masters of the guns they shoot. In Kenya in the 1950s, for example, captured Mau Mau were humiliated: they were taken to shooting ranges where they failed to hit a target with their guns. More recently, rebels in southern Sudan considered guns poor, if effective substitutes for more embodied weapons like spears, while young men in Sierra Leone fought with the weapons at hand such as knives or machetes, because they were too poor to obtain guns. When the armies of Ethiopia and Eritrea fought well and hard with sophisticated weapons, it was said to be the result of Cold War rivalries or national agendas gone berserk. Rhodesia's bush war, Zimbabweans' liberation struggle, suggests something else, a space shaped by technology and clientelism in which guns, most especially guns in guerrilla hands, exemplify very specific European ideas about Africans, that they are skilled and sophisticated.

Lenin spoke at the Second Congress of 1920 to multiple audiences. In continuity with the First International, he spoke in the utopian language of Bolshevism, of the successful revolutionary proletariat that had taken the state and was making its place in history without the intercession of bourgeois class rule. Recognizing the limits of socialism in one country surrounded by the military and economic might of “World imperialism,” however, Lenin also pressed for a broader, ongoing world-historic anti-imperialism in alliance with the oppressed of the East, who, it seemed, were neither sufficiently proletarianized, nor, as yet, subjects of history. There are many ways to situate this particular moment in Lenin's thought. One can see the budding conceits of Marxist social history, or “history from below,” in which millions in the East could become historical subjects under the sign of “anti-imperialism.” One can also see this gesture to those outside the pale as a flourish of the emergent Soviet empire, and as a projection of anxieties about Bolshevik control over a vast and varied Russian countryside with its own internal enemies. But Lenin also spoke to audiences who would make up the next, Third International, like the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy, who saw imperialism dividing the world into oppressed and oppressor nations. For this Third Worldist audience, looking increasingly to the new Soviet Union for material and military support for “national self-determination,” Lenin extends the historic mission of a future world socialism.

In 1899, Chilean workers discovered the mummified body of a woman in a copper mine in Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert. Chile's most prominent archaeologists were called to examine the body and they estimated it had been in the mine for more than four centuries. What most astonished both the public and the scholarly community was that the body had been preserved virtually intact, apparently by nothing but the environmental conditions surrounding it. José Toribio Medina, a central figure in Chilean archaeology at the time, discussed this finding in 1901:

In December of 1984, Zhang Chengzhi, a thirty-six-year-old ethnologist from Beijing and an important novelist in contemporary Chinese literature, reached a small village on the loess plateaus of northwestern China. An impoverished farmer, Ma Zhiwen, hosted Zhang during his brief stay and introduced him to the local community of Muslims who practiced Sufism, a form of mystical Islam. Night after night, the Muslim villagers sought Zhang out to tell him about events in the history of their Sufi order, the Zheherenye. Zhang learned that Zheherenye Sufis carefully cultivated historical memories reaching back to the mid-eighteenth century when the order was founded by a Chinese Sufi returned from Yemen. Since then, the order had been led by a murshid, the Arabic word for mentor or spiritual guide. During the last dynasty of the Chinese empire, which fell in 1911, the Zheherenye were often outlawed and clashed repeatedly with the imperial army in regional wars that the Sufis always lost. Interpreting their defeats as martyrdom, the Zheherenye narrated the lives of the successive murshid in their transmission of oral histories, but also in handwritten histories that were often written in Persian or Arabic.

This essay examines the relationship between Western notions of modernity and Wahhabi-inclined Islamic reform in Ghana and Burkina Faso (Upper Volta until 1984) during the early decades of independence. I will highlight ways in which Western/secular education facilitated the early diffusion of this genre of reform. Over the past decade or so, historians have explored the extent to which the appeal of the Wahhabi movement in urban West Africa, toward the end of French and British colonialism, can be traced to Muslim attempts to find a middle ground between Western “modernity” and authentic spiritual purity. In what follows, I employ comparative, ethnographic, and historical analyses to draw attention to the pivotal roles Western-educated urban Muslim professionals played in the development of this reform. Despite the active participation of these professionals in transforming the Wahhabi message into urban mass movements, scholars have paid scant attention to the factors that drew them to the Wahhabi doctrine in the first instance.

Despite official narratives of a relatively smooth transition, of the merging of “those things which belong together,” German unification and the formation of a new German state has been an uneven project filled with friction and animosity. While the West German government celebrated the “victory” of unification, and stated that all East Germans wanted unification, one group of East Germans did not look forward to the dissolution of the GDR: members of the East German military, the Nationale Volksarmee (National People's Army, or NVA). Disbanded immediately upon unification, the overwhelming majority of NVA officers were left unemployed overnight, stripped of their status as officers and portrayed by the West Germans as the “losers” of the Cold War. For these men, unification was not a joyous, desired event; rather, it represented the end of their careers, security, status, and the state they had sworn to defend. As such, the “fall” into democracy for these men was from the start fraught with uncertainty, disappointment, anomie, and a profound sense of loss.

Between 1780 and 1787 Samuel and Jeremy Bentham were asked to manage a large Russian estate owned by Prince Grigorii Potemkin, one of the closest advisors of Catherine II. They had to face two related but distinct problems: Russian peasants were unskilled, while British skilled workers and supervisors were hard to control. It was the problem of controlling skilled English workers in Russia (and not the Russian serfs) that led the Bentham brothers to reflect on the relation between free and forced labor, and then between labor and society. Before and after Foucault, the Panopticon has been seen as a response to social deviance, and in relation to prisons and the emergence of a global surveillance system in modern societies. According to Foucault, the Panopticon is not just a model for institutions, but something whose principles are those of power in society at large. I want to challenge this view by arguing that the Panopticon project actually was a system for controlling wage labor, which drew inspiration from a particular image of Russian serfdom and from the Bentham brothers' experiences in that country. Those experiences have been the subject of several papers and books. The first aim of this paper is not to recall these, but rather to integrate them into a broader intellectual debate. In particular, I will evoke the origins of the Benthams' experiences in Russian, British, and European debates of the period about the legal status of labor. The way that “western” thought conceived of labor in general and positioned itself vis-à-vis Russia necessitates a reexamination of the thesis that the principal schools of western thought were misunderstood in Russia. I will argue, instead, that Russian authors and reformers relied on ambiguities in western thinking about labor when they advanced their own images of serfdom and proposals for reform.

Nowadays, life itself is one of the most active zones of capitalist production. Not only has biology been upgraded to Big Science, biological material and information are increasingly the subject of engineering, banking, reproduction, and exchange. The description and broad implications of the refiguring of life itself and its intrusion into economics and politics represent some of the most important issues on the academic agenda at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Pálsson 2007). Foucault's works on biopolitics (see, for instance, Foucault 1994) have obviously contributed critical insights with respect to the current refashioning of the human body, illuminating the political and governmental dimensions of these developments (Inda 2005; Rose 2006; Gottweis and Peterson 2008; Nowotny and Testa 2009; Lock and Nguyen 2009). Recently, a series of scholars have revisited the early writings of Marx, sometimes in combination with Foucauldian perspectives, in their attempt to make sense of the political economy of modern biotechnology, including the fragmenting of body parts and the labor process involved. One of the emerging themes in current discussions relates to the conception and role of labor in the reproduction of bodies and body parts. While Marx may not be an obvious source of innovative perspectives on the modern production of human biovalue, a somewhat unique industry that had not arrived in his time, his early works offer useful insights into contemporary developments.

Malthus published his Essay on Population in 1798 and for the next century, as the new discipline of political economy incorporated his thought into its central tenets, population theorizing took place largely within a Malthusian framework. A stark simplicity marks his argument, especially as presented in the succinct first edition of the essay. He presents the reader with two self-evident natural laws: “that food is necessary to the existence of man,” and “that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state” (1798: 11). He then observes, “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man” (13), and contends that population, when unchecked, increases in a “geometrical ratio” while subsistence in only an “arithmetical ratio” (14). In this first edition, Malthus had the particular ideological goal of proving that “the advocates of equality and of the perfectibility of man” had an unattainable dream. Mr. Godwin could imagine a British Isle where all are equal, live in “airy” farmhouses, share “the necessary labours of agriculture” (182), and divide its fruits “according to their wants,” Malthus observed, but such a regime places no barrier to early marriage and large families. He calculated that in a hundred years the Isle's seven million people “would be one hundred and twelve millions, and the food only sufficient for thirty-five millions, leaving seventy-seven millions unprovided for” (23–24). Since “no possible form of society could prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind” (36), constructing a society of equals only ensures a society in which all will be poor. Any attempt to improve the conditions of the impoverished by granting them access to subsistence, such as the poor laws then in effect in England, simply works “in some measure to create the poor which they maintain” since they permit the poor man to “marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family in independence” (83).

Genealogies—representations of kinship and narratives of origin—are in the transnational Shi‘ite world intimately connected to politics of piety, the production of nationalism, and struggles over authority. In this essay, I am concerned with certain inflections in the links between genealogy and piety that make these terms central to contests over notions of territoriality in contemporary Shi‘ite politics. Nationalism replaces the sovereignty of God with the exclusive sovereignty of a “people” over a clearly demarcated territory, but religious language, identifications, and imagery often play prominent roles in how the imagined community of the nation is fashioned and delimited. Here I will show how, mediated through genealogy, religious leaders and pious movements with transnational ties produce religious authority, and create links to territory, to assert themselves as exemplary cultural citizens.

In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India. The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture. However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from. This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.

Early modern observers rarely failed to comment on the perceived diversity of peoples, customs, and languages of Mediterranean societies. This diversity they sought to capture in travel narratives, costume albums, missionary and diplomatic reports, bilingual dictionaries, and a range of other genres of the “contact zone.” Modern scholars, too, have celebrated the early modern Mediterranean's ostensibly multiple, diverse, and even “pluralist,” “cosmopolitan,” or “multicultural” nature. At the same time, in part thanks to the reawakened interest in Braudel's seminal work and in part as a much-needed corrective to the politically current but analytically bankrupt paradigm of “clash of civilizations,” recent studies have also emphasized the region's “shared,” “connected,” “mixed,” “fluid,” “syncretic,” or “hybrid” sociocultural practices. Of course, these two analytical emphases are far from mutually exclusive, as recently underscored by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell's comprehensive, longue durée model of diversity-in-connectivity. Yet, neither Horden and Purcell's structuralist “new thalassology,” nor other studies of the early modern Mediterranean have offered a systematic account of how “diversity” and “connectivity” as both the flow of social practices and the categories for speaking about them have been articulated through specific institutions and genres.

Sexual relationships between European men and indigenous women produced racially mixed offspring in all of Europe's empires. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship has shown how these persons of mixed race, seen as transgressing the interior frontiers of supposedly fixed categories of racial and juridical difference upon which colonizers' prestige and authority rested, posed a challenge to the elaborate but fragile sets of subjective criteria by which “whiteness” was defined. Scholars critiquing the traditional historiography of empire for its tendency to present colonial elites as homogeneous communities pursuing common interests have emphasized the repertoire of exclusionary tactics, constructed along lines of race, class, and gender, devised within European colonial communities in response to the presence of “mixed bloods.” This article aims to show that the presence of people of biracial heritage inspired collaborative as well as exclusionary responses in outposts of European empire during the late imperial era. It also illustrates how, with white prestige and authority at stake, age, age-related subcategories, and in particular childhood and adolescence, powerfully underpinned responses to the threat this group posed to the cultural reproduction of racialized identity.

At the turn of the twenty-first century two countries—one at the center of Europe and the other at its periphery—officially declared converts to minority religions to be threats to national security. The first is Germany, where since early 2006 Minister of Interior Affairs Wolfgang Schäuble has repeatedly warned against the danger posed by German converts to Islam (e.g., Schmid 2007). Recently, after two German Muslims were caught collecting chemicals used to make explosives, the Christian Democrat Union (CDU) faction's leader Wolfgang Bosbach and its Bavarian Interior Minister Günther Beckstein suggested the government register and follow all who have converted to Islam (Küchen 2007). Bosbach said, “A convert registry only makes sense given that we know some of them may be radicalized after converting” (Ringel 2007).