Are our minds becoming numb to images of death and violence? Though this question could hardly be settled even by the most extensive public polling techniques, it is of grave concern to theorists of modern visual media. It has become almost common sense that something momentous has happened in the proliferation of mechanical reproduction and electronic simulation, transforming our very sensory faculties to dangerous and largely disempowering effect. Some of the most radically historicizing media theory written in recent years concerns the alteration of our senses by discourses of vision or technologies of mass- mediated visuality (Crary 1990; Buck-Morss 1994; 1997; Feldman 1994; Levin 1993). These writings often turn on arguments about violent ruptures in modernity between the body qua body and the body as represented visually, especially where it concerns the depiction of the abject, such as in graphic violence and death. An over-kill of body-imagery circulates in what may seem like a postmodern “hyperspace” without corporeal bearings (Jameson 1991), flowing in “global mediascapes” with little regard to the limitations of time and space (Appadurai 1996), in flattened simulacra divested of multi-dimensional sensory embodiment (Buck-Morss 1994; 1998; Feldman 1994), and in an apparatus which enforces the privilege of the realm of vision over all other sensory channels (Crary 1990; Levin 1993). Two-dimensional reproductions swirl over the surface of the planet, carrying impressions of the body in violence and in death, graphic images that repeat themselves with such serial regularity that we are possibly becoming inured to them, and ever further distanced from the suffering they represent. Where our capacity for empathy, outrage, and compassion disappears, there also goes our ability to initiate sane reactions to insane actions.

On the 30th of December 1919, Colonel Amery, the British Acting Secretary of State for the Colonies, approved the establishment of the East African Currency Board (EACB).KNA AA/23/6, Summary of Proceedings of the East African Currency Board, 3rd May 1921. Following the general model established by the West African Currency Board, it was designed merely to be “from a broad point of view . . . a money changing and accounting device . . . engag[ed] only in currency administration;”W. T. Newlyn and D. C. Rowan, Money and Banking in British Colonial Africa, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 51. hardly a challenging or controversial function. Yet the EACB, attempting to replace the Indian rupee as the currency in use in the colonial East African territories, originated in crisis and went on to preside over considerable chaos in markedly inauspicious circumstances.R. M. Maxon, “The Kenya Currency Crisis, 1919–1921 and the Imperial Dilemma,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17 (1989):323–48.

In March 1534, the residents of Cuzco, the capital and sacred centre of the Inca empire, witnessed the last ceremony of royal inauguration and triumph to be celebrated in their city by an Inca ruler, Manco Inca Yupanqui.Pedro Sancho, An account of the Conquest of Peru (tr. P. A. Means, New York 1917), chapter 12, 111; Diego de Esquivel y Navía, Noticias cronólogicas de la gran ciudad del Cuzco (Lima 1980), vol. 1, 83. The author of this work belonged to a family of Cuzco notables, on whom see Bernard Lavallé, Le Marquis et le Marchand. Les luttes de pouvoir au Cuzco (1700–1730), Paris (1987). Eight months earlier, in July 1533, the Spanish invaders of the Inca empire, led by Francisco Pizarro, had executed Manco's brother, the Inca Atahuallpa. Shortly thereafter, they named Manco as the next ruler, while at the same time occupying the capital. Although, therefore, the victory being celebrated had been won under Spanish tutelage, some part of the traditional ceremonial was performed on this occasion, and affords a glimpse of the functioning of Cuzco as an imperial capital, of political relationships among the Inca elite, and of the vision of the past that gave meaning to these relationships.

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.

One hundred years ago, Mrs. Archibald Little summarized the activities of Sichuan women with whom she was, after long residence in that province, quite familiar.

This essay begins from a question that is often asked in practice but rarely in theory: What is the relationship between the good citizen and the good man or woman? This problem was a particular concern of ancient theorists of the polis, for whom it made little sense to consider the goods of the person apart from the goods of the community. I consider the question here in the context of nationalism, which has variously been described as a modern form of religion, of community, of belief system and social tie. Under all such descriptions, the nation—in all of its imagined breadth and scope—demands our sacrifices through the institutions that represent it. We sacrifice in the name of an ultimate good, of which we believe our own goods to be a part. It is possible, then, that the same question that animated thinkers of the polis may also help us to understand the triumph of the nation-state. Indeed, I argue here that it is our failure adequately to theorize the ethical dimensions of nationalism that has masked from us the institutional sources of nationalism's successes.The question about the relationship between citizenship and ethics is one that Alasdair MacIntyre poses in passing in works on social science theory and practice (MacIntyre 1998:56) and on the exhaustion of contemporary ethics (MacIntyre 1984:133). Although the question is a general one and does not require acknowledgement, anyone familiar with MacIntyre's work will recognize that the following argument takes at least some part of his as a foundation.

Categorization plays an integral part in how we see and interpret the world. This is especially true when we attempt to comprehend the complexities of human society, where the heterogeneity of human activity across time and space demands that some criterion (class, gender, age, profession, etc.) be used to reduce the number of variables examined. From the mid-nineteenth century—as statistics evolved from the simple “political arithmetic” of tax collectors and army recruiters into a potential science of human behavior—categorizing the population became a contentious issue that reflected the social and political agendas of data collectors.Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1986); Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1986); Stuart Woolf, “Statistics and the Modern State,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 3 (July 1989): 588–604; Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990); William Alonso and Paul Starr, eds., The Politics of Numbers (New York, 1987); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991), ch. 10, “Census, Map, Museum”; idem, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London, 1998), 29–45. At the same time, when data refused to be molded to researchers' assumptions, the task of putting people and their activities into analytical categories challenged the validity of the categories themselves. In this way, statistical representations and categories became socially constructed knowledge.

On May 29, 1996, travelers visiting Istanbul witnessed a rather peculiar celebration. A group of burly men dressed in Ottoman military clothing, some wearing false moustaches, were dragging a decorated sailboat along the asphalt road toward the central Taksim Square. Although it was no easy task to drag the sailboat uphill under the hot sun and the curious gaze of tourists on this summer day, the laboring men nevertheless displayed a solemn attitude of resolve and austerity, as if to remind the observing public of the grave significance of the historical event they were commemorating.

This essay is about the caste-wise enumeration of households taken in the major kasbah towns of the western Rajasthani kingdom of Marwar between 1658 and 1664 under the direction of the kingdom's “home minister,” Munhata Nainsi, for inclusion in his mammoth survey of kingdom entitled Marvar ra Parganam ri Vigat (An Account of the Districts of Marwar). This essay also explores how Nainsi's early enumeration of caste data, and other precolonial human inventories that followed upon it, helped shape the first known colonial census of western Rajasthan, undertaken by Alexander Boileau in 1835 in Marwar and the adjacent kingdoms of Bahawalpur, Bikaner, and Jaisalmer. One goal will be to redirect scholarly attention to some native agenda that may have been institutionalized and advanced by this nominal way of ‘knowing the country' both during the late precolonial and early colonial eras. Without positing an easy continuity from the precolonial to the colonial in terms of forms of knowledge and attendant institutions, this essay will suggest that colonial discourses often built upon indigenous ones in ways that inflected local politics about which the British initially were only dimly aware and indirectly concerned, but which later had a major impact on the constitution of colonial rule.

Twice, almost unconsciously (for there is no Mediterranean in the index), a contributor to the compilation of essays entitled Britain and Ireland, 900–1300. Insular Responses to European Change remarks with surprise that the commerce found in the high Middle Ages in the Irish Sea reminds him of the Mediterranean further south (see pp. 42, 64). It is not the first time this improbable comparison has been made. About 1200, Gerald of Wales, a prolific writer and ambitious ecclesiastical careerist, had already made such a juxtaposition, though for him what was most striking was how different the two bodies of water were. For Gerald, the true Mediterranean was easier to navigate in winter and less subject to dangerous tides in all seasons than the treacherous Irish Sea.Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica, 2.1, 2.3; Expugnatio Hibernica, 1.2, 1.35. Both texts are available in convenient English translation: The History and Topography of Ireland (Hamondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982). Still, Gerald's texts brim over with references to ships and people traversing the waters of the Irish Sea, which suggests that sea was more like the Inner Sea between Europe, Africa, and Asia than Gerald admitted. After all, both seas are enclosed by land, both are relatively small (though the Mediterranean is much deeper and about ten times bigger than the Irish Sea), and both have long facilitated communication. It is thus less surprising to find that in Peter Brown's mesmerizing account of The Rise of Western Christendom the importance of the Irish Sea for Ireland's unique early medieval development is emphasized by calling this appendage of the North Atlantic a “Celtic Mediterranean of the north,” in other words, it is a manageable body of water through which communication was easy enough for “Celtic” economic and cultural unity to arise along its shores.P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 81. Brown was, perhaps unwittingly, following a tradition among British geographers. H. MacKinder, in Britain and the British Seas (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1902, 20), already spoke of the Irish Sea as a “British Mediterranean.” Between the fifth and ninth centuries, when medieval Irish culture reached an apogee, the Irish Sea was bustling, conveying abundant goods and ideas rather as happened in the Romans' “very own sea” (mare nostrum) in the relaxed centuries of Roman peace. Some early medieval writers who had a more direct experience of the “Irish Ocean” (Oceanus Hibernicus) might have dissented from Brown's image of tranquil navigability, but Brown is, nevertheless, right.The Voyage of St. Brendan (available in English in The Age of Bede, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1988), perhaps the most famous account of medieval Irish navigation, presents the seas as highly unpleasant, dangerous places. Nor should it be forgotten that the early medieval Irish ascetic practice of abandoning oneself to the sea was considered a penance. Many sailed the waters between Britain and Ireland. St. Patrick is only the most famous to have completed the voyage (at least three times) in the postclassical centuries, bringing with him a typical Mediterranean export, Christianity. Mediterranean pottery and that distinctive Mediterranean machine, the watermill, crop up often enough in medieval sites in Ireland to prove the Irish Sea was no barrier.See C. Rynne, “Hydropower in Medieval Ireland,” in Working with Water in Medieval Europe, ed. P. Squatriti (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 1. In fact, borrowing a neologism from a fresh and stimulating survey of the pre-modern Mediterranean, we may say the Irish Sea enjoyed great “connectivity” in pre-industrial times.<+>5 This means that, as Brown postulated, beyond the transport of luxuries over long distances in the Irish Sea, many small-scale, short-range exchanges took place along its shores, across its waters, in its harbors, and quite far inland from its coast. Redistribution on such a scale was possible only thanks to the sea waters. The sea wove together a tapestry of interdependence, forming a true economic and cultural region.

In the age of Hindu identity politics (Hindutva) inaugurated in the 1990s by the ascendancy of the Indian People's Party (Bharatiya Janata Party) and its ideological auxiliary, the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), Indian cultural and religious nationalism has been promulgating ever more distorted images of India's past. Few things are as central to this revisionism as Sanskrit, the dominant culture language of precolonial southern Asia outside the Persianate order. Hindutva propagandists have sought to show, for example, that Sanskrit was indigenous to India, and they purport to decipher Indus Valley seals to prove its presence two millennia before it actually came into existence. In a farcical repetition of Romantic myths of primevality, Sanskrit is considered—according to the characteristic hyperbole of the VHP—the source and sole preserver of world culture. The state's anxiety both about Sanskrit's role in shaping the historical identity of the Hindu nation and about its contemporary vitality has manifested itself in substantial new funding for Sanskrit education, and in the declaration of 1999–2000 as the “Year of Sanskrit,” with plans for conversation camps, debate and essay competitions, drama festivals, and the like.The VHP assessment is cited in Bhattacharji 1990; see also Goldman 1996 and Ramaswamy 1999. A recent review of Hindutva fantasy (and fraud) about indigenous Sanskrit is found in Witzel and Farmer 2000. The “Year of Sanskrit” runs for “Yugābda 5101,” the year of the Kaliyuga dating system now apparently in use by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (“Times of India,” Bombay ed., December 10, 1999).

In 1990, after seventeen years of dictatorial rule in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet ceded power to a democratically elected government. The ensuing transition from authoritarian rule has presented the governing Concertación coalition and Chileans more generally with formidable challenges: checking the power of the military, dealing with the legacy of human rights abuses, democratizing the authoritarian state structures created by Pinochet and confronting the heightened class inequality generated by the military's neoliberal economic policies. In the years following 1990, however, public debate has frequently centered on a distinct, although not unrelated, set of issues: crime, teenage pregnancy, drug use, divorce and abortion.Works that provide an overview of military rule and the transition from authoritarian rule in Chile include The Struggle for Democracy in Chile, 1982–1990, ed. Paul Drake and Iván Jaksic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); El modelo chileno: Democracia y desarrollo en los noventa, ed. Paul Drake and Iván Jaksic (Santiago: LOM, 1999); Lois Hecht Oppenheim, Politics in Chile: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and the Search for Development (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); Philip D. Oxhorn, Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). My assertions regarding the prevalence of public debate on moral issues since 1990 are based on observations I made while in Chile during 1988, 1991–1993, and December 1996.

In 1993, John Foran argued that theorizing about social revolution was entering into a “fourth wave.” What distinguished the new wave from its predecessors, he said, was its emphasis on culture and contingency, and its critical stance towards class-based and structuralist accounts. The books reviewed in this essay suggest that a similar trend may now be underway in work on early modern state formation. Until quite recently, research in this area was completely dominated by neo-Marxist and neo-Hintzian scholars, who emphasized the impact of economic and/or geopolitical factors on the structure of early modern states and regimes and saw state power in purely fiscal and military terms, i.e., as a function of taxes and soldiers (Anderson 1974; Wallerstein 1974; Tilly 1975; Brewer 1989; Tilly 1990; Downing 1993; Bonney 1995; Ertman 1997; Barbera 1998; Bonney 1999; Brewer and Hellmuth 1999). Over the last decade, however, a growing number of sociologists and historians have begun to criticize these theories as too narrow and one-sided (Gorski 1993; Adams 1994; Ikegami 1995; Wilson 1995; Mukerji 1997; harbingers of this shift included Vann 1984 and Corrigan and Sayer 1985). Drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including Foucauldianism, gender theory and cultural sociology, they have argued that there is more to state power than coercion and extraction, and more to state formation than economics and geopolitics. The books reviewed here continue the revisionist trend towards more nuanced understandings of state power and less deterministic accounts of state formation. They suggest that a third wave of theorizing has begun.

This is a good moment to step back briefly and consider the growing interest in patronage, networking, and other forms of personalized political and economic association in Soviet history. The significance of such relations has grown pressingly evident in the murky, mafia-ridden post-Soviet era, and scholars have begun to search for their origins in the short but explosive and complex history of the Soviet state and society. This growing historical interest is in a sense part of a worldwide trend, as the accelerated processes of globalization force us all to face the many political and economic difficulties involved in moving toward a market economy that works for everyone. Prominent among these difficulties is precisely that complex agglomeration of personal ties that are generally lumped together as “corruption” by irate economists and policy-makers. These forms of association, however, have profound social, cultural, and historical roots that deserve a good deal more thought if we are to understand where they fit into the contemporary dynamics of economic transformation.

As we enter the twenty-first century, the photographed, digitally produced, and globally disseminated printed image impinges upon us with growing insistence from all directions, inflecting and normalizing certain views and desires while foreclosing and obscuring others. Never before has it been so cheap or easy to purchase, use, and then toss away a camera, so commonsensical to expect the everyday images that crowd one's day to “cover the globe,” or so unsettling to see the specter of total visibility and surveillance granted such legitimacy. Yet in an age in which the Internet is celebrated by many with messianic fervor, when modernity's fascination with speed enjoys a new apotheosis, and when the perceived shrinking of the globe crystallizes in the quaint vision of a “village” ready-made for a millennial “Family of Mankind” album, the photograph in all its two-dimensional stillness seems to beckon from a more quiet and disappearing world. Increasingly in this great blizzard of speed, technology, and global communication, all photographs appear to emit a sepia-toned glow. This may be one reason why the study of photographs and photography has become especially attractive in the last decade among those scholars especially attuned to their social and historical dimensions, notably anthropologists, historians, literary and art critics.

This volume represents a wide range of disciplines—English, anthropology, history, Irish and European studies, sociology, and geography—and deals with both Ireland and Northern Ireland, stretching from the late eighteenth century to the present. Editors Marilyn Cohen and Nancy J. Curtin define their project as a theoretical analysis of gender, an approach that results in compelling revisions of Irish studies, as well as contributions to gender and feminist theory relevant beyond the geographical focus of the book. For an indication of the range of topics addressed, consider articles by Cohen, Jane Gray, and Gordon Bigelow, which demonstrate how attention to gender can offer insights into migration, industrialization, and domestic economy.

In correlation to the expansion and intensification of capitalist forms of agricultural production in the Malay states during the end of the nineteenth century, the British Colonial administration articulated the need to systematize the policing of agricultural production with increasing strength. The economic prospects of feeding the world market's increasing demand for natural rubber, combined with the objective of decreasing the Malay states' dependence on import of basic staples (notably rice), were taken by the Colonial administration as indicators of an urgent need to spur on the progress of agricultural production. A revolution of agricultural practices, which would transform what was seen as the backward and inefficient techniques of the “native cultivators” into modern and progressive production forms based on scientific knowledge, could only take place, it was argued, by resorting to systematic government intervention.

Thomas Klubock's case study of labor struggles, gender politics, and the making of community in Chile's El Teniente copper mines makes an important contribution to labor history, Latin American history, and gender studies. Drawing on rich archival data and oral histories, Klubock examines the interplay of North American capitalism, Chilean state formation, and the construction of gender ideologies and relations in the creation of a militant working-class community of mining men and women in El Teniente.

Inner Asian nomadism is often conceived as a self-contained way of life driven to obsolescence by modernity, as in Nikita Mikhalkov's critically-acclaimed film “Close to Eden” (1991). Social anthropologists Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath offer an extensive fieldwork-based study of Inner Asian “mobile pastoralists”—a term they use to avoid the holistic overtones of “nomadism.” They reveal mobile pastoralism as a flexible “series of local knowledges and techniques located in particular historical circumstances” that are applicable to a range of institutional contexts, deployable as part of “technologically advanced and profit-oriented economic activity,” and even compatible with an urbanized lifestyle. Rigorously grounded in a set of ten case-study sites throughout post-socialist Russia, Mongolia, and China, the book shows how speci- ficities in local cultures, regional environments, and state policies differentially inflect global market forces, yielding divergent social and economic outcomes. True to the strengths of British social anthropology, the authors bring out the ways in which new forms of social networks that cross-cut ties of kinship, ethnicity, class, and proximity are shaping the economic and institutional frameworks in which pastoralism will continue to develop throughout this region.

Brett Christophers puts post-colonial and feminist theories and Foucault's writings to intelligent use in this carefully documented account of an Anglican mission. The author, a geographer, evinces a special concern with space and human placement on the land, but his methods here are historical. Christophers gives a fair and textured depiction of a missionary whom his contemporaries regarded as exemplary, but whose success was hampered both by logistical and political forces outside his control. Scholars whose focus is missionaries, as well as those interested in Canada's past, including that of its so-called First Nations, will appreciate this balanced blend of theory and history.