LANDSCAPES AND HISTORIES The relations of landscapes to the histories that take place upon them are not easy to specify, but attempting to do so seems worth the effort and the risk. It is better than ignoring the shaping effects of landscapes, as historians so often do, and treating them as blank slates upon which histories inscribe themselves. The first essay is distilled from a multivolume book-in-progress on the economic history of the Indian Ocean under Islam.

RACE AND SOCIAL MOBILITY Racial discrimination is an impediment to upward social mobility, but it is not always easy to measure its effects in relation to competing factors. The first essay argues for the importance of history in making this determination.

NAMING LIKE A STATE There is a great variety of naming practices around the world, and a largish anthropological literature is dedicated to charting them. The authors of the first article want to bring the state into the discussion. They ask, What happens when the state, with its own way of seeing, wants to know peoplesÕ names?

PROPERTY In so many ways property is a category of heightened importance just now. Property has become newly strange as it expands into unfamiliar places and develops novel kinds. The exchange of communism for capitalism in Eastern Europe; the claim of property rights over their own culture by indigenous peoples in Melanesia; and the ownership of bodily tissue significant for biomedical research in New Guinea are among the property issues that have been aired in CSSH (see Katherine Verdery, “Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids: Romania, 1990–1994,” 1995:625–69; Simon Harrison, “From Prestige Goods to Legacies: Property and the Objectification of Culture in Melanesia,” 2000:662–79; and Warwick Anderson, “The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange,” 2000:713–44). In our first two articles property under colonialism and after slavery come under scrutiny.

In February 2000, twenty years after their victories brought Rhodesia's ruling white regime to the conference table, veterans of Zimbabwe's war of liberation began to occupy some of the large privately owned commercial farms that controlled Zimbabwe's most valuable land. During the next few weeks, thousands of people followed suit: by May, nearly a third of the country's large-scale commercial farms had been seized (New York Times, 27 May 2000; Moyo 1998). Armed with a court order, landowners demanded that the “squatters” be evicted, but the police demurred, and President Mugabe refused to order them to carry out the court's instructions. A few weeks earlier, voters had rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have strengthened the President's powers to seize white-owned land, without compensation, for redistribution to land-hungry blacks. Angry over the deteriorating economy, rising levels of corruption, and Zimbabwe's costly involvement in Congo's civil war, a majority of those who voted were unwilling to increase the President's powers, even if they supported the cause of land reform. When the veterans took matters into their own hands, Mugabe lost no time in associating with their cause. He, in turn, was accused by Western governments, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and the international press, of sacrificing the rule of law in order to save his own political skin.

State naming practices and local, customary naming practices are strikingly different. Each set of practices is designed to make the human and physical landscape legible, by sharply identifying a unique individual, a household, or a singular geographic feature. Yet they are each devised by very distinct agents for whom the purposes of identification are radically different. Purely local, customary practices, as we shall see, achieve a level of precision and clarity--often with impressive economy--perfectly suited to the needs of knowledgeable locals. State naming practices are, by contrast, constructed to guide an official ÔstrangerÕ in identifying unambiguously persons and places, not just in a single locality, but in many localities using standardized administrative techniques.

A considerable debate has surrounded the question of Afro-Caribbeans and their social mobility in the United States, much of it based on or written in response to the work of Thomas Sowell. The polemical purpose of a large portion of this literature has diminished its value: designed to deny or excuse American racism or to lay the blame for the sorry predicament of Afro-America on Afro-Americans themselves, it has operated in a historical vacuum as far as Afro-Americans are concerned. Equally so Afro-Caribbeans, whose history—largely ignored in studies of American and Afro-American history—is also, inexplicably, neglected in the large literature on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American immigration. The debate over Afro-Caribbean social mobility and Sowell's controversial arguments has been dominated by anthropologists and sociologists with little expertise or apparent interest in the history of Afro-Caribbeans and their immigration to the United States and little acquaintance with the historical experience of Afro-Americans. This historical vacuum must be filled if we are ever to make sense of the Afro-Caribbean experience and, in particular, the social mobility of black immigrants in the United States.

It is widely acknowledged that Orientalist notions of political economy were marred by geographic determinism. From Marx to Wittfogel, generic concepts such as the “Asiatic mode of production,” the “hydraulic state” or “Oriental despotism” involved simplistic observations relating to climate and, particularly, the presence of large rivers and alluvial plains which were invoked to explain essential and persistent differences with the West.See R. Inden, “Orientalist Constructions of India,” Modern Asian Studies 20,3 (1986):422–23. Considering its overwhelmingly important role in this earlier literature, it is remarkable that the historical geography of the rivers and riverplains of the Indian Ocean has not yet been explored in any depth. It is perhaps to avoid being stung by charges of determinism that historians of India and the Indian Ocean area in recent decades have, if anything, downplayed the importance of geography. And, as W. A. McDougall has recently argued, it appears as if current thinking in general has become “suspicious of a subject [geography] that emphasizes distinctions among regions, invites unflattering comparisons and hierarchy among nations and cultures, and has been used in the past as an intellectual tool of empire.”W. A. McDougall, “You Can't Argue with Geography,” essay excerpted from a paper commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation as part of the History- Geography Project for publication in the Middle States Yearbook 2001. On the neglect of geography, see also E. W. Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York 1971); E. G. Genovese and L. Hochberg, eds., Geographic Perspectives in History: Essays in Honor of Edward Whiting Fox (Oxford, and Cambridge, Mass. 1989). By and large, what K. N. Chaudhuri observed in 1978 still holds true: “There can be few aspects of Indian studies more neglected than that of historical geography.”K. N. Chaudhuri, “Some Reflections on the Town and the Country in Mughal India,” Modern Asian Studies 12,1 (1978):77. In two later works, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge 1985) and Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge 1990), Chaudhuri made some attempts to remedy this situation, but they are faint. The aim of this essay is to re-introduce a geographic dimension in the history of the Indian Ocean area—one that is not overly deterministic and helps to account not only for continuities but also for changes in social and economic organization over an extended period of time.

For many historians, personal writings—whether correspondence, diary, or autobiography—are primarily of value as testimony. They become interesting to the scholar in proportion as they relate events (revolts, wars, celebrations, etc.) that the witnesses themselves often knew to be part of history. Personal papers can also illustrate the stages of a life that reveal shared experiences of members of a profession, a community, or some other group. The historian characteristically, though not always, tries to work with the text to reach the experience and its interpretation by the writer.

In 1606, Bernardo José de Aldrete,Sometimes spelled “Alderete;” b.1560 Malaga, d.1641 Cordoba. (See Mondéjar Cumpián 1974 for discussion of the confusion over these dates and places.) Spanish cleric and humanist antiquarian, published the first history of the Spanish language, On the origin and beginnings of the Castilian language or Romance, which is used in Spain today.Henceforth “Origin.” Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.Aldrete argued that Castilian—also known at the time as Romance and now commonly known as Spanish—had been derived from Latin over centuries of use, with the Visigoths playing a key role in creating the linguistic change.Throughout this paper, “Castilian” and “Spanish” will be used interchangeably to refer to the language in question.

In the most literal sense, the abolition of slavery marks the moment when one human being cannot be held as property by another human being, for it ends the juridical conceit of a “person with a price.” At the same time, the aftermath of emancipation forcibly reminds us that property as a concept rests on relations among human beings, not just between people and things. The end of slavery finds former masters losing possession of persons, and former slaves acquiring it. But it also finds other resources being claimed and contested, including land, tools, and animals<\m>resources that have shaped former slaves' working lives to date, and that now shape their prospects for the future. When former slaves make claims to such resources, they may draw on an idea of customary possession, or they may assert rights to respect and remuneration. The resulting conflicts thrust into the open the links between freedom, property, and membership in the political community.On varying conceptions of property, see, among others, Carol M. Rose, “Possession as the Origin of Property” and “Property as Storytelling: Perspectives from Game Theory, Narrative Theory, Feminist Theory,” both in Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994). On “a person with a price” as one vernacular definition of the slave relation, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Do revolutions affect one another? Certainly, in light of the Òvelvet revolutionsÓ of the past decade, the contagious effect of revolutions cannot be denied. Less remembered is the wave of constitutional revolutions of the early twentieth century that swept across Russia (1905), Iran (1906), the Ottoman Empire (1908), Mexico (1910), and China (1911). This short-term wave was couched within a long-term one that began with the American, Polish, and French Revolutions and included such other exemplary cases as the European revolutions of 1848 and the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Both waves, long and short, ended with the Russian Revolution of 1917 that initiated a new and different model of revolution (Sohrabi 1995).

It has long been recognized that great social-political revolutions have tended to be marked by three common experiences: (1) the ironic completion of the state building project of the ancient régime through strengthening of the state and its bureaucracy; (2) external warfare; and (3) the deployment of revolutionary terror, often initially restricted to obvious enemies of the new order, then expanding to larger groups in society and eventually consuming much of the revolutionary elite itself. Through investigation into the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950-1953), this essay concentrates on the linkages between these three elements, focusing particularly on the complex interaction between state building, state sponsored terror, and state paternalism in the early consolidation of the PeopleÕs Republic of China.

Like all great cities, Calcutta has its share of catty rumors, many of which are about Calcuttans themselves. One of these runs as follows: Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), the noted Bengali Anglophile and man of letters, visited England for the first time sometime in the late 1950s. Out on the streets of London, Niradbabu started navigating his cab like a veteran Londoner. What the driver found incongruous was the fact that Niradbabu mentioned some landmarks which no longer existed. It was explained to him that these had either been demolished or bombed during the War. Now, how did he know about the city so well without ever setting foot in England? By his own admission, he was brought up to consume England as an ever-present entity, “very much like the sky above our head,” in his remote ancestral East Bengal village, largely through books, pictures, and newspapers.Another variant of this story has been corroborated by Chaudhuri himself.

In 1893 a Welsh poet with the bardic name Glan Elsi uttered a remarkable vaticination that seemed to unite the fate of the Welsh language and the Welsh slate quarrier:

Dearest old Welsh, if ever it dies,

From the lips of a quarrier, I think, will come the final word.John Owen (Glan Elsi), “Y Chwarelwr” [The quarrier]. Cymru 5, 1893, p. 112.

What is immediately remarkable is that such an identification of a modern proletariat (as opposed, for example, to a vanishing traditional peasantry, as would be so common elsewhere in Europe), as a linguistic kulturträger of the Welsh language was by this time so unremarkable. Even more extraordinary, perhaps, is that this was a by-product of the slate-quarriers' own self-mythologizing.

The year 1998 marked the 150th anniversary of the cascading wave of revolution that swept across Europe in the spring of 1848. Like all great upheavals (indeed like all great events, personalities, or works of art), the revolutions of 1848 do not contain their own meaning. Powerful cultural objects—whether events, persons, or cultural creations—are always ambiguous: indeed that ambiguity, according to Griswold (1987a) is a key part of what constitutes their power. Such objects always offer rich and varied, though not unlimited, interpretive possibilities. It is now widely agreed that the meanings of such cultural objects are not fixed, given, or uniquely ascertainable, but instead are created and recreated in different times, places, and settings through a series of “interactions” or “negotiations” between the objects and their socially situated, culturally equipped, and often politically engaged interpreters (Hall 1980; Griswold 1987a, 1987b; Liebes and Katz 1996).

It is a commonplace in the study of nationalism that the construction of national identity inevitably relies on the creation and use of narratives—part history, part myth—that imbue nations and nationalist projects with coherence and purpose. This article seeks to render this idea more complex and analytically useful by asking how such narrative discourses become connected to personal identities. Why and how do people invest themselves in nations and nationalisms? An important part of the answer lies in the ways that constructions of narrative and agency at the collective level articulate with experiences of narrative and agency at a personal level. It is our constant existential concern with power that binds together collectivities and individuals, national narratives, and life histories. We must attend to this connection in order to better understand the powerful resonances nationalist discourses often have.

In July of 1860 the intra-mural Christian quarter of Damascus was looted and burned and thousands of its inhabitants were massacred. This horrific event, which arrived on the heels of sectarian bloodshed in Ottoman Mount Lebanon a month earlier, was all the more significant in light of the massacre of Christians in the northern city of Aleppo in 1850 and the blood-libel accusations against the Damascene Jewish community in 1840.The events of July 1860 lasted a week during which the largely Greek Catholic (Uniate) inner-city Christian quarter of Bab Tuma was attacked. Although historians disagree over the number of Christians killed by the mob, up to ten thousand men, women, and children may have perished. The attackers also targeted Christian businesses, churches, and foreign consulates, and what could not be carried away was set ablaze. In the wake of those events, and in order to forestall European intervention on behalf of its minorities, the Ottoman government quickly moved to re-establish order and to punish the perpetrators. The 1840 blood-libel accusations—the first of their kind in Damascus—were leveled against several Jews when a Capuchin monk and his Muslim servant disappeared and their bodies were allegedly found in the Jewish quarter. The shocks of the 1860 “event” (or al-haditha as the local court records refer to it) and the 1840 Damascus Affair were heightened not only by their suddenness, and indeed, novelty, but also because their targets—the Christian and Jewish communities of this Ottoman provincial city—were small in number and appeared to have led a life of relative historic obscurity.The Christians comprised Greek (Syrian) Orthodox, Armenian, Maronite, and Catholic communities. Among the Jews there was a Karaite community. For an informative discussion of the Christians of the Arab East, see Robert M. Haddad, Syrian Christians in Muslim Society: An Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). In the absence of reliable (official) figures, a rough average based on population estimates provided by European observers will have to suffice: in 1787 Volney estimated the Damascus population at eighty thousand people, twelve thousand of whom were Christian (M. C-F. Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte pendant les annee's 1783, 1784, 1785 [Paris: Mouton, 1787; repr. 1959], vol. 2, p. 250). Half a century later, Porter reported that the population of the city totaled around 108,000 among whom 14,000 were Christians and 4,600 were Jews (J. L. Porter, Five Years in Damascus Including an Account of the History, Topography, and Antiquities of that City with Travels and Researches in Palmyra, Lebanon, and the Hawran [London: John Murray, 1855], vol. 1, p. 139). These figures closely approximate the estimates of the Bowring Report of a decade earlier (John Bowring, Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria [London: William Clowes and Sons, 1840; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1973], p. 8). In 1890 Cuinet put the total population at 165,000 and estimated the Christians at 54,000 and the Jews at 5,000 (Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine: Ge'ographie administrative statistique, descriptive et raisonne'e [Paris: E. Leroux, 1896], p. 386). Despite their comparative importance in the socio-economic life of Damascus (and for reasons that relate to that city's interior location, among other factors) neither community had risen to particular regional or empire-wide prominence along the lines of, say, the Maronites in Mount Lebanon or the Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities of Istanbul. Historians have in general considered the two communities noteworthy, if they considered them at all, on account of the two events mentioned above, events that have since come to define much of their nineteenth-century history. As a result, narratives of these events are plentiful, found alongside accounts that focus on the wealth and fortune of a handful of Jewish and Christian men.There is a large number of published Arabic-language accounts of the 1860 riots. See, for example, Hasr al-litham ‘an nakabat al-Sham (Cairo, 1895); Iskander ibn Ya‘qub Abkarius, The Lebanon in Turmoil: Syria and the Powers in 1860, trans. J. F. Scheltema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920); Muhammad Abu'l Su‘ud al- Hasibi, “Lamhat min tarkikh Dimashq fi ‘ahd al-Tanzimat,” ed. Kamal S. Salibi in al-Abhath, 21 (1968) and 22 (1969); Mikhayil Mishaqa, Murder, Mayhem, Pillage, and Plunder: The History of Lebanon in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 244–68. For a list of unpublished manuscripts dealing with these events, see Fritz Steppat, “Some Arabic Manuscript Sources of the Syrian Crisis of 1860,” in Les Arabes par leurs archives, eds. Jacques Berque and Dominique Chevallier (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1976). For more recent scholarly analyses of the 1860 riots, see Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), pp. 87–106; Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 78–100; Kamal Salibi, “The 1860 Upheaval in Damascus as seen by al-Sayyid Muhammad Abu'l-Su‘ud al-Hasibi, Notable and Later Naqib al-Ashraf of the City,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, eds. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “New Light on the 1860 Riots in Ottoman Damascus,” Die Welt des Islams 28 (1988): 412–30. On the blood-libel, see A. M. Hyamson, “The Damascus Affair—1840,” Transactions: Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1945–1951); L. Loewe, ed., Diaries of Sir Moses Montefiore, 2 vols. (Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co., 1890); Salo Baron, “The Jews and the Syrian Massacres of 1860,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 4 (1932-1933); Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the Jewish community in general, see Moshe Ma'oz, “Changes in the Position of the Jewish Communities of Palestine and Syria in the mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1975); Thomas Philipp, “The Farhi Family and the Changing Position of the Jews in Syria, 1750–1860,” Middle Eastern Studies 20 (Oct. 1984); 37–52. See also al-Maghribi, “Yahud Dimashq mundhu mi'at ‘am,” al-Majma‘ al-‘Ilmi al-‘Arabi 9 (1929): 641–43; and Yusuf Nu‘aisa, Yahud Dimashq (Damascus: Dar al-Ma‘rifa, 1988); both of which are hostile to their subject matter. Although those two facets of non-Muslim (dhimmi)The status of non-Muslims is inscribed in Islamic law in the form of a contract (dhimma). The contract is historically anchored in the so-called Pact of ‘Omar, which spells out the rights and obligations of non-Muslims, including the right to the free practice of religion. life are important (and no doubt partly correlated), they hardly tell the whole story. If anything, they punctuated the course of a relatively undramatic everyday life at a time when the history of the city and the province of which it was the capital were undergoing socio-economic and political transformation.

While Alice brushed the White QueenÕs tousled hair, the monarch offered her employ as a ladyÕs maid for a salary of two pence a week, along with a regular ration of jam. As Lewis Carroll relates in Through the Looking Glass, Alice was disinclined to accept in any case. Nonetheless, she grew disturbed when the Queen informed her that the offered jam was only to be given Òevery other dayÓ--that is, only ÒyesterdayÓ and Òtomorrow,Ó but never Òtoday.Ó Alice immediately realized that she would never receive jam on the series of ÒtodaysÓ she worked, but could only enjoy the expectation of receiving it in the future, or perhaps the memory of having received it previously. In response to AliceÕs questions about the proposed arrangement, the Queen attributed her confusion to the Òeffect of living backwards,Ó a prospect that Òalways makes one a little giddy at first.Ó The Queen explained that Alice lived ÒforwardsÓ and was thus condemned to remember only Òbackwards.Ó The White Queen, on the other hand, lived ÒbackwardsÓ and could remember Òboth ways,Ó informed by a previous experience both of the future and of the past. The monarch was so confident of her faculties that she had the KingÕs Messenger sent to prison for punishment in advance of his trial and sentencing. ÒOf course,Ó the White Queen explained, Òthe crime comes last of all.ÓSee Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (New York: Norton, 1971), 150-51.

George Lipsitz, reflecting upon a growing body of American studies scholarship on whiteness, claims we now have a better understanding of “how people who left Europe as Calabrians and Bohemians became something called ‘whites' when they got to America.” As a summary of whiteness studies the statement is accurate. The verb “to become” in Lipsitz's assertion emphasizes the importance of deconstructing race in order to analyze it as an ideological and historical process. The statement implies, however, that European society did not also employ unstable hierarchical racial taxonomies. Indeed, the notion that it was in the United States where people defined by a European region or nation of origin became a race, isolates American racial thought from its Euro-American matrix.George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White' Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 43, 3 (Sept. 1995): 370.