The lobbying activities of private groups had an important redistributive influence on national economic policies in both England and France; however, the different organization of government in the two nations gave a particular shape and structure to the redistributive character of national politics. In England, Parliament's role in the legislative process made gaining economic concessions from the government long and difficult. During the eighteenth century, the English government's role was increasingly limited to adjudicating the claims of influential but conflicting groups. In France, by contrast, the government's economic decisions were neither subject to parliamentary scrutiny nor to open public discussion. Whereas the rules of the redistributional game in eighteenth-century England were increasingly public knowledge, the administrative and political process that allowed the French government to pursue its mercantilist programs was private. Furthermore, the rules changed according to ministerial whim. As one historian put it, public law was a forbidden domain, “a mystery reserved to the king and his ministers,” permitting select members of privileged clans, rather than broadly defined interest groups, to enjoy the benefits of government patronage. Although the creation of sophisticated interests and competitive lobbies allowed the English Parliament to provide special favors to particular industries during the eighteenth century, unlike the French executive, neither Parliament nor the English executive had the discretionary authority to distribute monopoly rents to particular ministerial or royal favorites. In England the government's distribution of spoils followed procedures more open to the English political elite as a whole; still, corruption was more pervasive in English public administration than in France, where executive supervision of central government agents was more comprehensive.

The pattern of development that emerged in the early stage of industrialization in South Korea, according to the British sociologist Ronald Dore, is closer to the classical (nineteenth-century) small-scale, individualistic entrepreneurial type than the large-scale bureaucratic type that characterizes development in many other countries embarking upon modernization programs in recent years (Dore 1980:292). This arguably stems from the fact that economic growth accompanied by development of a market (in the broader sense of that term) that created opportunities for individual choices and initiatives.

The relationship of religion and politics is continuously fascinating and elusive, not least because it is rarely posed in a direct way. In stable democracies, incidents which are rather out of the ordinary, such as publishing the Satanic Verses in the United Kingdom or sporting the Islamic headscarf in a French state school, might push the issue temporarily to the centre of the political arena until the categories of normal politics, such as class, region, language or ethnicity, incorporate it or contrive to edge it beyond public visibility. In developing countries, one is accustomed to the more salient presence of religion in the public sphere: for example, the broad sweep of an Islamic revolution in Iran, popular jihad in the Middle East, the militant Sikhs in the Punjab, or the battle for the birthplace of Rama in North India. However, the intelligentsia in these countries who speak with the authority of modern science and the modern state see these events, important as they are, as the expression of primordial sentiments, and indicative of the underdeveloped nature of the people concerned, rather than as the political expression of unresolved issues, ill concealed by the fabric of normal politics and not articulated by political institutions.

That the Meiji Restoration marked Japan's proruption as a modern industrial nation-state has become a commonplace among those who study Japanese political history. The event may lack the romantic drama and mythology of the French revolutionary upheaval of almost a century before, yet the Restoration has remained a source of fascination for scholars seeking patterns in the events that transcend national boundaries to form the seamless web of human history.

Colonial Java represents the paradigmatic case of an ethnically stratified economy. The Dutch controlled large-scale agricultural production and processing and the sale of these products in European markets. They also monopolised the import of European manufactured commodities, such as cloth. The Javanese provided labour for the cultivation and processing of export crops, maintaining themselves by subsistence farming and subsidiary occupations, such as petty trading and handicrafts. The Chinese linked the other two groups, providing supervisors and skilled workers in export agriculture, bulking peasant crops for interregional trade and export to other Asian countries, and wholesaling the imported and manufactured commodities that the Javanese required. Although ethnic monopoly of economic function was never quite this absolute, the basic hierarchical structure was only momentarily threatened in the mid-1930s, when the Japanese began importing their own commodities and selling them in their own stores to challenge the position of both the Dutch and the Chinese (Cator 1936:75–7; Liem 1947:66).

In 1975, the transnational British American Tobacco Company (BAT) set out to rapidly develop tobacco growing in four areas of smallholder production in Kenya. This move, prompted by the Kenyan firm's loss of tobacco leaf supplies from Uganda in 1972 and then Tanzania in 1976, was to prove remarkably successful. Output in the four areas chosen for production of tobacco leaf rose from 209 tons in 1975 to 4,034 tons in 1982, making Kenya self-sufficient in that crop despite a simultaneous sales campaign which doubled the domestic consumption of manufactured cigarettes over the same period. Production has continued to rise since then, with about 8,000 small-holder farmers in the scheme producing 6,000 tons of cured tobacco leaf in 1984.

Confronted with the reality of cargo cults, postcolonial politics, disunited working classes, and the United Nations seminars on racism, theorists of different persuasions have found themselves in the last twenty years having to explain—or explain away—ethnic phenomena. In his recent article in this journal (CSSH 29:1, 24–55), G. Carter Bentley1 points out the deficiencies in the two pervading schools of thought on ethnicity and fruitfully advocates applying Bourdieu's concepts of “practice” and “habitus” to the study of ethnicity. This appropriation of Bourdieu's concept of the habitus to the study of ethnicity is surely innovative, and Bentley argues effectively that we should look at practice for an objective “handle” on ethnicity. Nevertheless, Bentley's approach suffers for two reasons.

Similar forms of subsistence and social organization have emerged in different parts of the world in response to similar ecological, technological, and demographic factors. For example, moldboard plow agriculture evolved in many places as the result of high population density, availability of large domesticable animals, presence of wet and heavy soils, and such staples as wheat, barley, rye, and buckwheat, which required extensive land preparation and “considerable surface area to produce the food calories necessary to feed a family” (Pryor 1985:732). Wolf long ago (1957) noted that the colonial experience had helped to promote the development of closed, corporate communities in rural societies of Mesoamerica and Indonesia.

The massive and ongoing exodus to cities from the countryside, a fact of life throughout Latin America today, includes Brazil. Although as late as 1960 that nation was a primarily agricultural country, over two-thirds of the population presently live in urban centers.

In his challenge to the validity and utility of my argument in “Ethnicity and Practice” (CSSH 29:1, 24–55), Yelvington raises a number of issues. He notes, for instance, that I did not, in that article, offer a specific definition of ethnicity, although I did consistently refer to ethnicity as descent symbolism and as fictive kinship. Indeed, I believe ethnicity is, at base, a claim to common identity based on putative shared descent. Wherever we find an “ethnic” category or group of people, we will also find a myth that they all originated in some primordial person, place, or event. Membership in the category or group is validated by pointing to some set of attributes, usually overt culture traits, the members believe they share in common. Given Yelvington's concluding paragraph, it appears we generally agree on what ethnicity is, if not on how to explain it.

An anonymous comment on the suicidal inclinations of great men appeared among the regular articles in an 1850 issue of the highly regarded journal of mental hygiene, the Annales médico-psychologiques. “Some curious rapprochements might be drawn,” the author suggested, “given the frequency with which this thought occurs among celebrated men; but it is clear that if insanity were the sole possible explanation, only the lot of the common people would be desirable.” On one level, this statement represents an editorial contribution to an intense debate taking place in the journal's pages concerning the relationship between suicide and insanity. Although most nineteenthcentury observers associated self-destructive behavior with mental instability, viewing the individual who sought to put an end to his existence as weak, if not perverse, a certain mystique also surrounded suicide at this time. Images of Christian martyrs who willingly courted death in preference to leading lives of pagan dishonor, of the self-sacrificing heroes of antiquity, existed alongside more contemporary renderings of unrequited lovers and world-weary young men familiar to readers of Romantic novels and the faits divers. A longing for death was a sign of sensitivity and artistic promise. “Suicide,” wrote the influential critic, Saint-Marc Girardin, “is not the malady of one who is simple of heart or in mind; it is the malady of the refined and of philosophers.” Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Benjamin Constant, and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand all confessed to having been tempted to kill themselves in their youth. No less an idol than Napoleon Bonaparte was known to have entertained morbid ideas on occasion.