On 17 December 1961, Ronald Ngala faced an audience of some five hundred supporters in Malindi, a town on the East African coast of the Indian Ocean. The crowd had come to watch Ngala lower the flag that symbolized colonial rule along the coast. This was not the Union flag of Great Britain, but the red flag of the Sultan of Zanzibar. It flew over a number of towns located along the ten-mile coastal strip “Protectorate” of what was then Kenya Colony and Protectorate. The flag symbolized this latter legal distinction, representing the sovereignty that the Sultan of Zanzibar retained over the coastal strip of Kenya after leasing its administration to Britain in a treaty signed in 1895. The flag's lowering was an act of political theatre—Ngala's supporters had hastily arranged the flag and flagpole, while the Sultan's real flag flew over the Malindi courts office nearby. The crowd celebrated its lowering with loud and wild cheers. Anxious onlookers later complained that Ngala had performed an act of treason. In Zanzibar, tense with the specter of racial violence, local press expressed outrage at this insult to the Sultan.

During the Cold War, economists utilizing mathematical methods in both the Soviet Union and the United States found they shared a common research project. After the Stalinist years in which they could communicate very little, they found that they had much to learn from each other. Mathematical economics came to bridge the divide between East and West even though the meetings and collaborations between American and Soviet colleagues were fraught with tension and misunderstanding. The Cold War excitement about mathematical economics and the East-West cooperation it allowed, however, dwindled with the end of détente, the global shift in economic science away from mathematical economics, and the end of state socialism in the East Bloc. To understand the rise and fall of this cooperation and convergence, we examine the case of the connection between Tjalling C. Koopmans, a Dutch economist living in the United States as a result of World War II, and Leonid V. Kantorovich, a Russian scientist living in the Soviet Union. These two men jointly won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1975. Their scientific connections reflect the broader experiences of East-West scientific collaboration during the Cold War. At the same time, they offer insights for scholars regarding struggles over scientific research priority and the potential for convergence between capitalism and socialism during the Cold War era.

My knowledge of the inner workings of CSSH began when the journal had completed its sixth year and was already well known and widely circulated. A few years before, Sylvia L. Thrupp had brought it with her when she moved to Michigan from the University of Chicago. When I joined the Michigan faculty, its presence was one of the attractions. I had been become aware of CSSH in its first year, pointed to it by Robert R. Palmer, who was working on the second volume of his Age of the Democratic Revolution. As we talked about his project, I expressed surprise that more was not being done with historical comparison, and he mentioned, rather skeptically I thought, that there was a new journal I might be interested in. I found the first issues in the library and mentioned them to another Princeton colleague who commented, “When historians don't know enough to write about one place, they write on two.” So I learned from the first that the venture was controversial. In contrast, Joseph R. Strayer told me he thought the new journal very promising, largely because of the woman who had founded it. (Much later, I learned that he had persuaded Princeton to make a small contribution to the journal's founding, and some twenty-five years after that conversation, when both were in their eighties, Joseph Strayer married Sylvia Thrupp).

In March 1998, the political leadership of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel was looking for ways to commemorate al-Nakba (“The Disaster,” in Arabic), referring to the war of 1948, during which about 700,000 Palestinians were uprooted and hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed. This leadership, organized in the Follow-Up Committee (FUC), nominated a Nakba and Steadfastness Committee (NSC) chaired by the author Muhamad Ali Taha. Among the Committee's several initiatives, one gained front-page headlines in the Arabic media: a call for Arab municipalities to establish memorial monuments for the Palestinian martyrs (shuhada) of 1948.

On 20 July 2006, eight days into an Israeli air assault on Lebanon, Israeli shells hit the Khiam detention center, the notorious site where Lebanese resistance fighters and civilians had been imprisoned and tortured during the twenty-two-year (1978–2000) Israeli occupation of south Lebanon. A news article describing the destruction of the center was subtitled, “After being remade in recent years into a monument to political atrocity, the jail at Khiam now lies destroyed by Israeli strikes,” and noted, “Fragments of walls, concrete held erect by stubborn rebar, point mute to the sky” (Quilty 2006).

Bùi Minh Quốc left for the border in late 2001. His clandestine trip, which took nearly a month to complete on a 50cc Honda Cub motorcycle, retraced the perimeter of Việt Bắc, the name for the mountainous region that stretches across ten provinces in northeastern Vietnam. Quốc, a poet of considerable repute, documented the highpoints of the ride in verse. But the region’s rugged beauty, which holds a prominent place in official histories of the anti-colonial struggle against the French and those who collaborated with them, was not the real reason for his quest. Nor was the region’s more recent reincarnation as a socialist battleground during the Third Indochina War with the People’s Republic of China, a conflict that killed and wounded an estimated one hundred thousand people in the space of a month. Instead, Quốc’s self-appointed task was to find the current location of “Kilometer Zero” (Cấy số không) along the Sino-Vietnamese border—a difficult proposition since it appears nowhere on official maps of the country. Nonetheless, the toponym is commonly used to refer to the precise spot in Lạng Sơn Province where National Highway 1A, the only paved road to traverse the entire length of Vietnam, begins its long journey south.

Having brought my editorship to an end just before the CSSH fiftieth birthday—having, you might say, just stepped out of the maelstrom—it might be worthwhile to seize the occasion to analyze, in tranquility, what at the time was just too intense, too difficult but also too deeply satisfying an experience to put into words. Without a doubt, being editor of CSSH was the most gratifying job I ever had, but why? How to bottle the maelstrom?

When we think of the globalization of culture, we tend to think of the consumption of cultural goods produced in the West and the effects of these goods on the values and practices of non-Western consumers. The literature on the globalization of culture also tends to focus on how Western markets for non-Western cultural goods affect patterns of cultural production in the non-Western world.1 Naturally, this focus on markets tends to draw our theoretical interest toward questions of capitalism. However, when we look at societies without a history of capitalism, new questions come to light. That men wear Western-style suits in both Uzbekistan and Italy, that orchestras use polyphony in both Kazakhstan and Austria, and that King Lear is popular in both Turkmenistan and England cannot be explained by the dynamics of capitalism.

On 11 December 1912, Philadelphians encountered an extraordinary sight in their city's streets. Groups of prominent society women—“famous beauties and matrons … known all over the continent”—were selling eggs all over town. These eggs differed from those we buy today in that most had been in storage since April. Housewives nonetheless flocked to buy them, because they cost only 24 cents a dozen, much less than other April eggs. The sellers, themselves members of the Housekeepers' League, claimed they would not make money off the “hen fruit” that they had bought by the carload, but neither would they lose it. Rather, they aimed to break a commercial corner on eggs that, they claimed, fostered unfair and deceptive trade practices. In particular, they wanted to stop merchants from charging “strictly fresh” prices for what were in fact refrigerated eggs.

There has recently been an upsurge in anthropologists' interest in law, with North Africa and the Middle East taking a prominent position. One of the foci is the coexistence of multiple sets of legal practices, and the ways in which people negotiate between different legal “systems.” This emphasis closely mirrors the more general shift in anthropology from “discourse” to “practice,” and shares both its strengths and weaknesses. Among the latter is that the resulting emphasis on “legal pluralism” (Griffith 1986) runs the danger of eroding the concept of law as such, subsuming it within more general and all-encompassing notions of “conflict resolution.” Similarly, there is a risk that one of the most striking aspects of legal procedure, namely the value placed on the act of making rules, is being neglected, and the actual content of local law codes and their underlying principles are receiving less attention than they deserve. As a result, “customary law” is more often implicitly defined by what it is not. Here, my aim is not to shift the focus from “practice” to “discourse,” but rather to understand the internal logic of one such set of ‘customs,’ and to consider the act of making law in itself as a special kind of practice (see also Comaroff and Roberts 1981: 15–16).

In 1962, the recently established Peace Corps announced plans for an intensive field training initiative that would acclimate the agency's burgeoning multitude of volunteers to the conditions of poverty in “underdeveloped” countries and immerse them in “foreign” cultures ostensibly similar to where they would be later stationed. This training was designed to be “as realistic as possible, to give volunteers a ‘feel’ of the situation they will face.” With this purpose in mind, the Second Annual Report of the Peace Corps recounted, “Trainees bound for social work in Colombian city slums were given on-the-job training in New York City's Spanish Harlem…. New Mexican Indian reservations and Spanish-speaking villages make realistic workshops for community development trainees. Puerto Rico provides experience in living in a Latin American environment. The Island of Hawaii, with its multiracial population, remote valleys and varied rural economy, performs a similar function for volunteers headed for Southeast Asia.”1 Local communities throughout the United States were chosen for their apparent similarities to locations abroad such that they might serve as a staging ground for President John F. Kennedy's vaunted Cold War diplomatic venture.

The rise of Hamburg as a global marketplace and financial centre in the seventeenth century was a significant sign of the bourgeoning integration of European markets. In the early seventeenth century, the urban staple function in northwest Europe was largely concentrated in Amsterdam, while in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries London and Hamburg rose to preeminence. Hamburg served as a hub for international trade, connecting markets in England, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean. Goods such as raisins, sugar, tobacco, salt, iron, and leather changed hands, with the transactions reflecting the widespread mercantile network in which Hamburg took part. Furthermore, the commercial development of Hamburg and the rise of the Prussian state were important steps in creating a well-ordered and integrated urban network in Germany long before political unification.

On 2 October 1952, marking Gandhi's fourth birth anniversary after his assassination in 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of postcolonial India, launched the Community Development (CD) Programs. Dedicating the programs to Gandhi's memory allowed Nehru to claim symbolic legitimacy for them. At the same time, this centerpiece of Nehruvian policy in the Indian countryside was heavily interventionist, billed as “the method ... through which the [state] seeks to bring about social and economic transformation in India's villages” (Government of India 1952). In its heyday, CD preoccupied the Planning Commission, was linked to the office of the Prime Minister, had a ministry dedicated to it, and formed part of the domain of action of the rapidly proliferating state and other development agencies. Fifteen pilot projects, each covering 300 villages, were launched in all the major states. Planning documents of the day register high enthusiasm and optimism for these programs. However, by the mid-1960s, barely a decade after the fanfare of its launch, the tone of planners toward CD turned first despairing and then oppositional. They called for abandonment of its ambitious aim of the total development of Indian villages in favor of more focused interventions to achieve a rapid increase in food-grain production.

This essay probes the role of commodities in the crafting of state power, working from the vantage point of contemporary Ghana, a polity at once post-socialist and staunchly neoliberal, least-industrialized and highly cosmopolitan. Among the many commodities which Ghana's citizens and state bodies identify with and rely upon, cars are of critical significance. In what follows, I explore the raft of interventions surrounding car importation and allocation imposed by Ghana's Customs Service, and the resulting public critique, in an effort to capture the shifting contours of state authority in the context of an electoral and economic transition spurred by neoliberal reform.

It does not always happen that academic debates result in an agreed victory or a tidy consensus. As often as not, the protagonists lose interest, or the terrain itself shifts. For that reason, it is worth remarking on the fact that after around two decades of debating the roots of ethnicity in Africa, something like a consensus has in fact emerged. The colonial thesis that Africans were born into “tribes” that were rooted in a timeless past has been effectively critiqued by historians and social scientists alike. Arguably beginning with John Iliffe, revisionists advanced a challenging antithesis, namely that colonial administrative practices generated the very identities that officials and missionaries took for granted. In Iliffe's famous formulation: “The British wrongly believed that Tanganyikans belonged to tribes; Tanganyikans created tribes to function within the colonial framework.” Although Iliffe coined the term “the creation of tribes,” it was Terence Ranger's contribution to The Invention of Tradition that really sparked an interest in the historicity of ethnicity in Africa. In fact, this was only one facet of Ranger's overall argument, one that was a good deal more nuanced than he has sometimes been given credit for. Be that as it may, the time was evidently ripe for a historiographical break, and during the 1980s and 1990s historians set about demonstrating that particular ethnic groups were indeed the product of an interplay between European interventions—by administrators, missionaries, employers, and colonial ethnographers—and selective African appropriations—through the agency of Christian converts, educated elites, urban migrants, and rural patriarchs. The steady accretion of case-study material has subsequently culminated in reflections that have distilled the broad comparative lessons. These have been helpful in creating a sense of agreement that the debate was necessary, whilst underscoring that a law of diminishing returns has set in, something more generally true of debates about constructivist approaches to identity.

The origin and spread of money-based commodity markets is normally attributed to a natural evolution from barter and is usually seen as a solution to problems of exchange. I want to propose that markets to a considerable degree develop historically out of a different set of dynamics. These are concerned with the state-building tasks of territorial conquest and control, and are closely related to specific modes of war fighting. In this connection, markets develop not only to facilitate exchange per se but also to facilitate the mobilization of resources and their management across space and time. This need to manage resources geographically and temporally contributes not only to the spread of commodity markets but also to the development of markets in land and in labor.