Resurgent scholarly interest in the state has focused attention on the growth and decline of state power: Samuel Huntington's emphasis on the importance of state making and state decay, James O'Connor's anticipation of the financial crises of large states, Immanuel Wallerstein's identification of strong states with core areas of the world economy, Charles Tilly's accounts of European efforts to create more powerful states, and Theda Skocpol's analysis of revolutions as attempts to restore the strength of weakened central regimes.

On the morning of 4 April 1877, estate agent Arthur Brooke drove his carriage up to the gate of Cashel Farm, the residence of John Magroarty in Carrick, a small market town in the mountainous hinterland of southwest Donegal. Brooke had brought sheriff McCrory along with him, but his bailiffs emerged from their nearby homes a bit more reluctantly than usual. It was clear to Brooke that tenant Magroarty would not submit mildly to the impending eviction, for, although warned of the sheriff's intention several days earlier, he had not budged a parcel and a large crowd was gathering to witness the proceedings. Agent Brooke had never been so loath to perform his duty, for Magroarty was not the average evictee. He was the owner of several cows and was a reliable and even “improving tenant.” Most of all, however, he was the parish priest. It was Father Magroarty Brooke and his henchmen had come to toss into the streets of Carrick.

Studies of local markets have come to attract much interest of late in the anthropological and geographical literature. However, while a fair amount of work has been done on rural and periodic markets in the Middle East and some on North Africa, no serious research has been done in Egypt. Yet Egyptian weekly markets have been around for a very long time, and they continue to play an important role in the local and national economy today, despite extensive state control. For this reason they deserve more serious study and attention than they have so far been given.

The plow is one of those seminal inventions which has transformed history; unfortunately, we have little archaeological evidence about its origins. We believe that the plow existed 4,000 years ago in both ancient Sumar and Egypt, but we do not know when it was first introduced, or where, or by whom. It arrived in human history without fanfare and was an integral part of complex technological and social systems by the era from which we have first evidence of its presence.

The origins and first uses of money have long been topics of interest to scholars. Although economists today still repeat Adam Smith's argument that money was created to eliminate barter, researchers with an extensive knowledge of archaic and primitive cultures have shown that money was often required for reasons other than the indirect exchange of goods. Irish evidence gives a European example of primitive money used to pay fines and to meet social obligations; what made the money valuable was that it enabled its recipients to perform these functions. Money was not used to facilitate the indirect exchange of goods.

Case studies in local economic history and organization conventionally employ either of two rhetorical strategies. In the first, a particular world view, theoretical orientation, or set of basic categories is assumed and forms the basis for organizing a description of a particular case; in the second, the facts or data are marshaled in an attempt to validate, authenticate, or test an explicitly stated theoretical position. Of course, these are ideal types, and many studies quite appropriately combine both. Progress is conceived as an outcome over time in which both kinds of study contribute to ever more elegant, encompassing, and parsimonious orderings of data. The nature of the relationship between theory, assumptions, world view, and so forth on the one hand, and data, subject, or facts on the other, transcends otherwise widely divergent arguments-for example, “Marxist,” “dependency,” “neoclassical,” and (more subtly) “substantivist.” In short, a common value, broadly “positivist,” informs most Western sociaI science discourse.

Marx's well-known assertion that the basic form of all phenomena in the East was the absence of private property in land is part of an old tradition of Western thought which is still alive. But if the conclusions are similar, they follow from different arguments, varying from author to author, country to country, and, of course, over time as historical knowledge grows.