In the second half of the nineteenth century, objects from India were repeatedly assembled for display at international exhibitions, known then and now as world fairs. Their transience and ephemerality set world fairs apart as extraordinary phenomena in the world of collecting. They are special because, despite the permanence they imply, they do not last; they come and they go. Their buildings are constructed, and then, by international charter, they are deconstructed. They are also special because they place objects in the service of commerce and in the service of the modern nation—state, with the inevitable imperial encounters that these two forces promote. In doing so, they yoke cultural material with aesthetics, politics and pragmatics.

Historical consciousness has not been a prized possession in most human cultures, and a sense of a time that considers social affairs to have been developing over several hundreds of years [prior to the present] and by agents ⋯μοουσἱος ⋯μîνx(of essentially the same being as ourselves) is actually a cultural oddity. Most of the thousands of the world's cultures are discrete primal societies—many of them small—that constitute the ethnographic panorama of today. They remind us that there once lay hundreds of more regionally confined, more homogeneous and tribal-oriented human groupings. For such a vast array of societies, however, we simply lack long-term histories.

If a question can be mal posée, surely an interpretation can be mal étendue. This has been the fate of the social interpretation of the welfare state. The cousin of social theories of bourgeois revolution, the social interpretation of the welfare state is part of a broader conception of the course of modern European history that until recently has laid claim to the status of a standard. The social interpretation sees the welfare states of certain countries as a victory for the working class and confirmation of the ability of its political representatives on the Left to use universalist, egalitarian, solidaristic measures of social policy on behalf of the least advantaged. Because the poor and the working class were groups that overlapped during the initial development of the welfare state, social policy was linked with the worker's needs. Faced with the ever-present probability of immiseration, the proletariat championed the cause of all needy and developed more pronounced sentiments of solidarity than other classes. Where it achieved sufficient power, the privileged classes were forced to consent to measures that apportioned the cost of risks among all, helping those buffeted by fate and social injustice at the expense of those docked in safe berths.

Social facts and policies can be understood only in light of our own perceptions. This holds true with a vengeance where ethnicity, nationhood, or nationalism are concerned. All through the twentieth century this syndromecum-terminological chain has played an extensive, puzzling and usually unpredicted part in structuring social life and political action. New ethnic identities (for example, Tanzania'ism or Indonesian'ism) with their related designations and loyalties have cometo the fore with a speed that reveals the transitional and relational nature of ethnic phenomena. The same holds true for the ups and downs of acute nationalism. On the other hand, many throughout the world would agree with the great Catalonian historian, Pierre Vilar, whose internationalist values are not in doubt, that “in the relationship between my own life and history, nationals problems seem to overwhelm all others.” However one may conceptualize ethnicity and nationalism, their political impact has provided a major and continuous dimension of social action.

Winston Churchill was winning money at the Goodwood Races when he heard the news that a tribal uprising had broken out on the north-west frontier of India. Within a matter of hours, the young cavalry officer, who was then on home leave from his regiment in Bangalore, booked return passage on the Indian Mail. He also sent off a telegram to an old family friend, General Sir Bindon Blood, who had been appointed to head the column that was being dispatched to relieve the two garrisons at Malakand and Chakdara then under Beige. General Blood had once made a casual promise to Churchill that he would include him in a future campaign, and with this promise in mind Churchill set off for the frontier.

The Egyptian delegation to the Eighth International Congress of Orientalists, held in Stockholm during the summer of 1889, traveled to Sweden via Paris and paused there to visit the World Exhibition. The four Egyptians spent several days in the French capital, climbing twice the height (they were told) of the Great Pyramid in Alexandre Eiffel's new tower, and exploring the city and exhibition laid out beneath. Only one thing disturbed them. The Egyptian exhibit had been built by the French to represent a street of medieval Cairo, made of houses with overhanging upper stories and a mosque like that of Qaitbay. “It was intended,” one of the Egyptians wrote, “to resemble the old aspect of Cairo.” So carefully was this done, he noted, that “even the naivt nn the bildings was made dirty.”

The term ethnos or ethnic community has been used in contemporary Soviet literature mainly to denote a human community, referred to in spoken Russian as “a people” (narod). The same term denotes both those peoples who have lagged behind in their development and peoples of highly industrial countries; tribes and nations, small populations (for example, the Hoppi or the Ket) and large ones including millions of people (like the Russians or the Italians). It is used to designate contemporary people as well as those who have vanished with history (for example, the Etruscans or the Scythians); peoples who are territorially compact and those who are dispersed over widely separated areas (for example, the Armenians). The substitution of the term ethnos for the word people was made necessary by the fact that (in Russian and in many other languages) the word “people” has a number of different connotations, and the Russian narod is used to describe not only ethnic communities but also the “toiling masses of people” or simply a large crowd of humans.

The state apparatus in China today has taken upon itself almost total responsibility for administering the social and economic domain. The welfare and control of the population, the organization of production, planning all social activities, and the distribution of the means of subsistence have become primary concerns of organs of the state. The types of power relationships and their social and symbolic expressions, which have crystallized around the distribution and circulation of desirables in such a political economy, are the subject of the present study. The study will also examine how certain counter-techniques of power deviate from the larger strategy of power exercised through the state socialist political economy, forming pockets of intransigence from within.

The recent influx to the United States of a new large wave of immigrants from Hispanic America and Asia has reinvigorated immigration and ethnic studies, including those devoted to the analysis of the origins and process of international migrations. The accumulation of research in this field in the last fifteen years has brought about a shift in the theoretical paradigm designed to interpret these movements. The classical approach explains the mass flow into North America of immigrants (from Southern and Eastern Europe, in the period 1880 to 1914), as an international migration interpreted in terms of push and pull forces. Demographic and economic conditions prompted individuals to move from places with a surplus of population, little capital, and underemployment, to areas where labor was scarce and wages were higher (Jerome, 1926; Thomas, 1973; Piore, 1979; Gould, 1979). This interpretation views individual decisions and actions as the outcome of a rational economic calculation of the costs and benefits of migration. Recent studies of international population movements have reconceptualized this problem, recasting the unit(s) of analysis from separate nation-states, linked by one-way transfer of migrants between two unequally developed economies, to a comprehensive economic system composed of a dominant core and a dependent periphery— a world system that forms a complex network of supranational exchanges of technology, capital, and labor (Castells, 1975; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Kritz, 1983; Sassen-Koob, 1980; Portes, 1978; Portes and Walton, 1981; Wood, 1982). In this conceptualization, the development of the core and the underdevelopment of the peripheral societies are seen not as two distinct phenomena, but as two aspects of the same process—the expanding capitalist world system, explained in terms of each other. Generated by the economic imbalances and social dislocations resulting from the incorporation of the peripheries into the orbit of the core, international labor migrations between the developing and industrialized regions are viewed as part of a global circulation of resources within a single system of world economy. This interpretation shifts the central emphasis from the individual (and his/her decisions) to the broad structural determinants of human migrations within a global economic system.

Urban troubles were endemic in early modern Europe. Not only did cities undergo sieges, conquests, and epidemics, but the rapid spread of rural protoindustrial manufacturing threatened established markets and employment patterns. The acute problems of Antwerp, captured by Spanish troops in 1685, or of Como, whose textile industry collapsed in the early seventeenth century are not isolated examples of cities in trouble. Many more could be offered. Indeed, descriptions of cities in the seventeenth century, particularly those of the Spanish Empire, stress depopulation and decay. Contemporaries saw around them scenes of urban desolation. Sir Thomas Overbury, travelling in the Spanish Netherlands around 1610, wrote of the “ruinous” towns, while visitors to Ciudad Real in Spain around 1620 noted vacant, tumbledown houses, unemployment, and urban land gone to waste (Parker 1977:253; Phillips 1979:29). After several years in which Spanish Lombardy was devastated by wars, famine, and plague, the Milan City Council complained of “the destitution of all sorts of persons and the threat of impending ruin.” Moreover, throughout the state, values of houses and landed property had allegedly plummeted (Sella 1979:57,63).

This essay has presented a framework for the analysis of economic factors in political relations between developed and developing areas. The most relevant considerations in this regard are the potential costs of imperial intervention in enhancing the return to metropolitan economic interests, and the potential benefits that intervention might bring to these interests. The essay has emphasized the differential political implications of various types of metropolitan economic activity, and especially of different forms of foreign investment.

Writing about the development of historical writing in the West, Hayden White argues that “narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized ‘history’, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.” But precisely how does narrative treat the different forms of social authority? One answer is that historical narrative is a universal form representing time and experience that Western historians have made particularly persuasive and authoritative. The modern historian, according to this view, has brought narrative to its natural culmination by constructing such historical plots as the “Rise of the Nation-State” or the “Development of Modes of Production.” This perspective is put forward primarily by students of European historiography.

The agricultural policies of the New Deal persist to the present day and are a particularly important turning point in the history of the American farm sector. In the period from 1875 to 1940, agricultural policy evolved from a strategy of exporting the domestic surplus, to shrinking production through attrition in the farm population, to subsidizing production and restricting acreage. Although rooted in farm demands upon the political process, this evolution was ultimately driven by both foreign demand and the alternative employment opportunities available to American farmers.

When I did my first field research in Peru in 1974, I was struck by the forceful, energetic, and at times bawdy market women known as cholas. They stood out because they appeared fearless, astute, different, and unpredictable. I could ot find a counterpart among Peruvian males. The cholas feigned neither humility toward rich white foreigners nor unbridled admiration for their ways. They inhabited a world distinct from that of either the Quechua peasantry or the westernized mestizo but easily interacted with both campesinos and mestizos. They freely insulted whom they pleased; they engaged in wheeling and dealing and stood their ground but could also be surprisingly generous, almost religiously so.

In 1868, a clergymen told the annual congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science that “he had long lived in the town of Liverpool, and had been placed in circumstances there which made him frequently regret that there were no places in which women could find employment. The great want was of employment for every class of women, not only for the higher class, but for those placed in humbler circumstances.” At earlier conferences, however, a number of speakers described the abundant opportunities for female employment in other Lancashire towns. Census figures make it clear that the reason lay in the different industrial bases of these towns.

At the end of 1978, the German art critic Walter Frentz, introducing a film and public lecture in the city of Worms, postulated that Europeans could breathe new life into the idea of European unity by devoting greater care and attention to the shape and form of European cities. The theme of his remarks that night specifically encouraged the preservation of historic urban cores, but more striking was his general concept linking the development of the European Community with the treatment of the European city. As a growing literature on architectural symbolism and urban imagery suggests, cities take the shapes that are expressions of a total society, reflecting the spectrum of their political, economic and cultural life. As Europeans rebuilt and developed their cities in the period after World War II, they also charted the course of their unification.