The spread of manufacture in the European countryside initiated the formation of vital and complex rural laboring groups that defy neat classification. The nature of livelihood in these rural settings furthered an integration of diverse productive involvements rather than the creation of narrow occupational niches. In the course of their labor careers, men and women moved between agrarian and industrial pursuits—weaving linen cloth, spinning silk, raising livestock, digging potatoes, tending vineyards, making bricks, mining coal, casting iron, and forging steel. In this context, livelihood was not merely an individual concern; rather, it was part of a broader household strategy, rooted in a family-based agrarian holding. The maintenance of bonds to peasant agriculture fostered familial solidarity over working-class identity. These laborers saw their destinies in the immediacy of flesh-and-blood relationships among family and kin and not in more abstract social and political identifications.

In September of 1810, with a sudden flash of violent rebellion (preceded by months and years of salon conspiracies), the white native-born provincial elite of New Spain began the protracted and painful process of winning political independence from Spain. Although by about 1816 much of the country had been pacified by royal arms, pockets of rebellion continued to smolder and flare throughout the following years. The birth of modern Mexico itself finally occurred in 1821, owing as much to fortuitous political circumstances in Spain as to the military and political manipulations of Agustin Iturbide, the Creole adventurer who consummated the country's independence and briefly became its emperor. Programmatic pronouncements by the Creole and mestizo leadership of the independence movement abound in the form of pamphlets, constitutions, decrees, short-lived newspapers, captured correspondence, etcetera, and provide us with a reasonably clear view into the complex ideologi- cal process of political separatism from Spain. At least in the early years of the independence struggle, however, the insurrectionary armies were manned not primarily by Mexican-born whites or racially mixed groups, but by Indian peasants from rural villages all over the central parts of the country.

Modernization theory is essentially an academic, and pseudoscientific, transfer of the dominant, and ideologically significant, paradigm employed in research on the American political system. The still dominant paradigm, despite increasing criticism and revisionism is, of course, the pragmatic-pluralist conception of political process, associated with a form of liberalism which links democratic legitimacy with high levels of participation and with egalitarian distributive outcomes. While this paradigm has been criticized as either scientifically inadequate or normatively skewed (toward freedom, against order), its vigor as a legitimating explanation is largely undiminished. This pluralist legitimation of the American political system is based upon a relatively simple conception of political structure, which is understood as producing an appearance of a formal contradiction which is, in turn, resolved by means of the concept of time (or process). Just as Martin Heidegger used the idea of temporality to resolve the apparent contradiction between Being and existence, so the temporality of the pragmatic-pluralist political process resolves the apparent contradiction between the structured inequality of the American system at any given time and the legitimating ideal of equality. Temporality justifies inequality by subordinating it to the freedom to restructure the system through unfettered, self-motivated mobility. In other words, since freedom justifies order, according to this doctrine, an alternative scientific justification of either freedom or order has obvious political drawbacks.

In the ideology of “dependency” and the “world system” the preservation of a comprador bourgeoisie highly dependent on its control of the state apparatus perpetuates the condition of underdevelopment to the benefit not only of that class but also of the world capitalist system, and obviously to the detriment of the remainder of the population of poor countries (Wallerstein 1984). According to these theories, the condition of dependency is sustained also by the perpetuation of petty-commodity production and other precapitalist relationships. In his enumeration of the implications of accumulation in “socially and sectorally disarticulated economies” (that is, third world countries), Alain de Janvry, who places himself, with some reservations, in the world-system school, states that “subsistence agriculture becomes the ultimate embodiment of the contradictions of accumulation in the disarticulated economies; … the peasant household constitutes an articulated-dominated purveyor of cheap labour and cheap food [even though] subsistence agriculture slowly disintegrates under this domination as it performs its essential structural function under disarticulated accumulation” (1981:39). For Immanuel Wallerstein, the state-class relationship and the persistence of pettycommodity production are both features of the “peripheral condition” and explain why it is so difficult (though not absolutely impossible) in his schema for countries to graduate from his periphery and semiperiphery to the core of advanced economies. The argument runs as follows: in its expansion across the globe the capitalist world economy creates social structures and state structures that fit the needs of the core economies by establishing a ruling class in control of the state and holding monopoly power within the national economy.

The view that the opening up of Africa by metropolitan capitalism, particularly during the period of direct colonial rule, was bound to lead through evolutionary stages to economic development and modernisation has long since fallen into scholarly disrepute. In the atmosphere of radical pessimism that has pervaded academic perspectives on Africa since independence, an altogether more sceptical view of the beneficence of Africa's integration into imperial economies has prevailed. But as is often the case in scholarly debate, thesis and antithesis occupy the same battleground, and both tend to view the world through similar lenses. What modernisation and underdevelopment theories have in common is the assumption of a single universal dynamic in the making of the modern world; exposure to market forces is thus apparently destined either to reshape third world societies in the image of industrial Europe, or to “underdevelop” them in the interests of capital accumulation in the metropoles.

These observations, which open a widely read essay on primitive religion, might with equal profit be applied to the comparative study of complex societies. They suggest an unusual descriptive project: to catalog the threats to social order in particular cultures in order to make revealing comparisons. They also imply that, armed with such a catalog, unusual meanings might be wrung out of recurrent disasters and common dilemmas. Such a project has not been ventured for South Asia, and I should like to begin with modern Bengal, but the embarassment arises that I am not confident I possess the “active principles” of Bengali culture. It is only by taking up acknowledged instances of “dangers,” “cataclysms,” and “disasters” that I expect to be able to reason back to ordering concepts and thus to complete the catalog. In the course of this short essay, however, only one specific calamity—the death of C. R. Das, a charismatic Indian politician—can be examined in detail. If I succeed in showing that this one calamity has a hitherto unrealized significance in modern Bengal, perhaps the reader will grant that the role of relatedcalamities in Bengal, and even in the whole of modern India, has not been insignificant.

Although wage work has been present in the third world for some time, more people in that world are selling more of their labor today than ever before. Anthropologists and other social scientists have dealt with this increase in the amount of wage labor by using a variety of concepts, including urbanization, migration, and proletarianization. Recently, the concept of the peasant-wor-ker has appeared in the literature with greater frequency and a new meaning. This study examines one current use and discusses some of the problems associated with it.

It is a commonplace of our recent past that functionalism and the second system of Talcott Parsons (a distinctive version of functionalism) rose to power or attained hegemony in American sociology shortly after the end of World War II, retained this hegemony through the 1950s and 1960s, and lost a near-exclusive hold in the early 1970s when many of the younger sociologists abandoned a holist or transindividual perspective in favor of an interpersonal face-to-face context (associated with the social psychological concerns of symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology). What accounts for this? Why did functionalism and the second system of Parsons capture the intellectual allegiance of so many intelligent men and women in American sociology precisely at the end of World War II? What explains the almost total hegemony of this persuasion of general theory for more than two decades? Finally, what accounts for the fact that many younger sociologists withdrew their allegiance to these views at the end of the 1960s or early 1970s?

In late 1932 and early 1933 a popular rising occurred in the region of Mewat in northern central India. Although this rebellion broke out in opposition to the political power of the princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur, as a peasant rebellion it spread over and was supported from areas of British India. It was not, pace Harold Laski, merely an instance of peasant rebellion in an area of indirect British rule. Popular protest in Mewat arose within the totality of an historical context made up as much of developments in British India as of features that were specific to areas of indirect rule. The ideological and social world of the rebellion was also constituted of elements common to British and princely India and to the local histories of the peasant community of the Meos who rose in rebellion. The context that we write about, therefore, is one of a multiplicity of different, yet interlocking, histories—legendary, secular, reformist, sectarian, legitimist, nationalist, rebellious, nativistic—all of which end, as it were, in a final denouement in the rising of 1933.

The household as a unit of analysis has achieved wide currency in social science circles in recent years. Researchers have shown that in many contexts, both rural and urban, the household is the locus of important productive processes. It has also been demonstrated to be the context within which many decisions related to productive strategies are made and where income is pooled and then allocated. Testimony to the growth of interest in household-based analyses is provided by the recent appearance of a number of edited volumes (Netting et al. 1984; Smith et al. 1984) and review articles (Yanagisako 1979; Guyer 1981; Schmink 1984) on the topic.

Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.

By 1860, Cuba had become Spain's leading plantation colony in the New World, producing cash crops such as sugar, coffee, and tobacco for export. Cuba devoted so much effort to cash crops that the colony found it necessary to import foodstuffs to feed its slave and free populations. Among the essential foodstuffs that Cuba imported were dried beef from Venezuela and beef cattle from Florida. Venezuela, a Spanish colony that achieved its independence in 1821, and Florida, a Spanish colony acquired by the United States in 1821, had become Cuba's leading beef suppliers by the mid-nineteenth century.

The Irish national revolution has been a long time dying. This is due in part to its artificial continuance in Northern Ireland and in part to the survival of its slogans, in fossilized form, as official symbols of the democratic regime in the Republic of Ireland. The main phase of the movement is, however, long over; even the ideological residue left by it is in an advanced state of decomposition, and Patrick Pearse and James Connolly have no intellectual heirs of any importance.

Central to late Ottoman history is a series of events that marks a milestone in the emergence of modern forms of political thought and revolutionary action in the Islamic world. The sequence opened with the rise of the Young Ottoman ideologues (1865) and the constitutional movement of the 1870s. It continued with the repression of these forces under Abdülhamid 11 (1876–1909). It culminated with the resurgence of opposition in the Young Turk movement of 1889 and later, and especially with the revolution of 1908. Studied so far mostly in political and intellectual terms, the sequence seems well understood. The emergence of the Young Ottomans—the pioneers of political ideology, in any modern sense, in the Middle East—appears to result from the introduction of Western ideas and from stresses created within the bureaucracy by the political hegemony of the Tanzimat elite (ca. 1839–71). The repression under Abdülhamid follows from the turmoil of the late 1870s, the weaknesses of the constitution of 1876, and the craft of the new sultan in creating a palace-dominated police state. The emergence of the Young Turks shows that terror ultimately fostered, rather than killed, the opposition. Too, their eventual revolutionary success shows how much more effective than the Young Ottomans they were as political mobilizers.