For most of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Jamaica was the center of trade and commerce in the English Caribbean. Its economic growth was influenced little by the planter class, which was slow to develop and would not fully emerge until the mid-eighteenth century (Dunn 1973: 204; Sheridan 1965: 292–311). Jamaica grew prosperous, instead, from a merchant class that mediated international trade on one level and distributed goods to the island's inhabitants on another. It was the capital derived from such trade and commerce that ultimately fueled the island's agricultural revolution (Zahedieh 1986b), because many merchants became affluent from trade and then financed investments in sugar plantations, livestock, and secondary staples (Claypole 1970: 174–95). So, unlike other colonies in the Caribbean, where most capital investment originated in England and was sustained by agriculture, Jamaica's capital was locally generated with predominantly external commodities. The early merchants thus have a prominent position both in the history of the island and in Caribbean history in general.

National identity is hegemonic among the population of Jewish descent in Israel. Zionism, modern Jewish nationalism, originated in eastern Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A national movement without a territory, Zionism naturally adopted the ethnic, or integrative, type of nationalism that prevailed in the region (for a basic typology of nationalism see Smith 1986: 79-84). In Palestine the diasporic Jewish nationalism turned into a settler-colonial nationalism. The state of Israel inherited the ethnic principle of membership and never adopted the alternative liberal-territorial principle. To this day the dominant ethos of the state is Zionist, that is, Jewish nationalist. Though Israeli citizenship is de jure equal to Jews and Arabs, a de facto distinction is easily discernible between the dominated minority and the dominant majority and its state.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, for the first time in American history, a movement based on a broad agenda of political reform arose to dominate the political discourse. It inspired the growth of the regulatory state, the doubling of the size of the electorate, many reforms that were aimed at weakening the grip of machine politics, and other changes too numerous to list here. According to influential studies, the period gave us a “new American state” (Skowronek 1982) combined with the “onward march of party decomposition” (Burnham 1970).

For both major parties, we are told, there were clear divisions associated with support for or opposition to the progressive movement. Within the Democratic Party, William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson held high the banner of progressivism, while Alton B. Parker, John W Davis, and other heirs of Grover Cleveland spoke for conservatives.

In 1959, Theodor Adorno delivered a lecture whose title and theme played on Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” {Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?). Kant’s essay had begun with the statement that enlightenment is humanity’s emergence from self-imposed nonage. Called “What Does It Mean to Come to Terms with the Past?” (Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?), Adorno’s lecture takes issue with tendencies in the Federal Republic of Germany to wish away difficult legacies of the Nazi period. Evoking a parallel between Kant’s “enlightenment” (Aufklärung) and the contemporary expressions “coming to terms” or “working through” (Aufarbeitung), Adorno poses a high critical standard for German political culture. According to his diagnosis, the Federal Republic was more concerned with getting beyond the past, with avoiding difficult memory through what Adorno calls “an unconscious and not-so-unconscious defense against guilt,” than with the genuine working through that would be required to “break its spell.” The latter would demand an act of clear consciousness, a difficult process much like the work of psychoanalysis. According to Adorno, the defensive unwillingness in the Federal Republic to confront the past—at both the personal and official levels—indicated not the persistence of fascist tendencies against democracy (e.g., neo-Nazi groups) but of fascist tendencies within democracy. The latter, he argues, are much more insidious.