The title of the panel at which this paper was originally presented — “Nationalism and the Growth of States”, at the 1960 meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City — suggested a concern with nationalism as a political phenomenon. We were not speaking primarily about love of country, the cultivation of a national style or hatred of the foreigner, but about political convictions, attitudes or movements and their relation to the state. The dilemma of nineteenth-century Russian nationalism, so defined, consists in this — that it could only with difficulty, if at all, view the tsarist state as the embodiment of the national purpose, as the necessary instrument and expression of national goals and values, while the state, for its part, looked upon every autonomous expression of nationalism with fear and suspicion.

The period 1905–1912 saw a number of nearly simultaneous revolutions or mass movements in Asian countries, which may be considered as the first wave of a revolutionary movement which continues to rock Asia. The Chinese overthrow of the Manchu dynasty, the Young Turk victory, and the Indian mass movement of 1905–1909 are probably the best-known in a series of events which also embraced smaller Asian countries and groups. The main reasons for their simultaneity were probably: the electric effect of the Russo-Japanese War, a startling Asian victory over a Western Power; the Russian Revolution of 1905, an inspiring anti-autocratic struggle which temporarily took Russia away as a bulwark for conservative governments in Asia; the intensification of imperialist pressures on Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which brought Asian economic and political reactions; and, possibly, the beginnings of economic crisis, which were reflected in Asia. Among these the Russo-Japanese War perhaps deserves to be singled out as the immediate spark, igniting highly inflammatory material in Asia as it did in Russia itself. Not only was Asian pride, hitherto battered by a continuous stream of Western conquests, bolstered by this victory, but the fact that the only Asian constitutional power defeated the only major Western non-constitutional power strengthened the fight for constitutional government as the panacea for internal ills and the “secret” of Western strength.

Emigration from the land that now constitutes the Lebanese republic has long historical roots going back to the time of the Phoenicians, and probably only the Irish rival the Lebanese in exporting themselves. One commonly associates these emigrants with trade, although emigrant scholars, writers, and publishers, such as Yūsuf Samān al-Samān (Assemani) in eighteenth-century Rome, Jurjī Zaydān in nineteenth-century Cairo, or Khalil Gibran (Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān) in twentieth-century New York, are by no means exceptions.

Throughout the history of economics the stranger everywhere appears as the trader, or the trader as stranger. As long as the economy is essentially selfsufficient, or products are exchanged within a spatially narrow group, it needs no middleman: a trader is required only for products that originate outside the group. Insofar as members do not leave the circle to buy these necessities — in which case they are the “strange” merchants in that outside territory — the trader must be a stranger … This position of the stranger stands out more sharply if he settles down in the place of his activity, instead of leaving it again: in innumerable cases even this is possible only if he can live by intermediate trade… This position of the stranger stands out more sharply if he settles down in the place of his activity, instead of leaving it again: in innumerable cases even this is possible only if he can live by intermediate trade… The stranger is by nature no “owner of the soil“ — soil not only in the physical but also in the figurative sense of a life-substance which is fixed, if not in a point in space, at least at an ideal point of the social environment. Although in more intimate relations he may develop all kinds of charm and significance, as long as he is considered a stranger in the eyes of the other, he is not an “owner of soil”… Another expression of this constellation lies in the objectivity of the stranger. He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of “objectivity”. But objectivity does not imply passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement … The freedom, however, which allows the stranger to experience and treat even his close relationships as though from a birds-eye view, contains many dangerous possibilities. In uprisings of all sorts, the party attacked has claimed, from the beginning of things, that provocation has come from the outside, from emissaries and instigators.

In 1956 there were 16.3 million agricultural labour households in India, roughly one out of three for Indian agriculture as a whole. Their number has been rapidly increasing; in 1900 only 12 per cent of the agricultural population were landless labourers. It is tempting to see the creation of this huge landless class as yet another verification of a general theory of development which seems to apply to Japan and to much of South-East Asia, as well as to a great deal of Western experience. Such a theory would explain the growth of this class in terms of the weakening of village communities, the breaking down of traditional patterns of land tenure, the spreading of indebtedness and the consequent dispossession of the peasantry, and it would find the chief cause of these changes in the monetisation of the economy.

The accelerated tempo of change since the Industrial Revolution has naturally focussed interest on those phases of development that lead from preindustrial to industrial types of society. Economists discussing development problems, and especially those concentrating on the so-called “take-off” phase, thereby bluntly assume that the pre-industrial, “traditional” or “handicraft” types of society were static, as they easily appear when compared to the dynamic tempo of change experienced — and required — in the modern epoch.

The problem I wish to discuss is how Russian history has differed from that of Western Europe and whether the reasons for these differences continue to be relevant and deep-seated enough to make it seem likely that they will continue in the future.

During the thirteen centuries of their particular co-existence, Islam and Christianity have shown astonishingly little intellectual curiosity about one another. Through the contacts history has afforded them, contacts marked to be sure by other intellectual achievements, a general state of mutual understanding seldom better than elementary has persisted. Perhaps no Christian any longer believes that Mohammed was a renegade cardinal of the Colonna family and few if any Moslems believe that the Virgin Mary is a Person of the Christian Trinity; but they have continued to accuse one another of polytheism, the very last thing of which either is guilty, down to the present time. Today the Christian living outside the Isamic world who can distinguish Sunnite from Shiite is as rare as the Moslem who can distinguish among Protestant sects (many of them can distinguish Catholic and Orthodox from Protestant Christianity).