Although the empirical basis for the comparative study of the history of European family life is expanding, there remain extensive areas of Eastern Europe about which almost nothing is known. This situation weakens all generalizations about Europe as a whole, especially since those localities of Eastern Europe from which family data are available reveal formations very different from what obtains in the West. The most ambitious comparative study to date, Household and Family in Past Time (1972; edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall) has taken a long step in the direction of providing a comparative methodology, but even in this excellent volume Eastern Europe is represented by only three essays dealing with the best known of its areas, the Balkans. In the Preface of the work, Laslett suggests that future historical evidence from the eastern regions ‘may possibly go to show that the extremes of familial organization, from the simplest to the most complex, may have once existed within the confines of the European continent itself’.

There is a great deal of confusion about the history of women's work outside the home and about the origin and meaning of women's traditional place within the home. Most interpretations of either of these questions depend on assumptions about the other. Usually, women at home in any time period are assumed to be non-productive, the antithesis of women at work. In addition, most general works on women and the family assume that the history of women's employment, like the history of women's legal and political rights, can be understood as a gradual evolution from a traditional place at home to a modern position in the world of work. Some historians cite changes in employment opportunities created by industrialization as the precursors of legal emancipation. Others stress political rights as the source of improved economic status. In both cases, legal-political and economic ‘emancipation’ usually are linked to changes in cultural values. Thus William Goode, whose World Revolution and Family Patterns makes temporal and geographic comparisons of family patterns, remarks on what he calls ‘the statistically unusual status of western women today, that is their high participation in work outside of the home’.

The study of imperial rivalries is progressing at a rapid rate as more national archives become available and more researchers enter the field. But this progress tends too often to be a linear one, teaching us more about the aspirations, strategies and accomplishments of the rival powers but little about what took place within the actual pieces of territory over which they contested. And this is understandable, because whereas the former domain can be discussed with an increasing degree of precision, the latter tends to be more intractable. After all, colonial possessions were the ‘objects’, things to be fought over and about. The intention of this paper, however, is to look at the other, perhaps more problematic, dimensions of imperial rivalry, viz., the awareness and activities of the inhabitants and residents of one colonial territory with respect to the keen international competition over their country. By inhabitants and residents I mean to include not only the indigenous peoples of Cameroun but also the French administrators who were present in the territory during the interwar period.

This paper argues that the experiences of colonialism in Africa have led to the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern postcolonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one public, as in the West. Many of Africa's political problems are due to the dialectical relationships between the two publics. I shall characterize these two publics and attempt to explain some of Africa's political features within the matrix of these publics. In order to give some empirical content to the distinction drawn here, I shall illustrate the issues raised with examples from Nigeria.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that reciprocity may be of two types: prestations of things and prestations of actions or, expressed in another way, gift exchanges and cooperation. Evidence from two societies will be used to show that each of these two types of reciprocity is appropriate to a different type of society or social situation.