POSTCOLONIAL REMEDIATION How to remedy the postcolonial problems of former colonies depends greatly on how we assess the legacy of colonialism.

My starting point is the generation that inherited Africa's colonial legacy. Our generation followed on the heels of nationalists. We went to school in the colonial period and to university after independence. We were Africa's first generation of postcolonial intellectuals. Our political consciousness was shaped by a central assumption: we were convinced that the impact of colonialism on our societies was mainly economic. In the decade that followed African political independence, militant nationalist intellectuals focused on the expropriation of the native as the great crime of colonialism. Walter Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Dar-es-Salaam: TPH, 1971). But no one wrote of how Europe ruled Africa.

In Love in Times of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1985) creates a powerful image of Latin American modernity in the character of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Urbino is called back from France, where he has studied medicine and embraced European modernity, in order to save the coastal Colombian city in which he was born from that quintessence of the premodern world of ignorance, filth, and backwardness—cholera. García Márquez captures exquisitely the terror that is conjured up by the disease—thousands of bodies wracked by rivers of diarrhea and vomit, cramps, sunken eyes, blue lips, and twisted limbs, many of them dying rapidly. But Urbino is armed with that quintessence of modernity—hygiene. The terror inspired by the epidemic enables Urbino to transform both the urban landscape and bodily practices in keeping with the dictates of Continental biopower, neatly mediated by his own patrician class standing.

During the decade before 1914, the central coordinates of factory culture and employer politics in the heavy industrial Saar entered into a process of transformation. In a marked departure from the familial metaphors and representations long associated with the paternalist factory regime in this region of coal mining and iron and steel production in southwest Germany, many Saar industrialists began to reimagine work identities and the social relations of factory production in distinctively corporatist terms. In their industry newspaper, journal publications, and internal reports after the turn of the century, they increasingly referred to a new “social aristocracy” of labor in the “productive economy” and a harmonious “community of work” in the large-scale business enterprise. They also began to link these definitions of work and occupational identity to a larger social imaginary that articulated a corporatist vision of a world composed of “occupational estates” (Berufsstände). In this new ideological idiom, Saar employers began to call for the political organization of a wider “Occupational Estate of Industry and Trade” (Gewerbe- und Handelsstand) and the formation of a corporative state (Ständestaat). Accordingly, the language of Saar employers during the prewar years became corporatist in a dual sense: it articulated a worldview in a vocabulary that invoked forms of social address, natural hierarchy, and community that seem reminiscent of the old regime corporate order; and it formed the basis of programmatic political aims calling for the direct representation of economic interests in the realm of party politics and the state.

In these remarks Durkheim presages both Mauss's influential discussion of total facts (Mauss 1966) and Bloch's significant analysis of the way human supplicants produce the blessing they subsequently receive from Merina royalty in central Madagascar (Bloch 1989). Not unconnected are the ideas of two of the most influential thinkers on economy. That religion is a human construction whose objects come to appear as autonomous living beings to those who worship them provided a touchstone for Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism (1977). And Polanyi's formulation of the embedded economy (1968) resonates with Durkheimian and Maussian conceptions of the social whole.

On the 30th of December 1919, Colonel Amery, the British Acting Secretary of State for the Colonies, approved the establishment of the East African Currency Board (EACB).KNA AA/23/6, Summary of Proceedings of the East African Currency Board, 3rd May 1921. Following the general model established by the West African Currency Board, it was designed merely to be “from a broad point of view . . . a money changing and accounting device . . . engag[ed] only in currency administration;”W. T. Newlyn and D. C. Rowan, Money and Banking in British Colonial Africa, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 51. hardly a challenging or controversial function. Yet the EACB, attempting to replace the Indian rupee as the currency in use in the colonial East African territories, originated in crisis and went on to preside over considerable chaos in markedly inauspicious circumstances.R. M. Maxon, “The Kenya Currency Crisis, 1919–1921 and the Imperial Dilemma,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17 (1989):323–48.

Categorization plays an integral part in how we see and interpret the world. This is especially true when we attempt to comprehend the complexities of human society, where the heterogeneity of human activity across time and space demands that some criterion (class, gender, age, profession, etc.) be used to reduce the number of variables examined. From the mid-nineteenth century—as statistics evolved from the simple “political arithmetic” of tax collectors and army recruiters into a potential science of human behavior—categorizing the population became a contentious issue that reflected the social and political agendas of data collectors.Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, 1986); Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1986); Stuart Woolf, “Statistics and the Modern State,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 3 (July 1989): 588–604; Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990); William Alonso and Paul Starr, eds., The Politics of Numbers (New York, 1987); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, 1991), ch. 10, “Census, Map, Museum”; idem, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London, 1998), 29–45. At the same time, when data refused to be molded to researchers' assumptions, the task of putting people and their activities into analytical categories challenged the validity of the categories themselves. In this way, statistical representations and categories became socially constructed knowledge.

This essay is about the caste-wise enumeration of households taken in the major kasbah towns of the western Rajasthani kingdom of Marwar between 1658 and 1664 under the direction of the kingdom's “home minister,” Munhata Nainsi, for inclusion in his mammoth survey of kingdom entitled Marvar ra Parganam ri Vigat (An Account of the Districts of Marwar). This essay also explores how Nainsi's early enumeration of caste data, and other precolonial human inventories that followed upon it, helped shape the first known colonial census of western Rajasthan, undertaken by Alexander Boileau in 1835 in Marwar and the adjacent kingdoms of Bahawalpur, Bikaner, and Jaisalmer. One goal will be to redirect scholarly attention to some native agenda that may have been institutionalized and advanced by this nominal way of ‘knowing the country' both during the late precolonial and early colonial eras. Without positing an easy continuity from the precolonial to the colonial in terms of forms of knowledge and attendant institutions, this essay will suggest that colonial discourses often built upon indigenous ones in ways that inflected local politics about which the British initially were only dimly aware and indirectly concerned, but which later had a major impact on the constitution of colonial rule.

In 1993, John Foran argued that theorizing about social revolution was entering into a “fourth wave.” What distinguished the new wave from its predecessors, he said, was its emphasis on culture and contingency, and its critical stance towards class-based and structuralist accounts. The books reviewed in this essay suggest that a similar trend may now be underway in work on early modern state formation. Until quite recently, research in this area was completely dominated by neo-Marxist and neo-Hintzian scholars, who emphasized the impact of economic and/or geopolitical factors on the structure of early modern states and regimes and saw state power in purely fiscal and military terms, i.e., as a function of taxes and soldiers (Anderson 1974; Wallerstein 1974; Tilly 1975; Brewer 1989; Tilly 1990; Downing 1993; Bonney 1995; Ertman 1997; Barbera 1998; Bonney 1999; Brewer and Hellmuth 1999). Over the last decade, however, a growing number of sociologists and historians have begun to criticize these theories as too narrow and one-sided (Gorski 1993; Adams 1994; Ikegami 1995; Wilson 1995; Mukerji 1997; harbingers of this shift included Vann 1984 and Corrigan and Sayer 1985). Drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including Foucauldianism, gender theory and cultural sociology, they have argued that there is more to state power than coercion and extraction, and more to state formation than economics and geopolitics. The books reviewed here continue the revisionist trend towards more nuanced understandings of state power and less deterministic accounts of state formation. They suggest that a third wave of theorizing has begun.

Thomas Klubock's case study of labor struggles, gender politics, and the making of community in Chile's El Teniente copper mines makes an important contribution to labor history, Latin American history, and gender studies. Drawing on rich archival data and oral histories, Klubock examines the interplay of North American capitalism, Chilean state formation, and the construction of gender ideologies and relations in the creation of a militant working-class community of mining men and women in El Teniente.

This study of Dravidian ethnic mobilization in twentieth-century south India is a recent contribution to current theoretical debates on ethno-nationalism and mass politics. Eschewing a conventional state-centered approach to ethnic politics, it examines how political parties and societies interact to shape and direct ethnic identities.