When social ties are put to the test, proverbs affirm, those of consanguinity usually prevail: “Blood is thicker than water”; or as Arabs put it, “Blood is thicker than milk” (Lane 1893:1097). These enigmatic adages refer to former institutions of adoptive kinship in western Eurasia, contrasting the blood of natal kinship with the water of baptism or “spiritual kinship” in Christendom, and with infant fosterage or “milk kinship” in Islam. Other sayings, cited as epigraphs above, argue that the nurture of such adoptive kinship may match or supersede natal kinship, just as baptismal sponsorship was supposed to create a spiritual cognation superior to that of mere flesh and blood (Gudeman 1972; Guerreau-Jalabert 1995).

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 year 1492 in Spanish history is an unforgettable date. Within the span of a few months, Spain ended a struggle for political unity on the peninsula lasting centuries and embarked upon a colonial enterprise that was to encircle the globe. But 1492 seduces the imagination, inclining one to read history's momentous consequences into the minds of the protagonists at the time. The historian is tempted to make the actors of 1492 larger than life, multiplying the importance of their actions by the eventual consequences, but this would hinder an understanding of 1492 from the perspective of the people who experienced it.

In recent years paternalism has become one of the most discussed concepts in social history. While historians of women invoke paternalism and patriarchy to help explain relations of male domination, Marxist historians have found paternalism useful in expanding their analyses of class consciousness. Eugene Genovese organized his interpretation of slavery in the American south around paternalism. For E. P. Thompson, the breakdown of the ideology and practice of rural paternalism underlay the development of “class struggle without class” in eighteenth-century England. Despite Genovese's warning that paternalism is an inappropriate concept for understanding industrial society, several recent studies have identified paternalism as an important factor in the history of industrial labor during the nineteenth century. Daniel Walkowitz and Tamara Haraven have analyzed paternalism in the textile industries of upstate New York and southern New Hampshire. Lawrence Schofer and David Crew have studied paternalism in nineteenth-century German heavy industry, and Patrick Joyce has recently argued for its centrality in the restructuring of class relations in the late Victorian textile industry.

This paper investigates the role of urban subalterns both as participatory agents in the Arab revolutions and as mediating forces against revolutionary action. It argues that during revolutionary periods the positioning of subalterns as a political force should be understood in relation to their socio-spatial location in the urban political configuration. Looking at the protest movements in Cairo and Damascus, the paper examines the differentiated locations of subaltern actors in each to demonstrate how their positioning in relation to state and government has shaped their engagement in the revolutions. In Cairo, the mobilization of subaltern forces was anchored in spatialized forms of everyday interaction between popular forces and agents of government. These interactions were formative of urban subjectivities that entered into the making of “the people” as the subject of the Revolution. In Damascus, the configuration of the urban space and the Syrian regime's modes of control made it difficult for subaltern forces to mobilize on the same scale as in Cairo or to form a unified opposition. The regime instrumentalized socio-spatial fragmentation among subalterns, in effect turning some segments, as buffers for the regime, against others. In analytical terms, the paper underscores the common conceptual ground between the categories of “urban popular forces” and “urban subalterns.” This ground covers their socio-spatial positionality, their bases of action, and the factors shaping their political subjectivities.

There are several analytical strands through which historians and demographers understand the evolution of twentieth-century population politics and expertise. One is the history of the declining birthrate, nationalism, pro-natalism, and modern degeneration anxieties, including histories of eugenics. A second strand is the story of global overpopulation, its mobilization as a mid-twentieth-century issue in Cold War politics, the dominance of the idea of demographic transitions and political economy, and subsequent links between aid, development, family planning, and various international agencies. A third is the history of reproductive and bodily rights, feminism, and birth control, which has been analyzed with respect to the history of technology, the history of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the history of nationalism, and to some extent the history of internationalism. The political economy aspects of the population question tend chronologically to bookend the feminist narrative, with Malthus at the late eighteenth-century end and Cold War political economy of third world development at the twentieth-century end. A fourth strand is a burgeoning intellectual history of demography, social science, and economic theory.

Translation has often been characterized as a ‘central act' of European colonialism and imperialism. For example, it has been argued that translation had been utilized to make available legal-cultural information for the administration and rule of the non-West, but perhaps more importantly, translation has been identified as important for the resources it provided in the construction of representations of the colonized as Europe's ‘civilizational other.' In the context of British imperialism in South Asia, Bernard Cohn has persuasively demonstrated the first point, namely, that the codification of South Asian languages in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served to convert ‘indigenous' forms of textualized knowledge into ‘instruments of colonial rule.' Translational technology, in the form of language grammars and dictionaries, Cohn argues, enabled information gathering and the effective communication of commands, as well as the (at least partial) displacement of European dependence upon interlocutors of perceived dubious reliability. Most recent discussions of translation in this context, however, have focused rather more upon the act of translation as a strategic means for representing ‘otherness' to primarily domestic British reading audiences. In this case, the act of linguistic translation is more clearly being enumerated as a practice of cultural translation. English translations of the ‘ancient' Sanskrit texts of India, for example, have been analyzed for the rhetorical work that the text performs in certain contexts. On the one hand, European-produced translations of these texts might serve to reinforce the dominance of a European aesthetic sensibility through a process of ‘naturalization,' in which the culturally-specific is ‘sanitized,' subordinated to a European norm, thereby inherently limiting the ‘artistic achievement' of the colonized. The orientalist William Jones' erasure of the motif of sweat as an indication of sexual interest and arousal in his translation of Kālidāsa's fourth- or fifth-century Sanskrit play Śakuntala is a case in point. On the other hand, literary translations from Sanskrit might also foreground the ‘otherness' of Indian texts and cultural norms through a strategy of ‘foreignization'; that is, by registering for the European reader differences in language and cultural content. For example, European translations from Sanskrit might include anthropological notations which explain the cultural relevance of the text, or might instead adopt an overly literal rendering of prose, thereby foregrounding differences in syntax, vocabulary, symbol, or motif. Both such rhetorical devices, it can be argued, leave the reader tripping over the text, giving him pause to consider the very strangeness of its appearance and contents.

From a cultural and historical-sociological perspective, the Danish nationstate of today represents a rare situation of virtual identity between state, nation, and society, which is a more recent phenomenon than normally assumed in Denmark and abroad. Though one of the oldest European monarchies, whose flag came ‘tumbling down from heaven in 1219’—ironically enough an event that happened in present-day Estonia—Denmark's present national identity is of recent vintage. Until 1814 the word, Denmark, denominated a typical European, plurinational or multinational, absolutist state, second only to such powers as France, Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and perhaps Prussia. The state had succeeded in reforming itself in a revolution from above in the late eighteenth century and ended as one of the few really “enlightened absolutisms” of the day (Horstbøll and østergård 1990; østergård 1990). It consisted of four main parts and several subsidiaries in the North Atlantic Ocean, plus some colonies in Western Africa, India, and the West Indies. The main parts were the kingdoms of Denmark proper and Norway, plus the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. How this particular state came about need not bother us here.

In his magisterial studies on the Islamic educational system, George Makdisi (1961, 1981, 1990) traces three stages in the development of the madrasa (Islamic school) into colleges for the study of the Koran, the Traditions of the Prophet, and jurisprudence. These three stages, first suggested by Pedersen (1986), are the following: first, the development of teaching circles (halgas) for various subjects in mosques from the earliest times to the tenth century; second, the emergence of the “mosque-inn colleges” toward the end of the tenth century; and, finally, third, the development of the “madrasa colleges of law,” in which the functions of the mosque and the inn (or hostel, khān) were combined in an institution based on a single deed of endowment (Pedersen 1986: 1123). Makdisi includes the official establishment of the madrasas by the great Seljuq vizier, Nizam al-Murk, in the second half of the eleventh century in this stage. In the twelfth century, the college as developed in the Islamic world was, according to Makdisi, first imported into Europe by the Knights Templar of the Levant who founded the Inns of Court in London. The Inns of Court were attached to churches, as khāns had been attached to mosques. Somewhat later, one John of London who must have seen madrasas in or on the way to Jerusalem, endowed the College des Dix-Huit in Paris for 18 poor students in 1180. In the mid-thirteenth century, the first 3 colleges of Oxford were founded as charitable trusts. (Makdisi 1981:224–30; 1990:311–7). Whatever the merits of this argument for the world-historical importance of the madrasa as the prototype of the European university, the significance of its development in medieval Islam cannot be doubted. The subject is of particular theoretical interest because of the intricate connection between the evolution of the institutions of higher learning and the character of law and government. This connection can illuminate the dynamics of social agency in pre-modern Islamic society.

The international campaign to control human fertility has inspired a vast inter-disciplinary literature, but only in recent years has it become a subject for historical study and debate. New archives have opened, especially among the largest donors during its early, heroic phase. And scientists and activists are increasingly willing to be reflexive about their lives' work. Most importantly, with rates of fertility declining in every region of the world, it is now possible to begin to see the end of the story. As the period of unprecedented growth in world population draws to a close, international efforts directed at limiting that growth—as opposed to safeguarding reproductive rights and health—will inexorably pass from the domain of policy to history.This distinction suggests the nature and limits of the term “population control,” which is itself fast becoming a historical artifact. As will be discussed anon, while it now denotes a shrinking subset of the “family planning” agenda, population control can be seen as encompassing the once wide-ranging efforts to shape the quality as well as the quantity of population. On this point see also Dennis Hodgson and Susan Cotts Watkins, “Feminists and Neo-Malthusians: Past and Present Alliances,” Population and Development Review 23 (1997):471. The latest U.N. projections are presented in “World Population Prospects: The 2000 Revision,” http://www.un.org/esa/population/wpp2000.html.

The global movement of Indigenous peoples has attracted the attention of a number of scholars, notably lawyers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists (Muehlebach 2003; Anaya 1996; Battiste 2000; Churchill 2003; Dei, Hall, and Rosenberg 2000; Independent Commission 1987; Jull 1999; Kingsbury 1998; Minde 1996; Passy 1999; Pritchard 1998; Radcliffe and Laurie 2001; Feldman 2002; Smith 1999; Ward and Smith 2000; Wilmer 1993). With few exceptions such as Niezen (2000; 2003) and Radha Jappan (1992), this growing interest has not extended to the origins and development of this movement. There are obvious reasons for this: as in other areas of the discipline, historians have seen indigenous movements as matters of national history. However, the growth of “world history” (Hopkins 2002a; Bayly 2004: 432–50) offers a mode of analysis in which varied and related indigenous histories can be considered fruitfully. Moreover, the success of indigenous actors in creating new institutional spaces and a discourse of “indigenous rights” compels historical research into the emergence of the global movement, not least in understanding how very different and dispersed communities have begun to self-identify with the category of indigenous peoples. This is especially so as the movement works toward the declaration of positive international law that can recognize and protect the diversity of first peoples under precisely that banner.

During the latter part of the twentieth century, there was a country called Yugoslavia. Built on the ruins of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the post-World War II Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia was an ethnically diverse state comprised of six republics, which, by the 1960s, was committed to a foreign policy of non-alignment and to the domestic programs of worker self–management and “brotherhood and unity” among its peoples (see, e.g., Banac 1984; P. Ramet 1985; Shoup 1968; Zimmerman 1987). Like most other European states, the decennial census became a defining feature of Yugoslavia's sovereignty and modernity (Kertzer and Arel 2002: 7).

The increasing preoccupation of the scholarly community in recent years with globalization appears to have left its impact on postmodern geographers and historians of cartography as well, several of whom have turned their attention recently to the history and politics of the image that is at the center of this new problematic, namely, the terrestrial globe. As Denis Cosgrove notes in his provocative analysis of cartographic representations of Earth in the Western imagination, “Whether pictured as a networked sphere of accelerating circulation or as an abused and overexploited body, it is from images of the spherical earth that ideas of globalization draw their expressive and political force” (2001: ix). Its very ubiquity as a symbol of the times in which we live underscores the preoccupation with the image of the globe in the late modern imagination. However, as Jerry Brotton observes, its pervasiveness may also point to an increasing redundancy of its appearance in our times, and the image of the globe has suffered what might be called “a waning of affect” (1999: 73). This argument leads him to a study of the early modern period in Europe when the terrestrial globe first emerged in his assessment as “a socially affective object” (ibid.: 72). In his Trading Territories (1997), Brotton considers how the terrestrial globe came to not just reflect an increasingly “global” world but also to constitute it over the course of the sixteenth century. Its power lay “in the ideological representation of the world it purported to describe. Its lack of cognitive specificity was not its weakness but ultimately its greatest strength, because the very perceptions of distance and space upon which the terrestrial globe rested stressed speculation and conjecture over the extent and possession of distant territories” (1999: 87–88). From the early years of the sixteenth century, even as the Copernican revolution was slowly undoing medieval Christian cosmological conceptions of the universe, terrestrial globes became increasingly crucial to the exercise of state power in Europe, as well as to the surging search for new markets and tradable goods. As importantly, as prestige objects, globes and maps became part of a new gift economy of circulation and exchange, and were sought after like “the spices, pepper, silk and precious metals to which [they] appeared to give directional access” (Brotton 1997: 25; see also Jardine 1996: 295–309, 425–36). In the process, they helped fashion new bourgeois modalities of the self, mostly but not exclusively male. Not surprisingly, as Brotton notes, “It is upon the figure of the globe, as both a visual image and a material object, that many of the social and cultural hopes and anxieties of the period came to be focused” (1997: 21).

Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East Asian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Philippines under the Spanish and United States' regimes, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese territory of Taiwan. There is substantial evidence that, in each place, decolonization was yoked to scientific progress—not only in a practical sense, but symbolically too. The first generation to receive training in biological science and to become socialized as professionals used this education to imagine itself as eminently modern, progressive, and cosmopolitan. Their training gave them special authority in deploying organic metaphors of society and state, and made them deft in finding allegories of the human body and the body politic. These scientists and physicians saw themselves as representing universal laws, advancing natural knowledge, and engaging as equals with colleagues in Europe, Japan, and North America. Science gave them a new platform for communication. In the British Empire, for example in India and Malaya, medical science also proved influential, though it seems lawyers cognizant of precedent and tradition more often dominated decolonization movements. This essay will examine how scientific training shaped anti-colonialism and nationalism in the Philippines and the East Indies, concluding with a brief comparison of the situation in Taiwan.

The particular rebellion in the Congo with which we are concerned in this article is the one that began in the Kwilu Province in January 1964 and, as such, was the first in a chain of rebellions that have erupted in the Congo in the course of the past year.

For nearly forty years scholars have wrestled with the seventeenth-century “general crisis.” Certain facts are not in dispute. The first half of the seven- teenth century saw a widespread slowing and eventual halt to the steady increases in population and prices that had begun around 1500. In addition, rebellions and revolutions shook regimes from England to China. What is contested is the root cause, the connections, and the significance of these events.

The relationships among schooling, language, and knowledge—especially through the systematic comparison of the organization, form, function, and acquisition of institutionalized knowledge—in literate and nonliterate societies has hardly been examined. This essay attempts such an analysis, focusing on knowledge acquired through the use of language, because language is the major medium for imparting knowledge in schools and for social reproduction in the larger society, because knowledge acquired through the use of language is readily identifiable and testable, and because language is one of the major terms of the present analysis. The proposed elastic concept of schooling views schooling as a cover term for institutionalized learning in any society, literate or nonliterate. It thus questions the analytical adequacy of the received, Euro-American, concept of schooling as a unitary phenomenon based on the dual assumption that the school specializes in the transmission of literate knowledge and that literacy education is coterminous with formal education.

This paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonial uses of the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

As anthropologists turn increasingly to the study of complex societies, they are led to reflect on the role that social science plays in national ideologies and the ways in which the current state and development of social science reflect other cultural states and processes. Indeed, such reflections can usefully be turned on our own society. One sees that it is much more appropriate to discard old notions of the distinction between ‘science’ and ‘folklore’ and to regard the social science of a particular society, however sophisticated and presumably objective, as an important part of its subjective ideology about itself and the world and thus a part of its own folk theory about the relations of man to society and of men to men. This paper is a sketch of some of the interrelationships between Yugoslav social science and other aspects of Yugoslav culture, with primary emphasis on ethnology.

It is clear from the title that this paper has an historiographical emphasis, one which might seem naive to the professional historian, but one which is not at all so naive to the historian of science or medicine. For me, these disciplines should speak to the present; my aim is to direct our attention to the failure of the history of medicine in this respect, and to suggest possible linkages with the human sciences, whose energies are so directed. I do not mean that its subject matter must be drawn from contemporary events—sometimes the very foreignness of the past allows an encapsulation of a situation which gives a clearer view both of the constraints operative within it, and of the unities underlying apparent diversity. This clarity can then encourage a more perceptive reflexion back to the present.