How far were China's prewar economic institutions the product of its particular history and traditions—that is, the product either of the nature of its premodern society or of its later status as a semicolony—and how far can they rather be seen as answers to problems common to the stage of economic development which the country had reached at that time?

Edward Said's Orientalism has received both praise and criticism. Among the criticisms leveled is the charge that Said's neglect of German scholarship misses an important part of Orientalism in the West. Robert Irwin, for example, notes that German Biblical scholarship was critically influential as a “motivating force for the study of Islam” and that the “German form-critical techniques” developed to study the Old Testament influence on the way “Western scholars interpret[ed] the Koran and the early Islamic community.” Bernard Lewis claims that Said's neglect of German scholarship calls into question his entire project and likens it to writing a history of European music without a discussion of the German contribution. See Robert Erwin, “Writing about Islam and the Arabs,” Ideology and Consciousness, 9 (1981–82), 108–9; Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 108. More generally, critics have noted that the presence of an influential Orientalist scholarship in Germany, as well as the absence of any significant Germany colonies in the Orient, calls into question Said's claim that there is a confluence between scholarship and political power in Orientalist discourse. Neither critics nor supporters, on the other hand, have given much attention to Said's claim that there is a similarity between Orientalism and anti-Semitism. Said states this in his introduction, where he notes that in “addition and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism, and as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch Orientalism resemble each other is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood” (1978:27–28). Elsewhere, Said has faulted critics of his work on Orientalism for seeing “in the critique of Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism . . . and launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism,” instead of giving attention to the similarity “between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism” (1985:9).

Notwithstanding the wide currency of the concept of charisma in contemporary social science, considerable confusion exists in regard to its employment. While some authors insist that the concept should be used in the Weberian sense, others advocate its emancipation from the ecclesiastical context in order to render it suitable for use in the modern secular context. I will argue that “charisma” is ultimately a product of social structure and hence its nature and content will undergo a transformation as the society itself changes.

The modern history of Asians in the New World is a long and complex one beginning with South Asian indentured laborers brought to the West Indies in the early decades of the nineteenth century and continuing into the present, when, in recent years, wholly apart from Southeast Asian refugees, Asians have amounted to about one in four of the legal migrants to the United States. Almost all of the literature about these immigrants and their descendants has been particularistic, focussing on one particular ethnic or national group residing within a limited geographical area, often as narrow as a particular city. This being the case, the articles in this journal by Stephen I. Thompson (1979) and Bernard Wong (1978) about the degree of relative assimilation of East Asians in Peru and the United States should be welcomed by all scholars interested in comparative ethnicity. Although the comments to follow are largely negative they should not be considered as dismissive of the value of the empirical research of either scholar; I have learned from each and hope to continue to do so.

At the turn of the century, when lynching, Jim Crow laws, and disfranchisement were at their worst, black fraternal organizations offered Afro-Americans a place to preserve their self-respect. Scholars have studied these organizations little and understood them less. One early study dismissed them as merely parodying white organizations, but hardly resembling them, while the blacks, it claimed, exaggerated both regalia and ritual. When Noel Gist published his Study of Fraternalism in the United States, Carter Woodson charged that Gist failed to understand the importance of fraternal orders to blacks and that, indeed, Gist barely mentioned the black orders. After a detailed analysis, W. E. B. DuBois found that even black and white orders that shared a name might not resemble one another. He found similarities only in Pythians, Odd Fellows, and Masons. He thought the other black societies were “Negro inventions” and “curious and instructive” organizations. “Invention,” “curious,” “exaggeration,” “parody,” “importance to blacks”—these are the key phrases. All attempt to describe an amorphous quality of black fraternal orders that makes them unique. Yet while failing to define that quality, its would-be describers avoid the issue.

Urban troubles were endemic in early modern Europe. Not only did cities undergo sieges, conquests, and epidemics, but the rapid spread of rural protoindustrial manufacturing threatened established markets and employment patterns. The acute problems of Antwerp, captured by Spanish troops in 1685, or of Como, whose textile industry collapsed in the early seventeenth century are not isolated examples of cities in trouble. Many more could be offered. Indeed, descriptions of cities in the seventeenth century, particularly those of the Spanish Empire, stress depopulation and decay. Contemporaries saw around them scenes of urban desolation. Sir Thomas Overbury, travelling in the Spanish Netherlands around 1610, wrote of the “ruinous” towns, while visitors to Ciudad Real in Spain around 1620 noted vacant, tumbledown houses, unemployment, and urban land gone to waste (Parker 1977:253; Phillips 1979:29). After several years in which Spanish Lombardy was devastated by wars, famine, and plague, the Milan City Council complained of “the destitution of all sorts of persons and the threat of impending ruin.” Moreover, throughout the state, values of houses and landed property had allegedly plummeted (Sella 1979:57,63).

In an influential essay, Arnaldo Momigliano has identified an extremely important but perhaps little remarked oddity of ancient Greek historical writing and political thought.

The museum has become disputed terrain in the closing years of the twentieth century. Not that there has been any unanimity of opinion about these institutions at any time in their history, but until relatively recently the disputes were often among insiders. These disputes were conducted within Western culture, within the professional world of specialists, and within a universe of agreed upon and accepted ideas about a viewing public and the objects they viewed. Karp and Lavine locate this debate and its dimensions succinctly: “whether to privilege context or object… aesthetics of objects or prepositional knowledge about them… [and] whether a curator's message… is more authentic than the provenance of the object itself” (1991:12)

The Quincentennial of Columbus's Discovery of the Americas has come and gone. Some people celebrated, others protested. The Discovery has been called either “The greatest event since the creation of the world, save the incarnation and death of Him who created it” (Francisco Lopez de Gomera writing in 1552), or the greatest disaster in world history. Columbus is either a saint (who was actually proposed for canonization), or he is a sinner responsible for genocide. Can one even say that Christopher Columbus discovered America when there were already millions of people living in these lands? Did he discover America when he thought he had found a new route to Asia? The debates are interminable and the issues have become so politicized that an informed and informative discussion has been all but impossible; one steps warily into the fray. Yet, despite the voluminous literature by and about Columbus, Americans outside the rarefied circle of Columbus scholars still know little about the man and his mission. In this paper I discuss some of the little known religious beliefs that underpinned the “Enterprise of the Indies,” for I think they have the potential to change fundamentally our assessment of Columbus and relocate some of the responsibility for the consequences of the encounter.

One of the recent attempts to formulate a general theory of nationalism has been Deutsch's approach to the question. This aims to show that a correlation exists between changes in the process of social communications and the rise of national consciousness. A considerable number of studies based on this approach to nationalism will have to be carried out before its contribution to the identification of the elusive “essence” of nationalism can be evaluated with any amount of fairness. In the meantime one tentative procedure which might be used to assess its usefulness is to try to fit this model to the evolution of social communications in a number of countries which the author has not included among his illustrations.

In this paper an attempt is made to study the marriage customs and family relationships of the titular peerage and the 500 or so leading county families who together formed the dominant political and social grouping of Tudor and Stuart England. Generalisations here made apply only to this restricted class and not necessarily to those below it. When it comes to be investigated, the behaviour of the lesser gentry, the yeomanry, the peasantry and the merchants may well show significant differences from the model set by their betters.

Linguistic conflict between French and English-speaking Canadians has been an enduring feature of Canadian society since the British conquest of New France (Quebec) in 1759. This conflict has taken a variety of forms and revolved around a number of issues in the past two hundred years, ranging from the question of religious and linguistic civil rights to economic inequality and economic dominance. The latest and most significant manifestation of English-French conflict has been the emergence in the mid-1960s of a viable movement for political independence for the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec.

The question of populism in Uganda was investigated by Professor D. A. Low in this journal in 1964.1 He argued that the concept of populism was appropriate to describe the political agitation by the independent small landholders and poor peasants against the breakdown of the traditional hierarchical structure of Buganda under the impact of colonial rule. The populists were particularly concerned to reduce their economic disabilities through control of the marketing system for cotton, but at the same time were concerned to articulate ‘the kingdom's corporate solidarity’. To that extent Buganda populism was socially conservative, though it may have seemed radical to the colonial rulers.

The study of festivals has only recently caught the attention of historians, who have traditionally shown themselves more concerned with the labours and afflictions of men than with their pleasures and diversions. If from this time onward, festivals become an object of historical enquiry, it will be perhaps because industrial society no longer has festivals—or at least that it has the festival only as pageant in which the passive community of onlookers has been substituted for the active community of celebrants—and because our interest in the festival increases to the extent that we lose it. However, we should also mention the historian's debt to the double stimuli of folklore and of ethnology. From folklorists and ethnologists historians have learned to concern themselves with the armature given to human experience by ritualization, even if anonymous, even if destitute of an explicit system of regulation or of a conscious cohesiveness.

The primary interest in this study is to make some contribution to the elaboration of a theoretical problem: What are the relations between certain forms of ideology and the social formations in which they are, or can be, realized? The consideration of ideology as a sociological category is of continual and growing concern (e.g., Moskvichov 1974; Bétaille 1978; Gellner 1978), despite the attempts of bourgeois social science to kill it off during the 1960s (cf. Lipset 1960; Bell 1960; Waxman 1968). But my present interest in it arises out of a particular historical question: Why did the Christian missions fail so signally in their efforts to evangelize and convert East African pastoralists, most conspicuously the various sections of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania and Kenya?

The Otto di Guardia was a powerful magistracy established in the late fourteenth century just after Florence's experiment with democratized government (1378). The new regime was much perturbed by fear of revolution and replication of the terrible events of the Ciompi uprising. Intelligent commentators such as Francesco Guicciardini were to argue a century and a half later that formation of the Otto had saved the Repub- lic from anarchy. Without the fear of this dread tribunal, seditious and factious Florentines would certainly have toppled the regime. Many modern interpreters of these events follow this grand generalization, but few have bothered to study the day-to-day activities of this court or in fact of any of its adjuncts.

Most theories of revolution seem to agree that certain preconditions must be met if a revolutionary situation is to arise. The peculiar contribution of Ernesto Che Guevara to understanding revolutions is that according to him such preconditions can be created [1: 4]. Few men in the world today would be better qualified than Guevara to sustain such theory with empirical evidence from his own participation in revolutions. After his experience in Guatemala, Cuba, the Congo and, perhaps, other parts of the world, Guevara was considered, by friends and enemies alike, as one of the world's top-ranking guerrilla fighters of the twentieth century. By the time he started a new daring experiment in Bolivia he was reckoned as one of the most articulate theorists in the field. The death of Guevara in the mountains of Bolivia on October 9,1967, brought commotion and mixed feelings to his enemies and admirers the world over. His enemies were exultant, first because the dreaded Guevara was dead, and second because his death was ‘clear evidence’ that his theories were wrong. His admirers were sad because he was dead, but were also elated because the puzzle of his disappearance had been unraveled and because his death at the hands of Bolivian rangers trained by a U.S. military mission, far from being ‘evidence’ that his theories were wrong, was ‘evidence’ that they were right.

Scholars are looking again at banking and mercantile families in India's early modern history, responding to the challenge issued by Claude Markovits in the epilogue of his 2008 volume, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs, to “return the merchant to South Asian history.” Some of the underlying assumptions and questions being asked are old and some are new. My own longstanding assumption, upon which this article relies, has been that bankers and merchants played multiple and important roles with respect to states in South Asia, and that their relations with non-kin officials and other political actors determined their success or failure and sometimes the success or failure of a state, most notably, the Mughal state. Questions are again being raised about “trust,” assumed to be a leading attribute of and asset to financial networks (especially in long-distance trade diasporas), and the notion so commonly put forward by scholars to explain the success of Hindu banking and mercantile communities. Recent work by Francesca Trivellato has found that membership in the Sephardic trade diaspora facilitated but did not guarantee trust or cooperation: the Sephardic merchants relied on non-Jewish as well as Jewish agents and networks of information, and evolving legal norms guided their business activities.

As the industrialization process in Western European countries took off in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they largely turned to Asia and Africa for raw materials and other resources, as well as for markets of their manufactures. Various entrepreneurial diasporas, including the Indians, Lebanese and Chinese, were at the forefront to exploit these burgeoning economic possibilities, particularly in gathering local mineral and agricultural commodities and marketing European goods in the Afro-Asian regions. The Chinese activities in Southeast Asia stood out: they not only presided over the commercial realm but also organized mining production and cash crop agriculture in ways largely autonomous of the colonial regimes and Western entrepreneurs. How can we explain the dominance of the Chinese migrants and sojourners in the Southeast Asian economy from the 1850s to the 1930s? This paper repudiates the existing literature, which largely credits their economic presence to conscious immigration policies of the colonial authorities, and instead highlights the effects of a confluence of developments in the early modern period (ca. 1450–1800), including the sidelining of South Asians, West Asians, and regional trading communities in favor of the Chinese. A particular focus is the roles played by symbolic capital and mechanisms of advanced credit and spiral marketing, and how these gave the Chinese a comparative advantage over other trading groups.

Contemporary debates on policing trace the rise of “law and order” populism and police militarization to colonial histories and imperial boomerang effects. In a time marked by the renewed imperative “to decolonize,” however, few studies examine what decolonizing policing did or could look like in practice. This article draws on oral history narratives of Jamaican police officers to recover their ideas about transforming the colonial Jamaica Constabulary Force in the 1970s. Born out of black power mobilizations and under a democratic socialist government (1972–1980), police decolonization was viewed as part of broader transformative effort to rid the country of colonial inheritances in economics, culture, and politics. Jamaican policemen, radicalized since the early twentieth century, then began revising their social mandate and ask who the police should serve and protect. Ultimately, due to internal contradictions and external pressures, the experiment failed, giving rise to police populism and increased violence against black men and women in the ghettos. The episode reveals how populism emerges out of a failure of emancipatory campaigns and how radical critique can turn into ideological justification. It also highlights the need to distinguish between diverse, contradictory, and overlapping demands to decolonize societies and institutions today.