The rise of Hamburg as a global marketplace and financial centre in the seventeenth century was a significant sign of the bourgeoning integration of European markets. In the early seventeenth century, the urban staple function in northwest Europe was largely concentrated in Amsterdam, while in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries London and Hamburg rose to preeminence. Hamburg served as a hub for international trade, connecting markets in England, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean. Goods such as raisins, sugar, tobacco, salt, iron, and leather changed hands, with the transactions reflecting the widespread mercantile network in which Hamburg took part. Furthermore, the commercial development of Hamburg and the rise of the Prussian state were important steps in creating a well-ordered and integrated urban network in Germany long before political unification.

The Nordic countries differ from other Western societies in their long histories of premarital sexual permissiveness. Yet, in spite of this general permissiveness, there are enormous variations in the frequency of illegitimacy and in the tolerance of it, both among the five Nordic countries and within each of them. Iceland is an exception; here the rate of illegitimacy is high throughout the country, and so is tolerance of it. Sweden appears to be moving in this direction, but the historical situation is more complex.

The persistent vitality of groups that are neither traditional nor modern nor transitional poses one of the most stubborn conceptual and practical problems of political development. An examination of the political-religious sects of South Vietnam from the perspective of the paradox of non-modern and untraditional institutionalization questions the common hypothesis of unilinear development. It is facile to assume that such groups as tribes, castes, or millenarian movements will conveniently wither away under the onslaught of modernity or to condemn them as causes of the lack of development in the new states. Far from being aberrant vestiges of a past that is being overcome, the sects are but particular manifestations of historic and contemporary factionalism. What South Vietnam lacks is not a vigorous development of sub-national groups but a central government with responsive and directive capacity. Without such a center the concept of a system becomes meaningless and the sects have little reason for seeking security in interaction rather than incapsulation.

In January 2011, people around the world turned their attention to Cairo's Tahrir Square. The news network al-Jazeera quickly became a window onto the square and surrounding streets, and news reporters became eyewitnesses to historical events. Aware of the media spectacle unfolding around them, Egyptian protesters over the following weeks held up signs in Arabic and English and, maybe unknowingly, staged highly photogenic scenes, for instance when Christians formed a human chain to guard Muslims during their prayers, and vice versa. During the first few days of the uprising, the regime shut down cell phone and Internet networks to prevent activists from communicating, but it could not stop their taking pictures and filming with cell phones and cameras. Every moment was carefully recorded, and today multiple initiatives are collecting films, photos, and audio recordings to preserve them in digital archives. In July 2011, activists set up an open-air cinema at Tahrir Square to screen and discuss footage of the protests. Subsequently video materials became crucial pieces of evidence in the courtroom where the former President Mubarak and ex-Interior Minister Adly were being tried. The Egyptian revolution was a highly visible and “mediatized” event. Its history can and has been told in images.

Almost everyone who has investigated the subject agrees that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries a great social transformation occurred, primarily in England and France, but to a lesser extent in other European countries and America as well. In sociopolitical terms this change is generally characterized as the rise of liberalism and is linked with the English, French and American Revolutions. The socioeconomic factors are summarized under the general heading of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. Finally, there are several cultural dimensions to these changes, most notably the Protestant Reformation, but also the great advances in science, the declining status of the patriarchal family, new trends in philosophy, etc. It is generally felt that these dramatic events, which have shaped the course of Western civilization for four centuries, are, in some way, linked together.

Amid its human and material tolls, the Vietnam War has given rise to a curious enterprise—the complex process of recovering and repatriating the remains of U.S. service members Missing In Action (MIA) and presumed dead. In this trade, the bones that “count” are American and the aims underwriting the forensic efforts to return them are rooted in an ideology of national belonging.The resultant exchange of both knowledge and physical remains has developed through two historically intertwined ventures: state-sponsored casualty resolution efforts; and the much smaller, informal trafficking of skeletal remains, identification media, and information about American MIAs. This article examines how these sought-after bones tack between roles as objects of recovery, sale, or barter, scientific study, ritual burial, and public commemoration. Through their mutable worth, MIA remains illustrate the dynamic symbolism of war dead that evokes differing sensibilities about familiar or foreign soil, about care and belonging. Like the reliquiae of medieval Christianity, remains of missing service members, even in the most fragmentary form, are replete with the suggestion of power. Their pursuit depends on reciprocity. Indeed, more than just powerful symbols, these bones manifest and confer power itself, as caring for war dead demonstrates authority, and such authority falls to those who control access to the desired object, whether through formal or informal channels. Furthermore, power requires authentication, and the remains of missing American war dead become, in this system of circulation and exchange, a means to demonstrate knowledge, perform certainty, or exploit ambiguity.

The scholarly interest in emerging nations in the post-World War II period had its anthropological and sociological focus on the development of cities in these areas. Nationalism seems to be connected with industrialization and with urbanization. In West Africa much of the attention spent on study of developing cities has concentrated on the importance in such situations of the voluntary organization. It seems quite clear now that voluntary organizations are one of the most often used and most effective techniques for softening the shock of transplantation from the certainties of tribal life into the uncertainties of city life. The formation of voluntary organizations in cities is not restricted to Africa, however. In Central and South America, in Southeast Asia, and in India the voluntary organization has grown and developed and been studied. Most attempts to compare voluntary organizations in these places seem to have assumed that they were a natural or inevitable result of a process called “urbanization”. It does not seem to me to be necessary to compare these social phenomena in the context of such a process. We should compare voluntary organizations in different times and places and under different circumstances in order to enhance our understanding of more general social and cultural processes. This paper attempts two things: the delineation of the history of the formation of voluntary organization of one immigrant group in one West African city; and a comparison between the voluntary organizations of this group and of some other groups. It is hoped that the former will contribute to the body of knowledge we have about voluntary organizations, and that the latter will suggest hypotheses about social and cultural processes in general. It is not sufficient to describe the voluntary organizations of the Ibo in Calabar. It is necessary to trace the history of the town itself; to compare the reaction of the Ibo to the urban environment with that of the Efik, the indigenous inhabitants of the town; and to show in what ways the culture of the Ibo and the Efik predispose them to react in the ways they do.

In turning from the monasticism of the East the historian is struck by the comparative complexity of the institutions of Western monasticism. Christian monasticism has taken many forms. At some periods and places it performed nearly all the organized work of the church, at other times it would appear as a very specialized vocation in isolation from society. In this sense, the monastery, as the church, has borrowed from and adapted to its needs a wide range of institutions at different stages of development in the history of the West. While the description of this structural complexity is a fascinating though immense problem in the sociology of religion into which we cannot enter here, there was a ‘monastic period’ in the history of western Christendom that warrants comparison with monasticism in the East. From the time of the breakup of the Roman Empire to the rise of the nation-state monastic institutions maintained a continuity unique in the history of western Christianity. Although only rarely the sole ecclesiastical institution, the monastery was in most regions of western Europe for a long time the dominant form of ecclesiastical organization. Accordingly, we can expect to find during this period something of a common monastic reaction to problems of economic organization.

In a manner somewhat unusual in anthropological discourse, most writers on the Maa-speaking peoples of Tanzania and Kenya include an early section or chapter on what is often called “Maasai traditional history.” For example, in his pioneering work, “An Administrative Survey of the Masai Social System,” Henry Fosbrooke (1948) devotes a leading and major section to Maasai history and, in a later publication, he deals explicitly with what he calls a “tribal chronology” of the pastoral Maasai (Fosbrooke 1956a). Similarly, Thomas Beidelman, in an equally pioneering article, pays considerable attention to the historical connections of the Ilparakuyo (Baraguyu) section of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania (1960). It is among the Ilparakuyo that I have carried out most of my work in Maasai studies, and they are the primary focus of the present discussion (Rigby 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981).

This article deals with an important chapter in the economic history of Mexico. Throughout its history Puebla was an industrial center. Well into the 19th century it was the prime center of the country's chief manufacture — textiles. The city became the commercial and industrial capital of New Spain within a few years of its foundation. I shall concentrate on the ways in which the several branches of the textile industry were organized, comparing their development with that of the textile industries of medieval and early industrial Europe.

English cheeses—Cheddar, Gloucester single or double, Cheshire, Stilton, and others—are familiar throughout the Anglo-American world, whether consumed after dinner in English homes or as key ingredients of American tex-mex or vegetarian cuisine. These famous cheeses originated long ago but in most cases reached a zenith in quantity and in reputation during the last century. Little is known about the history of English cheese dairying, despite its fame and its importance to agriculture past and present. Its economic background has received only slight attention, and its social history is almost entirely unexplored; yet clearly the social structure of English cheese dairying has historically exerted a major influence on the industry, because it traditionally depended upon a distinctive sexual division of labor. The history of women's work in English cheese dairying has implications for a broader historiographical question: When and why did women gradually disappear from many kinds of agricultural work in Western societies?

Historians have long debated the importance of religion as a determining factor in relations between Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages. On the one hand, each side consigned adherents of the enemy's religion to eternal damnation. Religious animosity provided the casus belli of crusade and jihad; Christian and Muslim met each other on the field of battle with great frequency. On the other hand, Christian-Muslim relations also included peaceful commerce, institutional borrowing, and even cultural exchange. Christians and Muslims spent more time fighting their coreligionists than making war on each other. Churches continued to exist in the lands of Islam, and mosques survived under Christian rule as well. Such evidence has led some historians to minimize the degree to which religious intolerance influenced Christian-Muslim contacts during the Middle Ages.

In October 1898, the Italian vice-consul in Alexandria charged a group of Italians with participating in an anarchist plot to attack German Emperor Wilhelm II during his planned tour through Egypt and Palestine. This collective arrest produced unexpected outcomes, left a trail of multi-lingual documents, and illuminated specific forms of late nineteenth-century Mediterranean migration. Anarchists were among those who frequently crossed borders and they were well aware of and connected to what was happening elsewhere: they sent letters, circulated manifestos, raised and transported money, and helped fugitive comrades. They maintained nodes of subversion and moved along circuits of solidarity. Similarly, diplomats of Europe, Cairo, Istanbul, and local consular officials operated across borders and cooperated to hunt anarchists down. By following people who were on the move on boats, in post offices, and in taverns, I make a methodological and historiographical argument. First, I examine the Mediterranean as a space of flows and show how the Maghreb/Mashreq divide in Middle Eastern history has concealed webs and connections. Because anarchists and authorities acted on multiple fronts simultaneously, so must scholarship of this part of the world take account of several histories at once. Second, I look beyond the micro-macro binary to emphasize the interconnections and mutual implications of the micro, the macro, and everything in between. I highlight competing, intersecting, and even contradictory trajectories of some of these anarchist migrants’ belonging. As the affair of the bombs unfolded, all of these contradictions and scales of analysis became visible at once.

In the full-text databases of Latin sources from Europe from the period between 400 and 1500, the Latin word for violence crops up around two thousand times, about as often as “justice” (2,400) though not as often as other interesting words like “envy” (6,000) or “vengeance” (3,800). The frequency of use of the word, adjusted for the vagaries of survival, reveals an interesting trend. From the tenth to the eleventh centuries, an age of predatory castellans and violent territorial expansion, the frequency nearly doubles in the extant literature, and remains high for several centuries to come. The word often appears in texts alongside nauseating tales of violence, of hands lopped off and eyes plucked out and intestines dragged from their hidden recesses. There is the story told by Guibert of Nogent about the predatory castellan Thomas de Marle, who hung his captives by their testicles until the weight of their own bodies tore them off. These were exempla. They painted verbal pictures of the behavior of those who were surely doomed to hell. In the hands of clerical authors like Guibert, they served as a goad to kings and princes who, in their indolence, might allow this stuff to go unavenged.

The study of overseas Chinese has continued for some time as a series of somewhat unrelated monographs with little comparative analysis. One of the few important attempts at sociological generalization about Chinese communities in Southeast Asia was made by Maurice Freedman in an article entitled ‘Immigrants and Associations’, which appeared in this journal in 1960. In this article, Freedman suggested that ‘the associations which in a small-scale and relatively underdeveloped settlement express social, economic and political links in an undifferentiated form, tend, as the scale and complexity of the society increase, to separate into a network of associations which are comparatively specialized in their functions and the kinds of solidarity they express’ (Freedman, 1960: 47 f.). He proposed a continuum of types of overseas Chinese urban communities. At one end stands Kuching, Sarawak, ‘as the model of a simple and relatively small-scale overseas settlement’, while ‘Later Singapore is … the model of the most developed form of immigrant Chinese settlement in Southeast Asia’ (ibid.: 45). Singapore exhibits a great number of associations, based on criteria of recruitment that allow memberships to overlap to a great extent; the urban Chinese community in Sarawak includes fewer associations and consequently less overlap among memberships. Other studies in Southeast Asia suggest that this continuum might be a useful way of looking at the development of Chinese communities.

Ratu Kidul is a legendary spirit queen who plays a significant role in Javanese political ontologies and has come to be an icon of Indonesian public culture. In this paper, I trace the history of her mediation as image via paint, photography, television, film, and the Internet in order to ask how this queen of the unseen world came to be so visible a feature of the postcolonial landscape and to interrogate the nature and effects of this visibility. I argue that becoming accessible via the image was necessary to her continued political agency within a mass-mediated national public sphere in which visibility and circulation are preconditions of political recognition. Yet popular reception of images of Ratu Kidul as auratic conduits of her spiritual power reveal the continued presence of a visuality within Indonesian national modernity that runs counter to dominant logics of transparency. I offer an ethnographic examination of images of Ratu Kidul across a range of media, attending to their material qualities as mediums by which the spirit queen appears and circulates. Broadly, the essay argues that national political orders and their public spheres cannot be understood apart from a history of visual mediation.

The economic, social, and political development of newly independent nations depends upon the prior or concurrent strengthening of public administration. To be sure, the path of national development is a circular one as it traces a spiral ascent in which a step forward in one kind of development makes possible the next step in another. The administrative arc of this circle is here emphasized not because it is more basic than the others, but because it has often been slighted. New governments, often on the recommendation of technical-assistance advisors, adopt excellent programs in health, agriculture, education, and industry, but then fail to translate these programs from paper to action. The fault is not lack of earnest intent but the burden of an unresponsive and weak administrative system.

What has been called the early modern military revolution may be described most simply as the replacement of small cavalry forces by huge gunpowder infantry armies. The revolution was a diffusionary process with a relatively well-understood chronology and geography. The innovations at its core began in northern Italy in the later fifteenth century and spread throughout central, northern, and eastern Europe in the three centuries that followed. Seen in this way, it was a unique and unitary phenomenon. Thus we speak of the military revolution, an episode in world history, instead of several different revolutions in the constituent parts of Europe. Nonetheless, the course and impact of the revolution were different in the regions it eventually affected.

Students of contemporary campesino movements in Latin America have their analyses generally focused on two problem-complexes. One of these entails the macro-structural changes of the larger society within which campesino movements develop. Such changes are represented by the gradual imposition of the nation-state over the more remote regions of the countries, the concomitant decline in the geographic, political, and economic isolation of these remote areas, the emergence of ‘multiple-power domains’ within which ascending groups challenge the political brokerage monopolies of the traditional large landholders over the campesinos within their domains, and the development of clientelistic political structures within which campesino followings become attractive power resources for politicians at the regional and national level.

In a recent study, I sought to analyze political and cultural patterns across mainland Southeast Asia during roughly a thousand years, from c. 800 to 1830.1 In brief, I argued that each of mainland Southeast Asia's three great north-south corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration. This process was territorial in the sense that some twenty-three small polities in the fourteenth century were assimilated, gradually or convulsively, fully or partially, to three overarching imperial systems by the early 1800s. Integration was administrative insofar as within each imperial system mechanisms of provincial control, economic extraction, and manpower organization became more penetrating, stable, and efficient. Integration was cultural in the sense that hitherto self-sufficient communities across each of the three principal zones came to accept linguistic, ethnic, and religious norms sanctioned by imperial elites.