In July of 1860 the intra-mural Christian quarter of Damascus was looted and burned and thousands of its inhabitants were massacred. This horrific event, which arrived on the heels of sectarian bloodshed in Ottoman Mount Lebanon a month earlier, was all the more significant in light of the massacre of Christians in the northern city of Aleppo in 1850 and the blood-libel accusations against the Damascene Jewish community in 1840.The events of July 1860 lasted a week during which the largely Greek Catholic (Uniate) inner-city Christian quarter of Bab Tuma was attacked. Although historians disagree over the number of Christians killed by the mob, up to ten thousand men, women, and children may have perished. The attackers also targeted Christian businesses, churches, and foreign consulates, and what could not be carried away was set ablaze. In the wake of those events, and in order to forestall European intervention on behalf of its minorities, the Ottoman government quickly moved to re-establish order and to punish the perpetrators. The 1840 blood-libel accusations—the first of their kind in Damascus—were leveled against several Jews when a Capuchin monk and his Muslim servant disappeared and their bodies were allegedly found in the Jewish quarter. The shocks of the 1860 “event” (or al-haditha as the local court records refer to it) and the 1840 Damascus Affair were heightened not only by their suddenness, and indeed, novelty, but also because their targets—the Christian and Jewish communities of this Ottoman provincial city—were small in number and appeared to have led a life of relative historic obscurity.The Christians comprised Greek (Syrian) Orthodox, Armenian, Maronite, and Catholic communities. Among the Jews there was a Karaite community. For an informative discussion of the Christians of the Arab East, see Robert M. Haddad, Syrian Christians in Muslim Society: An Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). In the absence of reliable (official) figures, a rough average based on population estimates provided by European observers will have to suffice: in 1787 Volney estimated the Damascus population at eighty thousand people, twelve thousand of whom were Christian (M. C-F. Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte pendant les annee's 1783, 1784, 1785 [Paris: Mouton, 1787; repr. 1959], vol. 2, p. 250). Half a century later, Porter reported that the population of the city totaled around 108,000 among whom 14,000 were Christians and 4,600 were Jews (J. L. Porter, Five Years in Damascus Including an Account of the History, Topography, and Antiquities of that City with Travels and Researches in Palmyra, Lebanon, and the Hawran [London: John Murray, 1855], vol. 1, p. 139). These figures closely approximate the estimates of the Bowring Report of a decade earlier (John Bowring, Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria [London: William Clowes and Sons, 1840; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1973], p. 8). In 1890 Cuinet put the total population at 165,000 and estimated the Christians at 54,000 and the Jews at 5,000 (Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine: Ge'ographie administrative statistique, descriptive et raisonne'e [Paris: E. Leroux, 1896], p. 386). Despite their comparative importance in the socio-economic life of Damascus (and for reasons that relate to that city's interior location, among other factors) neither community had risen to particular regional or empire-wide prominence along the lines of, say, the Maronites in Mount Lebanon or the Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities of Istanbul. Historians have in general considered the two communities noteworthy, if they considered them at all, on account of the two events mentioned above, events that have since come to define much of their nineteenth-century history. As a result, narratives of these events are plentiful, found alongside accounts that focus on the wealth and fortune of a handful of Jewish and Christian men.There is a large number of published Arabic-language accounts of the 1860 riots. See, for example, Hasr al-litham ‘an nakabat al-Sham (Cairo, 1895); Iskander ibn Ya‘qub Abkarius, The Lebanon in Turmoil: Syria and the Powers in 1860, trans. J. F. Scheltema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920); Muhammad Abu'l Su‘ud al- Hasibi, “Lamhat min tarkikh Dimashq fi ‘ahd al-Tanzimat,” ed. Kamal S. Salibi in al-Abhath, 21 (1968) and 22 (1969); Mikhayil Mishaqa, Murder, Mayhem, Pillage, and Plunder: The History of Lebanon in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 244–68. For a list of unpublished manuscripts dealing with these events, see Fritz Steppat, “Some Arabic Manuscript Sources of the Syrian Crisis of 1860,” in Les Arabes par leurs archives, eds. Jacques Berque and Dominique Chevallier (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1976). For more recent scholarly analyses of the 1860 riots, see Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), pp. 87–106; Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 78–100; Kamal Salibi, “The 1860 Upheaval in Damascus as seen by al-Sayyid Muhammad Abu'l-Su‘ud al-Hasibi, Notable and Later Naqib al-Ashraf of the City,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, eds. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “New Light on the 1860 Riots in Ottoman Damascus,” Die Welt des Islams 28 (1988): 412–30. On the blood-libel, see A. M. Hyamson, “The Damascus Affair—1840,” Transactions: Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1945–1951); L. Loewe, ed., Diaries of Sir Moses Montefiore, 2 vols. (Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co., 1890); Salo Baron, “The Jews and the Syrian Massacres of 1860,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 4 (1932-1933); Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the Jewish community in general, see Moshe Ma'oz, “Changes in the Position of the Jewish Communities of Palestine and Syria in the mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1975); Thomas Philipp, “The Farhi Family and the Changing Position of the Jews in Syria, 1750–1860,” Middle Eastern Studies 20 (Oct. 1984); 37–52. See also al-Maghribi, “Yahud Dimashq mundhu mi'at ‘am,” al-Majma‘ al-‘Ilmi al-‘Arabi 9 (1929): 641–43; and Yusuf Nu‘aisa, Yahud Dimashq (Damascus: Dar al-Ma‘rifa, 1988); both of which are hostile to their subject matter. Although those two facets of non-Muslim (dhimmi)The status of non-Muslims is inscribed in Islamic law in the form of a contract (dhimma). The contract is historically anchored in the so-called Pact of ‘Omar, which spells out the rights and obligations of non-Muslims, including the right to the free practice of religion. life are important (and no doubt partly correlated), they hardly tell the whole story. If anything, they punctuated the course of a relatively undramatic everyday life at a time when the history of the city and the province of which it was the capital were undergoing socio-economic and political transformation.

In 1957, the security force of Angola's colonial diamond mining company recruited African diviners to help them solve a case of diamond theft in Lunda. This event reveals a peculiar convergence of divinatory practices with techniques of corporate surveillance in Lunda's political economy of security. In their overlapping features of secrecy and control, divination and corporate security can be understood as historically aligned evidentiary practices, or what I call “corporate divination.” By examining divinatory rituals in tandem with the “occult” apparatus of corporate surveillance, and the figure of a colonial sorcerer-detective renowned for his “divinatory” prowess, I ask how such seemingly opposed modes of knowledge production eroded or shored up colonial rule. The cultural significance of divination within the context of a mining company, I suggest, exposes the conditions under which a colonial corporation appropriates the social world in which it intervenes, and conversely, the cultural resources that potentially shape or undermine corporate life in a colonial context.

This paper analyses the significance of the Botswana High Court and Court of Appeal judgments of a case in which the Manual Worker Union, a blue-collar public sector union, challenged the Botswana Government to reinstate dismissed workers with all their past benefits. I examine the role of public ethics and morality in Botswana as reflected in key notions used by High Court judges, such as “the duty to act fairly” and “legitimate expectations,” and argue that legal anthropologists have neglected such ideas, despite their having become a bedrock of contemporary judicial reasoning. While anthropology has shown a renewed interest in ethics, issues of public ethics and morality remain relatively unexplored in contemporary legal anthropological debates. One has to go back to the work of Max Gluckman on reasonableness in judicial decision-making among the Barotse to find foundational anthropological insights into the morality and ethics of law in non-Western societies. In the legally plural context of Botswana, notions of equity and fairness, this paper argues, “permeate” the legal landscape.

Why did nationalism and socialism combine during Serbia's “anti-bureaucratic revolution”? This article critiques the elite-centric approach prevalent in the literature and suggests a cultural argument instead. Three interconnected “elective affinities” brought nationalism and socialism together and separated them from a weak liberal alternative: (1) the emergence of bureaucracy as a “floating signifier”; (2) the search for enemies and a predilection for conspiracy theories; and (3) anti-intellectualism with special emphasis on the search for “one truth.” The elite-centric approach is assessed by looking at actors who, if the thesis is correct, should have been the least likely adopters of nationalist ideas.

Freedom of conscience is widely claimed as a central principle of liberal democracy, but what is conscience and how do we know what it looks like? Rather than treat conscience as a transcendent category, this paper examines claims of conscience as rooted in distinct cultural and political histories. I focus on debates about conscientious objection in Second World War Britain, and argue that, there, persuasive claims of conscience were widely associated with a form of “detached conviction.” Yet evidence of such “detached convictions” always verged on being interpreted as deliberate manipulation and calculation. More broadly, I argue that the protection of freedom of conscience is necessarily incomplete and unstable. The difficulties in recognizing individual conscience point to anxieties within liberal democracy. Not only strangers are suspect and mistrusted, but also those who claim to stand most strongly by the principles of liberal citizenship.

Recent studies of trends in world income inequalities show that results differ significantly depending on whether income is measured through Purchasing Power Parities (PPP)- or exchange rate (FX)-based data. Korzeniewicz and Moran (1997), for example, relying on FX-based national income data, argue that world income inequalities rose during the 1980s. Firebaugh (1999), on the other hand, using PPP-based national income data, counters that world income inequalities declined through the same period. Both sets of authors subsequently have acknowledged and continued to debate the relative impact of PPP- and FX-based data in the assessment of world income inequalities (Firebaugh 2000; Korzeniewicz and Moran 2000).

Traditional explanations of the “rise of the West” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the conjunctural and contingent aspects of Europe's ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European development, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “West” and “East” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive and multilinear development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. From this perspective, the article examines the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies’ development over the longue durée and traces how the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism in Europe were fundamentally rooted in and conditioned by extra-European structures and agents. This then sets up our conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britain's colonization of India.

Americans have traditionally recognized social mobility as a valuable and characteristic feature of their society. Constant movement up and down the ladder of wealth and status, it is generally assumed, stems naturally from our healthy insistence on equality of opportunity, on careers “open to talent”. A corollary belief, embodied in a faith in such a system, is that an egalitarian society will necessarily produce the strongest and most stable institutions.

The very complexity of compagnonnage has always served to protect and foster the well being of its members despite the prohibitions issued against this workingmen's association by French authorities from the seventeenth century until 1848 when such bans were briefly lifted. However, the same secrecy and intricacy that enabled compagnonnage to evade official attacks has frequently shielded it from historical investigation. Thus, although there have been studies of compagnonnage, none has really attempted to explain the relationship between the association's rituals and mythology and its more apparent labor activities such as ‘fixing the price of work’ and ‘ruining the masters.’

In 2002, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu passed a law that illustrates the centrality of what may be called “authentic religious selves” to postcolonial Indian statecraft. It banned religious conversions brought about by what it termed “material allurement,” and it especially targeted those who might attempt to convert impoverished Dalits, descendants of unfree laborers who now constitute India's lowest castes. Conversion, thus conceived, is itself founded upon the idea that the self must be autonomous; religion ought to be freely chosen and not brought about by “allurement.” Philosophers like Charles Taylor have provided accounts of how selfhood of this kind became lodged in the Western imaginaire, but how was it able to take hold in very different social configurations, and to what effect? By attending to this more specific history, this essay brings a correlated but widely overlooked question to center stage: under what distinctive circumstances are particular selves called upon to actively demonstrate their autonomy and authenticity by divulging putatively secreted contents? In colonial South India, I will argue, the problem of authentic conversion only captured the public imagination when Dalit conversions to Christianity in colonial Madras threatened the stability of the agrarian labor regimes to which they were subject. And today, as in nineteenth-century Madras, it is Dalit selfhood that remains an object of intense public scrutiny and the target of legal interventions.

Among the agro-pastoral Kuria people, whose population straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya, many young men are actively engaged in an illicit livestock trade in which cattle stolen in Tanzania—from other Kuria, as well as from neighboring peoples such as the Luo, Ngoreme, and Maasai—are sold to buyers, mainly butchers, inside Tanzania or else are run across the border for cash sale in neighboring Kenya. Kenya is a more affluent country than Tanzania—consequently, the demand for beef is greater there and beef prices are considerably higher. The beef and hides from these stolen Tanzanian cattle also fuel Kenya's meat-packing and tanning industries, and live animals as well as canned beef are reportedly also shipped to buyers in Scandinavian countries and the Persian Gulf.

The German fascination with the American Indian is legion, enduring, and much more than a current, post-modern enchantment with ‘the primitive.’ Indeed, the special and continuing relationship between Germans and Indians is well known, and in recent years it has received considerable scholarly attention. One striking aspect of this relationship is the seemingly endless effort by scholars, museum curators, pedagogues, and dilettantes of all fashions to control the discourse on ‘Indianness’ in Germany by denouncing popular clichés and attempting to replace them with new versions of ‘the authentic Indian.’ Their ongoing efforts to harness concepts of authenticity while policing this discourse are hardly surprising; indeed they have become predictable. But the lack of self-reflection with which most people participate in this process is remarkable. Few laymen or scholars seem to notice that they are the latest participants in a repetitive process that has been going on in German-speaking lands for close to 200 years, and even fewer seem to notice the ironic turn it has recently taken.

These three statements regarding personal ancestry were made to me by villagers during life history interviews I conducted a few months into my research in northeastern Madagascar. Each statement is an admission of slave ancestry, and I highlight them to introduce this paper for three reasons. First, such statements are not uncommon in these villages. Many villagers told stories of lost or stolen ancestors, forced labor for “nobles,” and slave ancestry. Second, much of the recent scholarship addressing slavery elsewhere in Madagascar has suggested that slavery is not easily discussed among contemporary residents of this Indian Ocean island. Thus, the fact that the people among whom I studied readily acknowledged their own slave descent by referring to their “lost” or “stolen” grandparents or to their own Makoa identity prompts further comparative inquiry. What factors explain acceptance of slave ancestry among some Malagasy and its concurrent stigmatization among others? Third, examination of variations in Madagascar's responses to slavery can lead us to new insights into the forms of identity and opportunity in other post-slave societies.

The madrasa is one of the many institutions which have seen recurrent attempts at reform in Muslim societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the eleventh century, when it first emerged as the principal institution of higher Islamic learning, the madrasa has undergone many changes, adapting in varying degrees to local cultures and changing times.On the madrasa in medieval Islam, see George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus 1190–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Given the centrality of this institution in the preservation and production of knowledge as well as in the formation of the religious elite, the madrasa is crucial to the construction of religious authority. Profound changes in Muslim societies in modern times have not necessarily marginalized this institution, but such changes have frequently raised questions about the position and function of the madrasa in society and of the ‘ulama reared in it, about whether this institution ought to be reformed, and if so, to what end, how, and by whom.

The origins and first uses of money have long been topics of interest to scholars. Although economists today still repeat Adam Smith's argument that money was created to eliminate barter, researchers with an extensive knowledge of archaic and primitive cultures have shown that money was often required for reasons other than the indirect exchange of goods. Irish evidence gives a European example of primitive money used to pay fines and to meet social obligations; what made the money valuable was that it enabled its recipients to perform these functions. Money was not used to facilitate the indirect exchange of goods.

Suppose there are two lines on a graph, close together and moving in thesame general direction and that at one point one of them begins to divergefrom the other. After some time the gap between them will have widenedvery considerably. This simple image would command general agreementas an illustration of the different paths taken by Western and MiddleEastern or Islamic civilizations in the course of the last thousand years.

As the quotation from R. Park's 1928 work demonstrates, sociologists have a rather longstanding interest in migration and its consequences, in “the conflicts and fusions of peoples.” The period of relative tranquility between 1925 and 1955 was followed by a marked resurgence of ethnicity and a revitalization of international migrations during the 1960s and 1970s. Neither of these phenomena was confined to the Western Hemisphere or the new countries in Africa and Asia, but included a revival of ethnic mobilization in such nationstates as Great Britain, France, and Spain and the migration of millions of workers from southern Europe to the advanced industrial countries in northern Europe.

What is Islamic about reform among Muslims and what is not? How can we differentiate reform within an Islamic paradigm and a paradigmatic shift from the Islamic tradition to something else in a Muslim community? How do we establish the connection between reform as an intellectual or scholarly project and the translation of that project into social reality (or, in some cases, the absence of such a translation)? This article addresses these questions in the context of the Volga-Ural region in the late Russian Empire, where reformist Muslims attempted to reform existing Islamic educational institutions, particularly the religious seminaries called “madrasas,” as a means to modernize the region's Muslim communities. Educational reform initiatives among Volga-Ural Muslims originated within the framework of Muslim networks and institutions. Yet, especially after Russia's Revolution of 1905, reform in a number of prominent madrasas came to be characterized by various non-religious and at times even anti-religious influences emerging from the globalization of Western European modernity. Consequently, in these madrasas, education and the overall student experience turned into a secularizing process, and Islam as a religious system lost its weight and appeal for many students, who then engaged in a reform movement that evolved beyond an Islamic paradigm.

Indian immigration into the West Indies generally during the nineteenthcentury, and in particular to British Guiana, forms a small portion of migrationmovements from one area to another in the world during thatperiod. But in terms of West Indian societies, this immigration representeda major influx and so had significant social effects, especially inBritish Guiana and in Trinidad. By 1917 when the system was terminated some 429,286 Indians had been introduced into the West Indies since 1838, of which 238,909 went to British Guiana, and 143,939 to Trinidad.