The Norman and Swabian monarchy has a rich and valuable bibliography. Scholarly interest has been refreshed at intervals by conferences on it, by comparative notes and latterly by polemics. But these occasional papers do not explain by themselves the continuing interest of the subject, which arises from the extraordinary political precocity of this monarchy, and from the personalities of two kings who stand among the great statesmen of all time, Roger II and Frederick of Swabia.

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.

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.

Anthropology and other disciplines are engaged in an extended conversation about how to understand the dynamics of global interconnection. One dominant approach stresses political economies of global markets, exploring how commodity chains structure social relations and vice versa. I propose instead an emphasis on how semiotic mediation, specifically textual representation, shapes the circulation of material goods and surrounding social relations. I draw on ethnographic and archival research concerning the Mazatec region of Oaxaca, where psychedelic plants that local people have long used ritually have more recently become the subject of intense, socially violent consumer interest. I examine recent histories of interest in the region through texts written by outsiders, first “mushroom seekers,” and then Protestant missionary-linguists. Applying Keane's (2003) concept of “semiotic ideologies” to ideas about texts, I suggest that competing textual ideologies undergird conflicts between how outsiders have written about the region and local people have responded to their accounts. The nearly century-deep corpus of writings about the region tends to depict its people through reference to its hallucinogenic plants, a form of “semiotic collapse” wherein the commodities become fetishized proxies for people. Local people, particularly Mazatec authors, react by trying to manage this “representational hangover” from the history of outsider depictions. They adopt strategies to undo the power of the fetish by re-socializing the plants and re-embedding them in local social relations. This analysis offers a fruitful entry point for ethnographies of global connection while furthering the interdisciplinary project of attending jointly to materiality and semiotic representations.

This article uses gift-giving practices in early nineteenth-century Iran as a window onto statecraft, governance, and center-periphery relations in the early Qajar state (1785–1925). It first demonstrates that gifts have a long history in the administrative and political history of Iran, the Persianate world, and broader Eurasia, before highlighting specific features found in Iran. The article argues that the pīshkish, a tributary gift-giving ceremony, constituted a central role in the political culture and economy of Qajar Iran, and was part of the process of presenting Qajar rule as a continuation of previous Iranian royal dynasties. Nevertheless, pīshkish ceremonies also illustrated the challenges Qajar rulers faced in exerting power in the provinces and winning the loyalty of provincial elites. Qajar statesmen viewed gifts and bribes, at least at a discursive level, in different terms, with the former clearly understood as an acceptable practice. Gifts and honors, like the khil‘at, presented to society were part of Qajar rulers' strategy of presenting themselves as just and legitimate. Finally, the article considers the use of gifts to influence diplomacy and ease relations between Iranians and foreign envoys, as well as the ways in which an inadequate gift could cause offense.

On 15 August 1902, a battalion of Chinese police officers under the command of Superintendent Zhao Bingjun marched into city center of Tianjin and toward the Yamen Complex, the ceremonial site where the Eight Power Alliance was handing back the city to Governor General Yuan Shikai after two years of occupation following the Boxer Uprising. As they approached the complex, allied officials and commanders, standing with Yuan Shikai and his entourage under a “Friendship Forever” banner, were shocked and dismayed. As one of the preconditions for its resumption of the control of the city, the Qing government had agreed to the allied demand that its troops would not enter the vicinity of Tianjin, and some allied officials had even thought that Yuan would be compelled to beg the allied forces to stay and continue to maintain law and order. Yuan Shikai's sudden show of forces was a slap in their faces and potentially a violation of an international agreement. “What is the meaning of this?” asked an allied representative with raised voice. “Look carefully. These are not troops,” Yuan replied with a smirk, “They are policemen.” Not knowing what to do, allied officials pointed fingers at each other, blaming the stupidity of those who had designed the agreement. “It is not we who are stupid,” one said, “It is Yuan Shikai who is so cunning.”

It was the unanimous opinion of the early Orientalists of British India that India had no history, at least in the sense of historical writings. Like every consensus, it contained many variations of detail, as we shall see, but as the view of experts it was widely influential for a long time. For example, R. C. Majumdar gave a thoughtful version of this view at the beginning of the multivolume History and Culture of the Indian People (Majumdar 1951) by Indian scholars, published shortly after independence. But the consensus was eroded by the rise of what we may call the “colonial knowledge” paradigm, which asserted a close connection between European rule and European knowledge of India. It tended to discredit the old consensus and to lighten the specific gravity of Orientalist knowledge, simplifying it as an object of historical explanation. This development has cleared an opening, in recent decades, for a rush of new studies tending to create an opposing consensus, that India did have history of a kind, it being the task of scholars to explicate what kind, exactly, that was (for example, Pathak 1966; Warder 1972; Thapar 1992; Wagoner 1993; Ali, ed. 1999; Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 2001; Guha 2004; Mantena 2007). This in itself has been very much to the good, by reopening questions that had been closed by the old consensus. The old consensus itself, by contrast, was dismissed without much examination, and was attributed to colonial interest, cultural misunderstanding, or insufficient grasp of Indian languages and literatures. The old consensus now is seen as a simple ideological projection, easily explained and dismissed, with little complexity or interest for historical investigation. But this simplifying action of the prevailing paradigm renders invisible some of the very real effects of the old consensus, effects whose explanation can be very valuable to us. In order to gain the benefit it holds we have to take it seriously, trying both to explain it historically and to decide whether or in what way it is true.

At the turn of the nineteenth century in Southeast Asia, the Kingdoms of Burma and Siam were largely stable, independent polities: powerful in relation to their neighbors, self-sufficient in terms of food, and possessing little reason to believe that these parameters would be changing within the clearly foreseeable future.See Victor Lieberman, “Secular Trends in Burmese Economic History, 1350–1830, and their Implications for State-Formation,” Modern Asian Studies 25, 1 (1991), p. 22. A century later, Burma as an independent entity had disappeared off the map, and Siam—at least in terms of its official foreign trade—was an economic satellite of the British Empire. Burmese teak now floated downstream to British Rangoon, while Siamese rice was carried to the world in the hulls of British ships. The Burmese monarchy had been disbanded; 93 percent of all official Siamese imports and exports were in the hands of London's merchants.George Curzon, “The Siamese Boundary Question,” The Nineteenth Century 34, July (1893), pp. 53–54. How did these transformations occur, and why? Were the processes of domination geared toward the economies, politics, or “geobodies” of these two countries, or toward an integrated combination of all three? What role did material objects of trade themselves play in this process, objects that were often deemed illegal as they passed through unstable, liminal spaces along the frontier?

The title of the panel at which this paper was originally presented — “Nationalism and the Growth of States”, at the 1960 meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City — suggested a concern with nationalism as a political phenomenon. We were not speaking primarily about love of country, the cultivation of a national style or hatred of the foreigner, but about political convictions, attitudes or movements and their relation to the state. The dilemma of nineteenth-century Russian nationalism, so defined, consists in this — that it could only with difficulty, if at all, view the tsarist state as the embodiment of the national purpose, as the necessary instrument and expression of national goals and values, while the state, for its part, looked upon every autonomous expression of nationalism with fear and suspicion.

On the evening of March 17, 1940, about 600 workers gathered together inside the Marievale Consolidated Compound on the far southeastern tip of the Witwatersrand goldmining crescent (see Figure 1). The workers demanded that the gates of the compound be opened, as they intended to march the forty miles to Johannesburg to present their grievances to Henry Taberer at KwaMzilikazi, the headquarters of the Native Recruiting Corporation. At about 8 pm, thirty-five policemen arrived from the nearby towns of Nigel, Springs, and Brakpan and demanded to know what was troubling the workers. After considerable discussion, the policemen discovered that the Marievale mine had run out of the regulation shift tickets normally used to record the labor of African workers and that older tickets were being used in their place. These tickets were printed with the higher wage rates received by workers during the early development of the mine: The mine officials had simply crossed out the 2 shillings and 6-pence rates and stamped the standard minimum of 2 shillings onto each slip of paper. The workers were suspicious about this conspicuous reduction of wage rates, arguing that they were due the original rate established by the Native Recruiting Corporation.

This article explores how accusations of cannibalism in post-conflict Mozambique, which were leveled in the context of individually driven and protracted struggles, albeit with cultural spinoffs, have contributed to ongoing and contested forms of social transformation in the country. The accusations were accentuated by the mobilizing effects of memories of violence and interventions of the mass media, which in turn highlighted the enduring struggle over the politics of local recognition and authority and its dynamic and broader links to state-building and legitimacy in Mozambique. This analysis traces the origins of cannibal accusations in culture and politics and, through a discussion of the biographies of concrete social actors and their open and discreet struggles, has wider repercussions for the study of the role of indigenous beliefs about, and fears of, cannibals and witches on state-building in post-conflict countries.

Le même mouvement de la pensée scientifique qui rattachait définitivement l'homme à l'échelle des titres et l'intégrait parmi les phénomènes de la nature n'a pas manqué d'apporter une attention plus objective et plus systématique que jadis aux manifestations de la vie sociale. L'enfantement des sciences sociales en cours sous nos yeux ne se fait pas pour autant sans peine et it semble qu'on y puisse trouver une raison, si discrète soit-elle, dans la difficulté de constituer un vocabulaire apte à traduire des concepts définis et vérifiés. La remarque de Descartes n'y est pas moins vraie que dans les sciences de la nature: “Si de verborum significatione inter Philosophos semper conveniret, fere omnes illorum controversiae tollerentur.”

The first years following independence in Africa were an exciting time for scholars who rushed off to observe the emerging politics of new states across the continent. The analytical frameworks these scholars brought with them for the purpose of interpreting what they saw were largely borrowed from mainstream models derived from the study of American politics that were widely popular at the time. However, soon after the early independence era (1956–1966), it became obvious that a sole focus on the formal structures and functions of state and society revealed little about the actual practice of politics. Across the continent, governments were suffering from constitutional failures, an inability to offer a consistent application of regulatory mechanisms or enforceable law; and few states could even extract sufficient revenue to support either pre-existing colonial-era governmental structures or the many new ambitious projects undertaken by politicians soon after independence.

News from afar sometimes seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to one's own remembered past. This is not because of the banal redundancy of events, but because of memory's inclination to refurbish itself in contemporary designs and novel images. In 1994 I was in northern Sumatra collecting stories from Karo veterans of the Indonesian war of national independence. Every night the television news offered more horrifying pictures of ethnic violence from around the world. In central Africa, roadways were filled with thousands of starving, desperate people traveling toward unknown destinations. This made a big impression on my Karo informants. “That's exactly how it was here,” they told me over and over. “I saw it on TV last night. I told the kids, ‘We were just like that during the evacuation.' Nothing to eat. No clothes. We were living like animals.”

During the long nineteenth century, emerging bureaucratic states sought to align boundaries of space, political authority, and social identity. According to the normative ideal, ramified systems of delegated control should be consolidated into a single government, state power evenly applied throughout the entire area, and patchworks of local identities replaced with uniform citizenship. However, as Bayly has observed, states remained composite, negotiating with subordinates who retained their own spheres of influence. Integration was contested, uneven, and by no means linear. These tensions were evident in cities, with their traditions of trade and migration, and in colonial societies, characterized by the symbiosis between communal leaders and imported officials. However, even here informal controls were supplemented by state-sponsored social discipline as military power, managerial capacity, and populations expanded. Social categorizations were more rigidly enforced. Settlements and regulations became more closely packed, shrinking unclaimed space, both physical and social.

Two rulers, one in Africa, one in Asia, are about to undergo the ceremony of baptism following first contact with the Portuguese maritime expansion—but they insist that the rite be conducted in secret. The African ruler is a regional governor (the Mani Soyo) of the Congo King Nzinga Nkuwu who has just converted in 1491. The high king's diplomatic exchanges with the sea captain Diogo Cão had not elicited any real sensation of vulnerability to Portuguese imperial designs, yet he had been happy to convert nonetheless. Now the Mani Soyo is about to follow suit, but he will not have any of his subordinates witnessing the ritual because he does not want them benefiting from the enhanced status and power that the ritual could bestow. In the highlands of Sri Lanka some fifty years later, the King of Kandy is equally intent on keeping his baptismal rites hidden from public view. But his reasons are strikingly different. He does this “lest his people should kill him.” When news of the baptism did leak out rioting followed, and the king had to spread the story that it had all been a ploy to deceive the Portuguese.

One finds partition often mentioned but rarely discussed in any detail by authors of texts on world politics. Denned as the act of dividing into two or more units an area previously forming a single administrative entity, partition is firmly anchored in both the theory and practice of international statesmanship. Modern diplomatic history offers a classic illustration in the repeated partitioning of Poland in the late eighteenth century. More recent instances of territorial division are Ireland (1920), Germany and Korea (1945), India (1947) and Indochina (1954). Reinforcement for such political arrangements, moreover, derives from the teachings and insights of bargaining theory, negotiating strategies, crisis management and conflict resolution with their primary emphasis upon compromise. Partition is thus presented as being a traditional and accepted method for terminating disputes outstanding among nations without recourse to war.

In March 1998, the political leadership of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel was looking for ways to commemorate al-Nakba (“The Disaster,” in Arabic), referring to the war of 1948, during which about 700,000 Palestinians were uprooted and hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed. This leadership, organized in the Follow-Up Committee (FUC), nominated a Nakba and Steadfastness Committee (NSC) chaired by the author Muhamad Ali Taha. Among the Committee's several initiatives, one gained front-page headlines in the Arabic media: a call for Arab municipalities to establish memorial monuments for the Palestinian martyrs (shuhada) of 1948.

The article uses the first population census of postcolonial Ghana to analyze the relationship between statistics and the process of imagining the nation-state. In contrast with much historical and sociological literature, which conceptualizes the relationship between census-taking and state formation in terms of identification, classification, and quantification, the departure point of this analysis is the importance of gaining the trust of the counted subjects. In Ghana, where the possibility of obtaining accurate population returns had been severely hindered by people's distrust in the state, the 1960 population census saw the organization of a capillary education campaign in schools and in the press. By dissecting the iconographies emerging from the Census Education and Enlightenment Campaign, the article makes three contributions. First, it shows that understanding the concrete ways in which statistics inform political imagination requires an expansion of the field of observation beyond the statistical machinery and other “centers of calculation.” Second, complementing James Ferguson's understanding of “development discourse” as an “anti-politics machine,” it is argued that the possibility of making the people of Ghana “census minded” depended on the construction of a much richer set of inherently political representations about the nature of the postcolonial state. Finally, it shows the importance of critically interrogating the political implications acquired by the reception of global statistical practices. It does so by documenting the multiple ways in which the international standards promoted by the United Nations became entwined with the transformation of Ghanaian politics through the mobilization of children and press propaganda.

The phrase liberal capitalism has occasionally been used in contemporary political criticism to lump together the ideological approaches of nonsocialist political parties and to suggest that there are few significant differences among those who generally support a market-based political economy. C. B. Macpherson, in an influential essay entitled The Real World of Democracy (1965), argues that “by admitting the mass of the people into the competitive party system, the liberal state did not abandon its fundamental nature; it simply opened the competitive political system to all the individuals who had been created by the competitive market society.” As a first approximation then, liberal capitalism appears to stand for a combination of rational contractualism, utilitarian individualism, and the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith.