Reflecting upon the career in the colonial government of Formosa that was to win him world-wide fame in the early twentieth century, Baron Shimpei Goto once remarked that “Japan had made no preparations whatever for the administration of the island at the time of its acquisition”. Underscoring this neglect, he added, was “the fact that, in the case of other nations confronted by a similar occasion, elaborate schemes are generally formulated to meet contingencies connected with the occupation of a new territory”. One may wonder whether the Baron included among the “elaborate schemers” the “absent-minded” builders of the British Empire.

It does not matter whether Baron Goto was aware of the complex historical processes, of the actions and accidents, involved in the creation of great empires. It is not even important whether he really believed that the colonial programs of the imperial powers were, like the war plans carefully devised by army general staffs, drawn from secret files as occasions demanded. Goto was primarily interested in the formulation and implementation of a colonial policy for Japan. His observation on his government's lack of preparedness to assume control and direction of Formosan affairs should thus be taken not simply as a confession and condemnation but rather as a statement of purpose.

At the end of a distinguished career as chronicler of the Burgundian court, Georges Chastellain (1404–75) penned a quick sketch of the outstanding accomplishments of his duke, Charles the Bold. Accustomed to expositions awash in chivalric pomp, Chastellain employed a different tack to commemorate this sovereign: He sketched eleven “magnificences” performed by the duke of Burgundy, all reconstructed images of this prince's engagement with ceremony. Foremost among this snapshot collection of state ritual was neither a tournament, nor a wedding ceremony, nor even a processional entry. What stood out, in Chastellain's estimation, as Charles' greatest deed was something more riveting and more powerful than any of these spectacles so beloved by the fifteenth-century Burgundian court:

The first [magnificence] was at Brussels, where, seated on his throne, his sword unsheathed and held by his Marshall, he gathered the men of Ghent arranged kneeling before him and at his pleasure and in their presence cut and tore up the political charters they bore. Done for permanent record, this action was without parallel.

For Chastellain, the supreme magnificence of Charles the Bold was a lesson in exemplary punishment, the public abasement of the aldermen and guild deans of the Flemish city of Ghent in January 1469, a year and a half after a city revolt of rank-and-file guildsmen had unsettled celebrations in honor of his accession to the countship of Flanders.

In 1893 a Welsh poet with the bardic name Glan Elsi uttered a remarkable vaticination that seemed to unite the fate of the Welsh language and the Welsh slate quarrier:

Dearest old Welsh, if ever it dies,

From the lips of a quarrier, I think, will come the final word.John Owen (Glan Elsi), “Y Chwarelwr” [The quarrier]. Cymru 5, 1893, p. 112.

What is immediately remarkable is that such an identification of a modern proletariat (as opposed, for example, to a vanishing traditional peasantry, as would be so common elsewhere in Europe), as a linguistic kulturträger of the Welsh language was by this time so unremarkable. Even more extraordinary, perhaps, is that this was a by-product of the slate-quarriers' own self-mythologizing.

The entry of a universal revelation into the mundane world of language threatens to be paradoxical: it must take a specific and local form. As such, it becomes implicated in nationalist, ethnic, linguistic, and other sources of community. This article centers on a small melodrama in late twentieth-century Indonesia, home to the largest number of Muslims of any country. After undergoing a mid-life spiritual awakening, H. B. Jassin, a modernist literary critic, editor, and ardent defender of freedom of expression, undertook two projects intended to convey the aesthetic power of the Qur'an to a non-Arabic speaking public. But if Qur'anic Arabic summons a transnational community of the faithful, standardized Indonesian was developed to address a nation of citizens. If scripture speaks in a divine, uncreated idiom, the national language is shaped by human efforts. Jassin's career had served a vision of literature and its public whose values and semiotic ideologies were dramatically at odds with Qur'anic traditions. Although this may appear at first glance to be a familiar story of progress and its opponents, this article asks whether Jassin's critics grasped something about signs and communities that his defenders did not. Examining the furor that resulted from his Qur'ans, it explores an array of conflicting assumptions about language, freedom, truth, and people's lives together in the late twentieth century.

In a famous issue of Times Literary Supplement (TLS) focusing on the state of historical scholarship, Moses Finley called for “Unfreezing the Classics” through “serious history” and lamented that, “Less than a generation ago the profound disagreement between Hugh Last and (now Sir) Ronald Syme about Augustus was . . . serious. But today? While our colleagues engage in polemics over the Tudor Revolution in government, the rise of gentry, the roots of Industrial Revolution or the causes of the First World War, what excites us to debate?”Finley 1966:290. Less than a generation later, the field of classical scholarship had been so transformed that Keith Hopkins, one of Finley's successors as the chair of ancient history at Cambridge could report without much exaggeration that, “Ancient economy is an academic battle ground where the contestants campaign under various colours—apologists, Marxists, modernizers, primitivists . . . Even within schools, there are sects. Besides, new strategies, new alliances, new compromises are repeatedly devised. Fresh contingents of scholars arrive, new tactics (such as underwater archaeology) are developed . . . But no new weapon is finally decisive. The war continues.”Hopkins 1983:ix.

It is an anthropological truism that ethnic identity is “other”-oriented, such that who we are rests on who we are not. Within this vein, the development of Yoruba identity in the late nineteenth century is attributed to Fulani perspectives on their Oyo neighbors, Christian missionaries and the politics of conversion, as well as Yoruba descendants in diaspora reconnecting with their West African homeland. In this essay, my aim is to both complement and destabilize these externalist perspectives by focusing on Yoruba concepts of “home” and “house” (ilé), relating residence, genealogy and regional identities to their reconstituted ritual frameworks in Cuba and Brazil. Following Barber's analysis of Yoruba praise-poetry (oríkì) and Verran's work on Yoruba quantification, I reexamine the semantics of the category ilé in the emergence of Lucumí and Nagô houses in order to explain their sociopolitical impact and illuminate transpositions of racial “cleansing” and ritual purity in Candomblé and Santería. More broadly, the essay shows how culturally specific or “internal” epistemological orientations play an important if neglected role in shaping Atlantic ethnicities and their historical trajectories.

The thirty–fourth chapter of the Greater Bundahišn, which is the fullest eschatological account within this important Middle Persian text, ends on an extremely peculiar note. Its final verse states:

This also is said [in the Avesta]: “The earth becomes flat, without a crown and without a seat. There are no mountain peaks nor hollows, nor are ‘up’ and ‘down’ preserved.”

In a closed and stable society, innovation is likely to be rather feared than welcomed; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was sometimes used as a synonym for ‘revolution’; in an open society like our own, innovation is considered a virtue. In discussing the present condition of art, I want to strip innovation of its value connotations and to consider the search for the new as an historical condition of modern art, but not one that makes it either better or worse than the more stable arts of the past. I suggest a biological metaphor as a guide: in the evolution of species, innovation is not necessarily advantageous. If the conditions of the environment are stable, it is likely that mutants in a species will be selectively eliminated. Conversely, in a changing environment, the appearance of new characters better adjusted to the new conditions will improve the adaptation of the species and be favored by the selective process.

“Iglesia me llamo” (“church is my name”) was the only phrase uttered over and over by numerous criminals during judicial interrogations that took place at various times throughout the Iberian kingdoms that ultimately became Spain, and their American colonies. This expression meant that even after committing heinous crimes, those outlaws received shelter at local churches and thereby felt entitled not to disclose any information to justice officials about their conduct. Such criminals were confident that it would not be easy to remove them from the church for punishment. Indeed, groups of wrongdoers turned churchyards, churches, their cloisters, and their adjoining cemeteries into permanent residences. They were alleged to move freely in and out of church buildings under cover of night and to bring friends, lovers, and liquor in for enjoyment. Their presence terrorized neighbors and passersby, and inconvenienced priests and parishioners alike.

The public and professional significance of precolonial History as a discipline has declined markedly across much of sub-Saharan Africa over the last forty years: History has been both demonized—depicted as deeply dangerous and the source of savagery and instability—and portrayed as irrelevant when set alongside the needs for economic modernization and “development.” This paper explores this trend in the context of Uganda, with a particular focus on the kingdom of Buganda, chosen for its particularly rich oral and literary heritage and the thematic opportunities offered by its complex and troubled twentieth century. The paper aims to explore how “the past”—with a focus on the precolonial era—has been understood there in several distinct periods. These include the era of imperial partition and the formation of the Uganda Protectorate between the 1880s and the 1910s; competition for political space within colonial society to the 1950s; decolonization and the struggle to create new nationhood in the mid-twentieth century; and political crises and partial recovery since the 1970s. Ultimately, the paper seeks to assess the role of History in a modern African society vis-à-vis the developmental agendas and notions of economic growth against which African “progress” and prospects for “stability” are currently measured.

This article traces the shift in demographic thought from the Malthusian framework that predominated in English-language political economic writings of the nineteenth century to demographic transition theory, which prevailed by the mid-twentieth century. An analysis of demographic theory offers particular insights onto the intellectual history of development because the question of population served as the point of departure for various development theories. While the scholarly literature on U.S. development ideas and projects has grown increasingly rich and sophisticated in recent decades, it remains wedded to the notion that there was a stark rupture between American development theory and the conditions in and relationships to the underdeveloped world that it sought to describe. This belief threatens to trivialize the significance of violent economic, environmental, and political circumstances that made development a useful lens of interpretation. Focusing especially on ideas about India, this article examines how, in an era of economic crises, intellectual and political exchange between British colonial, Indian nationalist, and American thinkers concerning the problems of disease, famine, and immigration enabled a transformation in demographic thinking. The concept of development did not simply diffuse from the West to the Rest. Global conflict and dialogue—both between and within empires—enabled its emergence such that, by the early 1950s, peoples in various parts of the world had already taken the ideal of development for granted.

The rise of working-class movements has recently been subjected to a great deal of historical scrutiny. Although this literature treats a variety of topics, much of it is devoted to different aspects of socialism: the radical, reformist, or utopian nature of socialism, the sociological roots of the movement among artisans and industrial workers, and the creation of an alternative, or socialist, subculture. One reason socialism has been investigated so intensively is that historians have assumed that socialism represented the authentic working-class ideology. Implicitly or explicitly, scholars have conveyed the idea that socialism alone promoted class consciousness, that socialism led workers to realize that they formed a distinct group and had to act together to defend their interests. Other movements among workers have been considered to be conservative and, as such, have been discounted as unrepresentative of workers' interests.

Although only a minority of harvest workers in California are covered by union contracts, jobs in some nonunionized industries are becoming increasingly stabilized and internally stratified in ways and to extents that are largely unnoted. These conditions result from an augmentation of the labor market structure (Fisher 1953), that is, from policies evolving within agricultural industries that partially insulate their job markets from external market forces.

In looking at the production of pottery and cheese in the southwest of France, we want to suggest that over the long term the region had a much more complicated history of production than its present, predominantly rural economy might suggest. The manufacturing processes were linked symbiotically with other local activities, and were often carried out by “peasants” working in agriculture for a good part of the year.

Religion … appears in all different sorts in Syria: Turks, Jews, Heretics, Schismatics, Naturalists, Idolaters; or to be more exact these are genera that have their species in great number, for in Aleppo alone we counted sixteen types of religions of which four were Turks different from each other; of Idolaters, there remains only one sort which worships the sun; of Naturalists, those who maintain the natural essence of God with some superstition concerning cows and who come from this side of the borders of Mogor; and the others without superstitions named Druze, living in Anti-Lebanon under a prince called the Emir. They pay a tribute to the Great Lord, and live in their own manner, naturally. From this one can see how necessary it is to have good missionaries, and virtuous ones, for all the scandals that go on in this Babylon, and learned men to refute so many errors. There are fourteen Sects or Nations differing from each other completely in Religion, in rite, in language, and in their manner of dressing: seven of these are Infidels, and seven Christians. The Infidels are Turks or Ottomans. Arabs, Kurds, Turcomans, Jezides, Druze and Jews. Among the Turks there are, moreover, several sects and cabals affecting Religious sentiments just as there are among the Jews.

In each of the three cases presented, the changing role of the folk saint as well as the development of the movement indicate that a four-stage transformation is in operation:

(1) The ‘call’ by means of a supernatural experience or ‘vocational struggle’ occurs in the future folk saint's life and initiates his career.

(2) Offering a practical religion with solutions to physical and personal problems, the saint attracts individuals who are seeking such solace and remedy. Common purpose, journey and encampment near the curer foster group identity.

(3)Myths about the miracle worker grow in the group and circulate abroad, intensifying group solidarity and attracting new adherents. Administrators and would-be exploiters enter. A transcendent ideology is introduced with social, political, and religious ramifications. These may be at once restorative and innovative. The success of the folk saint spawns other saints who also attract followers.

(4) External, traditional power structures are threatened, and retaliate by applying political pressure, so that the last stage sees the decline and eclipse of the movement, and the loss of its innovative elements. The saint, no longer a potential secular power, devotes himself to curing, thus reemphasizing the culturally defined, traditional role of curandero or hitolio.

All history is comparative. The judgments historians make are derived from some explicit or implicit standard of comparison. Thus, when historians describe the antebellum South in the United States as technically backward, rural, nonindustrial, socially retrograde, and paternalistic, they mean to say that it was so in comparison with the North. When historians of nineteenthcentury Brazil describe it in the same terms, they compare it either to the hegemonic capitalist areas of that period, including the United States North, or to Brazil itself at later periods in its history.

The Levantine business community—the Sursuqs, Bustruses, Tuenis, Khuris, Debbases, Trads, Tabets, Naggiars, and Farahs—created large agricultural estates in the Levant and established company branches in Beirut, Alexandria, Haifa, London, Liverpool, Paris, and Marseille in the mid-nineteenth century. Against both culturalist and new institutional paradigms, I argue that the trajectories of the Levantine firms were much like those of their European counterparts; Dutch and English capitalism—what came to be recognized as modern forms of capitalism—developed out of long-distance trade and relied on forms of coerced and semi-coerced labor as well as other so-called “non-capitalist” or “precapitalist” elements. Beirut-based companies relied on tenant contracts, sharecropping, and other forms of labor control rooted in the Ottoman social formation. Drawing upon the unexplored private papers of these business families in Beirut and a diverse collection of documents from Istanbul, Beirut, Jerusalem, London, Liverpool, and Marseille in Arabic, German, Ottoman Turkish, and French, this paper examines the parallels and the links between the business practices of the Levantine joint-stock companies and their European partners. It contends that the development of nineteenth-century capitalism relied on several different institutions and relations of production formulated and articulated on both sides of the Mediterranean and in the competition between them. Only after World War I, because of settler-colonialism, the settlement of nomads, and large-scale European capital investment backed by imperial power, did Levantine capital accumulation begin to take a form that was subordinate to Europe.

French literature has specialized, almost since its beginning, in accounts of eroticism and courtship. During the twelfth century, Northern romance and Southern lyric described an idealized heterosexuality and its role in honing the aristocratic individual. In the thirteenth century, a new genre appeared that dealt with sexual encounter in more materialistic terms. The new form, the fabliau, added to literary language a vocabulary of vulgarisms from the spoken vernacular. At the same time, it gave European literature a new theme: sexuality that betokens not personal fulfillment, but rivalrous interpersonal struggle.