At regular intervals in the United States political parties conduct campaigns, the purpose of which is to elect their chosen candidates to public office. Each party seeks political power, guided in this pursuit by a complex set of election laws which spell out in detail the rights and duties of the parties. The electoral process is the mechanism by which power is maintained within a party or transferred to a competing party. The legitimate right of one party to take power from another when the people so elect is enforced. The ideal image of the American political system in action reflects two parties struggling to maximize the interests of their constituents in the hope of maximizing votes in the next election. Out of this struggle the rights of the people are preserved.

Many colonial regimes appropriate traditional symbols of power to enhance authority. In many cases this appropriation results in the hardening of more transitory political divisions among subject people into ethnic, national, or tribal ones. Colonialism often, in essence, creates different identities for subject peoples. For example, the East India Company (E.I.C.) and royal colonial government in India manipulated caste and religion to carry out a policy of divide and rule. Moreover, the E.I.C. and later the Raj attempted to create a European-style landed elite that could promote development of agriculture, maintain social control in the countryside and, perhaps most important, collect taxes owed to the government. The Raj attempted to place the structures of power that evolved within the framework of the symbols of Moghul legitimacy, going so far as to create a hybrid traditional style of architecture used in many public buildings that mixed elements from both Hindu and Muslim buildings. In South Africa, colonial legislation, as seen in the process begun by the Glen Gray Act of 1894, resulted in the proletarianization of the African population by creating tribal reservations without enough resources to support all the people often arbitrarily defined as members of a particular tribe. And, as seen in studies of mine labor, coloniallegislation also defined a distinctive legal status for workers.

Within nationalist movements a tension typically exists between group demands for ethnic self-preservation and the more universal demands of religious belief, professional commitment, or academic vocation which confront particularly the intelligentsia in the group. Ethnic politicians tend to argue that decades or centuries of oppression or the anticipated disastrous consequences of a loss of self-determination makes loyalty to the group and its leadership's strategies a matter of overriding importance. It is usually exceptional individuals, often poets or novelists, who in times of crisis issue the challenge that survival be reconciled with universal values and prevailing international political norms.

While most American academics and policymakers are familiar with the problems facing the growing elderly population in the United States, many are surprised to learn of the troubles confronting the aged in Africa. In stark contrast to the mythic image of the tightly-knit extended family, where grandparents are lovingly cared for as a respected and integral part of the family unit, is the unforgiving reality of hunger, ill health, and loneliness that is the daily existence for many elderly Africans. It is critical that the problems of the aged in Africa and other parts of the developing world be examined, but we must recognize that these problems do not signify a simple convergence toward a common social ill across the globe. Rather, the nature of inter-generational solidarity varies, sometimes dramatically, over time and across contexts. This study employs a comparative analysis to reveal important differences in the nature of inter-generational solidarity over time between two similar sub-regions in neighboring Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa, and asks what explains those differences.

In his own mission to versify the planet, or at least an exemplary portion of it, Captain Francis Kingdon-Ward (1885–1958) returned repeatedly, even obsessively, to certain places on the alpine plateaus of Northwest Yunnan and Southeast Tibet, where the vegetation, refracted through the Aleph of what I shall argue was a deliberate, laborious, and disciplined optical practice, became liquid, a sea:

To date, only a handful of scholars, most notably C.L.R. James and Eugene Genovese, have seen slave rebellions and peasant revolts as having anything in common. Fewer scholars still would be prepared to accept the assumption that slaves and peasants were agrarian working classes that shared significant characteristics. Yet, the issues of rural unrest and class formation continue to haunt the historiography of both slave and peasant societies long after James' and Genovese's studies, and have forced several historians to revise and broaden their definitions of class conflict as a means to describe the social transformations of several rural regions. In this essay, I focus on the American South as a case study of a slave society and on the Italian South, or Mezzogiorno, as a case study of a peasant society. Notwithstanding the fundamental differences between the social structures of these two regions, in both cases debates on the class character of rural workers began when leftist historians raised the possibility of applying Marxist categories to their particular historical conditions. In both cases, they were dealing with a ‘south’ characterized by a preeminently agricultural economy and a persistent social and political conservatism. In both cases, too, the debate has moved from broad theoretical positions to the explanation of specific instances of class conflict in a rural setting—the slaves' resistance to their masters and the peasants' resistance to their landlords, respectively—and then on to a criticism of the Marxist approach to the problem.

For a long time now, people have pondered the ambiguity, at least in English, of ‘history’: the records men make, the records men write. In modern Chinese history, these are beginning to correspond. Revolutionary spirits like the famous writer Lu Hsün (1881–1936) felt that the old high culture was dead, and they resented being instructed, as it seemed, to rest quietly, uttering platitudes in silk-fan attitudes. They wanted to create (and destroy): to make-their own history, not to be politically stricken by forces from abroad, or culturally sterile at home, their past frozen solid in the present. The revolution they helped to foster in a cosmopolitan spirit—against the world to join the world, against their past to keep it theirs, but past—may be interpreted, in cultural terms, as a long striving to make their museums themselves.

‘Modernization theory’, Alexander Gerschenkron remarked recently, ‘obstructs rather than promotes the understanding of processes of econo- mic change’. Far from being a startling judgement, Gerschenkron's comment only signals that another distinguished scholar has joined the theory's detractors. The marked failure of modernization theory to predict how less developed countries would react to incentives for material advance explains the growing chorus of criticism. This indeterminate response from third world peoples has quite properly raised doubts about how well we understand what is involved in the reorientation of a society's habitual practices. The blight of disconfirming evidence, according to E. I. Eisenstadt, has now led to the abandonment of hope that breakdowns in modernization would be followed by resurgences towards modernity.

Historical research has supplied extensive information about the stark facts of the Holocaust. It includes efforts both to document the full extent of the horror and to maintain a degree of objectivity and avoid undue sentimentality (Bauer 1978). The historical work includes, and goes beyond, chronicling the details of the murderous events. It points up unresolved-and possibly unresolvable-questions, such as the nature of the involvement and responsibility of European Christians. That issue involves, at one end, the accusation that Pope Pius XII was, at the very least, inactive in the face of a supreme moral challenge (Falconi 1970). At another end, it involves acknowledgement of extensive efforts by Christians to protect Jews, at considerable risk to themselves (Friedman 1980; Flender 1963).

This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930–1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came to link cultivation and territorialization, state violence and food, and dispossession and espionage. I engage with the powerful symbolism attached to rice by colonial and post-colonial officials, border guards, and cultivators who were variously conceived of as peasants and adivasis, as they sought to settle, cultivate, demarcate, and govern new national boundaries in a radically changing landscape. This paper situates rice battles within current discussions on Asia's borderlands to show how rice established the border as a space for alterity and to expose the blurred boundaries between static peasants and mobile adivasis, and between cultivation and soldiering.

In worlds of difference, how might certain unities be forged for liberation? This paper pursues this question from the vantage-point of the dialectical tension between Marxism and religion. While some scholars have noted parallels between the two, philosophers of critical realism have aimed to establish a deeper equivalence between Marxism and religion. This paper, however, considers how an equivalence may be forged by subaltern actors in the context of political struggles—how a religious Marxism might look as a theoretical and political practice. I do this by historically reconstructing the life of Sufi Sibghatullah Mazari, a locally influential communist from Pakistan who equated Sufism with Mao-inflected Marxism. Born into a poor farming family from South Punjab, he would go on to lead peasant movements against “feudal” landlords (jagirdars) during the 1970s and be recruited into the Mazdoor Kisan Party, the country’s historically largest communist party, which drew inspiration from Mao Tse-tung. Sibghatullah’s introduction to Maoist thought and practice, especially its emphasis on a vernacular-driven communist universalism, led him to comparatively reflect on circulating insurgent Sufisms and their own universalist possibilities. Maoism and Sufism’s shared universalist elements then allowed him to equate the two: an equivalence he centered on the concept of Truth (Haqiqat). Sibghatullah also expressed this “mystical Marxism” in his political practice, as he mentored revolutionary Sufi disciples, recruited Sufi-inflected mullahs into the communist party, built alternative insurgent mosques, and even challenged the tribal and patriarchal “honor” codes, practices that, in undermining landlordism’s hegemony over Islam, threatened its reproduction.

Intellectual networks linking humanitarians in Britain, Western Australia, and New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s operationalized the concept of native “protection” by arguing contra demographic pessimists that native peoples could survive if their adaptation was thoughtfully managed. While the population-measurement capacities of the colonial governments of Western Australia and New Zealand were still weak, missionaries pioneered the gathering of the data that enabled humanitarians to objectify natives as populations. This paper focuses on Francis Dart Fenton (in New Zealand), Florence Nightingale (in Britain), and Rosendo Salvado (in Western Australia) in the 1850s and 1860s. Their belief in the necessity of population statistics manifests the practical convergence of colonial humanitarianism with public health perspectives and with “the statistical movement” that had become influential in Britain in the 1830s. We draw attention to the materialism and environmentalism of these three quantifiers of natives, and to how native peoples were represented as governable through knowledge of their physical needs and vulnerabilities.

Scholars have long been attentive to the relationship between legal regimes and agrarian dispossession in the resource frontiers of the postcolonial world. The analytical problem of identifying how private firms use legal regimes to take control of land—whether for mining, plantations, or Special Economic Zones—now animates a new body of research seeking the historical antecedents for contemporary land grabs. In the case of colonial South Asia, existing scholarship has often tended to suggest that the law precedes processes of capital accumulation, and that colonial capital operated within the confines of definable, even if legally plural, institutional regimes, such as property rights and commercial law. This perspective suggests, if only implicitly, that capitalist firms prefer to work within formal frameworks of legality. In this article, I outline a different understanding of the place of law in colonial South Asia, which follows the formation of property law for coal at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that the discursive framing of coal's status as property emerged out of, rather than preceded, social and ecological displacements caused by a coal commodity boom after 1894. Reconstructing conflicts over coal-bearing agrarian land through civil court records and mining company property deeds, I demonstrate how the absence of coal property within the colonial legal archive was reassembled through a recursive conception of legality. This genealogy of law recovers the historical context for contemporary struggles over mining claims in India's coal region today.

The mid-nineteenth-century renaissance of interest in historical and comparative social and cultural studies issued in a rich variety of work ranging through religion, law, myth, language, kinship, art, politics—indeed, the whole sweep of human institutions. We see it as an intellectual movement given unity by a common resolve to bring time and space dimensions to humanistic inquiry, to replace analysis of abstract categories with explication of specified conditions of human affairs as outcomes of processes operating through time. Revolutionary zeal that encouraged an immediate reconstruction of society based on deduction from reasoned, timeless principle was countered with a view that the setting of human group life is always a going concern, shaped variously by temporal forces, and understandable only in its concrete forms. From this perspective the Austinian search for legal forms and the dry calculations of Benthamite utilitarianism had painted a false picture that did not get at the real stuff of social life.

In the spring of 1907, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Herbert Asquith, was asked in Parliament for his opinion on taxing the growing number of private automobiles in Great Britain. Such a measure, Asquith replied, would be an ‘almost ideal tax, because it is a tax on a luxury which is apt to degenerate into a nuisance’. This remark was typical of the British upper-class attitude toward the motor car in theearly decades of this century: it was unlikely that the automobile would become widely owned by the middle classes, and unthinkable that it could be owned by the lower classes. Such motoring as was to be done by men of humble station would be as chauffeurs and lorry drivers. The wealthy would continue to use their new self-propelled playthings for weekend pleasure trips in the country.

Schooling is now a routine part of childhood in Western Europe, but this has not, of course, always been the case. The historical process of incorporation into school systems was one which affected the children of some social groups earlier than others and which occurred earlier in some regions than in others. In Western Europe, the contrast between the Protestant North and the Catholic South has proven to be significant in schooling history as in so many other realms: in general the South was less literate and less schooled than the North apparently from the sixteenth century until the accomplishment of universal school attendance and literacy around the beginning of the twentieth century.

In the process of industrialization Western Europe went through a period of serious social tensions. For a while this phenomenon became of the utmost concern to all men engaged in socio-political thinking and action. In some countries one spoke - and sometimes still does - of “the social problem” or “the social question” in the singular to indicate its over-all importance.

Historians generally dislike lost causes. They seek to explain what happened, rather than what might have been, and have consequently neglected the story of political emigrations. Granted, the study of dmigres is full of methodological pitfalls for the unwary: biased accounts of past issues, outright forgeries of documentary evidence, personal recriminations that serve to distort political reality, and a pervasive mood of bitterness, acrimony, nostalgia, and endless hope. Yet it is an important story, not only because of its intrinsic merit as a political phenomenon worth studying, but also because of the effect that exiles have had both in their place of refuge and in their homeland when they have been able to return. He who would ignore the émigrés might do well to recall that the experience of exile helped fashion the political careers of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, as well as of Charles II and Louis XVIII.

The Book of Imaginary Beings, by the celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, appeared in 1969. This was the English translation of the revised and expanded second edition of an anthology of fantastical stories he had published two years before in association with Margarita Guerrero (El Libro de los seres imaginarios). According to the author, it was a “handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination,” a topic that was known to fascinate him. In fact, the success of Borges' work shows that such creatures appeared to hold as great a fascination for contemporary society as they had held over other societies many centuries before. Perhaps this brief evocation of Borges' interest in imaginary beings from other times and from all cultures—even if fantasies certainly do not hold an identical value in each historical period and the same significance in every culture—may help to demonstrate how mistaken it is to think that such ‘aberrations’ and ‘anomalies’ have entirely faded as ‘modernity’ has emerged. However, Borges did make it clear that the beings he was dealing with—whether the Indian elephant-headed god Ganesha or the monstrous Kujatha—were ‘imaginary,’ and he took care to distinguish them from other, let us say, ‘real’ entities. Such a clear demarcation has not always been feasible, and it is precisely the changing status of the ‘strange and marvelous’ that lies at the center of this essay.