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.

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.

Officers in active military service engaged in administrative tasks in the civil service, in the management of economic enterprises, in farming estates, teaching, bank management and other “civilian” tasks are not an unusual phenomenon in countries where the military is the exclusive ruler, or a direct and active partner in the government. The number of officers in this category is increasing also in those countries where the military is only a latent and unofficial partner in the regulation of the different sectors of political, economic and social power. However, even in countries where it is excluded from power, the military as an organization (as opposed to individual officers) takes charge of services which in Western countries are regarded as the domain of the civilian administration, or of other civilian bodies. This issue has received only partial and incidental treatment in the literature devoted to the subject of modernization. The “infiltration” of various military branches into different sectors of society is generally explained, if the issue arises at all, in terms of the conflict preceding the coup, or through other political events. Although this method of explanation is perfectly legitimate, it does narrow the discussion to the political sphere. This results in the neglect of highly significant material for the analysis of what may be termed “improvised” processes of modernization and nation-building. “Improvisation”, in this context, means the utilization of unorthodox means and routes to accelerate the modernization process. Infiltration and usurpation of non-military roles by officers is a case in point, although one should acknowledge that modernization is not always desired by the “infiltrators”.

Questions of responsibility are central to the politics and metaphysics of history. This paper examines the creation of different histories from alternative formulations of personal and collective responsibility among urban Ndyuka Maroons in present-day Suriname. Tracing conflicting attempts to assign accountability for a senior man's sickness, I argue that a distinctly Ndyuka conception of history emerges from the dialectical relation between the material qualities of misfortunes and the practices Ndyuka use to affix responsibility. Ndyuka efforts to assuage history as embodied by ghosts and other spirits that seek revenge on corporate kin groups simultaneously use the symptoms of misfortune to make history and attempt to contain or deny the transmissibility of collective responsibility to future generations. Understanding this process demonstrates how distinct perceptions of historicity emerge from different conceptions of responsibility, and the extent to which intergenerational sociality is defined by conflicted attempts to redefine historical accountability as much as to acknowledge it.

Durable Inequality is a very ambitious work of social theory by one of our foremost sociologists. In many ways, it builds upon the grand master theorists of the nineteenth century through a language of the present. It is like the more structuralist versions of Marx. For Marx, however, class relations and class inequality have different dynamics and different characteristics, depending on historically variable modes of production. For Tilly, inequality refers to relations between paired and unequal categories that have differential access to value- producing resources. And for Tilly, again in contrast to Marx, categorical inequality is perpetuated—is durable—in large measure because of various specified organizational properties and dynamics. There are no contradictions for Tilly, no dynamics of change that are internal to his model or vary by the specific historical conditions that one is attempting to analyze. This is, indeed, surprising for a scholar so identified with historical sociology. In Tilly's formulation, the characteristics and dynamics through which categorical inequality creates durable inequality appears transhistorical. It is not inequality under capitalism that seems to be Tilly's focus, but, rather, a universal theory of inequality across time.

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.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. government paid the economics department at the University of Chicago, known for its advocacy of free markets and monetarism, to train Chilean graduate students. These students became known as the “Chicago Boys,” who implemented the first and most famous neoliberal experiment in Chile after 1973. Peruvian, Mexican, and other Latin American economics students followed a similar path and advocated a turn to neoliberal policies in their own countries. The Chicago Boys narrative has become an origin story for global neoliberalism. However, the focus on this narrative has obscured other transnational networks whose ideas possess certain superficial, but misleading, similarities with neoliberalism. I examine Chilean and Peruvian engagements with Yugoslavia's unique form of socialism, its worker self-management socialism, which was part of a worldwide discussion of anti-authoritarian socialism. I first introduce the Yugoslav socialist model that inspired those in Chile and Peru. I then examine socialist discussions in Chile and Peru that called for decentralized, democratic socialism and looked to Yugoslavia for advice. I conclude by examining the 1990s postponement of socialism in the name of a very narrow democracy and realization of neoliberalism. The Chicago Boys story assumes the easy global victory of neoliberalism and erases what was at stake in the 1988–1994 period: radically democratic socialism on a global scale.

Shortly before Vasco da Gama returned to Lisbon in September 1499 from his great voyage to India, a Florentine merchant in the Portuguese capital reported troubling rumors that ‘certain vessels of white Christians’ had visited the port of Calicut on the Malabar coast only a couple of generations previously. If true, this would mean that some other European power had beaten Portugal in its long search for a maritime route to the Indies. After speculating that the mysterious mariners were Germans (although ‘it seems to me that we should have some notice about them’) or Russians (‘if they have a port there’), the merchant concluded that ‘on the arrival of the captain [da Gama] we may learn who these people are.’

The diffusion of British institutions, ideas, and values and the spread of the English language and of British peoples are among the major events in modern history. The study of the effects of this diffusion in the New World, Africa, and Asia in shaping political institutions in these regions has attracted many scholars, but the systematic and analytic study of the British themselves and of the societies and cultures they built overseas in their African and Asian colonies has thus far been neglected, except in the memoir and travel literature.

In recent years historians and sociologists alike have given increasing attention to the relationship between education and social structure in France. Louis Althusser has argued that the French educational system was designed to preserve elites. Michel Crozier concluded that the system prevented a too rapid mobility that would upset the status-quo and that ‘graduates [of grandes é'coles] have a de facto monopoly on the top brackets of the Civil Service, the universities, and medicine, and decisive advantages in entering most professions and many industrial organizations’.

Traditional European values of noncapitalist wealth preferred “rent to profit, security to risk, tradition to innovation, and, in terms of personal goals, gentility to entrepreneurial skill and renown.” Both in the dynamic, expansive sector of the international economy and in marginal, “retrograde” economies, nonpecuniary values based upon kin, custom, religion, law, and politics openly contradicted the utilitarian assumptions of our contemporary economic theory, spurned reinvestment, and worked against development. How can we balance such premodern conceptions with economic forces that may have been imperfectly understood or not even perceived and, at the same time, give both early modern rationale and economic rationality a place in our descriptions of the old order in Europe? In other words, how can we account for the role of culture in economic decision making?

This paper describes the landmarks of Western education in India, the content of this education, the nature of social and political changes which resulted or were furthered by this education, the groups that imparted and the groups that received this education, and finally it compares the Indian with the Chinese and to some extent with the Japanese experience.

“Political capitalism” is a term frequently deployed in analyses of the economic systems that emerged in the former Soviet block after the implosion of communist autocracy. This crisp, evocative phrase effectively expresses the shared feeling that the transmogrifications of the formerly “planned economies” did not lead to the desired consolidation of a “normal” capitalism. Many would say that by the mid-2000s several East European countries had reached a state approximating “Western ordinariness.” But even they would agree that, at least during the first dozen years of postcommunist changes, the somewhat mysterious dynamics shaping postcommunist “economic domains” were marred by persisting “anomalies,” enduring “atavisms,” and recurring “distortions” which originated in the realm of “politics.” One cannot in good faith dispute that there was something “political” about the way the idiosyncratic postcommunist economies functioned throughout the 1990s.

This paper examines the healing practice of strava, which translates as “great fear.” With a long oral history in Bosnia, it has become particularly popular since the end of socialism and the 1990s war. This postsocialist therapy, informed by gifting dispositions, is a bustling business that intervenes into disorders that people commonly relate to the new economy. Strava treatment presupposes distance, since the therapist rarely touches the bodies at hand, and concerned intimates commonly arranged interventions in a patient's absence. Inspired by Bruno Latour's advice to expand our notion of agency in directions indicated by those we study, I depart from the earlier accounts of strava as a traditional and symbolic folk practice. Instead, I explore its claims to efficacy in competition with psycho-pharmaceutical treatments of anxiety and depression in contemporary Bosnia. Of particular interest is a commonplace therapeutic blunder—the accidental mixing of “fears” water and Coke, which therapists shrug off as inconsequential. This points to a model of action best explored outside the pragmatics of science studies, employing insights gained from a rereading of Mauss', Tylor's, and Frazer's classic theories of sympathetic magic. I examine what makes strava water—carefully prepared with prayers and handled by the therapist's and patient's wishing breaths—ritually potent, while Coke remains ineffectual. I show that this therapy is the domain of wishing, which does not interrupt a sphere of new political economy, but nevertheless intervenes in the bodies that suffer from it, and effectively redraws the limits of the social.

From the middle of the nineteenth century until recently, the only acceptable way to discuss political developments in early modern Europe was in terms of the rise of absolutism. “Absolute monarchy” was the political theory of early modern states formulated by ideologues of their respective regimes. Later historians accepted this ideology as the way these monarchies operated and formulated a model called “absolutism,” which posits a monarch who accrues power at the expense of the nobility. During the last three decades, however, a number of historians, whose studies focus on elite politics, have undermined this historiographical model. Through their archival research on the operation of regimes in early modern Europe, these historians have instead described an interlocking relationship between ruler and nobility in which the ruler acted as legitimizer of the nobility and adjudicator of differences among its members.Adamson has described the emerging pattern of understanding this way: “At the most ‘absolutist' of courts, the exercise of authority was always in some sense a negotiation founded, in the final analysis, upon the community of interest between the crown and the noble elites. The court, far from being an instrument whereby monarchs could weaken the nobility, as was once supposed, provided the forum in which that compact could be subjected to a regular process of revision and renegotiation.” John Adamson, “The Making of the Ancien-Régime Court 1500–1700,” in The Princely Courts of Europe 1500–1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 39. Then, in a strongly argued book, The Myth of Absolutism, Nicholas Henshall delivered what many specialists consider to be the coup de grâce to the absolutism model as a worthwhile way of discussing early modern European governments.Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London: Longman, 1992). See also Henshall “The Myth of Absolutism,” History Today 42 (June 1992): 40–47. He pointed out that “absolutism” is a term coined in 1823 to apply to the contemporary ruler Ferdinand VII of Spain, and argued that it is an anachronism for us to apply it to earlier centuries.

This article investigates the socio-discursive processes that have enabled the emergence and maintenance of pilgrimage practice by examining the rising popularity of the Ḥaḍramawt valley of southern Yemen as a pilgrimage destination for Indonesian Muslims. Pilgrimage to Ḥaḍramawt mainly revolves around visiting the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī (a group of Ḥaḍramīs who claim direct descent from the Prophet Muḥammad) Sufi saints and scholars scattered around the valley. Moving away from ritual analysis, I examine the roles of various actors involved in the production and consumption of pilgrimage. I analyze pilgrimage as a poetic project that frames travel as a transformative process. As a project, pilgrimage can be described as poetic because it hinges on the construction of multiple chronotopes that are juxtaposed, compared, contrasted, and assembled into meaningful alignments. The actors discussed are involved in producing chronotopes of Ḥaḍramawt as a spiritually idealized place, which are made to resonate with mass-mediated chronotopes of idealized Islam circulating among Indonesian Muslims, and contrasted with chronotopes of the modern world. Framed by such a poetic mediation, pilgrims comprehend their actual travel to Ḥaḍramawt as a cross-chronotopic movement that they believe transforms their own selves. The article observes the various mechanisms of attraction and seduction at work in pilgrimage practice, while demonstrating the structural similarities between pilgrimage and other forms of tourism.

Historians have long recognized that the large body of periodical literature surviving from the eighteenth century, along with the smaller amount preserved from the seventeenth century, is an important source of insight into the early development of modern society in the West. Newspapers and other periodicals—magazines, reviews, and a miscellany of other publications difficult to characterize precisely—provided eighteenth-century readers with fundamental information about their world and with news of the ways in which it was changing. It is not surprising that this voluminous printed record also yields evidence to those seeking to understand that world from the vantage point of a subsequent era.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the Middle East and North Africa first began to attract the sustained attention of European imperialism and colonialism, Arab, Ottoman Turkish, and Iranian polities began a protracted experiment with army modernization. These decades saw a mania in the Middle East for the import of European methods of military organization and techniques of warfare. Everywhere, in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Egypt, and Iran, nizam-i jadid (new order) regiments sprang up, sometimes on the ruins of older military formations, sometimes alongside them, unleashing a process of military-led modernization that was to characterize state-building projects throughout the region until well into the twentieth century. The ruling dynasties in these regions embarked on army reform in a desperate effort to strengthen their defensive capacity, and to resist growing European hegemony and direct or indirect control by imitating European methods of military organization and warfare. Almost every indigenous ruler who succeeded in evading or warding off direct European control, from the sultans of pre-Protectorate Morocco in the west to the shahs of the Qajar dynasty in Iran in the east, invited European officers, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as formal missions, to assist with building a modern army. With the help of these officers, Middle Eastern rulers thus sought to appropriate the secrets of European power.

Venice faced serious political and economic setbacks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The future of the Eternal Republic seemed bleak when, in 1509, nearly bankrupt, her commercial empire in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean slipping away, Venice's army was routed at Agnadello by the forces of the League of Cambrai. Even the elements seemed to have turned against Venice around this time, visiting the city with earthquake, storm, flood, famine, and the plague. Well might the prominent banker Girolamo Priuli have feared that “great God has permitted and ordered this severe ruin of the Venetian Empire”