This article examines the emergence of Jamshedpur, site of India's first steel plant and privately governed company town, as part of an unprecedented large-scale extraction of mineral resources at the turn of the twentieth century for the purpose of industrial development. It traces the protracted acquisition of land and dispossession of mainly adivasi (tribal) cultivators by the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO) from ca. 1900 to 1930. The company pursued a distinct strategy of obtaining short-term leases from princely states and zamindars (landowners), while simultaneously appealing to the legal apparatus of the colonial state to secure absolute tenurial rights. The uneven application of laws such as the Land Acquisition Act (1894) and the Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act (1908) allowed TISCO to become a quasi-sovereign power in eastern India, simultaneously acting as employer, landlord, and municipal government. Jamshedpur's continually anomalous legal status underlies the persistence of multiple, fragmented, and competing sovereignties in India, even as an ostensibly unified national economic state space emerged by the time of independence in 1947. More broadly, it suggests that the contours of the relationship between states and corporations, particularly in a postcolonial context, are determined both by preexisting political geographies and contingent legal struggles.

Palestine, under British mandatory rule since the end of the First World War, was an arena of confrontation between Arabs and Jews over land, immigration, and political power, as well as over place and position in the labor market. This article will deal with the split labor market of mandatoryPalestineand the actors within it. The analysis will make use of the split labormarket theory of Edna Bonacich. In her theory she posits a situation in whichtwo groups of labor, belonging to different ethnic and national origins, meet in the same labor market. The more advantageous ethnic group has been able, due to its past history and its more advantageous position within world capitalist development, to ensure a higher value for its labor but considers itself threatened by the presence of the less advantageous groups, whose labor has lower value and thus greater attraction to employers who aim to maximize their profits. The theory then goes on to develop the different ways in which cheaper labor might serve to displace and substitute higher-priced labor and the strategies pursued by the latter in recurring attempts to maintain its relative advantage.

The history, philosophy, sociology and even the science of science are by now thriving activities. This is in no way surprising; indeed if one examines the development of each of these approaches to the study of sciences, the surprising thing is that it emerged so comparatively recently. The history of science as an academic discipline tends to begin with a reference to Comte's grand scheme of the mid-nineteenth century, passing through Sarton's great pioneering work of the first half of the present century, largely embodied in the volumes of Isis (1913- ), founded, edited and in no small part written by Sarton himself. At present, so far as one can see, many historians of science are rethinking the great and fairly continuously progressive features of Sarton's account, and the emphasis is turning more and more to the discontinuities.

It has been nearly a decade since Linda Gordon published her influential review of the “new” feminist scholarship on the welfare state. Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in L. Gordon, ed., Women, the State and Welfare (Wisconsin, 1990). In the essay, Gordon traced the contours of the then-blossoming feminist literature on the welfare state and encouraged feminists to move beyond a critique of gender-blind welfare analyses to construct their own, less deterministic historiographies of state formation. In the last ten years, feminists have not only heeded this call but have largely surpassed it, developing a voluminous literature that now addresses gender and the welfare state. Feminist historians have written new origin stories to reveal how female reformers, motivated by both maternalism and professionalism, participated in the building of Western welfare states. For an excellent review of feminist work on maternalism and motherhood, see Lisa Brush, “Love, Toil, and Trouble: Motherhood and Feminist Politics,” Signs (1996), 21:21. For feminist analyses of maternalism and the origins of the welfare state, see Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (Oxford, 1991); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Harvard, 1992); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge, 1995); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (University of Illinois, 1994); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and Origins of Welfare States (Routledge, 1993); Gisella Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s (Routledge, 1991); Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in Nineteenth- Century United States (Yale, 1990); and Regina Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890–1945 (Yale, 1993). They have also unearthed the gendered scripts adhered to by male politicians, policy makers, and class-based movements. In addition, feminist social scientists have explicated the re/distributive outcomes of welfare states to illuminate how states allocate resources in gendered and racialized ways. For feminist analyses of the gendered underpinnings of state re/distributive practices, see Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minnesota, 1989); Linda Gordon and Nancy Fraser, “Dependency Demystified: Inscriptions of Power in a Keyword of the Welfare State,” Social Politics, 1:14–31; Virginia Sapiro, “The Gender Bias of American Social Policy,” Political Science Quarterly (1986), 101:221–38; Barbara Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workman's Compensation and Mothers' Aid,” in L. Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Wisconsin, 1990); and L. Bryson, Welfare and the State (Macmillan, 1992). For studies of the racialized undercurrents of state re/distribution, see Gwendolyn Mink, Wages of Motherhood (Cornell, 1994); Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (Oxford, 1994); and Eileen Boris, “The Racialized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States,” Social Politics, 2:16–80.

Tehran, 1934. Introducing his newest book, Mental Diseases, Dr. Muhammad-עAli Tutiyā hits a raw nerve. Iran's capital is abuzz with news about עAli Asghar Borujerdi. Earlier on that year, the man soon dubbed Asghar Qātel (the murderer) confessed to having had sexual intercourse and subsequently killed thirty-three adolescent boys. Born in 1893 in the Western Iranian town of Borujerd, at the age of eight he left with his mother and siblings for Karbalā, Iraq. Six years later, he moved on to Baghdad, and began to sexually abuse adolescents. Eventually, he began to murder them, according to his initial testimony in order to trick the police that were observing him. In 1933, after having taken twenty-five lives, he only escaped Baghdad and arrest by the skin of his teeth. Arriving in Tehran, he worked as porter and vegetable-seller, and took up residence in Bāgh-e Ferdous, a neighborhood in Tehran's poor popular south. He carried on with his deeds, killing eight boys, most of them homeless vagrants. The first bodies, heads severed, were found on 31 December 1933. Borujerdi was arrested once and released for lack of evidence, but in early March of 1934, the police detained him again, and this time he confessed. He was tried, convicted, and, after an unsuccessful appeal, was hung in front of an immense crowd in Tehran's Sepah Square on 26 June.

This article examines concepts of youth, maturity, and generations in nineteenth-century Ireland and Italy and perceived connections between young people and political and social unrest. I demonstrate that, rather than being consistent, the involvement of younger generations in radicalism was uneven, and varied significantly with historical contexts. I argue that the authorities frequently exaggerated associations between young people and radicalism as a subtle strategy of exclusion, as a means of downgrading the significance of collective action and portraying it as a criminal, emotional, or even recreational matter rather than a political one, a tendency that has often been reinforced in the historiography. Descriptions of youth and maturity should not be understood as merely reflections of age. They were not value-free, and served as indicators of individuals' social standing and political agency or lack thereof. Yet fighting in a rebellion offered an alternative to marriage, owning property, or education for the achievement of “manhood,” or adult status and political agency. The article also investigates how the Great Irish Famine shaped generational consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century through an analysis of the participants in nationalist and agrarian violence. In all, over four thousand participants in collective action in Ireland and Italy are examined.

This essay unravels the intertwined emergence of “Fordist” connections and conceptions of America in Iran during the 1920s. By focusing on the interplay of infrastructure and information, I use a Persian travelogue to chart the impact of motor transport that, in the wake of the First World War, connected a formerly isolated Iran to the Arab Mediterranean and thence to America. Compared to the extensive Levantine encounter with the Americas that from the 1870s generated an Arab diaspora and Arabic emigration literature from Buenos Aires to Detroit, the Iranian encounter with the United States was much later and more limited. This changed rapidly, however, with the opening of the “Nairn Way” and the importing of American automobiles, developments that tied Iran to the Levant at the very moment American strategists were coining the unitary spatial concept of a “Middle East.” In Iran, this conjunctural moment coincided with the rise of Riza Shah and the nationalist search for a third-power strategy to negate a century of Russian and British influence. Expanding the recent literature on Middle Eastern globalization, this essay uses ‘Abdullah Bahrami's 1926 travelogue Az Tihran ta Niyu Yurk (From Tehran to New York) to reconstruct what Iran's new nation-builders hoped to learn from the United States during the formative decade of U.S.-Iran relations. From behind the better-known story of petropolitics, Bahrami's travelogue captures the turning point when the United States first rose on the globalizing horizons of Iran's modernizing nationalists.

This article investigates how middle-aged to elderly Kurdish women in Turkey engage with large collections of Kurdish music recordings in their possession. Framing them as archives, women mobilize these collections as central elements in a larger, ongoing Kurdish project of historical critique, which seeks to resist hegemonic state narratives that have long denied and marginalized Kurdish voices. While recognizing the critical intervention such archives make, the article contends that, to be heard as “history” with a legitimate claim to authority, subaltern voices often have to rely on the very hegemonic forms, genres, and discourses they set out to challenge. This means that subaltern projects of historical critique walk a fine line between critique and complicity, an insight that nuances narratives that would approach subaltern voices predominantly from a perspective of resistance. At the same time, this article argues that a more complete picture of subaltern archives requires us to attend to the voices they contain not just as metaphors for resistance or political representation but also as acoustic objects that have social effects because of the way they sound. By outlining the affective qualities that voice recordings held for the Kurdish women who archived them, the article shows how their collections participated in carving out specific, gendered subject positions as well as forging a broader Kurdish sociality. Paying attention to history's “acoustic register” (Hunt 2008), this suggests, promises to open up perspectives on subaltern historiography that go beyond binary frameworks of resistance and domination, critique and complicity.

Most education in the pre-colonial Middle East and South Asia was inextricably permeated by religion, in that it relied heavily on study or memorization of religious scriptures and rituals for the purpose of training believers, or on the use of religious texts or stories to teach ostensibly secular subjects such as geography or history. Colonial penetration of these areas introduced a new model of Western education, in which the curriculum was dominated by material whose truth claims were not based on religious faith, and which were not taught through the medium of religious texts. Religion, if allowed at all, was confined to discrete classes on the topic. This marginalization or exclusion of religious material did not necessarily mean that the resulting education was inexorably secular: Gauri Viswanathan has demonstrated that British educators in India circumvented policies forbidding the teaching of Christianity in government schools by creating English literature courses designed “to convey the message of the Bible.” In contrast to its predecessors, however, Western-style education was based on the conceptualization of religion as a discrete subject separate from and incapable of shedding reliable light upon worldly matters, and on the premise that it was mastery of these worldly matters, rather than knowledge of sacred scriptures and rituals, that would bring students success. In this model, religion would be understood “as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions and practiced in one's spare time.”

I unpack the “potter's field” as an everyday practice and a category, especially as it operates in the material treatment of bodies as a mirror of life. I examine this space of “worthlessness” as it exists in liberal capitalism. From the potter's fields of São Paulo, Brazil, I consider how these are, in fact, mundane mass graves, made politically useful as a means to obscure important bodies alongside those who are, today, the subjects of terror. I then ask how the rise of the uncertified potter's field—a burial field for disposable bodies, not made legal by the state—is inseparable from recent historical and contemporary conditions of political abandonment. The uncertified field is made easy by a politics of abandonment, and becomes useful to state institutions as a material invocation of responsibility, interred elsewhere, while nonetheless advancing a larger logic of governance and political will in our times.

In most contexts, personal names function as identifiers and as a locus for identity. Therefore, names can be used to trace patterns of kinship, ancestry, and belonging. The social power of naming, however, and its capacity to shape the life course of the person named, becomes most evident when it has the opposite intent: to sever connections and injure. Naming in slave society was primarily practical, an essential first step in commodifying human beings so they could be removed from their roots and social networks, bought, sold, mortgaged, and adjudicated. Such practices have long been integral to processes of colonization and enslavement. This paper discusses the implications of naming practices in the context of slavery, focusing on the names given to enslaved Africans and their descendants through baptism in the Lutheran and Moravian churches in the Danish West Indies. Drawing on historiographical accounts and a detailed analysis of plantation and parish records from the island of St. Croix, we outline and contextualize these patterns and practices of naming. We examine the extent to which the adoption of European and Christian names can be read as an effort toward resistance and self-determination on the part of the enslaved. Our account is illuminated by details from the lives of three former slaves from the Danish West Indies.

One need not be an anthropologist or a cultural historian to remark that social dancing these days seems to isolate the individual in a trance-like self-absorption which virtually disconnects him from the world and even from his partner. Indeed, the dance of the day—like other art forms—is often a good reflection of the values of a given time and place. Today's developments, both in the dance and in society, provide more than the usual scholarly justification for looking back to one of the earliest manifestations of individualism and escape in the dance and its association with the values of liberty, equality and uncertainty which followed upon the French Revolution. The dance was the waltz; the dancers, at first, were the middle classes, soon to be joined by both upper and lower classes; the time and place are Central Europe, and soon the whole Western world, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

A marriage expresses a mutual recognition of some degree of shared identity. The wedding ceremony confirms these links and creates new ones, although to an extent variable with the culture and the specific case. The affinity can be between individuals acting for themselves, for families, or for larger social or national groups. At one extreme would be the temporary liason, stemming from personal whim or passion, between individuals who share little more than common acceptance of the culture which recognizes the form. A Las Vegas marriage followed by a quickie Mexican divorce, a Hindu Gāndharva marriage consummated without any ceremony, or a Shi'i mut 'ah (marriage of pleasure) of contractually stipulated length might typify this end of the continuum. At the other end would be the purely political marriage that links social groups, parties, or even nations together but which disregards the desires of the principals. Richard II's diplomatic marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, a Kulin Brahmin's ritual marriage with dozens of women, or Asaf al-Daula's apparently unconsummated marriage with Shams al-Nisā' Begum (discussed later) exemplifies this extreme. Between lie a diversity of forms within a variety of cultures.

If one were to survey social movements in the last decade that were inextricably linked to global socioeconomic processes, the significant social movements that have emerged in Islamic oil-producing countries could hardly escape notice. Since nine oil-exporting states possess Muslim majorities, there appears to be an objective relationship between the global consequences of the post–1973 oil-price revolution and the socioeconomic transformation of Muslim populations. Although most Muslim states experienced social movements in this period, it is clear that in the oil-producing Islamic countries, the particular social impact and institutional location of petroleum rents greatly intensified the disruption of urban social networks. Indeed, the cases of Shi‘ite Iran and Muslim northern Nigeria indicate how this disruptive element may have contributed to Islamic revolutionary movements which, though having quite distinct goals, ideologies, and social bases, remain inexplicable without analyzing the consequences of the petroleum boom on the relationship between state and society.

Following the American Revolution, the social foundation supporting a settled ministry and sustaining the Old World tradition of an established state church began to crumble, prompting Alexis de Tocqueville to observe that in the United States, “the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely intermingled that it is almost impossible to conceive of the one without the other.” Large numbers of ordinary Americans who had internalized egalitarian, anti-aristocratic attitudes while advancing the patriot cause began to search for and find spiritual meaning in evangelical forms of religious expression. Indeed, the revivals sweeping the northern and western states between the American Revolution and the Civil War have been described as “the Revolution at work in religion.”

The Nagy-Magyar Alföld, the Great Hungarian Plain, lies within the Carpathian crescent, between the last foothills of the Alps and the South Slavic and Transylvanian mountain ranges. The Danube and the Tisza meander slowly through it, carrying their muddy waters to the narrow passage of the Iron Gates. The landscape here—the wide horizons shimmering in the heat of summer with unreal outlines, the crossed well-poles like slanting T's, the endless fields alternately of wheat and maize, the alkali-rimmed lakes, the lack of trees, the occasional stretches of empty steppe with not a single human being in sight—is to anyone from the tree-clad mountain slopes across the Danube a startling contrast. The visitor will soon discover that the character of the region and the traditions of its people have combined in the course of history to create here unique social forms.