How do we explain adequately the relative success or failure of complex political phenomena such as democratization? In the battle between conceptual and explanatory parsimony, on the one hand, and rich, thick description on the other, social scientists often fall into traps that obscure more complete explanations for our cases from the portfolio of the possible. For example, we often unconsciously generalize from the cases we know best. In single case studies, we can fail to recognize the explanations that don't shine brightly or bark loudly. More generally, we acquire a habit of thinking that orders causality in particular ways for each of us, a result both of an empirical reliance on our own familiar cases, and the conceptual and theoretical conclusions we have generalized consciously or unconsciously from those cases. In this article, we are self-consciously engaged in two tasks: (1) comparing divergent outcomes of democratization in otherwise fairly similar cases—Benin and the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville); and (2) proposing three possible primary causal hypotheses for the successful (Benin) and failed (Congo) outcomes.

Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an immense body of morality literature emerged in the Ottoman Empire as part of a widespread turn to piety. This article draws upon the anthropology of Islamic revival and secularism to reassess this literature's importance and propose a new view of the history of political thought in the empire. It does so through a close analysis of a fundamental concept of Ottoman political life: “naṣīḥat, ” or “advice.” Historians have used “advice books” to counter the presumption that the Ottoman Empire declined after the sixteenth century, but in doing so they have overlooked the concept's broader meaning as “morally corrective criticism.” I analyze two competing visions of naṣīḥat at the turn of the eighteenth century to reveal how the concept was deployed to politically transform the empire by reforming its subjects’ morality. One was a campaign by the chief jurist Feyżullah Efendi to educate every Muslim in the basic tenets of Islam. The other was a wildly popular “advice book” written by the poet Nābī to his son that both explicates a new moral code and declares the empire's government and institutions illegitimate. Both transformed politics by requiring that all subjects be responsible moral, and therefore political, actors. The pietistic turn, I argue, turned domestic spaces into political battlegrounds and ultimately created new, individualistic political subjectivities. This, though, requires challenging functionalist conceptions of the relationship between religion and politics and the secularist inclination among historians to relegate morality to the private sphere.

Mayas from Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico, narrate strikingly similar stories that are part of their oral tradition. These similarities reflect the fact that Mayas from both areas share a common cultural tradition dating to pre-Hispanic times and a basic pattern of beliefs central to the Mesoamerican cultural complex. At the same time, the stories contain notable differences that can be explained historically and traced both to pre-Hispanic or post-Hispanic developments as they combined with ecological conditions. In this study, we compare the present expression of a series of Earth Lord accounts and explain interesting differences that we observed between two groups of Maya Indians. Our results suggest that the differences can be traced to the diverse ways by which peasants are incorporated at various degrees into the capitalist system, mainly through trade or through wage labor or combinations of these with other forms of production.

I During the 1970s, residents in Scotland and the Basque region of Spain began to vote in large numbers for nationalist candidates. Almost overnight the Scottish National Party and a collection of three Basque parties became important electoral forces, expanding their shares in general elections by more than 15 percent of all ballots cast (see Tables 1 and 2).

The time seemed propitious for the establishment of a government of law in Serbia at the beginning of 1830. Between the end of 1828 and the autumn of 1830 Prince Miloš of Serbia created a so-called “legislative commission” to translate the Code Napoléon into Serbian and codify the laws and customs of the country. In January 1830 he solemnly advised a great national assembly that he had obtained an imperial edict from the Sultan ending all direct obligations of Serbian peasants to their former Turkish lords, guaranteeing Ottoman recognition of Serbian autonomy in most matters of internal administration, and offering Serbia the prospect of territorial aggrandizement, as well as the express right to institute schools, courts, and a governmental administration of her own. Shortly thereafter the Serbian envoys to St. Petersburg returned to Serbia and made it known that the Tsar-Protector had supposedly expressed the view that every state should have an “organic charter”. The able and enlightened Count Paul Kiselev, Russian Governor of the Rumanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, had moreover just endowed these provinces with “Organic Statutes”

Before the 1915 Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, the region of Van, in contemporary southeastern Turkey, held hundreds of active Armenian churches and monasteries. After the destruction of the Armenian community, these ruined structures took on new afterlives as they became part of the evolving environments and communities around them. These ruined spaces play a role in the everyday lives of the people who live among them and shape their historical understandings and relationships with the local history and geography. I interrogate the afterlives of one abandoned monastery and examine how local Kurds imagine, narrate, and enact the politics of the past and the present through that space of material ruin. I demonstrate how the history of the Armenian Genocide and ongoing state violence against the Kurdish community are intricately linked, highlight the continuation of violence over the past century, and deconstruct notions of ahistorical victims and perpetrators. This article builds on a critical approach to ruins as it traces how histories of destruction and spaces of material ruin are revisited and reinterpreted by those whose lives continue to be shaped by processes of ruination. It demonstrates how ruins created through violent histories become spaces for articulating alternative senses of history and crafting possible futures.

In one chapter of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson draws attention to an obvious, yet seldom remarked, contrast between the anticolonial nationalist movements in the prewar Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. This contrast concerns not class, ideology, or politics but ethnicity and geography. In the Dutch colony, the Indonesian nationalist movement sought to unite all of the scattered islands and diverse ethnic groups into a single Indonesian nation based upon the ambiguous principle of unity in diversity. In Indochina, by contrast, existing ethnogeographic divisions were not abridged by the common reaction against French colonialism; and the colony ultimately disintegrated into the separate nations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The Indonesian and Indochinese responses to colonialism represent examples of what I will call integrative and exclusive nationalism, respectively.

While the colonial and contemporary economy of Bengal's Himalayan foothills is most often associated with the tea plantations of Darjeeling and the Dooars, the small farms of nearby Kalimpong were also a key space in which colonial agents and missionaries worked to “settle” the mountainous terrain. Focused on Kalimpong, this article traces the trajectory of one technology of settlement, agricultural extension, from the late 1880s to the early 1940s. It highlights agricultural extension's racialized and gendered politics, as well as its implication in a long-term project that merged material (i.e., food) provision with social reproduction (i.e., childrearing, kin-making). Agricultural extension created a patchwork of relatively biodiverse small farms that historical and contemporary accounts describe as a “green belt”: a socio-ecological outside to the plantation monocultures that dominate the hills. British governors attempted to use non-plantation space for multiple ends. In this sense, their work might be termed “biopolitical,” in that it was geared toward supporting and amplifying the life chances of certain human bodies and certain botanical species. Through a series of experiments, colonial agents made calculated choices about which of these forms of life should be made to flourish, and which might be allowed to perish. Importantly, settlement, as a set of intertwined projects, did not unfold in a coherent or deliberately sequential manner. Settlement was, and continues to be, a sedimentary process.

What little has been written about Chinese immigrants in the British Empire has focused mainly on laborers, commonly known as “coolies,” and their roles in imperial society, culture, and industry. Chinese commercial immigrants, though they loomed large in public dialogues about race, migration, and empire, have been virtually ignored. This article examines how such immigrants were represented, and how two prominent individuals represented themselves, in London and metropolitan Australia, respectively, during a high tide of British imperialism and Chinese global migration. By the 1920s, the ardent pro-British sentiment expressed by Mei Quong Tart, the de facto representative of the Chinese merchant class in Australia, had been superseded by the anti-colonial critique of Lao She, one of China's foremost modern novelists. Lao She's semi-autobiographical depiction of Chinese life in London condemned the violent and emasculating character of British imperialism, while also excoriating Chinese society's failure to modernize, cohere as a nation, and overcome internecine class conflicts. Both authors were concerned with social relations between Chinese men and white British women, as were British commentators throughout this period, and with differentiating themselves from laboring Chinese immigrants. Contrary to Stuart Hall's famous assertion that “race is the modality through which class is lived,” for these Chinese commercial immigrants class and gender proved to be more essential than were crude concepts of race to their experiences and self-identification, and ultimately to British society's rejection of their attempts to assimilate.

In this essay I propose to examine an hypothesis about dowry payments in the light of certain evidence from Ireland. The sources of this evidence are, first, my own data collected during fieldwork in the small community of Beaufort, County Kerry, Ireland, and, second, the work of writers who have studied the question of dowry payment in Ireland, notably Conrad M. Arensberg, Solon T. Kimball, and K. H. Connell. The intent here is to draw attention to some of the deficiencies in Jack Goody's definition and discussion of dowry payments, and to offer alternatives to them. In particular I shall argue that Goody's discussion of dowry is centrally flawed by a discrepancy between the generality of the variables he uses to explain the geographical distribution of the practice, and the specificity of his definition of it. It is the unwarranted detail involved in the latter that leads him to obscure certain crucial variations within dowry systems more broadly defined, and to confuse the issue of the relationship between dowry and bride wealth.

The terms poruka (suretyship or collective responsibility) and poruchnik (surety, guarantor) rarely appear in pre-Mongol Russian texts. Formal poruka seems to have expanded enormously only after the Mongol invasion. The institution clearly flourished in Muscovite Russia, where q“surety bonds” (poruchnye zapisi) were drawn up to cover debts and contractual obligations, military and administrative service, payment of fiscal levies, obligatory labor, trial procedure, personal conduct, public safety, political allegiance—and even matters of conscience and orthodoxy (“spiritual suretyship”). In all those areas, individuals or groups of people could, as “sureties,” be held responsible for the conduct of others, the “principals.” Sureties faced harsh penalties—fines, forced labor, corporal punishment, and worse—for their principals' misconduct or failure to fulfill certain obligations.

The experience of modernity is one that cuts across national boundaries. Regardless of where it occurs, modernization—defined here as the nexus of changes that includes technological innovation, economic rationalization, demographic change, the bureaucratization of the state, and the triumph of science—has certain inevitable consequences. To live in a modern society means to live in a constantly changing world, in which the forces of modernity have dissolved old forms of community, altered traditional notions of work, undermined social hierarchies, produced new social spaces, and transformed the sights, sounds, and even smells of everyday life. Modernization also engenders its own response. Societies in the throes of rapid modernization inevitably have their critics: individuals who for a variety of reasons object to the myriad of changes that accompany this process. Recoiling from the present, these antimodernists take refuge in an often idealized past, longing for what they believe to be a simpler, purer way of life.

In a provocatively entitled article, “Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case,” Professor G. William Skinner has raised a number of important issues regarding the closed corporate and open peasant community types first formulated by Eric Wolf (1955, 1957). Skinner questions Wolfs assumption (1957: 8) that closed corporate communities developed in areas where society became dualized “…into a dominant entrepreneurial sector and a dominated sector of native peasants,” whereas open peasant communities arose in the new, market-production oriented settlements budded off from Europe “ …in response to the rising demand for cash crops which accompanied the development of capitalism in Europe” (Wolf, 1955: 462).

A large body of research conducted over a period of many years has demonstrated the enormous contribution that Scottish thought made to early America. Curiously enough, the evidence for this important influence accumulated gradually without attracting widespread attention until 1978, when Garry Wills published a book on the Declaration of Independence, orienting that document within the context of Scottish thinking. All of a sudden, eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy was being discussed in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and all the major relevant professional journals. Wills' work aroused a storm of controversy, and by now it appears certain that his discussion of the philosophical issues underlying the Declaration was garbled. Nevertheless, his book proved to be a landmark of a certain kind: It focused attention on the relevance of the Scottish Enlightenment to the American Revolutionary generation. Sometimes a forceful statement, even if wrong, can have a constructive effect, and so it seems to have been with Garry Wills's account, Inventing America.

As demonstrated by the above lyrics, the Shakers (known officially as the “United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing”) were not favorably disposed toward the bonds of marriage, family, and kinship. Started as a Quaker splinter group under the charismatic leadership of Ann Lee in Manchester, they emigrated to the United States, gathered further adherents there, and became a communal sect in 1787. Within the next sixty years, they grew to more than 4,000 members in sixteen villages in New England and the Midwest.Stein 1992:87–89. True to their view of God as androgynous, and their founder as the female equivalent of Jesus Christ, women had a comparatively strong position in the sect, and there were equal numbers of male and female office holders on all hierarchy levels.The question of how much gender equality existed among the Shakers is subject to some debate. The division of labor as well as many gender stereotypes remained conventional (Brewer 1992), and after the death of the initial leaders Ann Lee and Lucy Wright, male members dominated the leadership (Stein 1992:132–33, Brewer 1986:51) until they became a small minority in the later years (Stein 1992:339). Brewer concludes that true gender equality was not achieved, nor even aimed at (1992). Compared to their female contemporaries, however, “Shakeresses” were able to keep their private lives free from male interference to a considerable degree (Humez 1991). Besides, male Shaker complaints about “pettycoat government” do not only suggest a patriarchal striving for power, as Humez argues (1991), but also the imperfect realization of these tendencies. Female Shakers also made important contributions to the early women's rights movement (Stein 1992:258–68, 310–12). Genders, however, were strictly separated, and celibacy was obligatory in the “gospel relations” between members.Brewer 1986; Stein 1992.

This paper examines convergence theory in relation to welfare-the institutional pattern of a society concerned with meeting needs. In contemporary industrial societies needs are met through a variety of patterns, viz. social services, tax rebates, fringe benefits provided by enterprises, mutual-aid, and voluntary and charitable assistance. The question is whether in the course of transition from early to advanced industrialization, Western and communist societies have become more alike in respect of such institutional patterns.1 The proposition has been examined in relation to evidence drawn from one communist and one Western country and the underlying theory criticised in the light of evi-dence.

The break-up of empires was the most profound geo-political phenomenon of the twentieth century. In 1900, except in the Western Hemisphere, most of the world's people lived in polities which readily described themselves as empires. These polities were territorially vast, or at least far-flung, and each of them ruled a multitude of peoples who differed enormously in the usual markers of ethnicity such as language, religion, and culture. Over the course of a century, however, most of these empires disappeared. The territorial empires of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans fell apart in the aftermath of the First World War, the colonial empires of the Germans, British, Americans, Dutch, French, Belgians, Spanish, and Portuguese gave way to a combination of nationalist and international pressures, the wartime conquests of Germany, Japan, and Italy came to nothing, and finally the Soviet Union fragmented into a multitude of new, independent states at the end of the Cold War. Smaller polities such as Yugoslavia and Ethiopia fractured into still smaller ones.

Between 1895 and 1945 Japan assembled one of the largest empires in modern world history. It vanished abruptly in the summer of 1945 at the end of the Second World War, and seemed to leave no trace in public consciousness. Historians, too, have portrayed postwar Japan as characterized by a virtual erasure of the imperial past. This article draws on recent scholarship to argue that things were more complicated than that. While references to the imperial past indeed dwindled after about 1960, immediate forgetting did not exhaust the reactions by individuals and interest groups. Some social milieus experienced the dissolution of the empire much more profoundly than official discourse would suggest. Since the mid-1990s, Japan's imperial past has reemerged as a major field of historical inquiry and a more general concern in public debate. In this article I situate the dialectic of remembering and forgetting within larger processes and transformations of the postwar order in East Asia, in particular the American occupation and the emergence of the Cold War.

In primitive and nonindustrialized societies the typical (and in many cases, the exclusive) tasks of religious elites have revolved chiefly around the creation, modification, and maintenance of the symbolic universe of society. Such work invariably implied privilege and various kinds and degrees of political power. But with the expansion of the modern world order, the situation of religious elites has altered dramatically. For one, religious-knowledge workers make up a very small percentage of the ranks of a much larger knowledge sector. For example, while the percentage of religious-knowledge workers (including clergy) relative to the entire economically active population in the United States has remained relatively constant since 1870, the percentage of religious workers to the knowledge workers has declined by one half in the period between 1950 and 1970—a period of dramatic growth of the knowledge sector (see Table 1). By 1970, the percentage of religious-knowledge workers to knowledge workers generally had shrunk to one sixth of its proportionate size a century earlier. Between 1970 and 1984, this proportion has leveled off somewhat. In Western Europe and Japan the same patterns have become firmly established as well.