The impact of Henry George's land value taxation theory was nothing less than global in scope, and his epochal Progress and Poverty – first published in 1879 – gained wider fame than any other political or socio-economic treatise emanating from an American pen. While George's doctrine was essentially a product of of his experience in California during the land-grabbing 60's and 70's, the most pervasive influence of the San Francisco sage was not manifested at home, but in Europe, Australasia and other distant places.

It is with some aspects of this remarkable diffusion of Georgeism during the latter part of the 19th century that this study is concerned. In particular, we would like to examine the circumstances under which this ideological stimulus was transmitted and received in such divergent settings as England, China and Japan. First we will trace the history of the Georgeist influence in each of these countries and then compare their respective patterns of development.

The historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1405), in his Muqaddimah (Introduction to history), explained historical change and the succession of dynasties as a function of the interactions between nomadic culture and urban civilization. His major contribution is usually considered to be his analysis of the correlation between ‘asabiyya, social cohesion or group feeling, and political power. He argued that the strong group feeling of tribal peoples enabled them to conquer urbanized regions and build regimes and civilizations, but that these conquests were undone by the tribes' gradual loss of ‘asabiyya in the urban setting, leading to new conquests by tribal peoples still strong in desert cohesiveness. Although power was the basis of rulership and royal authority was established through military might, the glue that held societies together was ‘asabiyya, based on kinship and religion and stronger in tribal than in urban society. Conquerors with strong group feeling could create greater and longer-lasting empires because they fielded larger armies and retained their own cultural dynamism for a longer time, and thus were able to defeat their rivals. Conquerors whose social cohesion was weak were soon overcome by the civilization of the conquered and gave way to a new conquering group. Strong group cohesion would also allow royal authority to pass to a second branch of the ruling family if the first was weakened, perpetuating its dominion. The ruler and his army were supported by the wealth of conquest, and returned the people's taxes in the form of gifts and public works. They would be successful only so long as they remained just; as the rulers' level of luxury increased so did their level of exploitation, and injustice soon produced division and “the ruin of civilization.”

During the last week of July, the people of the lower Luapula Valley in northern Zambia gather in the village of Mwansabombwe to celebrate their Lunda traditions and their paramount, Mwata Kazembe. For days prior to the main event, pubs serve bottled beer, much of it imported from nearby Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to quench the thirst of guests who have arrived in the hot, dusty village; women from different village sections deliver pots of millet beer to Mwata Kazembe's palace; and the youth organize special sports competitions and cultural events. Toward the weekend when the main festivities are to take place provincial, and on occasion national political and military dignitaries dressed in their suits and ties arrive. On Saturday afternoon, following the performance of certain rituals in the morning, chiefs, headmen, state dignitaries, and the villagers crowd together in a stadium on the outskirts of Mwansabombwe. A dignitary delivers a speech that highlights the importance of culture and tradition for progress, development, and national well-being. Listening to the national leadership's calls for the preservation of these traditions are chiefs and headman, who appear in the traditional Lunda garb of long imikonso skirts (sing. umukonso), leather inshipo belts and ututasa crowns (sing. akatasa). After the speeches, on the instruction of Mwata Kazembe, selected aristocrats and members of the royal family dance. The day's events culminate in Mwata Kazembe performing the Lunda dance of conquest, the Mutomboko.

Studies of European colonialism have long documented how colonial states served as incubators of nationhood, yet the literature has limited its analytic scope largely to the encounters and ethnic mixings that took place within the territorial boundaries of colonies. This article examines a hitherto understudied phenomenon, the colonial state's trans-border engagement with its subjects who left the territorial unit of the colony and its impact on the contested development of diasporic nationhood. My empirical focus is the shifting trajectories of the classification struggles over Korean migrants in Manchuria during Japan's occupation of Korea. I identify the tumultuous and uneven development of specific legal, organizational, and bureaucratic infrastructures that helped the colonial state extend its trans-border reach and define and identify these migrants as “its own,” often against suspicion, sabotage, hostility, and resistance on the part of other states, indigenous populations, or migrants themselves. I argue that the colonial state's extensive and intensive transborder engagement provided a critical institutional scaffolding for the imagined community of the Korean nation, which came to be conceived as transcending the geographical boundary of the colony. This article contributes to the comparative studies of empire, migration, diaspora, and nationhood formation by challenging the prevalent sedentary bias of the existing literature, by elucidating the critical infrastructural underpinning of the formation of diasporic nationhood, and by extending the horizon of comparison to the political dynamics and long-term ramifications engendered by the migration of, not only metropolitan settlers, but also colonial subjects, within and beyond the ambit of the empire.

This article discusses the changing relationship between Kurdish bandits and the Ottoman and Turkish states. Considerable research has been conducted on the impact of state formation on the establishment and maintenance of a monopoly of violence. But little is known about the state's use of outlaws for various security tasks. I address this hiatus and focus on the ebb and flow of Kurdish chieftains' relations to the state. Although these states followed consistent policies of disarmament and pacification, in periods of crisis, such as war, this changed as they tried to use the outlaws for their own purposes. I draw on previously untapped Ottoman and Western sources to portray the experience of one group of Kurdish tribal outlaws who found themselves at times diametrically opposed to the state, but in other times in accord with it.

As a major socio-political doctrine in the industrializing West, Marxism has had great impact on die research and theory of political sociology and behavioral political science. Particularly, a great deal of research energy has been expended on establishing the nature and degree of the relationship between social class and political partisanship in Western democracies.

In Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault characterizes the permanent, conflictual relationship that exists “between the two groups that constitute the social body and shape the State [as] in fact one of … permanent warfare” (2003: 88). Foucault argues that acknowledging that “race wars” constitute the substructure of the state enables a new conception of power, one that is simultaneously implicated in knowledge regarding the source of that power: re-conceptualizing the bases of power also demands a shift in knowledge practices. This problem (of power/knowledge) was administrative/managerial from the start: it constituted the conditions of possibility for the exercise of sovereign power, and was itself sovereign-like. “The administration allows the king to rule the country at will, and subject to no restrictions. And conversely, the administration rules the king thanks to the quality and nature of the knowledge it forces upon him” (ibid.: 128–29). Foucault asserts that historical knowledge is produced at precisely this juncture, as a form of counter-knowledge that is the outgrowth of a race war or class war, in which the nobility seek to defend society—their society—from new challengers, “the people,” for example, as well as from the sovereign himself. Thus, modern history germinated as a form of knowledge against absolutist sovereign power, but it was grafted onto the edifice of the state to buttress the sovereign's threatened legitimacy. Thus, “From 1760 onward we see the emergence of institutions that were roughly the equivalent of a ministry of history” (2003: 130 ff).

A significant paradox of the missionary endeavor in many parts of Africa, as elsewhere, is the preponderance of female adherents to Christianity, despite concerted efforts by most mainstream missionary groups to convert men.Theoretical or comparative studies of missionization, conversion, or religious experience and change which have informed this article include Beidelman (1974), Etherington (1977), King (1995), Holden (1983), Bowie (1993), Rafael (1993), Blakeley, Van Beek and Thomson (1994), Swatos (1994), Shaw (1995), Kipp (1995), and Spear and Kimambo (1999). “Again and again in a mission history,” notes Adrian Hastings, “the early significant baptisms were mostly of women” (Hastings 1993:112).In her history of Christianity in Africa, Elizabeth Isichei (1995) corroborates Hastings' findings, as does much of the ethnographic and historical literature on missionization in Africa (e.g. Barrett 1968:148; Landau 1995:197; Hastings 1993:112–114). Although not self-evident, such an outcome is of course more understandable for missionary groups who tried to convert and train African women to be the “good wives and mothers” necessary for the propagation of the Christian family and the “domestic” duties of the Christian home (Gaitskell 1979, Hunt 1990, Labode 1993, Kanogo 1993). Certainly this has been the case among Maasai in Tanzania, even though Catholic missionaries from the Congregation of the Holy Ghost have spent over forty years trying to evangelize Maasai men. In vain they tried to convert men first through schools, then in their homesteads, and finally in individual instruction classes. Maasai women were restricted from attending school, tolerated but not encouraged to attend homestead instruction and services, and dissuaded from holding formal leadership positions in the church. Despite these gender-based evangelization strategies and objectives, however, significantly more Maasai women than men have sought instruction and baptism in the Catholic church. Conversion to Catholicism was never easy for these women, as they had to overcome not only the reluctance of the missionaries but also the objections of their husbands and fathers. Yet they persevered, and now constitute the majority of practicing Catholics. Intent on creating Christian communities premised on male leadership and patriarchal authority, the men of the church have instead facilitated the creation of a “church of women.”

The highest stage in the history of the labor movement came with the unionization of the Fordist-Taylorist factory system.The concept of the “Fordist-Taylorist factory system,” first developed in Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 277–318, was popularized in the 1970s by France's “regulation economists” (Boyer, Aglietta, Lipietz, Coriat). It refers to those mass-production metal-fabrication plants based on the assembly-line techniques devised by Henry Ford and managed according to the “scientific” principles worked out by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The U.S. auto industry of the 1920s and 1930s best exemplifies this form of production. Neither before nor since has labor achieved a comparable influence. In the United States and France, this stage was reached in the same period and through roughly similar means. In June 1936, a massive wave of factory occupations swept across the Paris metal industry, forcing employers to introduce one of the world's most progressive systems of industrial relations. Six months later, sit-in strikes in Flint, Michigan, defeated the open shop at the General Motors Corporation, opening the way to the subsequent unionization of America's mass-production sector. These two events, the dominant peaks in the history of the modern labor movement, have rarely been viewed in the same light, yet they were part of a unique set of circumstances affecting not merely the fate of unionism, but that of industrial society.Most accounts of the French and American occupations make reference to the other national case, but the only actual attempt to compare them is to be found in Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 125–8. Notwithstanding his definitive study of the Flint occupations, Fine's treatment of the Paris strikes, based on a few English language sources, examines only their general contours, not the structural and contingent factors linking them with the Flint movement. Cf. Val R. Lorwin, “Reflections on the History of the French and American Labor Movements,” The Journal of Economic History, 17 (March 1957).

Of Edward Said's many passions, Joseph Conrad was among the most persistent. That a Polish-English writer of nineteenth-century colonial fiction should be the hero of the author of Orientalism might challenge those, among both Said's friends and enemies, who misread his work as a condemnation of major Western writers and thinkers who shared their period's Eurocentric prejudice. Said fully recognized Conrad's “uncompromising Eurocentric vision,” yet discovered in it, perhaps paradoxically, a “felt tension between what is intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it.” With the passage of time, what speaks to us is not Conrad's prejudices, but the way his texts “brush up unstintingly against historical constraints.”

During the first millenium A.D. a series of states were formed by Turkic and Mongol peoples, the nomadic pastoralists of the Asian steppes - the Tatars of European and Chinese record. These political enterprises enlarged their scope and power during the period of a millenium, reaching a climax in the empire of Chingis Khan in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; from this climactic achievement they have since declined. The social and political organization as well as the economy of these peoples are at once simple and complex, primitive and advanced. The characterization of this cultural world has been given focus in a sharp controversy, the controversy over the establishment and internal ordering of the political system.

This article analyzes the configuration of biology, anthropology, and history over the last generation by taking the sub-field of the “history of sexuality” as a case study. The history of sexuality developed at a particularly important site of engagement with neighboring disciplines. I argue that the concepts of nature and culture that came to prevail among historians of sexuality were deeply influenced by the debate between a particular strand of evolutionary biology, namely sociobiology, and its critics, who were committed to cultural hermeneutics. This debate encouraged a formulation of nature and culture which is effectively dualist and which remains present within the sub-field. By focusing the analysis on the study of ancient (classical Mediterranean) sexuality, I seek detailed insights into the reception of this debate within a specific domain of historical investigation, one whose stakes have been particularly high because of the intervention of Michel Foucault. The article closes by arguing that biologists and anthropologists in the last two decades have advanced the study of culture as a part of nature, and that historians have much to gain by engaging with more recent models. The institution of monogamy is highlighted as an emerging theme of investigation that can only be approached with the unified insights of history, anthropology, and biology.

The notions of ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’, coined by Emile Durkheim and reinforced by Mircea Eliade, have become indispensable for the historian of religions. No matter how details may vary, every society, every human tradition singles out certain things, acts, words or places as totally distinct from others. In these special things, acts, words or places ‘real reality’ (Eliade) is present, made available or conveyed, and therefore they differ from all ordinary, profane reality.

The history of collective attitudes about death, a branch of the newhistory of mentalités, was until recently considered a speciality, or even acuriosity that was peculiarly French, or so at least, E. Le Roy Laduriewrote with reference to the work of Philippe Aries, Francois Lebrun and myself in his Territory of the Historian.

Sexual division has been an obvious and enduring characteristic of wage work, much studied on both sides of the Atlantic. Gender roles, household forms, and community welfare have been made and remade by changing access to paid work. The theoretical literature on gender segregation in the labour force is rich, but economists and feminist theorists have been interested in sexual divisions as general features of the economic or sex/gender system rather than as boundaries between tasks forged in defined contexts by particular clashes of interest. Whether in specifying the social groups that benefited by gender division, the systematic relationships that generated the boundaries, or the traits upon which lines of partition were drawn, most analysts have dealt with gender division as a characteristic of the work force as a whole.

Gilbert Durand, the theorist of the imaginary, is fond of saying that the study of human beings is “like being in a room and watching yourself go by in the street:” what is said of the object is always applicable to the subject. That is why the discourse of academic disciplines concerned with humans is peculiarly vulnerable. If you produce a theory of the imaginary, like Gilbert Durand, that theory will also be applicable to the discourse which produces it, immediately relativizing the theory as an imaginary product. If you study a culture or group of cultures having the character of the “Oriental,” your study, as Edward Said's book points out, is itself open to analysis as a manifestation of “Western” culture. A book which indicates, as his does, that “Western” representations of the East (beginning with the notion of the East itself) have purposes which relate to purely Western needs and projects can be seen in its turn as a representation of Orientalism having purposes of its own, such as the furtherance of Arab politial causes. A review which points these things out is itself asking to be reviewed in terms of its own representations and purposes. And so on.

This essay reflects a year of field work in what was then the Soviet Union, in a study regarded as the first ethnographic research conducted by a Western anthropologist in a Russian city. The Russians are particularly important for anthropological study, not only because of recent historic events indicating changes in their political and economic structures but because they are one of several groups of northern people organized into urban industrial societies characterized by varying amounts of mass violence. This violence has been employed in subjugating minority peoples within their normal borders and outside of their borders, in absorbing those cultures, and has taken on the various forms of genocide, purges, propaganda and fear.

Since the mid-1970s a number of rural areas on the periphery of Southern Europe have undergone rapid economic growth and structural transformation. They appeared to be following the earlier and much celebrated experience of the Third Italy comprising the North-East and Central provinces. The major form of industrial organisation which emerged in these regions was the small “flexible” firm, which was widely regarded as an alternative to the principles of Taylor-Fordism that lay at the heart of the industrialisation process of the more favored regions. However, almost from the outset the idea that flexible specialization presented a coherent and robust organisational paradigm has been controversial. Much of the debate was directed towards Spain and Portugal, but Greece, though an integral part of the Southern European space and despite its earlier accession to the European Community (hereafter, EC), has only attracted a limited degree of scholarly interest.