This essay compares two communities of common origin that now dwell in separate rural lowland South American settings, one in the Bolivian Chaco and the other in the Paraguayan Chaco (maps 1 and 2). South America's Gran Chaco is sparsely populated, averaging one person per three square kilometers (Censo Nacional Indígena [Paraguay], 2002). Nevertheless, the present essay takes as its analytic-theoretical point of departure a phrase invoked by Michael Warner in his 1999 book on queer publics in New York City: “Urban space is always a host space” (1999: 190).

The General Prologue is often called a picture of its age and, frequently inthe next breath, a satire. In English Lit. this usually draws a stern lectureabout confusing the distinction between literature and history, but in thisessay, unobserved by my sophomores, I propose to talk about the General Prologue as a picture of its age and then, tentatively, about some uses suchhistory might be put to by historians and literary students.

It is an historical truism that the Reformation of the sixteenth century consisted of a unique series of events. What we don't always realize, however, is that this series of events was itself one member of a class of historical phenomena. The most direct approach to elucidating this proposition is to start with the most obvious characteristic of Luther's teaching, his emphasis on salvation through faith. It is not generally recognized that this idea can be found in other religions and that it developed in those, as it did in Europe, in reaction to religious ideas which stressed works and subtle theological knowledge as the road to salvation.

To the extent that the social sciences have been concerned with thestratification of Latin American societies they have shown a well-knowntendency to dichotomize their structures into a small upper class of wealthy and powerful landowners and a poor and powerless lower class hetero-geneously composed of rural workers, urban proletarians, petty traders, artisans, and the like. As a rule, the emergence of new classes and thegrowing internal differentiation of emergent or traditional classes are somewhat reluctantly admitted only as the societies of Latin America have demonstrated the ability to depart from their agrarian tradition and topursue the irreversible course of modernization. There has been a strong inclination to ignore or to minimize those aspects of the social structure which suggest a higher degree of complexity than the stereotype of a two-class system seems to indicate.

In this age of rapid urbanization, with all that that term connotes, it is revealing to view the familiar and ofttimes troublesome attributes of city life from the perspectives of the sophisticated urbanites of an earlier era. Our aim, then, has been to glean from the writings of the ancient Romans their personal images of, impressions of, and attitudes toward life in a metropolitan environment. The period covered extends from the time of Cato through the end of the First Century A.D. If the satirists seem overly represented in this distribution of authors, the explanation is simply that the satirists chose to comment upon the conditions of city life more frequently and more intensely than did other writers. Horace even suggests that satire is the literary form most appropriate for commentary upon the urban scene (Satire II. 6).

This article has had a long incubation. Three stimuli operating in different ways over a period of time account for its genesis: my exposure to anthropological writings on the Bible, my field work research in Israel, and my teaching of social anthropology in Swansea. Education in England, both secular and religious (by the latter I mean attendance at Hebrew classes outside of school from age seven to thirteen, culminating in my bar mitzvah), had exposed me to both the Old and New Testaments but had failed to raise any enthusiasm or interest on my part. Only when I began to study anthropology as an undergraduate did I begin to consider the biblical stories that I had heard in my childhood and youth. One of my first, serendipitous discoveries was Isaac Schapera's paper, “The Sin of Cain” (1955), in which he examines the first case of fratricide recorded in the Bible and postulates why Cain was not punished in the usual manner for engaging in homicide. He argues that precisely because Cain murdered his brother he evaded the usual penalty: he placed his group in the dilemma of compounding the loss of one of its members if it were to practise retaliation, nor could it agree to accept compensation since it would be in the position of accepting from its members and then paying out again to the same members. Into this impasse God enters, truly a deus ex machina, to resolve the problem. Schapera supports his argument by examples derived from ethnographic studies that recorded similar problems of homicide, especially fratricide.

Professor Miller adds more information to help build up a knowledge of how Lamaist monasteries have functioned in the recent past. Such monasteries performed (and in some cases still perform) not only religious and social functions but political and economic ones. As regards their internal financial systems, they seem to have had similar organizations all of which varied somewhat according to local environments. But Professor Miller comments on one common thread: the uisa system, and appraises its significance for the original spread of Inner Asian monasticism, for the fluctuations in fortunes of individual monasteries, and for the economy as a whole.

This paper explores certain regularities between social-structural and historical particulars. The particulars are drawn from the society and history of Brunei, an ancient Malay state in northwest Borneo. Since the center of my attention is theory, I shall merely refer the reader to my more extensive summary of the particulars in question.

The agricultural policies of the New Deal persist to the present day and are a particularly important turning point in the history of the American farm sector. In the period from 1875 to 1940, agricultural policy evolved from a strategy of exporting the domestic surplus, to shrinking production through attrition in the farm population, to subsidizing production and restricting acreage. Although rooted in farm demands upon the political process, this evolution was ultimately driven by both foreign demand and the alternative employment opportunities available to American farmers.

Key moments of the American Civil War and the 1899–1902 South African War and their tragic immediate aftermaths remain powerful features of national memory in both countries. Over the past century, vengeful politicians and ideologues in both have transformed them into formidable stock-in-trade. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts of the alleged churlish manner of the victorious armies, especially soldiers of African descent, were made into combustible timber for reactionary political campaigns. The perceived cruel turns of fate have made their way into literature, stage, and screen. The two wars afforded people of various races and social conditions opportunity to act upon their conceptions of a just society, albeit amid terrible carnage and loss. They also underscored the permanence of the industrial transformation of both countries. In the decades following these two wars most of the black and white agrarian populations discovered that state and agrarian elites had cynically manipulated and then extinguished their aspirations. Most often, for black agrarians, violence was the preferred instrument to pursue desired outcomes. Reconstruction in the American South was a paradox. The Civil War emancipated the slaves but left the entire South, especially upland cotton regions, economically backward. In Louisiana, especially, politicized violence to coerce black labor was pervasive. After the South African War, white violence against rural black people was widespread. Lord Milner’s Reconstruction Administration was more concerned to bring South Africa’s gold mines back into production than to stem the violence. The low-intensity violence of the postwar countryside became the backland route to apartheid.

Numerous scholars have emphasized the “centrality” of Inner Asia to furthering our understanding of global, or cross-cultural phenomena, and the role of such phenomena in the preservation, modification, and transmission of historical experience. Yet the research has almost exclusively been carried out by specialists in Chinese civilization, and as one moves further away from the Chinese sphere of influence the notion of Eurasia as an integrated socio-political unit of historical analysis becomes more problematic. Here I attempt to bridge the western and eastern edges of the great steppe by focusing on a specific aspect of Inner Asian political culture—the phenomenon of shared sovereignty between military-based ruling dynasties and their urban constituencies—in the principalities of Rus' and the oases of Transoxiana, between the ninth and twelfth centuries. I propose that the dual administrative structure that developed in the two regions was an autochthonic, Eurasian state-formation, distinct from the city-state and imperial models, which emerged as a result of what Joseph Fletcher identified as “horizontal continuities.”

Studies of southern Africa's liberation movements have turned attention to the great importance of their transnational lives, but have rarely focused on the effects of the military training Cold War-era allies provided in sites across the globe. This is a significant omission in the history of these movements: training turns civilians into soldiers and creates armies with not only military but also social and political effects, as scholarship on conventional militaries has long emphasized. Liberation movement armies were however different in that they were not subordinated to a single state, instead receiving training under the flexible rubric of international solidarity in a host of foreign sites and in interaction with a great variety of military traditions. The training provided in this context produced multiple “military imaginaries” within liberation movement armies, at once creating deep tensions and enabling innovation. The article is based on oral histories of Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) veterans trained by Cuban and Soviet instructors in Angola in the late 1970s. These soldiers emerged from the Angolan camps with a military imaginary they summed up in the Cuban exhortation “Adelante!” (Forward!). Forty years later, they stressed how different their training had made them from other ZIPRA cadres, in terms of their military strategy, mastery of advanced Soviet weaponry, and aggressive disposition, as well as their “revolutionary” performance of politics and masculinity in modes of address, salute, and drill. Such military imaginaries powerfully shaped the southern African battlefield. They offer novel insight into the distinctive institutions, identities, and memories forged through Cold War-era military exchanges.

In 1991 Jack A. Goldstone published an important book, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, in which he boldly charted a new way to explain the basic causes of revolution throughout Eurasia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Goldstone attempts to explain the periodic waves of early modern state crises, rebellions, and civil wars in widely divergent cultures and geographic settings by developing an intriguing model of state breakdowns which he applies primarily to England, France, the Ottoman Empire, and China. Goldstone views the crises of large agrarian absolute monarchies mainly as the result of a single basic process: prolonged population growth in the context of relatively inflexible economic and social structures, eventually resulting in rapid price inflation, sudden shifts in resources, and rising social demands on a scale that most agrarian-based bureaucratic states found overwhelming. Simply put, long-term population and price in-creases have helped push rigid political, economic, and social institutions into crisis. Since the publication of Goldstone's work, there has been a positive response to it from many historians and social scientists. So far, however, no one has attempted to test Goldstone's model by applying it to a state break-down which the author did not include in his study. In my own research I have discovered that Goldstone's model may apply to Russia even though he did not focus on it. In this article I hope to demonstrate that his work helps explain Russia's Time of Troubles (1598–1613) and that the Russian test case helps validate Goldstone's model as an important contribution to comparative history.

Beginning in the early 1970s, a large number of countries initiated transitions from forms of authoritarian rule to democracy.The research for this essay was made possible by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship as well as support from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Institute for Turkish Studies, and Princeton University's Center for International Studies and Council on Regional Studies. The author wishes to thank John Waterbury, Atul Kohli, Jeffrey Herbst, Anna Seleny, and two anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting thoughtfully on earlier versions of this essay. This democratizing trend, dubbed “The Third Wave,” began in Southern Europe and continued in Latin America, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe.Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Similar transitions were also begun in parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The Middle East, by contrast, has remained untouched. Some instances of political liberalization (i.e., enlargement of the freedoms of speech and movement, and the freedom from arbitrary state action) have taken place in the region. But no country held democratic elections that contained the possibility of real change in the locus of political power.

Archives are, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, “the institutional sites of mediation between the sociohistorical process and the narrative about that process.”Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 52. How this mediation structures the production of meaning, on the one hand, and historical knowledge, on the other, is the major problematic of this article. I focus on how certain textual models and modes of representation impart a particular sense of purpose to the archives. That is, I am concerned with investigating how it is that texts are construed as documents that are destined for state archives. This project requires questioning how documents are made credible and authoritative in their myriad social contexts, in order to understand the relation between historicity and power relations. To study the potential impact of archival documents thus requires re-evaluating the uneasy relationship between documentary practices, canons of representation, politics, and scholarship.

This article is an historical ethnography of the popular conceptualizations of crowd behavior during the pogroms against the Armenians in the Ottoman East in 1895–1896. It draws on contemporary sources like official telegrams, governmental reports, letters of American missionaries, and Armenian periodicals to show that observers with otherwise highly conflicting views described the structure of the event in the exact same way: as an outcome of sinister deception. Without exception, all parties told some story of deception to explain the violent attacks of the Kurdish semi-nomadic crowds on the Armenian neighborhoods of the city of Harput. The article analyzes these cases of disguise, deluding, and inculcation to reveal how contemporary observers theorized crowd behavior in general and the atrocities they witnessed in particular. They did not perceive violence as an index of social distance or deep societal divisions. On the contrary, they described a world in which Armenians and Muslims lived a shared life, and where one attacked the other only when deceived. Methodologically, the article lifts barriers between intellectual history and social history on behalf of an historical ethnography of people's theories about their own society.

Slavery and warfare were inextricably intertwined in the history of Britain’s North American colonies and, subsequently, the early republic. Yet this deep connection has not been acknowledged in the historiography. In particular, the debate about an “American way of war” has neglected the profound significance of slavery as a formative factor in America’s “first way of war.” Here, these two forms of organized, systemic violence are considered not merely within a comparative framework but as phenomena whose relationship is so deeply enmeshed that they cannot be meaningfully understood in isolation. Slavery is thus placed centrally in an examination of American war making, from the colonial to the antebellum period. Three main areas are highlighted: slave raiding against Native Americans, slavery as a factor in imperial and national strategy-making and diplomacy, and slavery as an “internal war.”

Insisting on a radical divide between post-1750 ideologies in Europe and earlier political thought in both Europe and Asia, modernist scholars of nationalism have called attention, quite justifiably, to European nationalisms’ unique focus on popular sovereignty, legal equality, territorial fixity, and the primacy of secular over universal religious loyalties. Yet this essay argues that nationalism also shared basic developmental and expressive features with political thought in pre-1750 Europe as well as in rimland—that is to say outlying—sectors of Asia. Polities in Western Europe and rimland Asia were all protected against Inner Asian occupation, all enjoyed relatively cohesive local geographies, and all experienced economic and social pressures to integration that were not only sustained but surprisingly synchronized throughout the second millennium. In Western Europe and rimland Asia each major state came to identify with a named ethnicity, specific artifacts became badges of inclusion, and central ethnicity expanded and grew more standardized. Using Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain as case studies, this essay reconstructs these centuries-long similarities in process and form between “political ethnicity,” on the one hand, and modern nationalism, on the other. Finally, however, this essay explores cultural and material answers to the obvious question: if political ethnicities in Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain were indeed comparable, why did the latter realm alone generate recognizable expressions of nationalism? As such, this essay both strengthens and weakens claims for European exceptionalism.