At the beginning of the long reign of George III, a new mass media outlet for political expression surfaced in England: the colored political and social print. These prints were first carried as a sideline at stationers and bookstores, but from the middle 1770s on their popularity was great enough to justify setting up special print shops.

The Georgian print after 1760 was different in more than color from those that had preceded it, though the use of color was indicative of the change. Artistically they were less representational, more free in line, and made heavier use of caricature in both face and body action. In content their appeal was more populist and urban than aristocratic and rural. They were also more journalistic; they focused their comment increasingly on current and often trivial political and social events and were published soon after the event occurred. In an earlier period, comment was in response to events. After George III, the commentators became established professionals seeking out events which they could make the theme of their weekly or so caricature comment. The prints also continued to be unrestrained in ridicule, attacking not only political leaders, but royalty itself. If possible, they became more unfair and calumnious than the prints of the period of the first two Georges. The prints were a part of what was evolving, I will argue, as a new democratizing force in the politics of England: a stream of mass media criticism of current political practices.

The newly awakened interest in the comparative study of politics is part and parcel of a silent revolution that has taken place in the social sciences during the last decades. Such a re-orientation in turn is in part due to the radical social and political transformations in this era of total wars and revolutions. Because as Aristotle knew all too well, and peaceful periods in history all too often tried to forget, the social sciences are disciplines of “ethics”, spelling out man's deep involvements and demanding decisions at critical turning points of history.

This article offers biographical sketches of the Jewish members of the Bolshevik revolutionary élite. It explores how their commitments to socialist universalism and eventual identification with Bolshevism were influenced by experiences and identities as Jews in fin de siècle Tsarist Russia. Situating them within a comparative historical sociology of ethnicity and identity across the Empire, I consider the ways in which ambiguities of assimilation, ethnic exclusion, and ethnocultural marginality influenced their attraction to Bolshevik socialism. In doing so, I revise the traditional argument that that the Bolsheviks of Jewish origin were highly assimilated “non-Jewish Jews” whose Jewishness played no role in their political radicalism. Instead, the claim is made that for the Jewish Bolshevik élite ascriptive Jewishness was a social fact mediated by ethnopolitical context, and therefore a dimension of varying significance to their radicalism, even for those for whom Jewishness was not a claimed identity.

Sai Baba of Shirdi, who died in 1918, was raised as a Muslim but is today revered as a Hindu saint. One of his most important perceived qualities was his ability to provide miraculous cures for his devotees, and this has continued after his death. I argue here that the emphasis in the Hindu tradition on saintly figures healing the sick is a relatively modern phenomenon. Earlier, though such figures were renowned for their miracles, healing played a very minor part in this. Their miracles were generally designed to worst religious rivals and to enable them to speak truth to power. In the modern era, however, such saintly figures can gain a reputation through healing in a way that is presented as beyond the comprehension of modern medical science. Such people are seen to provide living evidence of the superiority of Indian civilization and its religious beliefs. This move became entangled with nationalist sentiments, so that getting the better of the “English” doctor became a means to reveal the limited scope of Western science and culture. Although this appears to suggest that many Indians have rejected the biopolitics associated with Western modernity (as defined by Foucault), I argue that certain elements of such biopolitics are central to this process, and illustrate this through a study of Sai Baba, a village holy man taken up by the Indian middle classes and made into a pan-Indian figure, with a now global presence.

The geographical distribution of separatist movements in the world today is, and always has been, highly skewed. At any point in history such movements arise only in particular states, and—within these states—only in particular regions. One task of a general theory of separatism is to account for this skewed geographical distribution. Mr. Sloan seems to think that the answer to this problem is ‘imperialism’, tout court. He apparently believes that any region subject to dependent development is likely to spawn separatist movements (hence his discussion of Vermont). According to Mr. Sloan ethnicity has no causal status in a theory of separatism. Thus, to pay it heed is to mistake an effect for a cause.

Mr. Davis finds The Moral Basis of a Backward Society subject to criticism on three grounds: (a) inadequacies of method, (b) inadequacies of formal argument, and (c) omissions and commissions in the presentation of the material itself. Let us examine his bill of particulars on each count.

Through a new type of global microhistory, this article explores the remaking of the political system in Egypt before colonialism. I argue that developmentalism and the origins of Arabic monarchism were closely related in 1860s Egypt. Drawing on hitherto unknown archival evidence, I show that groups of Egyptian local notables (a‘yan) sought to cooperate with the Ottoman governor Ismail (r. 1863–1879) in order to gain capital and steam machines, and to participate in the administration. Ismail, on his side, secured a new order of succession from the Ottoman sultan. A‘yan developmentalism was discursively presented in petitions, poems, and treatises acknowledging the new order and naturalizing the governor as an Egyptian ruler. Consultation instead of constitutionalism was the concept to express the new relationship. The collaboration was codified in the Consultative Chamber of Representatives, often interpreted as the first parliament in the Middle East. As a consequence of the sultanic order and the Chamber, Egypt's position within the Ottoman Empire became similar to a pseudo-federal relationship. I conclude by contrasting different ways of pseudo-federalization in the global 1860s, employing a regional, unbalanced comparison with the United Principalities and Habsburg Hungary.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a frequent claim among speakers of local Chinese languages (called fangyan in Chinese) is that their native languages preserve the language of antiquity better than the Beijing-based national language, Mandarin. This paper explores the origin of these claims and probes their significance in the making of the Han ethnoracial collective identity. I argue that claims of linguistic proximity to the imagined ancient origins of Chinese civilization represent a form of “hegemonic Han-ness”—an idealized form of the Han collective identity that was both internally hegemonic, in that it was meant to supersede other expressions of Han-ness, and externally hegemonic, in that it was meant to uphold the superiority of the Han people over other ethnoracial groups. From Zhang Taiyan, whose work provided a model for drawing linguistic connections between contemporary local languages and the language spoken at the dawn of Chinese civilization, to local gazetteer authors, who used linguistic data to prove their mother tongues directly had preserved the language of antiquity without being adulterated by the languages of non-Han peoples, this paper explores how various groups drew upon the cultural power of an idealized Han-centered past to challenge the authority afforded to the national language by the state.

The vigorous revival of institutionalist theories and methods among economists, political scientists, and other social scientists has prompted a broad reconsideration of how political and economic preferences are transformed into social outcomes. In much of the professional literature, this change has stimulated a shift away from behavioral and empirical methods to those that rely on interpretation of the historical evolution of policies in an organizational framework. Focusing on topics as disparate as the implementation of Keynesian economic policies in the 1930s, United States civil service reform at the turn of the twentieth century, or the evolution of property and other rights in early modern England, institutionalist studies by sociologists, political scientists, and economists have, increasingly, addressed problems by using historical narratives.

British Cochin was a port in southwestern India surrounded by princely states. This article uses a dispute surrounding its limits to interrogate the role international law played in generating novel forms of political claim-making among European and non-European powers at the turn of the twentieth century. Cochin was located in an area where both physical and political boundaries were hard to define. Situated at the tip of a narrow coastline surrounded by water, it was also lodged amid territories belonging to two princely states—Cochin State and Travancore. Its ever-shifting coastline and proximity to princely states forced colonial authorities to adopt a flexible approach to the port’s boundaries, allowing the tiny princely state of Cochin to become progressively more involved with the British port’s development over the nineteenth century. The article starts by examining the forces that shaped these entanglements, and then explores a territorial dispute involving British Cochin to illuminate the ways in which, during the twentieth century’s first quarter, both the colonial administration and the Cochin State deployed the language of international law to try to extend their powers over the port. By highlighting the Cochin State’s partially successful attempts at claiming sovereignty over the waters surrounding the harbor in order to become involved with the development of a port in British India, this article shows how international law emerged as a site through which semi-sovereign territories began testing and even extending the limits of their sovereignty.

During much of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital, was under a selective curfew that made it a crime to be in the city's public spaces after dark. The curfew bent normal rules and attenuated supposedly universal rights, overtly discriminating between people on the basis of class and race. Rules that legally defined the nighttime did not come from any national statute, or from newly independent Brazil's liberal Constitution (1824) or its Criminal Code (1830). Instead, Rio's nocturnal sociolegal world was the product of police edicts, on-the-ground policing practice, and city ordinances. It also emerged from the actions of people who used the darker hours for work, play, and resistance against oppression, especially members of the city's immense enslaved population and the growing number of free persons of African descent. In other words, this is a phenomenon of urban governance that allows, and indeed forces us to look beyond the nineteenth-century nation-state to understand the exercise of power at a local level. This article explores how the curfew established patterns and means of limiting the basic freedom to move about the city. It was at night when both the necessity and fragility of what jurists in Brazil called the “freedom to come and go” came into view. The daily transition between day and night enacted juridical changes that, although invisible at the national level, fundamentally shaped the social categories that determined people's places in society in ways that historical research has yet to explore.

Assimilation makes new members of a group by changing particular characteristics of non-members to reflect the fundamentals of collective belonging. Gaining the qualities for inclusion in one community typically involves losing at least some features that confer acceptance in another. However, scholars have generally not acknowledged assimilation as a process of loss. In part, this gap bespeaks a larger tendency to overlook the influence of emigration on national identity in population-exporting states (compared to the vast literature on immigration and national identity in population-receiving countries). This article analyzes discourses of assimilation concerning Japanese emigrants as a case study of how the ways in which members are understood to leave the national community delimits the bases of belonging for those who remain. Historically, Japanese ideologies of assimilation have been most contested in Brazil, where the largest Japanese diaspora in the West sought to reconcile patriotism and the expectations of the Japanese government with local nation-building agendas. After World War II, many emigrants and their descendants in Brazil refused to acknowledge Japan's surrender. This crisis inspired the first study of the Japanese diaspora ever conducted by a Japan-based social scientist. Izumi Seiichi's work in cultural anthropology helped to build Japan's new identity as a “peace state.” Subsequent generations of Japanese scholars continued to study the assimilation of the diaspora, recategorized as “Nikkei,” as a foil for “Japaneseness.” Their ethnic conception of national membership remains influential today, even as Japan transitions from a population exporter to a land of immigrants, including the Nikkei.

Recent transitional justice scholarship has explored the role of emotions during periods of political transition. Scholars have taken negative emotions as both legitimate responses to past crimes and as supports to the pursuit of justice in the present. This paper argues that feelings circulate across a wide array of individuals, things, and processes that often sit apart from the formal, judicial spaces of transitional justice. To make this argument, I consider the Tunisian campaign Manich Msamah (I Do Not Forgive) and its articulation of an affect of unforgiveness in resistance to the proposed Economic and Financial Reconciliation Law. Formed in 2015, the campaign came about in response to the law and efforts, under the pretext of “reconciliation,” to return to public life figures from the repressive regime of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Drawing on affect theory, I argue that unforgiveness was stuck to particular individuals (figures from the old regime and circulated between a community of unforgiving activists), things (public spaces, posters, T-shirts and the ephemera of protest) and processes (accountability and substantive forms of justice). I argue that an affect of unforgiveness thus aided activists not only in their resistance to state-led reconciliation but also helped imagine alternative paths to justice in Tunisia.

Revivals of public interest in the Neolithic Near East have generally coincided with the emergence of powerful imagery, such as the discovery of Çatalhöyük’s striking wall paintings in the 1960s. Now, sixty years later, the sculptures of Göbekli Tepe are ensuring the period’s widespread appeal. The capacity of these well-preserved buildings to carry such imagery until today has made them, in turn, an image of the supposed achievements of Neolithic sedentism. But the popularity of these images depends on their decontextualization. This modernist notion that permanent architecture represents the conquest of spatial forms over time is in contradiction with the early Neolithic experience of settled life, which had more to do with the unstable duration of places than with an emancipation from motion. This essay explores the Neolithic preference for earth architecture over more stable construction materials such as stone, its influence on visual culture, and how it contributed to building new living relations to the inhabited landscape. Instead of the sense of fixity and completeness that we, moderns, desperately seek in plans, reconstructions, and monumentality, it is the very transience, repetitiveness, and cumulativeness of earth that determined the transformations of the archaeological record. In other words, rhythms are key to understanding Neolithic sedentism in ways that differ wildly from the static images we have substituted for it.

To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called “native prisons” in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana), this essay shows how birthing, impregnation, and menstruation shaped West Africa penal practices, including the selection of the captives, the duration of their time in prison, and how the prison factored into the legal infrastructure around tort settlements for debts and crimes. The term “prison of the womb” is used here to describe how the West African prison held bloodlines captive, threatening the impregnation of a female kin member as a ticking clock for tort settlement. Furthermore, it will be shown that this institution was imperative to the spread of mercantile capitalism in nineteenth-century Gold Coast.

At the turn of the twentieth century, most of the world’s pearls were extracted from rich oyster and coral reefs on the northern Indian Ocean rim. This paper returns to the sites of extraction, studying imperial maps made from 1889–1925 to delineate oyster reefs on the seafloor. Building from the submarine up, I draw on environmental, animal, and history of science studies to explore the work of mapping oceanic, animate space. Attending to the role of divers, whose labor was required to make the seafloor visible, and the lifecycles of oysters, which changed over time, I argue that the seafloor represents a kind of unruly terrain, out of both the reach and control of imperial authorities. The paper’s final section meditates on reading humans as part of Indian Ocean landscapes and the possibilities this offers for further comparative, transnational work in a materialist vein.

Forced branding, tattooing, and bodily inscriptions were linked to a complex intersection of meanings and uses in nineteenth-century Iran. Drawing on insights from studies of bodily inscriptions in other world historical contexts, this paper discusses branding as a marker of ownership, both of human slaves and of animals; Islamic attitudes toward bodily inscription and its symbolic significance in the afterlife; and associations between branding and human or divine love in Persian poetry. From this semiotic foundation, it turns to judicial uses of branding in nineteenth-century Iran: as torture for the extraction of incriminating admissions, and as punishment intended to shame (symbolically casting the criminal from society, stigmatizing their crime) and identify (tracking convicted criminals). Throughout the paper, branding’s legal place is understood in relation to silence and speaking, writing and reading, pain, humiliation, and the inversion of branding’s meaning by its victims, in Iran and a number of other societies.