The widespread reaction against secret diplomacy which followed the First World War led to demands that statesmen conduct their affairs openly and be responsive to public opinion. The specific forms that Open Diplomacy might take in the post-war world were hard to envision, even for the most ardent advocates of change. At the Paris Peace Conference several hundred newsmen discovered that ‘open covenants openly arrived at’ did not mean that negotiations would be held in public. Similarly, the whole process by which governments were supposed to determine domestic or world opinion on a given issue and then formulate policies in accord with it was easier to talk about than to implement. If supporters of Open Diplomacy wanted simplicity, they were in fact getting a host of new complexities in their quest for a more democratic foreign policy.

Anthony Low is surely right in urging students of modern African politics to probe deeper into African society and culture than they have been accustomed to do. In part because of the speed with which political events have unfolded during the past decade – making it difficult enough just to keep up with day-to-day events – and in part because of the disjunction between traditional socio-cultural groupings and modern political boundaries – making it easy to believe that the former are irrelevant to the latter – much recent writing on African affairs, even when “well informed”, has been exceedingly superficial. Low's work on Buganda, including especially his sensitive study of Ganda-British relations during the early years of the Protectorate, stands as an admirable exception. Both in the earlier studies and in his present analysis of populism, twentieth-century Baganda are shown to act in ways, and out of sentiments, that are understandably related both to contemporary circumstances and to the Ganda past.

The expansion of Western influence during and after the fifteenth century was a pervasive phenomenon. European seamen, traders, and settlers set off one of the most widespread and complex processes of cultural contact and transfer in human history. Students of acculturation are thus presented with a unique opportunity for controlled observation, that of keeping one variable—the culture of Western Europe—relatively constant while allowing others to range widely. European traders carried much the same cultural baggage, material and conceptual, whether they travelled to the Americas, Asia, or the East Indies, but the cultures they encountered and with which they interacted covered a wide spectrum of human conditions.

The concept of agrarian reform and its role in economic development have been crucial issues among scholars concerned with Third World problems. However, some clarity with regard to the cause and effect nature of agrarian reform is desirable. The purpose of this article is to critically assess past and current literature dealing with agrarian reform and its impact on agricultural development and social, political, and economic change. We will proceed by surveying the literature to determine: (1) where a consensus exists among scholars and officials regarding the concepts of agrarian reform and agricultural development; (2) the role assigned to agrarian reform in social and political development.

In recent years, American scholars have begun to search for the uniqueness of the American institution of Negro slavery, by contrasting it with the experience of the other colonizing nations of Europe in the New World. Even as far back as the 17th century, a sharp difference in slave institutions was noted between English, French and Spanish possessions, yet few historians until recently have attempted to analyze the causes and consequences of these distinctions.

This article is an attempt to survey, in a thematic fashion, the history of whiteaboriginal relations in Western Australia. Although it is based on research into the period from 1897 to 1954,1 the author believes that the more recent developments have not basically affected the validity of the comments here presented. He is also convinced that, speaking broadly, they are applicable to the Australian scene as a whole. The article should therefore be of interest to the students of white-aboriginal relations anywhere in Australia.

Despite official narratives of a relatively smooth transition, of the merging of “those things which belong together,” German unification and the formation of a new German state has been an uneven project filled with friction and animosity. While the West German government celebrated the “victory” of unification, and stated that all East Germans wanted unification, one group of East Germans did not look forward to the dissolution of the GDR: members of the East German military, the Nationale Volksarmee (National People's Army, or NVA). Disbanded immediately upon unification, the overwhelming majority of NVA officers were left unemployed overnight, stripped of their status as officers and portrayed by the West Germans as the “losers” of the Cold War. For these men, unification was not a joyous, desired event; rather, it represented the end of their careers, security, status, and the state they had sworn to defend. As such, the “fall” into democracy for these men was from the start fraught with uncertainty, disappointment, anomie, and a profound sense of loss.

This paper means to suggest that it is good at times to step out of the glare of modern frames of intelligibility in order to perceive in ethnographic data dim, or subtle, signs of worldviews no longer apparent. It proposes to show, in this strain, that humble attention to folklore allows us to make sense of seemingly pointless trivia. Overall, the article is an experiment in interweaving ethnologic and folkloristic approaches to expand the relevant contexts of problematic cultural details and thus attain theoretical generalization.

This book answers a challenging question: what is the importance of nationalism as a source of identity in the era of globalization? The question is explored through various case studies of the inscription of nationalism in Papua New Guinea (PNG). PNG's experience of nationalism, Foster argues, is revealing because nationalist discourse has been imported to the country first by weak attempts at state-building and second from international non-governmental sources. He follows theories that contend that nationalism is created through mundane, everyday practices that bolster the control of productive forces through the state. What Foster finds interesting about PNG is that there the mundane practices involve engagement with private institutions of international scope as much as, if not more than, state institutions. Each chapter presents a case study in which nationalist discourse is a subtext to the institutions, practices, and messages associated with economic development and the international division of labor. Through these cases, Foster shows how people are placed in nation-like collective identities in their everyday engagement with the global order of production and consumption. Further, the mass culture of the nation-state is useful for creating subjects of new kinds of political power.

For many city dwellers in Pakistan the distant memory of outdoor cinemas in their ancestral villages rekindles the thrill of first contact with film exhibition. This paper considers attempts made in colonial British India and postcolonial Pakistan to understand, wield, and benefit from the staging of such memorable and affective filmic events. In its cultivation of “cinema-minded” subjects, the British Empire commissioned studies of audiences and their reactions to film exhibition in hopes of managing the unruly morality and materiality of the cinematic apparatus. After Partition and the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan, similar studies continued, evincing a residual strategy of elicited contact. The elicitation of film contact aimed at the exertion and commandment of the event of film exhibition for the purposes of knowing their constituent subjects at a moment of malleability. Yet the Empire's struggle with the perceived problems of “Muslim tastes” and audience members’ ambivalence over rural screenings in post-Partition Pakistan calls for a reconsideration of the efficacy of these tactics. I argue that what complicated these encounters are affective responses that questioned the address, permissibility, and efficacy of film exhibition. In these tactics of elucidation, disenchantment, and denial, ruptures are refused and the new is dismissed as inoperable, incompatible, or impermissible.

This article explores the widespread phenomenon of anti-colonial movements that relied on magical rituals for protection against European weapons. It examines both the beliefs of the magical practitioners themselves, and those of colonizing observers whose fascination with stories of “primitive magic” contributed to their contrasting self-representations as superior beings in possession of technological wonders. North America’s Ghost Dance movement, China’s Boxer Rebellion, and East Africa’s Maji Maji uprising took place on three different continents but occurred almost simultaneously. The cases come from a narrow period of time, roughly 1890 to 1910, during a peak of colonial violence all over the world.

Semper eadem—always the same—was Elizabeth I's motto, but the accounts and appropriations of her legacy have been anything but. In the century after her death, as John Watkins' study shows, Elizabeth received mostly good press, but she was praised for different reasons by different people, and to greatly varying political ends. Jacobean economists linked James and Elizabeth as saviors of the English nation against Catholic threat. Parliamentarians in the 1630s and 1640s (and Whig historians thereafter) praised an Elizabeth whose supposedly moderate, constitutionalist government contrasted with the tyrannical innovations of the Stuarts; Royalists, by contrast, praised her as a defender of royal prerogative. Elizabeth made an uncomfortable model for revolutionaries, and her famous memory was invoked less during the Interregnum than before or after; but Restoration writers such as Clarendon and William Cavendish advocated a return to Elizabethan government, which Clarendon understood as a via media between tyranny and excessive popular concessions, but which Cavendish frankly praised as a successful despotism. After the Glorious Revolution, the power of the monarchy had become too limited for Elizabethan government to serve as a practical political model of any kind; but popular interest in Elizabeth flourished in “secret histories” which purported to reveal the passions of her private life, a genre which appealed to the public appetite for scandal in high places, and which endures to this day.