In the year 946, in three separate areas of the civilized world, certain changes took place which mark the beginning of a new era. In Iraq in this year a Daylamite Persian adventurer of Shiah persuasion, named Ahmad, seized control of Baghdad and the surrounding Iraqi plains and in so doing established a dynasty which was to last more than a hundred years. About a decade earlier in the French Midi two princes of the house of Toulouse and their Gascon ally and kinsman journeyed north to Auvergne to do homage for their vast holdings in Southern France to the weak Carolingian monarch, Louis IV, the last such homage scions of this house were to render to their Northern French overlords for more than two centuries. Finally, during the same year of 946, in distant Japan, an official of the central government of Kyoto, named Ono, after suppressing the dangerous pirate forces of a certain Sumitomo, issued an appeal against the use of private armies which was resulting in disorder and the inability of the central government to maintain peace and security.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Mel'gunov, the son of a well-to-do landowner, was born in 1804 in the province of Orel, south-west of Moscow. He was educated largely at home by private tutors and was well read at an early age. When Mel'gunov was still a boy the family moved to Kharkov and soon thereafter their home became a center of intellectual and social life. Among those who participated in the gatherings at the Mel'gunovs were professors from the newly-established University of Kharkov as well as government officials.

Drawing on never-before-utilized archival and oral sources, “Making Peasants Chèf” contends that decades of peasant marginalization from political power created the social and political conditions for the rise of the infamous tonton makout militia under the dictator François Duvalier. After coming to power in 1957, Duvalier militarized and rearmed peasants in exchange for their loyalty. Thousands of previously ostracized peasants enlisted in the dreaded makout militia to access status and political power. This explains why the peasant-based militia formed an arm of state repression. With the support of an armed peasantry, Duvalier successfully repressed the political opposition, allowing the regime to stay in power for almost three decades.

In 1997, an “attempted rebellion” erupted in the Professor Barreto Campelo Penitentiary on Itamaracá Island, Pernambuco. A journalist reported that the suspension of conjugal visits sparked a brawl in which three inmates were stabbed before guards restored order. The warden clarified that conjugal visits had been suspended after fights broke out between rival cellblocks when someone pilfered objects visitors had brought to prisoners. A woman who desired anonymity informed, “The convicts notified us in the afternoon by way of notes that they would fight again that night. I think that the lack of contact with their female companions leaves all of the men agitated.” The warden brokered a truce with the inmates' leaders in part by promising that conjugal visits would resume the next week. The reporter concluded, almost as an afterthought, that inmates renewed protests about the overcrowding of eleven hundred inmates into a jail designed for four hundred.

This article explores the legal and temporal dimensions of the transition from British Mandate Palestine to the State of Israel on 15 May 1948. I examine the paradoxical character of Israeli jurisdictional claims during this period and argue that it reveals the Israeli state's uncertainty as to whether the Mandate had truly passed into the past. On one hand, Israel recognized the validity of the Mandate administration's jurisdiction until 15 May; I employ the Israeli trial of the British citizen Frederick William Sylvester to demonstrate how Israel even predicated its own jurisdictional claims on their being continuous with those of its predecessor. In this case, the Mandate administration was cast as having entered the realm of the past. Conversely, the Israeli state contested Mandate laws and legal decisions made prior to 15 May to assert its own jurisdictional claims. In the process, Israeli officials belied their efforts to bury their predecessors in the past and implicitly questioned whether the past was in fact behind them. By simultaneously relying upon and disavowing past British legal decisions, the Israeli state staked a claim on being a “completely different political creature” from its British predecessor while retaining its colonial legal structures as the “ultimate standards of reference.” Israel's complex attitude toward its Mandate past directs our attention to how it was created against the backdrop of the receding British Empire and underscores the importance of studying Israel alongside other post-imperial states that emerged from the First World War and the mid-century decolonizing world.

Over the past three decades, writings on modernity and post-modernity have emanated from both the social sciences and humanities. In this context, the voluminous works of Niklas Luhmann and his interpreters (Lee 2000; Rasch 2000) have had a lasting impact on how social theory and various expressions of modernity are interconnected. Yet, one of the finest and most critical understandings of modernity and its totality is still found in the writings of Georg Simmel, who is barely referred to in most recent analyses. Now, through the brilliant interpretations and translations by David Frisby and his colleagues over the past two decades, the interest in Simmel and his intellectual efforts has achieved a position which ranks him with Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Although Simmel (1858–1918) is classically labeled a sociologist, the depth and breadth of his interests simply cannot be limited to any one discipline. Rather, it is best to approach Simmel as a cultural philosopher, one who used the essay format to address a number of subjects, issues, and problems. Simmel wrote some ten to fifteen books of which only a few have been translated into English, The Philosophy of Money (1900, 1907) being the most visible.

The rumors of Brazil’s mineral riches reaching London and Vienna in the first half of the nineteenth century, started by enslaved Africans mining clandestinely in unexplored regions and later through geological surveys by mining engineers from the Habsburg Empire, prompted aspirations to wealth which circulated fluidly in the transatlantic context. This article examines the distinct but convergent agencies of garimpeiros, enslaved miners and prospectors, and of Habsburgian mining engineers in the territorialization process of Minas Gerais during the nineteenth-century expansion of global capitalism. It analyses the degree of connectivity and cooperation across British and Habsburgian imperial spaces in Brazilian mining ventures, focusing on the case of the mining engineer Virgil von Helmreichen, who arrived in Minas Gerais in 1836, under contract to the British-financed Imperial Brazilian Mining Association. The Habsburgian expert elite of which Helmreichen was a part played a crucial role in the expansion of the commodity frontier in this region, providing proficient knowledge in mining and geology. This expert community collaborated with the logistics networks of British free-trade imperialism and the Brazilian slave system inherited from the colonial period. The territorialization of Minas Gerais shows the global dynamics at play between British interests in the discovery of new mines, the need to produce expert knowledge at the local level, and the Brazilian government’s desire to control the hinterland region and profit from its mineral wealth.

This article examines four typologies of secularism in China from the sixteenth century onward, through an analysis of the triadic relationship between the secular, religious, and superstitious. These notions have been considered to be derived from the particular intellectual and political history of the West, but this fails to grasp the complexity of non-Western belief systems. This article proposes to instead examine how Chinese policymakers and intellectuals actively fabricated religion and produced secularization. It goes beyond a simple rebuttal of Eurocentrism, and arguments regarding the mutual incomparability of Western and Chinese experiences of secularization. It distinguishes four typologies of secularism that emerged successively in China: (1) the reduction of Christianity from the sixteenth century to the 1900s; (2) the Confucian secular and (3) atheist secular that were conceptualized, respectively, by royalist reformers and anti-Manchu revolutionaries during the final two decades of the Qing Dynasty; and (4) the interventionist secularism pursued by the Republican and the Communist regimes to strictly supervise and regulate religious beliefs and practices. The paper argues that, if secularization is indeed Christian in nature, secularism and religion were not imposed in China under Western cultural and political hegemony. Instead, the Christian secular model was produced in China mainly via pre-existing cultural norms and the state’s ad hoc political needs, making the Christian secularism itself a multipolar phenomenon.

During the thirteen centuries of their particular co-existence, Islam and Christianity have shown astonishingly little intellectual curiosity about one another. Through the contacts history has afforded them, contacts marked to be sure by other intellectual achievements, a general state of mutual understanding seldom better than elementary has persisted. Perhaps no Christian any longer believes that Mohammed was a renegade cardinal of the Colonna family and few if any Moslems believe that the Virgin Mary is a Person of the Christian Trinity; but they have continued to accuse one another of polytheism, the very last thing of which either is guilty, down to the present time. Today the Christian living outside the Isamic world who can distinguish Sunnite from Shiite is as rare as the Moslem who can distinguish among Protestant sects (many of them can distinguish Catholic and Orthodox from Protestant Christianity).

I am greatly indebted to Professor Marc Galanter and Professor John T. Flint for their detailed and thoughtful reviews of India as a Secular State. One of the important objects of the book was to stimulate precisely this kind of serious discussion of problems, problems of both scholarly analysis and public policy. The two reviews are useful in sharpening certain of the issues, and I am grateful for this opportunity to comment on them.

In 1957, when William Langer called the attention of professional historians to the “urgently needed deepening of … historical understanding” by means of the application of modern psychoanalytic theory to the problems of history, he seemed to have in mind the use of these constructs in the writing of biography and for the analysis of obviously irrational movements. In half praise, a critic found it interesting that this suggestion was not extended to the “study of the psychic foundations of civilization and the historical process as a whole”. While encompassing less grand designs than these in this paper, I would like to add a further, but simpler, extension of my own. I would like to use psychoanalytic understanding in an attempt to shed light upon some aspects of a well-known problem in American historiography, the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner.

Early twentieth-century South Africa was a composite society—“part settler state and part African colony … includ[ing] diverse recently conquered African polities as well as a divided white population.” Mining industrialization and British imperialism, particularly after the discovery of substantial gold deposits and the founding of Johannesburg in 1886, put pressure on southern African peoples and states to function as an integrated labor market, and on their leaders to submit to an overarching political authority. These developmental and administrative rationalizing forces were given greater scope in the years following the South African War of 1899 to 1902, especially in the defeated Boer republics of the interior. Renamed the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies, these territories were initially under the direct rule of British High Commissioner Alfred Milner. They took the lead in a process of state-building that continued well beyond their political amalgamation with the coastal colonies of the Cape and Natal to form the Union of South Africa in 1910. It has been argued that this institutional reconstruction left South Africa with “a modern civil service, with controls and an information-gathering capacity sophisticated enough to … make the competence, helpfulness, and honesty of individual state officials relatively less crucial.”