Wordsworth was appalled and outraged. A proposal had been put forth to build a railroad from Kendal to the shore of Lake Windermere in the very heart of his beloved English Lake District. He did what we would do in similar circumstances: he wrote two long letters to a newspaper. And, more memorably perhaps, he also wrote a poem in which he asked: ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure From rash assault?’

Egyptian professional men have worked hard since 1900 to create professional organizations similar to those of Western countries. These bodies—of lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, and teachers—have struggled to further their own economic interests and prestige, raise professional standards, influence the country's politics, and—less consistently—to serve the public. They have molded into institutional form the growing self-consciousness of professions which were either lacking or quite different in the traditional Islamic world. The lawyers came first, forming the first predominantly Egyptian professional syndicate in 1912. After the failure of the other professions' efforts to channel the heady nationalist enthusiasm of the 1919–24 years into the establishment of other syndicates, the movement subsided, producing only occasional flurries of interest until World War II. A burst of activity then set up the medical, press, and engineering syndicates in quick succession (1940, 1941, 1946). The formation of the teachers syndicate and other less important ones under the Nasser regime in the 1950s rounded out the movement. This article will trace the growth and sequence of professionalization in these five occupations, with particular attention to the establishment of syndicates, which represented the culmination of long years of gradually emerging self-consciousness. Less important professions will be mentioned only in passing.

Poverty in Southeast Asia has been analyzed in numerous ways (squatters, high population densities, dietary deficiencies, war, disease, etc.) though there has been no single systematic work which attempts to delineate all socio-economic and political forces which create the evolution of rural poverty. Although rural poverty in Southeast Asia is widespread and in most ways represents poverty in its most acute form, I am purposely not dealing with poverty per se. My aim is to discuss how regional, economic and population factors such as types of cultivation and labor requirements influence the variety and intensity of rural poverty in the rural Philippines. In particular the hypothesis under investigation is that where a landscape is economically committed to a single cropping activity (such as an export crop) which is highly labor intensive, the worse aspects of rural poverty commonly emerge. Furthermore, where a regional landscape is characterized by a diversity of agricultural patterns—some labor intensive crops, some capital intensive crops—the scale and character of rural poverty is of a different order or at least of a different magnitude.

Because of the importance of the family and household in all societies and at all historical periods, it is essential to be able to make comparisons between varieties of domestic groups. If we wish to comment on the extent to which the household is affected by social change and especially by the process of modernization, industrialization, social mobilization, or whatever that vague but ubiquitous phenomenon is called, it must be clear what would consitute such change. This means knowing how domestic group structure differs from country to country as well as from period to period.

In a recent article in this journal, Peter Schneider, Jane Schneider and Edward Hansen (1972) examine the role of regional elites and noncorporate groups in the European Mediterranean and proceed to elaborate a model that should allow us to understand more clearly the dynamics of social and economic change in underdeveloped peripheral regions. The two areas which they have selected for detailed consideration, and which consequently form the empirical basis for a model of broader applicability, are Western Sicily and Catalonia. Sicily I know only from the literature, but my impression is that it can more realistically be regarded as an underdeveloped peripheral region with the structural attributes described and analyzed by the authors. Catalonia, though, is a different matter, and it is to the Catalan case that I will be addressing myself.