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Reply to William A. Green's “The Perils of Comparative History”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

O. Nigel Bolland
O. Nigel Bolland*
Affiliation:
Colgate University
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Extract

The preceding article by William A. Green does not make clear the basis upon which he criticizes my October 1981 comparison of Belize and the British sugar colonies. He begins by saying that the “phenomena compared must possess important and comprehensive unities of character” and writes later that “it is the presence of similar people performing similar functions under similar circumstances that renders comparative analysis valuable. These identities did not prevail between Belize and the British sugar colonies.” Belize, he writes, had a “unique system of domination” (his emphasis). Is the problem, then, that there are no “unities of character,” that “identities did not prevail,” or that Belize was “unique”? Every case is unique, surely, yet comparisons are made in social, as in natural, science between selected common factors which appear under similar, but not identical, conditions. There exists a range between John Stuart Mill's formulae called The Method of Agreement, in which one compares two situations which differ in every respect save one, and The Method of Difference, in which one compares two situations which are alike except in one respect, but Green seems to think only the latter is acceptable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 1984 , pp. 120 - 125
Copyright
Copyright   Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1984

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References

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3 Letter to Governor Dalling, 3 September 1779, CO 137/75, Colonial Office Records, Public Record Office, London. (Hereafter cited as CO.)

4 White, Robert to Evan Napean, 18 September 1788, CO 123/6.Google Scholar

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9 Superintendant Codd to Wilmot, R., 23 Feb. 1823, CO 123/34.Google Scholar

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14 Ibid., 86.

15 Ibid., 96.

16 Bolland, , Formation of a Colonial Society, 156.Google Scholar

17 See Roberts, David, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, 1979), 236–38.Google Scholar

18 Bolland, , “Systems of Domination”, 600, 614.Google Scholar

19 Andreski, , Uses of Comparative Sociology, 66.Google Scholar