Although much of the history of women's suffrage has focused on the American and British struggles of the early twentieth century, a newer generation of interdisciplinary scholars is exploring its global trajectory. Fundamental to these cross-cultural comparisons is the establishment of an international timeline of women's suffrage; its order at once shapes and is shaped by its historiography. According to the currently dominant chronology, “Female suffrage began with the 1893 legislation in New Zealand” (Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan 1997: 738; see also Grimshaw 1987 [1972]: xiv). In this timeline, “Australia was next to act, in 1902” (ibid.). Despite the geographical location of New Zealand and Australia in greater Southeast Asia, the narrative that accompanies this timeline portrays “first world” women as leading the struggle for suffrage and “third world” women as following their example.1 As Ramirez, Soysal, and Shanahan write, “A smaller early wave of suffrage extensions between 1900 and 1930 occurred mostly in European states. A second, more dramatic wave occurred after 1930” (ibid.). Similarly, Patricia Grimshaw writes, “It was principally in the English-speaking world, in the United States, in Britain and its colonial dependencies, and in the Scandinavian countries that sustained activity for women's political enfranchisement occurred. Other countries eventually followed suit” (1987: xiv).

To possess something is an unpredictable combination of the following: to have, to own, to know, or to control. Land, stories, resources, equanimity, and loyalty are all examples of materially incommensurate things a person might possess. Even without material wealth, for example, one might be said to be in possession of a wicked sense of humor or a good memory or despite all else, one's own life story. Possessing one's own life story, however, is not a given. Thinking of one's life as a story, as something that can be narrated, involves social processes and conventions operative well beyond individual processes of reflection or experience. Narrating one's life, then, is to situate oneself and to be situated in dialogue with society.1 As such, whether one's narrative is consensual with or contradictory to social norms, such narration signals possession of shared structures of possibility, including normative understandings of history, memory, knowledge, and truth. To narrate one's life is not just an issue of how, but also a matter of if.

It is a basic truism that the past influences the present, but the key questions concern which past and how its impact occurs. In this paper we seek to understand how legacies of the past affect the pathways and experiences of contemporary immigrants. Our specific concern is with the present-day impact of two momentous historical ethno-racial traumas: the Holocaust in Western Europe, and slavery and ensuing legal segregation (“Jim Crow”) in the United States. At first blush, their legacies seem unrelated to immigration today, and these pasts are rarely central to discussions about it. But in fact memories of and institutional responses to the sins of the Nazi genocide, on the one hand, and of slavery and legal racial segregation, on the other, have played a role in shaping public perceptions and policies that affect contemporary immigrants and their children.

This essay examines the relationship between contemporary racialized subjects in Germany and the process of Holocaust memorialization. I ask why youths from these contexts fail to see themselves in the process of Holocaust memorialization, and why that process fails to see them in it. My argument is not about equivalences, but instead I examine the ways in which the monumentalization of Holocaust memory has inadvertently worked to exclude both relevant subjects and potential participants from the process of memorialization. That process as a monumental enterprise has also worked to sever connections between racialist memory and contemporary racism. The monumental display of what presents itself, at times, as moral superiority does not adequately attend to the everyday, mundane, repeatable qualities of racialized exclusion today, or in the past.

As the French conquered Muslim lands in their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century quest for empire, they encountered multiple and sometimes mixed judicial systems among the native populations. In many places, legal codes were shaped by either fiqh, meaning Islamic law, one component of which is customary law, or by non-Islamic custom, or some combination of the two. To administer native justice in French colonies and protectorates, officials sorted through this multiplicity in order to standardize procedures, principles, and punishments. The standardization of customary law codes, whether written or oral prior to submission to the makhzan (the central Moroccan government, lit. “storehouse”) under the Protectorate, required that French officials both maintain pre-contact codes and create new institutions to administer and monitor them. Through new judicial bureaucracies, the French transformed indigenous law. Customary law was a “residual category” in the sense that it consisted of what remained after colonial powers ferreted out what they considered morally offensive and politically objectionable. Legal codification involved what Vincent calls “a compromise between those recognized as leading elements in indigenous societies and the colonial administrators who co-opted them.” Yet customary law, “if understood as allowing local people to do their own cultural ‘thing,’ should also be understood to have been a carefully restricted fragment of ‘tradition.’” This tradition when manifest as customary law “implies that there is a different kind of law with which it can be contrasted,” making customary law “the ongoing product of encounters between subordinate local political entities and dominant overarching ones.” In such encounters the distinction made between custom and law has long preoccupied legal historians, as well as anthropologists, colonial administrators, and importantly, lay people. Throughout French African colonies and protectorates, this distinction was key to the French usurpation of social institutions, as was true in British overseas territories as well.

On 15 August 1902, a battalion of Chinese police officers under the command of Superintendent Zhao Bingjun marched into city center of Tianjin and toward the Yamen Complex, the ceremonial site where the Eight Power Alliance was handing back the city to Governor General Yuan Shikai after two years of occupation following the Boxer Uprising. As they approached the complex, allied officials and commanders, standing with Yuan Shikai and his entourage under a “Friendship Forever” banner, were shocked and dismayed. As one of the preconditions for its resumption of the control of the city, the Qing government had agreed to the allied demand that its troops would not enter the vicinity of Tianjin, and some allied officials had even thought that Yuan would be compelled to beg the allied forces to stay and continue to maintain law and order. Yuan Shikai's sudden show of forces was a slap in their faces and potentially a violation of an international agreement. “What is the meaning of this?” asked an allied representative with raised voice. “Look carefully. These are not troops,” Yuan replied with a smirk, “They are policemen.” Not knowing what to do, allied officials pointed fingers at each other, blaming the stupidity of those who had designed the agreement. “It is not we who are stupid,” one said, “It is Yuan Shikai who is so cunning.”

Political scientists in early-twentieth-century America who traced the nineteenth-century origins of their field pointed to the British theorist and statesmen, George Cornewall Lewis (1806–1863). His best-known work is An Essay on the Government of Dependencies (1841). Lewis defined the science of politics as comprising three parts: the nature of the relation between a sovereign government and its subjects, the relation between the sovereign governments of independent communities, and “the relation of a dominant and a dependent community; or, in other words, the relation of supremacy and dependence.” Modern writers, however, had not yet taken up the nature of the political relation of supremacy and dependency in any systematic way.

Until recently, historians tended to think of government, the market, and the nonprofit sector as discrete entities. When they ventured into the voluntary sphere, they almost always focused on individuals and institutions, rather than the mechanics of government or the economy per se. Thus, the 1960s and 1970s saw a windfall of works on social control; scholars in the 1980s examined class relations; and those in the 1990s studied issues of political culture, nation building, and citizenship. With both Marxism and civil society paradigms now in retreat, a new crop of books has begun to reexamine the ties between the sectors in new ways, moving away from traditional “charity to welfare state” models that held that when the state moved in, philanthropy withered. Although written about very different geographical regions and times, each of the three books reviewed here delves into the jumbled “mixed economy” between markets, philanthropy, and the state, and combined, they provide a fresh lens for assessing historical developments.