It is commonplace to treat the 1860s and 1870s as a crucial period in the making of modern South Africa. These two decades saw the beginnings of the mineral-led industrial revolution that so dramatically transformed the political economy of the region; they marked a decisive moment in the assertion of colonial political hegemony over regional African kingdoms; and they witnessed a secular intensification in imperial involvement in the sub-continent. In light of their importance in understanding the history of white supremacy in twentieth-century South Africa, these social, economic, and political processes have been extensively analyzed. Yet, settler power and authority were not expressed only in terms of economic control or political conquest: in order to achieve the mature form of colonial proprietorship that distinguishes South Africa from most other nineteenth-century settler societies in Africa, cognitive as well as physical mastery had to be established over indigenous peoples and the natural environment. It is surprising, therefore that so little attention has been devoted to the conspicuous display of intellectual curiosity that accompanied growing colonial and imperial engagement in the African subcontinent at this time. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance.

Recent studies of trends in world income inequalities show that results differ significantly depending on whether income is measured through Purchasing Power Parities (PPP)- or exchange rate (FX)-based data. Korzeniewicz and Moran (1997), for example, relying on FX-based national income data, argue that world income inequalities rose during the 1980s. Firebaugh (1999), on the other hand, using PPP-based national income data, counters that world income inequalities declined through the same period. Both sets of authors subsequently have acknowledged and continued to debate the relative impact of PPP- and FX-based data in the assessment of world income inequalities (Firebaugh 2000; Korzeniewicz and Moran 2000).

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in Tamilnadu state became India's centerpiece in the export of cotton knitted garments. Between 1986 and 1997, Tiruppur's export earnings skyrocketed from $25 million to $636 million, the number of garments exported increased more than nine-fold, and Tiruppur shifted from basic T-shirts to diversified multi-product exports of fashion garments. This industrial boom has been organized through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of the Gounder caste from modest agrarian and working-class origins. In effect the whole town works like a decentralized factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant-worker origins at the helm. What is more, these self-made men hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to ‘toil’: the word ulaippu is distinct from the conventional Tamil word for work. How did Gounder peasant-workers remake the dynamics of work through their toil, to make Tiruppur a powerhouse of global production?

The South African state at the height of apartheid depended upon two kinds of borders. Firstly, there were the boundaries between South Africa and what was tellingly referred to then as “the outside world.” These were, like all such borders, highly porous when it came to the movement of migrant laborers from poorer adjoining countries. But in most other respects, they were impermeable. Indeed, the South Africa of the 1960s and 1970s must have been one of the least “globalized” states of the time. Economically it had pursued a protectionist policy. Flows of even mildly controversial or subversive ideas, of illegal commodities, and of people deemed “undesirable,” were strictly forbidden, and their entry from outside made difficult. Television was banned; books were subjected to rigorous censorship, and radio broadcasts were regulated and often manipulated by the state-controlled broadcasting corporation. The opposition African National Congress (ANC) and a variety of other movements were in exile and their members harassed, jailed, or worse. Physical and cultural borders were well-patrolled by censors, state bureaucracies, customs officers, immigration officers, spies, and police.

Ethnicity is increasingly central to analysis of war.Michael Brown et al., eds., Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); David Lake and Donald Rothchild, eds., The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Cf. John Mueller, “The Banality of ‘Ethnic War,'” International Security 25, 1 (Summer 2000), pp. 42–70. Whether conceived in essentialist or constructivist terms, ethnicity is often accorded explanatory primacy in accounting for the organization and use of violence in wartime settings, in part due to the utility of processes of othering for group mobilization. Both the political and ideological context of hostilities as well as the motivations of combatants in the actual making of wartime violence are frequently conceptualized in ethnic and racialized terms.Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); John Dower, War Without Mercy (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). In a word, wartime violence is domesticated; it is seen as arising from the identities of, and commitments to, homelands.

In his groundbreaking Nationalism Reframed, Rogers Brubaker challenges conventional understandings of nations and nationalism by advancing a distinctive, if not innovative, approach to the subject. Drawing on recent theoretical developments that problematize the realist ontology implicitly assumed in previous literatures, Brubaker calls for an institutionalist approach to the study of nations and nationalism. As he points out, nation and nationhood can be better understood not as substance but as institutionalized form, not as collectivity but as practical category, and not as entity but as contingent event (1996:18). He then employs this approach to analyze the breakdown of the Soviet Union. According to Brubaker, nationhood and nationality were institutionalized in the Soviet Union in two different modes: political-territorial and the ethno-personal. While the incongruence between these two modes led to tensions and contradictions within Soviet society, the dual legacy of such an institutionalization, manifesting itself as unintended consequences, eventually shaped the disintegration of the Soviet Union and continues to structure nationalist politics in the successor states today.

At the turn of the nineteenth century in Southeast Asia, the Kingdoms of Burma and Siam were largely stable, independent polities: powerful in relation to their neighbors, self-sufficient in terms of food, and possessing little reason to believe that these parameters would be changing within the clearly foreseeable future.See Victor Lieberman, “Secular Trends in Burmese Economic History, 1350–1830, and their Implications for State-Formation,” Modern Asian Studies 25, 1 (1991), p. 22. A century later, Burma as an independent entity had disappeared off the map, and Siam—at least in terms of its official foreign trade—was an economic satellite of the British Empire. Burmese teak now floated downstream to British Rangoon, while Siamese rice was carried to the world in the hulls of British ships. The Burmese monarchy had been disbanded; 93 percent of all official Siamese imports and exports were in the hands of London's merchants.George Curzon, “The Siamese Boundary Question,” The Nineteenth Century 34, July (1893), pp. 53–54. How did these transformations occur, and why? Were the processes of domination geared toward the economies, politics, or “geobodies” of these two countries, or toward an integrated combination of all three? What role did material objects of trade themselves play in this process, objects that were often deemed illegal as they passed through unstable, liminal spaces along the frontier?

When social ties are put to the test, proverbs affirm, those of consanguinity usually prevail: “Blood is thicker than water”; or as Arabs put it, “Blood is thicker than milk” (Lane 1893:1097). These enigmatic adages refer to former institutions of adoptive kinship in western Eurasia, contrasting the blood of natal kinship with the water of baptism or “spiritual kinship” in Christendom, and with infant fosterage or “milk kinship” in Islam. Other sayings, cited as epigraphs above, argue that the nurture of such adoptive kinship may match or supersede natal kinship, just as baptismal sponsorship was supposed to create a spiritual cognation superior to that of mere flesh and blood (Gudeman 1972; Guerreau-Jalabert 1995).

Today cultural thingness is on the agenda. What Appadurai has called “methodological fetishism” has become the byword for a new type of inquiry into the ontology of possession and circulation of things. Of these, the Maussian ’gift' has emerged as an organizing topos for other institutions of exchange not structured by the contractual rationality of commodity.

The break-up of empires was the most profound geo-political phenomenon of the twentieth century. In 1900, except in the Western Hemisphere, most of the world's people lived in polities which readily described themselves as empires. These polities were territorially vast, or at least far-flung, and each of them ruled a multitude of peoples who differed enormously in the usual markers of ethnicity such as language, religion, and culture. Over the course of a century, however, most of these empires disappeared. The territorial empires of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans fell apart in the aftermath of the First World War, the colonial empires of the Germans, British, Americans, Dutch, French, Belgians, Spanish, and Portuguese gave way to a combination of nationalist and international pressures, the wartime conquests of Germany, Japan, and Italy came to nothing, and finally the Soviet Union fragmented into a multitude of new, independent states at the end of the Cold War. Smaller polities such as Yugoslavia and Ethiopia fractured into still smaller ones.

These three statements regarding personal ancestry were made to me by villagers during life history interviews I conducted a few months into my research in northeastern Madagascar. Each statement is an admission of slave ancestry, and I highlight them to introduce this paper for three reasons. First, such statements are not uncommon in these villages. Many villagers told stories of lost or stolen ancestors, forced labor for “nobles,” and slave ancestry. Second, much of the recent scholarship addressing slavery elsewhere in Madagascar has suggested that slavery is not easily discussed among contemporary residents of this Indian Ocean island. Thus, the fact that the people among whom I studied readily acknowledged their own slave descent by referring to their “lost” or “stolen” grandparents or to their own Makoa identity prompts further comparative inquiry. What factors explain acceptance of slave ancestry among some Malagasy and its concurrent stigmatization among others? Third, examination of variations in Madagascar's responses to slavery can lead us to new insights into the forms of identity and opportunity in other post-slave societies.

In a famous issue of Times Literary Supplement (TLS) focusing on the state of historical scholarship, Moses Finley called for “Unfreezing the Classics” through “serious history” and lamented that, “Less than a generation ago the profound disagreement between Hugh Last and (now Sir) Ronald Syme about Augustus was . . . serious. But today? While our colleagues engage in polemics over the Tudor Revolution in government, the rise of gentry, the roots of Industrial Revolution or the causes of the First World War, what excites us to debate?”Finley 1966:290. Less than a generation later, the field of classical scholarship had been so transformed that Keith Hopkins, one of Finley's successors as the chair of ancient history at Cambridge could report without much exaggeration that, “Ancient economy is an academic battle ground where the contestants campaign under various colours—apologists, Marxists, modernizers, primitivists . . . Even within schools, there are sects. Besides, new strategies, new alliances, new compromises are repeatedly devised. Fresh contingents of scholars arrive, new tactics (such as underwater archaeology) are developed . . . But no new weapon is finally decisive. The war continues.”Hopkins 1983:ix.

To review a volume such as this in this journal is a bit tricky. I am not an historian of the United States nor of its diplomatic history. Rather I am a pre-modern historian of Vietnam looking at a book on American legislative history that deals with Vietnam and our war in that country. I shall seek to examine it from a more Vietnamese point of view.

In the 1970s and 1980s, two influential books, both entitled, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, were published (Holton 1985; Sweezy 1976). The titles were signs of the times: reflecting a concern with explaining a supposedly decisive shift in historic Europe economic systems. Today, “transition” language is likely to take the form of the title of this essay and the books reviewed here, employing some plural form of the principal nouns, and question marks. As the format indicates, current scholarship questions whether such a transition took place at all, and argues that if it did, it was regionally and historically specific.

Twenty years ago a work entitled The Nations Within examined the political structures that keep Native polities embedded within the United States, and the legal armature that sovereignty principles might provide for future activism (Deloria and Lytle 1984). The Native nations are still “within,” in the political sense, but they are “out” in public discourses; activism has given sovereignty claims more standing that all but dreamers would have imagined in 1984. During the same period, however, federal Indian policies have alternatively buttressed and undercut the power of tribal leadership, just as they have on other continents where imperial powers have cultivated “Native authorities.” Such destabilizing shifts impel scholars of Native political, economic, and cultural histories to examine less visible violence and inequalities that underlie political institutions, particularly those that remain as evident constructions of power change.

The title of this essay is inspired by Melford Spiro's “Whatever Happened to the Id?” (1979), in which he critiqued structural and symbolic theories of culture that denied Freudian universals such as sexuality and aggression. In some ways, there might be no connections between the Id and the Soul. The Id is associated with the writings of Freud while the history of the concept of the Soul links us to classical Greek philosophy and early Christian philosophers.

Dream Travelers is a collection of essays focusing on Western Pacific societies that weaves together new theoretical insights and richly detailed ethnographic analyses on dreams as travels. The result is a fascinating and impressively coherent volume. Recognizing that dreams in most societies are considered to represent actual travels of the human soul across temporal, spatial, and spiritual planes, the contributors take as their starting point questions about the social/political, cosmological/religious, and personal/psychological consequences of this assumption in eleven societies scattered across Melanesia, Aboriginal Australia, and Indonesia. Lohmann's introduction provides an informative historical overview of the social science literature on dreams, and then confronts methodological and epistemological problems that have long-stymied those whose interests in dreams are more cultural than psychoanalytical. These problems stem from the widely accepted notion that dreams are more problematic than other kinds of experiences because they are personal/private/internal and can only be made social/public through narrative. Dreams, so it goes, can only be known in a limited, biased, and filtered way. But, as Kracke reminds us in his Afterword, the inability to directly share experience or verify their content is not a unique feature of dreams, but extends to all sorts of social and cultural phenomena. More importantly for the volume's authors, these assumptions a bias in anthropological thinking about dreams as mere (often bizarre) imaginings of the individual, rather than as actual travel experiences that are fundamentally important to social, political, and religious life.

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.

Can the concept of “everydayness” help us widen “our understanding of the processes of modernity” (p. 4)? Yes, asserts Harry Harootunian in History's Disquiet, arguing that everydayness allows for seeing assimilations (not copies or alternatives) of modernity as experienced in regions outside Euro-America. Exploring early twentieth-century Japanese notions of modernity in tandem with a much larger roster of European theorists, Harootunian suggests that as both temporal experience and historical category, everyday life allows for a leveling of the analytical playing field across diverse societies such that a “native theory” (6) is not needed to explicate modernity in places such as Japan. Instead, as shared experiences of capitalism that transcend cultural geographies, everydayness allows for a coevalness of capitalist societies in and out of Europe.

Reproducing Empire is an invitation to reconceptualize gender, sex, and reproduction as an analytical framework for understanding Puerto Rico. In this complex and multivalent work, Laura Briggs repositions ideologies of family, sexuality, and reproduction as central to U.S. imperial enterprises. In so doing, she focuses a powerful lens on how discourses of sex, science, race, reproduction, deviance, and domesticity have shaped and propelled U.S. colonialism, in both form and substance.