The sociologist's apparent bias against historical data is founded in the main on the restricted definition of a “fact” which he has come to accept during the past generation. Having found by tedious and pedestrian work that many popular impressions about social relations in our own time are incorrect, he has become sceptical of the possibility of ascertaining the facts about historical populations whose members can no longer be interviewed or observed. But I sense among my fellow sociologists a diminishing parochialism and for this reason I welcome Lawrence Stone's work on marriage patterns among the English nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries. I should like to weigh his conclusions by reference both to general social science principles and to cross-cultural data.

The Nagy-Magyar Alföld, the Great Hungarian Plain, lies within the Carpathian crescent, between the last foothills of the Alps and the South Slavic and Transylvanian mountain ranges. The Danube and the Tisza meander slowly through it, carrying their muddy waters to the narrow passage of the Iron Gates. The landscape here—the wide horizons shimmering in the heat of summer with unreal outlines, the crossed well-poles like slanting T's, the endless fields alternately of wheat and maize, the alkali-rimmed lakes, the lack of trees, the occasional stretches of empty steppe with not a single human being in sight—is to anyone from the tree-clad mountain slopes across the Danube a startling contrast. The visitor will soon discover that the character of the region and the traditions of its people have combined in the course of history to create here unique social forms.

The Tibetan term which is pronounced jisa and written spyi signifies literally terra commune or, like spyi, the principal or capital piece of land. The fact it is not to be found in the classical dictionaries of the Tibetan language, such as those of Sarat Chandra Das and Jäschke, seems to show that it is fairly recent. In these works the terms closest to it are spyi-tor and, better still, spyi-thog, which refer to a common fund or a common piece of property. These terms, too, appear to be relatively recent or at least exclusively Tibetan, for the dictionaries give no Sanskrit equivalent and they suggest that the terms belong solely to the dialects of Western Tibet. The Sanskrit terms corresponding to spyi would be sāmanyabhūmi and sādharanabhūmi in the first and most satisfactory sense, of common land, and agrabhūmi, murdhabhūmi and sirobhūmi in the second sense. But these do not occur in the dictionaries of classic Sanskrit, nor of Buddhist Sanskrit (Edgerton), nor of Pali. Nor were any equivalent expressions either developed in Chinese Buddhism or preserved through Chinese translations of Sanskrit terms. If any Indian or Chinese terms corresponding to the Tibetan spyi-sa existed, they obviously formed no part of the canonical or even of the paracanonical literary language of Indian or ancient Chinese Buddhism. It follows that if Indian or Chinese Buddhism had an institution resembling the Tibetan jisa, the Buddhist monks must have considered it to be foreign to their activities and in some way unworthy.

In turning from the monasticism of the East the historian is struck by the comparative complexity of the institutions of Western monasticism. Christian monasticism has taken many forms. At some periods and places it performed nearly all the organized work of the church, at other times it would appear as a very specialized vocation in isolation from society. In this sense, the monastery, as the church, has borrowed from and adapted to its needs a wide range of institutions at different stages of development in the history of the West. While the description of this structural complexity is a fascinating though immense problem in the sociology of religion into which we cannot enter here, there was a ‘monastic period’ in the history of western Christendom that warrants comparison with monasticism in the East. From the time of the breakup of the Roman Empire to the rise of the nation-state monastic institutions maintained a continuity unique in the history of western Christianity. Although only rarely the sole ecclesiastical institution, the monastery was in most regions of western Europe for a long time the dominant form of ecclesiastical organization. Accordingly, we can expect to find during this period something of a common monastic reaction to problems of economic organization.

P. 207. Surely I make it clear (pp. 182–3) that although romantic tales were widely read, there was no admiration of love as an ideal. I should have thought that my setting out of this point was fairly explicit. Goode is right to underline it, but I think he is at present misrepresenting what I say in the process.

Since the end of the first world war scholars have intensified their research on the Cistercian movement and its 12th-century architecture. In this note dealing with the building code and the structures of a minority group an attempt will be made to analyze the historical and theoretical bases which were responsible for the austerity of the Cistercian oratories. The question will have to be asked if and for how long the community was able to achieve and to maintain an ideally neutral type of monastic architecture, which was intended to be of such simplicity that it would not impose any emotions on the viewer.

Le même mouvement de la pensée scientifique qui rattachait définitivement l'homme à l'échelle des titres et l'intégrait parmi les phénomènes de la nature n'a pas manqué d'apporter une attention plus objective et plus systématique que jadis aux manifestations de la vie sociale. L'enfantement des sciences sociales en cours sous nos yeux ne se fait pas pour autant sans peine et it semble qu'on y puisse trouver une raison, si discrète soit-elle, dans la difficulté de constituer un vocabulaire apte à traduire des concepts définis et vérifiés. La remarque de Descartes n'y est pas moins vraie que dans les sciences de la nature: “Si de verborum significatione inter Philosophos semper conveniret, fere omnes illorum controversiae tollerentur.”

At the beginning of the period 1870–1913 the United Kingdom was the acknowledged leader in the iron and steel industry; at its end she was in some sense or other a third-rate iron and steel producer, surpassed by the United States and Germany. The first section of this paper will formulate definitions of “loss of leadership” which are statistically verifiable and economically significant, and will determine whether or not, for a given sense of the term, it is true that the United Kingdom fell behind the other countries. The second section considers some of the factors which led to the U. K.'s “loss of leadership”.

Gordon Griffiths and George Nadel have shown convincingly that the Revolt of the Netherlands shows some resemblance to the four great revolutions—the English, American, French and Russian revolutions—that Crane Brinton analyzed and compared in his stimulating work The Anatomy of Revolution. Both authors have been perhaps too modest. The resemblances are even more striking than they suggested; the Dutch Revolt had some features in common with the other revolutions which did not receive sufficient consideration in Brinton's analysis

Purism represents the conscious effort of a culture to reject a commonly accepted iconography and the meanings implicit in its canons of proportion, taste and esthetic, and to substitute in their place a pragmatic solution of the artistic problem involved. What is not always recognized is that this solution must be the consequence of the terms of the problem; and the statement of these terms, indeed the selection of the problem itself, are both culturally determined.

The two papers on Overseas Chinese (M. Topley, “The Emergence and Social Functions of Chinese Religious Associations in Singapore”, CSSH, and Tsien Tche-hao, “La vie sociale des Chinois à Madagascar”, CSSH, III no. 3) which have followed my own paper (“Immigrants and Associations: Chinese in Nineteenth-Century Singapore”, CSSH, III, no. 1) raise by implication a number of problems. I shall deal first with a few of the points suggested by Mrs. Topley's essay.

The study of economic growth would seem to offer unusual opportunities for the application of the comparative method. The number of cases is large, from the Egypt of the Pharoahs to the Egypt of Nasser, from the civilizations of the Indus, of Babylon, and the Mayas to the latest development programs of Pakistan, Iraq, and Guatamala. The practical significance of increased understanding of the process of growth could be great indeed. And economic growth theorists, after plunging ahead in the eary postwar years with unlimited confidence in the tools of their trade, have more recently issued open invitations to historians, anthropologists, and other scholars who deal with whole societies to assist in the formulation of hypotheses explanatory of economic growth. Recent textbooks and surveys of the field now include as a matter of course a section devoted to “the lessons of history”. More specialized works frequently include a chapter on the historical background of their subjects or numerous historical or comparative analogies. As yet, however, the actual contributions of comparative history to an understanding of the process of economic development have been limited, not to say negligible. Historical events and episodes have been used to illustrate this or that theory of development, but historical experience en grand has not yet been used satisfactorily to generate a theory of its own; nor have economic historians, the scholars indicated by training and professional orientation to bridge the gap between economic theory and historical experience, shown any great enthusiasm for the task. A prize competition recently opened by the Council (formerly Committee) on Research in Economic History for studies in comparative economic history failed to attract a single suitable entry.

If historians, as some non-historians imagine, were occupied only with the detail of national past politics, they would have nothing to say to each other at an international conference. Yet leading historians have labored to create a permanent organization, the International Congress of Historical Sciences, which now holds regular quinquennial meetings with increasingly worldwide representation. At least twenty countries besides all European countries and the Soviet Union were represented at its eleventh meeting, held at Stockholm in August 1960.