Among the social sciences, the discipline of anthropology displays perhaps the greatest affinity for the methods and assumptions of historical enquiry. Anthropology’s turn to history began as early as the 1950s, but the relationship between the two fields was cemented a generation later. Yet because it is now disciplinary folklore, the precise character of anthropology’s turn to history is less well understood than it should be. In this chapter, I seek to explain why the methods of historical enquiry became so attractive to a generation of anthropologists. I make two major claims: first, that it was the problem of the origins and persistence of institutions that drew social and cultural anthropologists toward history; second, that this concern with institutional reproduction was part of anthropology’s long struggle to offer an alternative to a post-Hobbesian state-centred politics. In defending these claims, I examine in particular the writings of Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Clifford Geertz.

When the League of Nations lost ground in the 1930s, the ICI joined forces with fascist colonial movements to build up a fascist and corporatist “Eurafrica.” Chapter 7 shows how ICI members co-organized the international Volta Congress on Africa, held in Rome in 1938. The predominantly fascist Volta Congress wanted to replace the League of Nations as the torchbearer of colonial internationalism. To do so, colonial internationalists synthesized liberal and fascist colonial ideas into a revived Roman Empire, which they called Eurafrica. The eclectic character of this fascist Eurafrica came to the fore, when they incorporated Malinowski’s progressive anthropology and Islamic “tribal” and warrior traditions alike to govern the fascist Eurafrican empire. In a typically fascist manner, they did not want democratic representation in the colony and favored a corporatist representation through the different branches of the economy. This attempt to establish a corporatist “Eurafrican” empire coincided with ICI members from France reviving Islamic corporatism in Africa to use as a governmental tool.