In the ideology of “dependency” and the “world system” the preservation of a comprador bourgeoisie highly dependent on its control of the state apparatus perpetuates the condition of underdevelopment to the benefit not only of that class but also of the world capitalist system, and obviously to the detriment of the remainder of the population of poor countries (Wallerstein 1984). According to these theories, the condition of dependency is sustained also by the perpetuation of petty-commodity production and other precapitalist relationships. In his enumeration of the implications of accumulation in “socially and sectorally disarticulated economies” (that is, third world countries), Alain de Janvry, who places himself, with some reservations, in the world-system school, states that “subsistence agriculture becomes the ultimate embodiment of the contradictions of accumulation in the disarticulated economies; … the peasant household constitutes an articulated-dominated purveyor of cheap labour and cheap food [even though] subsistence agriculture slowly disintegrates under this domination as it performs its essential structural function under disarticulated accumulation” (1981:39). For Immanuel Wallerstein, the state-class relationship and the persistence of pettycommodity production are both features of the “peripheral condition” and explain why it is so difficult (though not absolutely impossible) in his schema for countries to graduate from his periphery and semiperiphery to the core of advanced economies. The argument runs as follows: in its expansion across the globe the capitalist world economy creates social structures and state structures that fit the needs of the core economies by establishing a ruling class in control of the state and holding monopoly power within the national economy.

The view that the opening up of Africa by metropolitan capitalism, particularly during the period of direct colonial rule, was bound to lead through evolutionary stages to economic development and modernisation has long since fallen into scholarly disrepute. In the atmosphere of radical pessimism that has pervaded academic perspectives on Africa since independence, an altogether more sceptical view of the beneficence of Africa's integration into imperial economies has prevailed. But as is often the case in scholarly debate, thesis and antithesis occupy the same battleground, and both tend to view the world through similar lenses. What modernisation and underdevelopment theories have in common is the assumption of a single universal dynamic in the making of the modern world; exposure to market forces is thus apparently destined either to reshape third world societies in the image of industrial Europe, or to “underdevelop” them in the interests of capital accumulation in the metropoles.

The household as a unit of analysis has achieved wide currency in social science circles in recent years. Researchers have shown that in many contexts, both rural and urban, the household is the locus of important productive processes. It has also been demonstrated to be the context within which many decisions related to productive strategies are made and where income is pooled and then allocated. Testimony to the growth of interest in household-based analyses is provided by the recent appearance of a number of edited volumes (Netting et al. 1984; Smith et al. 1984) and review articles (Yanagisako 1979; Guyer 1981; Schmink 1984) on the topic.

By 1860, Cuba had become Spain's leading plantation colony in the New World, producing cash crops such as sugar, coffee, and tobacco for export. Cuba devoted so much effort to cash crops that the colony found it necessary to import foodstuffs to feed its slave and free populations. Among the essential foodstuffs that Cuba imported were dried beef from Venezuela and beef cattle from Florida. Venezuela, a Spanish colony that achieved its independence in 1821, and Florida, a Spanish colony acquired by the United States in 1821, had become Cuba's leading beef suppliers by the mid-nineteenth century.

The history of women is different from that of men. Women's history is the highlighting of the cultural construction of gender, the ways in which “men” and “women” are defined in considerable autonomy from biological males and females. The culturally constructed gender system interacts with a society's political system in ways that are just beginning to be explored.1 At the same time, scholars also find their definitions of national states to be in flux. Criticizing both Weberian and Marxist traditions of analysis of the state, Charles Bright and Susan Harding have stressed the open-ended, continuous, and contingent interplay between state structures and initiatives on the one hand, and social movements on the other.2 It is an auspicious time to reconsider the relationships between women and the state in cross-cultural perspective. Here I will examine the women's suffrage movement in Japan (1919–31 ) in its political context in order to encourage comparison with other women's suffrage movements, and to re-examine the interwar Japanese state from the viewpoint of one of its least-studied challengers.

In historical writing on the British West Indies, discussion of the transition from slavery to other forms of labour control after emancipation has been largely confined to the plantation colonies. It is usually argued that planters were most successful in controlling former slaves in colonies where they were able to limit the freedman's access to land and thus create a dependent wage-earning proletariat. Such an analysis cannot, however, be readily applied to the Bahamas, where the plantation system based on cotton production had collapsed before emancipation and where the sea provided an important source of subsistence and employment. This article examines the control mechanisms which enabled a white mercantile minority to consolidate its position as a ruling elite in the postemancipation period. Rather than a monopoly of land, the important elements in this elite's economic and social control were a monopoly of the credit available to the majority of the population and the operation of a system of payment in truck. The credit and truck systems frequently left the lower classes in debt and, as a governor of the colony in the late nineteenth century remarked, in a position of “practical slavery. ”