The museum has become disputed terrain in the closing years of the twentieth century. Not that there has been any unanimity of opinion about these institutions at any time in their history, but until relatively recently the disputes were often among insiders. These disputes were conducted within Western culture, within the professional world of specialists, and within a universe of agreed upon and accepted ideas about a viewing public and the objects they viewed. Karp and Lavine locate this debate and its dimensions succinctly: “whether to privilege context or object… aesthetics of objects or prepositional knowledge about them… [and] whether a curator's message… is more authentic than the provenance of the object itself” (1991:12)

In the early nineteenth century, many private, well-to-do persons collected rocks, minerals, fossils, insects, skeletons, animal skins, Indian artifacts, and so on, for their aesthetic appeal or mystical connotations. Their fragmentary and miscellaneous collections incited wonder and admiration in those privileged to see them while communicating a narrative of the prestige, esoteric knowledge, and adventurous spirit of the collector. Referring to aesthetic and mystical, rather than scientific criteria, collectors juxtaposed a seemingly incongruous hodge-podge of objects in their cabinets—armadillos and ostrich eggs, quartz crystals and rattlesnake rattles, for example. These collectors sought to celebrate the stability of their belief systems through the commonly understood marginality of the strange freaks and curiosities that sparked their imaginations. The rare, abnormal, bizarre, and the old were especially valued.

The forms and processes of local-level social organisation seen today in fishing communities in northern Europe can be fully appreciated only after their history is recognized and explored. Until the middle of this century, the predominant form of organisation was the joint maritime household, which involved men and women in separate sets of collaborative activities. With changing technology, rising standards of living, and the intervention of the institutions of modernity, women everywhere in northern Europe have been able to disengage themselves from their former obligations, doing so largely in order to realise their aspirations for domestic independence. The men, however, continue to own their boats in partnerships and to pool their labour, drawing upon relationships of kinship, affinity, and neighbourhood as economic and social recnnrces

The industrialization of shipping, a process which accelerated rapidly between the 1870s and 1910s, induced and accompanied dramatic changes in European and American port cities. Never before or since have so few cities on both sides of the Atlantic concentrated such a large proportion of the world's commerce. Thanks to the expansion of shipping, the great port cities of the Atlantic world acquired a significant manufacturing sector, including shipbuilding, and met the needs of their growing population for food and energy supplies. The reduction of freight rates and the expansion of shipping capacity and services brought considerable benefits to the urban economy. But the growth of shipping was also a factor in waves of migration, environmental and public health problems, traffic congestion, substandard housing, strikes, and conflict over strategies for development.

The decline of Iberia in the sixteenth century shook the foundations of world trade and politics, undermining Spain's Asian and American trade monopolies and creating the international opening that spurred other European states and merchants in the contest for overseas markets. After the waves had subsided in the seventeenth century, the world system had been reconfigured. The United Provinces of the Netherlands had become the first truly global commercial power—the first hegemon. The rise of the Netherlands to the position of world hegemony is at first glance startling. The seven provinces had a relatively small population (some 1.5 million inhabitants in 1600, compared to 10 million in Spain and Portugal, and 16 to 20 million in neighboring France), and had formed part of the Low Countries, an uneasily aggregated group of seigneuries, cities, and provinces under Spanish rule until the 1570s.

If the market has emerged in current Soviet and Western discourse as a notional Rosetta stone capable of deciphering the coded blueprints of post-Soviet reconstruction, its apparent destruction by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War and subsequent resurrection under the New Economic Policy (NEP) is often seen as a similarly defining element of the whole early Soviet project. As many would have it, the party's initial urge to control entirely the whole complex of economic exchange relations firmly situates Soviet totalitarianism in a Leninist political economy. The brutal repression of free traders and the mindless nationalization of production clearly evidences the calamitous utopianism of Bolshevik class-based ideology, while the reemergence after 1921 of limited market mechanisms, even if only a reluctant concession to political weakness and economic devastation, opened alternative paths to a non-Stalinist Soviet modernity involving elements of a civil social order. In a phrase, reified conceptions of the market broadly shape historical constructions of a unique and problematic Soviet past, just as they purportedly demonstrate what is peculiar about the post-Soviet present and necessary for the future.