Most historians of the Mughal empire currently emphasize economic factors in their attempts to locate and measure the causes of imperial decline in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India. Recent articles reiterate a standard set of tensions: those between monarch, military and service nobles (mansabdars), landholders (zamindars), and peasants. Existing theories attribute the Mughal decline to the nature of the monarchy, the breakdown of the mansabdari administrative system, and the challenges from newly established regional rulers. One influential analysis points to the increasing burden of taxation and consequent zamindar-peasant rebellions throughout the empire as the fundamental cause of decline. The nobility and the mansabdari system have received most attention, however. Historians have emphasized the strains caused by numerical expansion, inflation of noble ranks, and the ‘aristocratization’ of the mansabdars through conspicuous consumption and hereditary control of positions.

Introduction

Programs of agrarian reform have continued to be used either to bring about change or sometimes to slow it down, depending on whether such programs were introduced after a major upheaval in society or as a preventive against it. Economic development and modernization have been used as justifications for introducing reform programs, on the assumption that reform facilitates these processes, but the actual contribution of reform to development and modernization is not obvious nor easily measured because of the variety of approaches utilized in evaluating the effects. Furthermore, only the rudiments of a theory of agrarian reform have been formulated in the literature. To a large extent, agrarian reform programs have been pragmatically oriented, aimed at short-term political goals, or viewed as problem-solving mechanisms in the day-to-day affairs of the state. One may go farther by suggesting that reform programs have often been used to inhibit change. In that role reform serves as a pacifier, and only minimum change would be brought about—just enough to avoid an upheaval or to stabilize the relations between reformers and potential beneficiaries. By the time such a weakness, if it may be considered that, has been discovered, another potion of reform would be introduced to keep the lid on the dormant restlessness of its potential beneficiaries.

Recent challenges to the unity of the nation-state in advanced industrial societies have surprised most of us. Scotland, Quebec, Flanders, Occitania, bCatalonia and other regions have made life more interesting politically and more confusing intellectually. While the emergence of ethnic consciousness, or concern with ethnic identity, appears nearly universal across Europe and North America (or indeed around the globe)nationalist movements—demands for autonomy or outright separation—are not equally strong: the nationalism of the Scots, the Basques, Catalans, Croats, Flemish, and Quebecois is far more powerful than that of the Alsatians, Bretons, South Italians, and the Occitents.

In many otherwise diverse societies, owners of large agricultural estates have paid their year-round workers with the use of a piece of land on which to produce their own subsistence crops. In a “preliminary report” Magnus Morner cited some eleven examples of this system in Europe, Latin America, and Africa. Although Mörner mentions different influences, he does not advance an argument to explain these systems. This essay seeks to contribute to our understanding of the political economy of these “labor rent” or “estate labor” systems. The paper is exploratory: previous approaches are considered, a theoretical framework is proposed, and some tentative hypotheses are presented. My evidence comes from three examples: the Insten system of East Elbian Germany from ca. 1750 to ca. 1860; the ‘izbah system of the Egyptian Delta from ca. 1850 to ca. 1940; and the pre-1930 inquilinaje system of Central Chile.

Early in his tenure in office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announced that his agrarian reforms would affect the lives of the common people of Pakistan more than any other measure contemplated by his avowedly socialist and populist regime. Almost seven years later, the martial law regime of Zia-ul-Haq issued a White Paper on the performance of Bhutto's government (which Zia ended with a coup in July of 1977), charging that the land reforms were in practice yet another example of that Government's cynical posturing, sinister manipulation, favoritism and victimization, corruption and abuse of power. The irony is that a centerpiece of Bhutto's program for the “salvation” of Pakistan should appear in a White Paper which attempted to add legitimacy to the execution of the popular ex-Prime Minister. A further irony is that Bhutto himself came from a background which could only be called “feudal” in the terms of Pakistani political discourse, and surrounded himself politically with scions of similar families. What was meant by Bhutto's pledge to eradicate feudalism via land reform and what are we to make of it?

A decade ago, most African states had proclaimed their commitment to centralized planning and administration. At the end of European rule, African leaders saw their countries as poor and malintegrated, but with great potential. That potential could be realized, they thought, only through firm central direction. Scarce resources, including capital and technology, had to be coordinated effectively and managed carefully. The few skilled personnel had to be located at key points. And the divisive tendencies of regional, religious, and ethnic differences had to be constrained by a centralized, national authority.

This paper is a semiological attempt to derive meaning from the recent reconceptualization of the German nation: the thesis of the separate socialist nation as advanced by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Before entering upon the question of how the-socialist nation of the GDR is defined and what this definition means in contrast to the definition of the nation current in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), we may well ask whether it makes any difference. In spite of the furor aroused by this idea in the West German press, non-Germans may legitimately wonder whether it is not silly to quibble over whether to the GDR a separate state or a separate nation.

There is an uncanny similarity between regulations on merchant activity in various medieval Western European countries, on the one hand, and, on the other, those in the People's Republic of China (PRC) just after its institution (see Appendix). My discovery of this resemblance informed the research on which this paper is based and directed my attention to some crucial relationships in the interaction between commerce and state at a certain level of economic development. The presence of similar regulations in these societies had to point to (1) like activities going on in them all, along with (2) governmental disapproval of these activities. Thus, a preliminary look at materials on Europe led to new insights into the Chinese situation.

This essay outlines research that has occupied much of my time for the past several years. It concerns regional associations in traditional China, or what is known as hui-kuan or tung-hsiang-hui. When I began this research, inspired in part by Ho Ping-ti's masterful survey (1966), I believed, as did Ho, that most of the stones on this particular field of knowledge had been turned.What remained to be done, it seemed to me, was to record the vicissitudes of these traditional associations in the modernizing atmosphere of early twentieth-century China. But the more I began to look into these associations—into the way they operated, what they implied about Chinese society, and how they seemed to put the countryside into the city—the less I felt I knew and the less I was satisfied with previous generalizations made about them.

When the insurrection of February 1848 chased Louis-Philippe from the throne and brought a provisional republican government to power, the Parisian workers who had made the insurrection suddenly found themselves at the center of the political stage. As the heroes and victors of the revolution, they immediately won important concessions: the declaration of the right to work (the ‘droit au travail’), the opening of the National Workshops, and the establishment of the Luxembourg Commission—a body composed of representatives of all the capital's trades, chaired by the socialist theorist Louis Blanc, which was to discuss the organization of labor and make proposals to the government. The workers responded to this revolutionary situation with a monumental outpouring of words and action, attempting to construct a new social and political order based on labor and its rights. In this paper I shall try to describe and interpret one prominent feature of the workers' projects for revolutionary transformation: their use of language and of organizational forms that were apparently borrowed from the corporate system of the old regime.

Most of the literature concerning traditional African medical practice has dealt with aspects often deemed ‘irrational,’ such as the role of priests, shrines, magic and religious ritual. M. J. Field's work demonstrates convincingly that these aspects of medical treatment in Ghana are essential in mitigating and curing psychosomatic illnesses as well as controlling neuroses. The emphasis on religious and psychological methods of treatment, however, can often lead to less perceptive conclusions, such as those of U.S. doctors visiting Ghana in 1960 who stated flatly that traditional medical practices there consist solely of ‘ignorance and superstition’ and that ‘witchdoctor … medicine man and native doctor are synonymous terms.

The eighteenth-century medical view of the peasantry offers clues to a series of problems. This essay will treat one of them, namely the processes by which the French medical community in the declining years of the ancien régime and the early years of the Revolutionary period came to justify proposals for intervention in a rural society generally hostile to its claims and suspicious of its motives. The theme of the present study is an exploration of how the ideology of rationality and control, which was being developed in the learned world of the eighteenth century, was reinforced by a group within it that was gaining prestige and searching for means to enhance its professional status and power.Since the demands of such an inquiry are rather large, many of the related questions which it raises, such as the nature of medical knowledge, the contemporary disputes in medical philosophy, and the movement of change from one form of medicine to another, will be touched on only insofar as they have direct relevance to the major need to clarify the medical contribution to the development of the new ideology. In my present conceptualization of the problem, I am concerned to show that there was a close interaction between medical knowledge and the social values of the members of the medical trade, even if there existed no conscious direction of the elements connecting the two, and in spite of the difficulties there are in establishing the precise links mediating intellectual products and their social configurations.

At 7:00 a.m. on 16 July 1833, M. Minder, owner of a cotton mill at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, a small textile center in Alsace, announced to his spinners that he would henceforth be charging them 1 franc 20 centimes per week for dévidage, that is for the reeling and unreeling of roving or finished thread—a task accomplished by women in a separate workroom. In response, his spinners walked out of the mill. A local arbitration board (the Conseil des Prudhommes) would later rule that M. Minder had broken the work contract (the contrat du travail) since he had not given proper advanced notice to his laborers of the new charge for dévidage. In other words, the board ruled that the laborers had in fact become legally free to leave work by virtue of Minder's improper announcement. Even though all ninety-five of them walked out en masse, they did not thereby constitute an illegal coalition since their unwritten contract with M. Minder as denned by law had been broken first by Minder's failure to give notice. The laborers' subsequent actions, however, did constitute a coalition; and ten of them were later prosecuted under the anti-coalition statutes. They marched directly to several neighboring mills and tried to induce their fellow spin- ners to join them in the streets. Everyone in town knew that M. Minder had not acted alone, that most local mill owners planned to institute a charge for dévidage.

Western sociology, which mirrors the dynamic development of modern industrialised and urbanised society, has not escaped the need for radical division of work; and many of the social institutions of Western society have been made subjects of sociological specialisation. These treat various kinds of human activity as fixed behaviour patterns which, up to a point, exist in their own right but cannot be divorced from their social background. A society cannot be understood without examining its specific institutions; conversely, these can be understood only in the context of that society.