Entrepreneurship in Africa can be analyzed from a number of perspectives. One approach, undoubtedly the most popular among economic anthropologists and sociologists, has been to conduct group surveys of the attitudes and behavior of small-scale traders and market-stall operators against the background of specific urban or rural settings. These studies have emphasized the importance of religion, ethnic group affiliation, family or clan structure, specialization, and the development of long-distance trading networks through migration or diaspora. Another type of study pioneered by Polly Hill, and since taken up by other field economists and historians, has been to analyze the individual innovation, cooperative effort, and adaptation of traditional institutions involved in the development of export crop agriculture (groundnuts, cocoa, coffee) by small farmers in Africa.

A nationalist coalition with middle-class leadership seized control of the Bolivian state in 1952. Uprisings immediately broke out in the countryside, and peasants seized lands previously held in large estates. In response to pressure from below, the new government in 1953 initiated an agrarian reform that destroyed the economic base of the landed oligarchy. It also reorganized old agrarian institutions and created new ones to serve the rural poor. Yet government policies a short while after the revolution ceased to favor the peasantry.

During the early 1830s Russian officials drew up plans to reform the educational system of foreign colonists in southern Russia. The colonies of Mennonites there welcomed the proposals as evidence of official interest in plans already formulated by leading Mennonites. In certain quarters, however, educational reform met fierce resistance. Around 1833, Heinrich Balzer, a Lehrer of the Kleine Gemeinde, a small schismatic group in the Mennonite colony at Molochnaia, wrote a number of tracts warning fellow brethren and the other colony Aeltesten of the dangers of close involvement with the “world”, particularly through educational reform. One pamphlet was concerned with the categories of “understanding and reason” (Verstand und Vernuft).

Considerable interest is again being expressed, in the public domain as well asin the academy, in the processes of change-ideational and pragmatic-which seem to characterize Islamic societies; societies, that is to say, of thosewho regard themselves as muslim, acceptors of the revealed law or “way“ shari'a of God. This interest is not new, but it seems to present itself anew in each generation, partly perhaps because it is something that has concerned Muslims themselves for most of the fourteen centuries that have elapsed sincethe religion of islām was proclaimed afresh and finally, by the Prophet Muhammad, in 622. Muslims are of course not alone in being required to see life as ideally governed by an unchanging set of rules which must be understood and conformed to, for this much is true of many other systems of belief which rest upon transcendent authority. It is sometimes held, however, that of all such believers in transcendence, that is, in a transcendent moral law, Muslims have an especially hard time in bringing life as (and where, and under what other cultural constraints) it is led into conjunction with the enjoined ideal.

The thirty–fourth chapter of the Greater Bundahišn, which is the fullest eschatological account within this important Middle Persian text, ends on an extremely peculiar note. Its final verse states:

This also is said [in the Avesta]: “The earth becomes flat, without a crown and without a seat. There are no mountain peaks nor hollows, nor are ‘up’ and ‘down’ preserved.”

It has lately become commonplace to suspect that most household and family structures in history were much the same. Under the pugnacious influence of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, historians have grown wary of drawing attention to apparently abnormal household structures, and perhaps weary of reiterating the predominance in northwestern European societies of the simple or nuclear family household. Ireland, however, was not easily squeezed into the Cambridge standard model as generated for preindustrial England. Not only were Irish households before the First World War uncomfortably large, but their bulges appeared in the wrong places. Admittedly these divergences were not great; yet to students following the path of Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball they betokened a more fundamental divergence between the underlying structures of English and Irish families.

The debate over estate and class continues to be one of the more enduring in colonial Latin American history. At its core lies an argument, much older than the terms estate and class, about the degree of rigidity of the colonial social structure. Evidence of this older concern can be found in the writings of Sergio Bagú (1952) and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1946) among others. The formulation of the debate into more precise sociological terms originated with the publication of an article in 1963 by Lyle McAlister in the Hispanic American Historical Review entitled “Social Structure and Social Change in Colonial New Spain.” In that article McAlister characterized the social structure of Latin America on the eve of independence as shifting from inequality based on estates to a new system founded upon economic class. What McAlister sought to underline was the transition from a social structure with static, defined statuses to a more open system based upon property and wealth. Since then the terms class and estate have been utilized to signify relatively open or closed social structures. Magnus Mörner (1967), for example, argued that the emerging system of economic classes could be found in the rural areas, whereas the urban areas retained more of a static, closed quality. The dichotomy of estate and class has since been widely utilized to characterize Latin American social structure.

The modern history of Asians in the New World is a long and complex one beginning with South Asian indentured laborers brought to the West Indies in the early decades of the nineteenth century and continuing into the present, when, in recent years, wholly apart from Southeast Asian refugees, Asians have amounted to about one in four of the legal migrants to the United States. Almost all of the literature about these immigrants and their descendants has been particularistic, focussing on one particular ethnic or national group residing within a limited geographical area, often as narrow as a particular city. This being the case, the articles in this journal by Stephen I. Thompson (1979) and Bernard Wong (1978) about the degree of relative assimilation of East Asians in Peru and the United States should be welcomed by all scholars interested in comparative ethnicity. Although the comments to follow are largely negative they should not be considered as dismissive of the value of the empirical research of either scholar; I have learned from each and hope to continue to do so.