In 1812 a Russian army inflicted two decisive defeats on the Persian army. The resulting Treaty of Gulistan shifted tsarist borders 250 miles south and secured Russian control over Georgia and the Caspian Sea littoral. The commanding general, Piotr Kotliarevsky, received a second St. George Cross (the equivalent of the Victoria Cross) for this accomplishment—wounded in the battle, surgeons removed forty pieces of bone from his skull to save his life. The Persians were allied to Britain, who, fearing Russian and French designs on India, had sent a mission in 1810 headed by General John Malcolm, to the Shah. Charles Christie, a military advisor on the mission was killed in battle. Whereas Malcolm was an important agent of British policy in Central Asia and India, Christie was one of the first Europeans to travel and map the Afghano–Persian frontier. These achievements are normally logged into Russian and English history, but the men behind them were not native Russians nor Englishmen. Kotliarevsky was born into a lesser Ukrainian noble family in Kharkiv (Kharkov) province, while Malcolm and Christie were Scots. Like thousands of their countrymen, they served and made careers in the empires that ruled their native lands. A Ukrainian was Peter I's principal panegyrist. Scots wrote Rule Britannia and created “John Bull.”

Modern nations have often been explicitly imagined through familial metaphors. In particular, the construction of the national community as a brotherhood (a fraternity) has pointed both to the centrality of male bonding in the production of nationalist sentiment and to the exclusion of women from the social contract. Within that contract not only were women “subject to men's power; it also implied complementary bonds between men;… women had no place in the new political and social order except as markers of social relations between men.”

Hunt's observation recalls Sedgwick's analysis of how male bonding is mediated through the figure of woman. In nationalist discourse representing the homeland as a female body has often been used to construct a national identity based on male bonding among a nation of brothers.

In 1987, there was an uprising of sorts in the remote interior headwaters of Sarawak, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo. In March of that year, Penan hunter-gatherers in the Baram and Limbang Districts of Sarawak suddenly erected more than a dozen blockades against logging companies. Since that time, scores of Penan have been arrested for resisting the activities of these companies by erecting more blockades and engaging in other acts of civil disobedience. In doing so, they have achieved a great deal of international reknown among environmentalists, indigenous rights activists, and the Euramerican public at large. Their story has received broad international media coverage, and scores of celebrities, from politician Al Gore and musician Jerry Garcia to Prince Charles, have spoken out on their behalf. The Malaysian government has responded to these efforts with a vigorous media campaign of its own and, in the process, has come to play an increasingly visible role as a critic of what is portrayed as neocolonialist attempts at control over environmental affairs in the South.

Recently I have been examining the international campaign that emerged around the Penan issue in the late 1980s. In a series of interviews with European and American environmentalists, Penan resistance to logging was repeatedly cited as an important influence in the growth of movements promoting rainforest preservation and indigenous rights. Virtually everyone describes the Penan as exemplars of how an indigenous people can assert control over their own destiny and, in the process, halt the loss of global biodiversity. In short, the Penan have become an icon of resistance for environmentalists worldwide.

A few thousand young Mexicans were standing together in large groups in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco in downtown Mexico City to remember the massacre which had brought the student movement of 1968 to a sudden end ten years before. Many turned their heads upward to the balcony of a residential building that faced the plaza to hear Carlos Monsiváis, a well-known intellectual who had savored the protests, tell them that they “no longer saw the state as a tyrannical and omnipresent father.” Still another ten years later, many of them, and others as well, read the words of Hugo Hiriart, a promising young journalist in 1968, who claimed that the students had “dared to lead in a frontal and uncompromising opposition to the paternal and authoritarian Mexican state.”

We didn't have sharecroppers in here very much like we did in the South. Those families were paid a salary, which wasn't very much, and they always had a hard way to go, but most of the farmers, they had just about as hard a way to go as their tenants; their farms were small. … They [the tenants] all had their own garden, and own livestock and everything, and some of them even did do a little sharecropping. Most of them worked only so much a day for so much an hour. … But you know, one thing through here, whenever the work closed down in the fall of the year they didn't have any income. And they were really—[they had a] hard way to go. Now a lot of farmers that had more feeling for them would carry them through the winter, but I remember lots of them didn't have any income at all in the wintertime and it was really a big hardship.

In 1991 Jack A. Goldstone published an important book, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, in which he boldly charted a new way to explain the basic causes of revolution throughout Eurasia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Goldstone attempts to explain the periodic waves of early modern state crises, rebellions, and civil wars in widely divergent cultures and geographic settings by developing an intriguing model of state breakdowns which he applies primarily to England, France, the Ottoman Empire, and China. Goldstone views the crises of large agrarian absolute monarchies mainly as the result of a single basic process: prolonged population growth in the context of relatively inflexible economic and social structures, eventually resulting in rapid price inflation, sudden shifts in resources, and rising social demands on a scale that most agrarian-based bureaucratic states found overwhelming. Simply put, long-term population and price in-creases have helped push rigid political, economic, and social institutions into crisis. Since the publication of Goldstone's work, there has been a positive response to it from many historians and social scientists. So far, however, no one has attempted to test Goldstone's model by applying it to a state break-down which the author did not include in his study. In my own research I have discovered that Goldstone's model may apply to Russia even though he did not focus on it. In this article I hope to demonstrate that his work helps explain Russia's Time of Troubles (1598–1613) and that the Russian test case helps validate Goldstone's model as an important contribution to comparative history.