It was rather bold of Furnivall, less than a decade after the event, to announce that the Depression had brough to an end the history of European overseas expansion over almost half a millennium. Against a background of renewed disorder in the international economy, the current historiography seems to be taking this bold suggestion fairly seriously. The 1930s slump is now the accepted starting point for studies of the relations between the west and the rest in the postcolonial era.

In Carlos Fuentes's recent novel, Terra Nostra, El Señor, an autistic Spanish king who bears a conspicuous resemblance to Philip II, is told of the existence of new worlds across the seas. In outrage and disbelief, he denies that such a thing was possible, for he, El Señor, had decreed that the only world which existed was to be found within the walls of his newly constructed palace. Royal monk that he was, he had ordered the world built for him and so forbade the existence of other worlds.

In the analysis of ethnic separatism and secession, two approaches can be distinguished. One is to ask what forces are responsbile for the general upsurge in secessionist movements, from Burma te-Biafra and Bangladesh, from Corsica to Quebec, and from Eritrea to the Southern Philippines. Another approach is to ask what moves certain territorially discrete ethnic groups to attempt to leave the states of which they are a part (or at least to secure substantial territorial autonomy), whereas other groups, also regionally concentrated, make no such attempts. The first question calls for a general explanation of aggregate trends; it aims to compare the present with some period in the past. The second calls for an explanation that can discriminate among classes of cases; it entails comparison not across time, but across space.

“Phrenology is of German origin: Vienna was its birthplace, Gall and Spurzheim its progenitors. But it was in France that it acquired its European eclat”, stated George Lewes in 1857. But he went on to declare that it was in America and Britain that the pseudo-science had its widest popularity amongst the “general thinking public”. The writing of the history of phrenology has also broken along national lines. Its impact on America and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century has attracted the attention of a generation of young social historians, whereas its progress in France has drawn the interest only of historians of medicine.

The last major bastions of dynastic rule exist among the Muslim states of the Middle East. In the last thirty years, as they have emerged from under the “protective” umbrella of European domination, the rulers of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States have attempted to maintain their personal control while coping with problems, on the one hand of unstable external conditions, and on the other of the pursuit of economic and administrative modernization. Their successes and, more recently, their failures, have held the attention of the world. In some ways their predicament represents a more acute aspect of the problem confronting some of the Indian princes in the 1930s when, as British dominance in the subcontinent was increasingly challenged by the Indian National Congress, they attempted to lead their states on the first halting steps towards modernity.

Linguistic conflict between French and English-speaking Canadians has been an enduring feature of Canadian society since the British conquest of New France (Quebec) in 1759. This conflict has taken a variety of forms and revolved around a number of issues in the past two hundred years, ranging from the question of religious and linguistic civil rights to economic inequality and economic dominance. The latest and most significant manifestation of English-French conflict has been the emergence in the mid-1960s of a viable movement for political independence for the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec.

André Breton often insisted that surrealism was not a body of doctrines, or a definable idea, but an activity. The present essay is an exploration of ethnographic activity, set, as it must always be, in specific cultural and historical circumstances. I will be concentrating on ethnography and surrealism in France between the two world wars. To discuss these activities together—at times, indeed, to permit them to merge—is to question a number of common distinctions and unities.

As a work of political theory, Ideology and Utopia has satisfied almost no one. Mannheim's critics extend across a wide range of viewpoints, from Parsons, Merton, Bendix, Popper, and Shils on one side to Marcuse, Hork-heimer, Lukacs, and Adorno on the other. Neither Marxists nor non-Marxists have found much to their liking in the book, and the rather easy dismissal of Mannheim's arguments by such influential thinkers on both sides of the political spectrum has certainly constituted a major obstacle to any serious consideration of the position he developed in Ideology and Utopia. For, I shall argue, the arguments contained in that work, when they have not been neglected altogether, have been poorly understood by those individuals whose writings exercise a dominant influence upon the thinking of contemporary social scientists.

Although there has been a dramatic broadening of the definition of social protest in recent years to include collective behavior that was once dismissed as criminal, irrational, or insignificant, our attention has continued to be focused on movements involving direct, often violent, confrontations between the wielders of power and dissident groups. Avoidance protest, by which dissatisfied groups seek to attenuate their hardships and express their discontent through flight, sectarian withdrawal, or other activities that minimize challenges to or clashes with those whom they view as their oppressors, has at best remained a secondary concern of students of social protest. Although specific forms of avoidance protest, such as the flight of slaves in the plantation zones of the Americas or the migration or serfs to the towns of medieval Europe and peasants to the frontiers of Tsarist Russia, have merited a prominent place in the historical literature on some societies and time periods, avoidance protest has rarely been systematically analyzed as a phenomenon in itself. There have been few detailed studies of the diverse forms which avoidance protest may take and the ways in which these are shaped by the sociopolitical contexts in which they develop. This neglect is serious because in many societies and time periods (perhaps in most in the preindustrial era), modes of protest oriented to avoidance rather than confrontation have been the preferred and most frequently adopted means of resisting oppression and expressing dissatisfaction.

“The personal is political” was a central insight of the wave of feminism which gathered momentum in the 1960s. Within that phrase is condensed the understanding that the seemingly most intimate details of private existence are actually structured by larger social relations. Attention to the personal politics of intimate life soon focused on sexuality, and many canons of sexual meaning were challenged. The discovery of erotic art and symbols as malecentered, the redefinition of lesbian sexuality as positive and life-affirming, and the dismantling of the two-orgasm theory as a transparently male perception of the female body were among the products of this critique.

Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their places in the social scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of modernization theory. This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habits of mythological thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorientation of these ideas in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the novel division of the globe into three conceptual “worlds” in response to the Cold War.

Americans who visited the young Soviet republic during the first dozen or so years of its existence were astonished at the degree of interest, fascination, respect, and even liking that their hosts displayed for them and the United States. “Ours is the only important Government which refuses to grant Russia political recognition,” one of them wrote, “and yet it is our country that Russia emulates and admires.” Another reported that “the word for industrialization is Americanization, and the passion to Ford-ize the Soviet Union is even stronger than the passion to communize it.”

Four years after their “emancipation” in 1838, the former slaves of British Guiana protested against their conditions and their unfair treatment by the planters who sought to bind them to labor on the estates. When the planters introduced certain rules and regulations, which were intended to regulate the quality and quantity of work, and to reduce labor costs by lowering wages and abolishing customary allowances of free medical attention, housing, and provision grounds, the workers complained to the stipendiary magistrates and stopped work.

The Route nationale 116 runs west from Perpignan, away from the Mediterranean and up the valley of the Tet River towards the heights of the Pyrenees. For about thirty kilometres, the road follows the river through a district known as the Riberal, a densely populated area of substantial villages and bourgs surrounded by river flats which for centuries have nourished up to six crops of vegetables annually. Just past the peach-growing town of Ille-sur-Têt, the valley narrows to no more than a gorge, and the road has to diverge to skirt a rugged granite bluff and cross over a pass called the Col de Ternère. As the road swings back around the other side of the bluff to rejoin the river and begin its steep climb through the conflent to the highlands, it passes a large cluster of ochre and white houses, with their characteristically southern orange-brown tiles, clinging to the lower part of the hill.

When one nation looks to another as an example for social and economic change, as the Soviet Union did to certain aspects of American experience for a time after 1917, the results are likely to reveal much about the borrower nation—its dominant values as well as its economy and social structure. The role which foreign, and particularly American, technology and industrial expertise played in the Soviet economy during the interwar period is still inadequately understood and is a subject of some controversy, with implications not only for an understanding of Soviet history and society but for the study of international technology transfers. (The term technology will be used here not only in the sense of “machinery” and processes, but in the broader sense of Simon Kuznets's phrase, “stock of knowledge,” that is, the knowledge of techniques of production, including economic organization.) Such transfers, particularly those between economically advanced and less-developed countries, have played an important but as yet inadequately studied role in modern history.

This essay discusses some beliefs and activities of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), a missionary body of Evangelicals in the Church of England, as its members attempted to found and expand missionary work in Ukaguru, an area inhabited by the Kaguru people about one hundred and fifty miles inland in east-central Tanzania. In the nineteenth century, Ukaguru lay on the most frequented caravan route used to reach the great interlacustrine kingdoms of Uganda. Initial contact with the Kaguru was made in 1876 by CMS members en route to Buganda. Although CMS work in East Africa was concentrated in Uganda and coastal and highland Kenya, a minor station in Ukaguru was established in 1878, in part as a rest-stop for those proceeding inland but also to save souls.