As the industrialization process in Western European countries took off in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they largely turned to Asia and Africa for raw materials and other resources, as well as for markets of their manufactures. Various entrepreneurial diasporas, including the Indians, Lebanese and Chinese, were at the forefront to exploit these burgeoning economic possibilities, particularly in gathering local mineral and agricultural commodities and marketing European goods in the Afro-Asian regions. The Chinese activities in Southeast Asia stood out: they not only presided over the commercial realm but also organized mining production and cash crop agriculture in ways largely autonomous of the colonial regimes and Western entrepreneurs. How can we explain the dominance of the Chinese migrants and sojourners in the Southeast Asian economy from the 1850s to the 1930s? This paper repudiates the existing literature, which largely credits their economic presence to conscious immigration policies of the colonial authorities, and instead highlights the effects of a confluence of developments in the early modern period (ca. 1450–1800), including the sidelining of South Asians, West Asians, and regional trading communities in favor of the Chinese. A particular focus is the roles played by symbolic capital and mechanisms of advanced credit and spiral marketing, and how these gave the Chinese a comparative advantage over other trading groups.

What little has been written about Chinese immigrants in the British Empire has focused mainly on laborers, commonly known as “coolies,” and their roles in imperial society, culture, and industry. Chinese commercial immigrants, though they loomed large in public dialogues about race, migration, and empire, have been virtually ignored. This article examines how such immigrants were represented, and how two prominent individuals represented themselves, in London and metropolitan Australia, respectively, during a high tide of British imperialism and Chinese global migration. By the 1920s, the ardent pro-British sentiment expressed by Mei Quong Tart, the de facto representative of the Chinese merchant class in Australia, had been superseded by the anti-colonial critique of Lao She, one of China's foremost modern novelists. Lao She's semi-autobiographical depiction of Chinese life in London condemned the violent and emasculating character of British imperialism, while also excoriating Chinese society's failure to modernize, cohere as a nation, and overcome internecine class conflicts. Both authors were concerned with social relations between Chinese men and white British women, as were British commentators throughout this period, and with differentiating themselves from laboring Chinese immigrants. Contrary to Stuart Hall's famous assertion that “race is the modality through which class is lived,” for these Chinese commercial immigrants class and gender proved to be more essential than were crude concepts of race to their experiences and self-identification, and ultimately to British society's rejection of their attempts to assimilate.

This article traces the shift in demographic thought from the Malthusian framework that predominated in English-language political economic writings of the nineteenth century to demographic transition theory, which prevailed by the mid-twentieth century. An analysis of demographic theory offers particular insights onto the intellectual history of development because the question of population served as the point of departure for various development theories. While the scholarly literature on U.S. development ideas and projects has grown increasingly rich and sophisticated in recent decades, it remains wedded to the notion that there was a stark rupture between American development theory and the conditions in and relationships to the underdeveloped world that it sought to describe. This belief threatens to trivialize the significance of violent economic, environmental, and political circumstances that made development a useful lens of interpretation. Focusing especially on ideas about India, this article examines how, in an era of economic crises, intellectual and political exchange between British colonial, Indian nationalist, and American thinkers concerning the problems of disease, famine, and immigration enabled a transformation in demographic thinking. The concept of development did not simply diffuse from the West to the Rest. Global conflict and dialogue—both between and within empires—enabled its emergence such that, by the early 1950s, peoples in various parts of the world had already taken the ideal of development for granted.

Two young men met on a quay at the port in Conakry, Guinea in 1946. One, waiting dockside, was Mamadou Madeira Keita, a low-level civil servant and archivist. Years later, when he was a political prisoner in the Malian Sahara, some would argue that he was “the first francophone African ethnographer.” The other, descending the gangplank, was the Frenchman Keita had come to meet. Georges Balandier was unknown then, but would soon become a leading figure in the fields of sociology and anthropology. The encounter between Keita and Balandier was foundational for both men. Conakry incubated a canonical intervention—Balandier's 1951 article “La Situation Coloniale”—that some attribute an ancestral role in a particular francophone tradition of postcolonial thought. Conakry, and Guinea at large, was also the crucible in which a powerful anti-colonial politics were forged by Madeira Keita and his allies. In this particular corner of West Africa, anti-colonial politics and an emergent, politically engaged social science conditioned each other, like the two strands of a double helix, each a necessary yet ultimately contingent element of the other's structure. Though these links did not last long, they had important effects. This article, by emphasizing the contingencies of the two men's intertwined biographies, seeks to carry out Balandier's dictate to emphasize the “concrete” nature of this particular situation in order to understand how and why anti-colonial politics and an innovative sociology converged and ultimately diverged.

In 2002, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu passed a law that illustrates the centrality of what may be called “authentic religious selves” to postcolonial Indian statecraft. It banned religious conversions brought about by what it termed “material allurement,” and it especially targeted those who might attempt to convert impoverished Dalits, descendants of unfree laborers who now constitute India's lowest castes. Conversion, thus conceived, is itself founded upon the idea that the self must be autonomous; religion ought to be freely chosen and not brought about by “allurement.” Philosophers like Charles Taylor have provided accounts of how selfhood of this kind became lodged in the Western imaginaire, but how was it able to take hold in very different social configurations, and to what effect? By attending to this more specific history, this essay brings a correlated but widely overlooked question to center stage: under what distinctive circumstances are particular selves called upon to actively demonstrate their autonomy and authenticity by divulging putatively secreted contents? In colonial South India, I will argue, the problem of authentic conversion only captured the public imagination when Dalit conversions to Christianity in colonial Madras threatened the stability of the agrarian labor regimes to which they were subject. And today, as in nineteenth-century Madras, it is Dalit selfhood that remains an object of intense public scrutiny and the target of legal interventions.

All the elements of twentieth-century politics in Tamilnadu cohere in 1918–1919: human and natural rights, women's rights, the labor movement, linguistic nationalism, and even the politics of caste reservation. Much has been written of how this politics was mediated by newspapers, handbills, and chapbooks, and the dominant narrative of such events privileges the circulation of print and print culture of vernacular language. This paper explores the relatively lesser-known story of the role and impact of vernacular oratory on the development of the mass political in Tamilnadu from the Swadeshi movement (1905–1908) to the formation of labor unions (1917–1919), and the explicit attempt to persuade non-elites into speech, action, and ultimately politics. I argue that Tamil oratory was an infrastructural element in the production of the political, at least the political as we understand it in twentieth-century Tamilnadu, where oratory became the defining activity of political practice. When elites made the conscious move to begin addressing the common man, when Everyman was called to join into the political, a new agency was formed along with a new definition of what politics would look like. The paper considers what such new agency and definitions entail in pursuit of a better understanding of what constitutes the political generally and the Tamil political in particular.

Scholars of democracy from Tocqueville to Habermas have long considered the proliferation of so-called voluntary associations as a sign of a flourishing civil society and as central to the rise of democratic modernity. I contend that the Algerian theatrical and musical associations of the reformist period anticipate another kind of civic history: a history of displays of unanimism in public life. I am interested in how and why Algerians learned to produce public displays of agreement for particular audiences (including themselves) at particular historical moments. I emphasize three factors that contributed to the production of unanimity: the achievement of tawḥīd or unity in the Islamic reform movement, vernacular practices of consensus-based argumentation, and French colonial legal and surveillance mechanisms. The essay engages theories of civil society, colonialism, and performance. It draws primarily on material from the French colonial archives for the city of Constantine, Algeria.

This article uses an analysis of discussions of the November 1970 Portuguese attack on Guinea as a window into issues that continue to be raised concerning the country's first post-independence regime (1958–1984). We analyze ongoing debates among Guineans regarding the legacy of the former president, Sékou Touré, and whether or not there is a need for truth-telling and/or justice for abuses committed under his rule. One strand of this discussion focuses on legitimate political tactics and another on the politics of ethnicity in contemporary Guinea. The frequent assertion by Guinean interlocutors that “history is stubborn” points to both the perceived power of truth-telling and the ethno-political stakes with which these debates have become imbued. Debates among Guineans often focus on the uses and abuses of “truth and reconciliation” testimony, which for some Guineans is essential to breaking past cycles of violent state repression and for others is a kind of Pandora's box that could fuel not reconciliation but retribution. We show that Guineans are also engaged in a third order of analysis, of the status of “imported” notions of justice, agency, and culpability in an African setting.