Social facts and policies can be understood only in light of our own perceptions. This holds true with a vengeance where ethnicity, nationhood, or nationalism are concerned. All through the twentieth century this syndromecum-terminological chain has played an extensive, puzzling and usually unpredicted part in structuring social life and political action. New ethnic identities (for example, Tanzania'ism or Indonesian'ism) with their related designations and loyalties have cometo the fore with a speed that reveals the transitional and relational nature of ethnic phenomena. The same holds true for the ups and downs of acute nationalism. On the other hand, many throughout the world would agree with the great Catalonian historian, Pierre Vilar, whose internationalist values are not in doubt, that “in the relationship between my own life and history, nationals problems seem to overwhelm all others.” However one may conceptualize ethnicity and nationalism, their political impact has provided a major and continuous dimension of social action.

The term ethnos or ethnic community has been used in contemporary Soviet literature mainly to denote a human community, referred to in spoken Russian as “a people” (narod). The same term denotes both those peoples who have lagged behind in their development and peoples of highly industrial countries; tribes and nations, small populations (for example, the Hoppi or the Ket) and large ones including millions of people (like the Russians or the Italians). It is used to designate contemporary people as well as those who have vanished with history (for example, the Etruscans or the Scythians); peoples who are territorially compact and those who are dispersed over widely separated areas (for example, the Armenians). The substitution of the term ethnos for the word people was made necessary by the fact that (in Russian and in many other languages) the word “people” has a number of different connotations, and the Russian narod is used to describe not only ethnic communities but also the “toiling masses of people” or simply a large crowd of humans.

Urban troubles were endemic in early modern Europe. Not only did cities undergo sieges, conquests, and epidemics, but the rapid spread of rural protoindustrial manufacturing threatened established markets and employment patterns. The acute problems of Antwerp, captured by Spanish troops in 1685, or of Como, whose textile industry collapsed in the early seventeenth century are not isolated examples of cities in trouble. Many more could be offered. Indeed, descriptions of cities in the seventeenth century, particularly those of the Spanish Empire, stress depopulation and decay. Contemporaries saw around them scenes of urban desolation. Sir Thomas Overbury, travelling in the Spanish Netherlands around 1610, wrote of the “ruinous” towns, while visitors to Ciudad Real in Spain around 1620 noted vacant, tumbledown houses, unemployment, and urban land gone to waste (Parker 1977:253; Phillips 1979:29). After several years in which Spanish Lombardy was devastated by wars, famine, and plague, the Milan City Council complained of “the destitution of all sorts of persons and the threat of impending ruin.” Moreover, throughout the state, values of houses and landed property had allegedly plummeted (Sella 1979:57,63).

At the end of 1978, the German art critic Walter Frentz, introducing a film and public lecture in the city of Worms, postulated that Europeans could breathe new life into the idea of European unity by devoting greater care and attention to the shape and form of European cities. The theme of his remarks that night specifically encouraged the preservation of historic urban cores, but more striking was his general concept linking the development of the European Community with the treatment of the European city. As a growing literature on architectural symbolism and urban imagery suggests, cities take the shapes that are expressions of a total society, reflecting the spectrum of their political, economic and cultural life. As Europeans rebuilt and developed their cities in the period after World War II, they also charted the course of their unification.

Maurice Agulhon, in his classic French historical study, revealed how the changing political fortunes of Republicanism were reflected in the many metamorphoses that statues of the Republic had undergone in the century after the French Revolution. This study and a number of important works by North Americans, like those of James Leith and Lynn Hunt, are also important in making us understand French political iconography.

The once well-defended border between legal history and social history has been overrun. The assault has been carried out on two fronts. In part, it occurred through internal subversion by legal historians actually interested in the nature of societies whose laws they studied. The attack has also been launched externally by researchers who persistently employed records generated by the operation of the legal system to shed light upon various aspects of contemporary social structure. This union of interest between disciplines with widely divergent research skills, a phenomenon somewhat similar to what French political commentators have termed cohabitation, has been soundly applauded. Conferences have been convened; journals have been founded; monograph series have been established. All of these have facilitated methodological and substantive dialogue between legal and social historians.

One of the earliest and most highly developed areas of orientalist scholarly production was the study of Islamic law. Modern western investigation of Islamic law emerged during the era of European colonial expansion, and the first studies of the subject were written by citizens of the colonial powers, many of whom had lived in the colonies for extended periods. These men produced the first translations of legal texts, the first studies of individual legal institutions, and the first comprehensive studies of Islamic law, thereby laying the foundations for the modern discipline of Islamic legal history. Surprisingly, students of orientalism have devoted little attention to the colonials' views of Islamic law—that is, to the attitudes and assumptions that underlay their writings and interpretations—or to the impact of those views on the development of Islamic legal studies as a discipline.

A large body of research conducted over a period of many years has demonstrated the enormous contribution that Scottish thought made to early America. Curiously enough, the evidence for this important influence accumulated gradually without attracting widespread attention until 1978, when Garry Wills published a book on the Declaration of Independence, orienting that document within the context of Scottish thinking. All of a sudden, eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy was being discussed in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and all the major relevant professional journals. Wills' work aroused a storm of controversy, and by now it appears certain that his discussion of the philosophical issues underlying the Declaration was garbled. Nevertheless, his book proved to be a landmark of a certain kind: It focused attention on the relevance of the Scottish Enlightenment to the American Revolutionary generation. Sometimes a forceful statement, even if wrong, can have a constructive effect, and so it seems to have been with Garry Wills's account, Inventing America.

“Lies, damned lies,” the possibly apocryphal comment of a British political leader on statistics about the unemployment consequences of his economic policy in the 1920s, sums up the impotent, frustrated acceptance of the ubiquitous presence of this tool of modern administration. We have slipped into living with statistics as we have with television or computers, even into accepting the assertions of value-free neutrality of its more brash exponents. The study of statistics is integral to the development of the modern state and modern society. Hence the relative paucity of studies of how statistics became what they are today is somewhat surprising, not least because its history offers insights into so many aspects of modern life, from the self-perception of society to the internal history of the exact and medical sciences, from the relationship between state and citizen to the social implications of the production of knowledge.