The study of comparative politics is currently invigorated by a world-wide perspective. There is now a lively concern with the politics of societies hitherto little regarded or left comfortably to specialists, and these societies often challenge familiar assumptions based on Western experience. Efforts to understand unfamiliar institutions or why formally similar political institutions perform differently in different societies inevitably forces attention outward from the political focus into wider reaches of each society.

Studies of local markets have come to attract much interest of late in the anthropological and geographical literature. However, while a fair amount of work has been done on rural and periodic markets in the Middle East and some on North Africa, no serious research has been done in Egypt. Yet Egyptian weekly markets have been around for a very long time, and they continue to play an important role in the local and national economy today, despite extensive state control. For this reason they deserve more serious study and attention than they have so far been given.

It is noteworthy—and at the same time a bit disappointing in a what-took-so-long sort of way—that a recent innovation in the study of human rights should involve a focus on the lives of the people directly affected by them. To explain this delay of the obvious would probably call for a review of the persistent influence of Kantian transcendentalism, the quasi-utopian search for ideal justice, and the inherently abstract nature of law in its quest for impartiality. A similar effort could be applied toward fully understanding the changed circumstances that encouraged the shift toward practical realism. It would have to take into account the surprisingly late elaboration and popularization of human rights instruments, the proliferation of transnational NGOs that act on new opportunities to exercise moral and political influence, and the growing reach of new technologies of information and communication (necessary tools for the emergence of transnational NGOs). All of these developments have raised the prominence of legal issues and strategies among those once considered isolated and, in varying degrees, uncivilized. But whatever the dominant trends might once have been, and whatever new, enabling circumstances have recently emerged, there can be little doubt that over the last several decades a shift has taken place in the study of human rights toward practical or applied realism, with a focus on ordinary actors.

There are approximately six million Muslims in the United States. They come from a great variety of backgrounds. Among the few things they have in common are Islam as a religion and their American experience. The latter produces some previously unencountered consequences, including the rise of English as the language of Muslim ummah (community) and the reality of being a “minority” in a non-Muslim society. The American experience also raises questions of citizenship, identity, and integration.

Orientalism is a study of the genesis, evolution, and reproduction of aspecific Western tradition of knowledge concerned with the Mashreq, orthe eastern part of the Arabo-Islamic world. This tradition, however, isnot one of pure and objective knowledge; rather it is the elaboration of aset of fantasies and beliefs that is subsequently used as the basis forWestern colonial enterprise.

This article argues for the culturally productive power of imperial rule by exploring how missionary projects in Russia constituted new understandings of ethnic particularity among one group of imperial subjects—baptized Tatars, or Kräshens.<+>3 I demonstrate that while many Tatars who had been formally baptized into Christianity sought to rejoin the Tatar Islamic community over the course of the nineteenth century, a perhaps larger group, slowly abandoning the complex of Muslim and indigenous Turkic (“pagan”) practices that conditioned their subordination to the church's spiritual authority, constructed an indigenous Orthodox Christian identity. Subsequently, and particularly in the early Soviet years, at least some Kräshen activists sought to transcend the predominantly confessional foundations for this identity and began to contend that Kräshens constituted a secular nation altogether distinct from Tatars. In short, this study considers the (incomplete) transformation of a community that had been defined in religious terms, largely through the intervention of imperial Russian authority, into a self-conscious political and cultural community.The small number of Soviet studies on Kräshens, concerned principally with linguistics and material culture, have made little effort to trace the development of this identity, especially in its politicized forms. See Iu. G. Mukhametshin, Tatary-kriasheny: Istoriko-etnograficheskoe issledovanie material'noi kul'tury, seredina XX–nachalo XX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1977); F. S. Baiazitova, Govory Tatar-kriashen v sravnitel'nom osveshchenii (Moscow: Nauka, 1986); and idem, Keräshennär: Tel üzenchëlekläre häm iola ijaty (Kazan: “Matbugat Iorty” Näshriiaty, 1997).

In the 1970s and 1980s, two influential books, both entitled, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, were published (Holton 1985; Sweezy 1976). The titles were signs of the times: reflecting a concern with explaining a supposedly decisive shift in historic Europe economic systems. Today, “transition” language is likely to take the form of the title of this essay and the books reviewed here, employing some plural form of the principal nouns, and question marks. As the format indicates, current scholarship questions whether such a transition took place at all, and argues that if it did, it was regionally and historically specific.

An imaginary Berlin Wall stands between nationalist trajectories of the Western hemisphere and those of the East. While the nationalism of the West is generally associated with Enlightenment, the Eastern version is usually referred to as dormant cultural or linguistic nationalism stirred up by Western education. It is an old academic canon that gained new respectability through Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. But even if political realities in the postcolonial world apparently vindicated this academic canon, the same realities might trap us into writing history retrospectively. A pertinent case in point is the narrative of the emergence of the Indonesian nation in which the notion of a slumbering national identity has been central. A concomitant of that is the almost complete isolation of Indonesian historiography from important discussions in other postcolonial societies. This article proposes a heterodox perspective on the emergence of Indonesian nationalism, which is informed by literature on Senegal and Bengal. This choice is not coincidental, as these locations were the heartlands of the former French and English colonial empires.

The oppressive regime of Nicholas I witnessed the rise of the free-lance literati in Russia. Estranged from the state and divested of status in the official hierarchy, they turned their youthful energies and talents into intellectual pursuits. The generation of the “remarkable decade” represented the crowning point of this emancipatory development. While contrasting cultured Moscow before 1812 with that which he left in 1847, Herzen's heart throbbed with joy and satisfaction:

We have made tremendous strides forward. In those days there was a society of the discontented — that is, of those who have been left out, dismissed, or laid on the shelf; now there is a society of independent people.

“ …from the moment when a tribal community settles down finally upon a definite space of land, the land begins to be the basis of society in place of the Kinship. The change is extremely gradual, and in some particulars it has not even now been fully accomplished, but it has been going on through the whole course of history. The constitution of the Family through actual blood-relationship is of course an observable fact, but, for all groups of men larger than the Family, the Land on which they live tends to become the bond of union between them, at the expense of Kinship, ever more and more vaguely conceived.”

Although Ottoman cities long have been recognized as sites of significant ethnic and religious heterogeneity, very little scholarship exists that documents or analyzes patterns of residential sorting, be it segregation, the physical separation of groups from each other in the urban landscape, or its opposite, integration. GIS mapping of the Ottoman censuses of Jerusalem illuminates these urban patterns and reveals the importance of scale when considering this question. Even the most “integrated” neighborhood on the aggregate level reveals “segregated” zones of clustering and concentration at the smaller scales of quadrant, street, and building. At the same time, the proximity and exposure of residents to each other reveals how very porous boundaries were in the neighborhood. In order to understand how and why the city developed such a complex spatial pattern, qualitative sources like newspapers, memoirs, and court records are a necessary supplement to demographic records. This approach allows for a comprehensive outlining of the economic, legal, religious, and cultural factors and forces contributing to both segregation and integration in an Ottoman city. It also points to a multidisciplinary reconstruction of the social space of an historic neighborhood.

This article analyzes the role of soil in the making of authoritarian regimes and illustrates twentieth-century practices and discourses related to fertility across the globe. It compares two different approaches to and understandings of soil fertility: the first emerged in North Libya under Italian Fascist rule (1922–1943), the second in Central Brazil during the civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985). We compare two soil-forming processes that changed physical and chemical properties of the original matter and were embedded within specific ideologies of modernization. In both cases, state agendas of agrarian production played a paramount role not only in socioeconomic projects but also as an instrument to suppress opposition. Technocratic and political aspects of building and maintaining fertility were interwoven, although in different patterns in the two countries. We show how the rejuvenation of land bled into the regeneration of communities through processes that anchored the self-definition and development of these authoritarian regimes, and argue that attempts at landscape transformations through agricultural activity and strategies of fertilization are inescapable features of dictatorships. In so doing, we elaborate the concept of “authoritarian soil.” The juxtaposition of these non-synchronous cases reveals how agricultural modernization developed throughout the twentieth century. Our study is rooted in environmental history and contributes to the ongoing dialogue between that field and science and technology studies. Its cross-temporal, comparative methodology draws upon sources and historiographical debates in English, Italian, and Portuguese.

For many historians, personal writings—whether correspondence, diary, or autobiography—are primarily of value as testimony. They become interesting to the scholar in proportion as they relate events (revolts, wars, celebrations, etc.) that the witnesses themselves often knew to be part of history. Personal papers can also illustrate the stages of a life that reveal shared experiences of members of a profession, a community, or some other group. The historian characteristically, though not always, tries to work with the text to reach the experience and its interpretation by the writer.

This article describes how Islamic and Frankish legal devices complemented each other and were even combined to settle disagreements in the late medieval Middle East. For this purpose, it focuses on two legal institutions that provided responses to the biases of Islamic law against non-Muslims and to the prejudices of Franks against the local law. The first are the notaries sent to the Mamluk cities by the Venetian government to draw up legal documents and to support the transactions of Venetian merchants. The second are the new royal or siyāsa courts implemented by the sultans, where justice was dispensed by government officials instead of by traditional judges, or qāḍīs. Specifically, the article discusses, in a comparative manner, what constituted proof for Christians and Muslims, whether minorities could bear testimony or not, and how notaries and judges dealt with unbelievers. A common notarial culture, together with the expansion of siyāsa jurisdiction over the affairs of foreigners, brought about a much deeper legal interplay than has previously been understood. Ultimately, it is argued that Mediterranean medieval societies had evolving attitudes toward justice and diversity, and approached their own legal traditions in ways compatible with the conflict resolution, while constantly borrowing legal concepts about difference from each other.

This article traces the impact of Kenya's Mau Mau uprising in Jamaica during the 1950s. Jamaican responses to Mau Mau varied dramatically by class: for members of the middle and upper classes, Mau Mau represented the worst of potential visions for a route to black liberation. But for marginalized Jamaicans in poorer areas, and especially Rastafari, Mau Mau was inspirational and represented an alternative method for procuring genuine freedom and independence. For these people, Mau Mau epitomized a different strand of pan-Africanism that had most in common with the ideas of Marcus Garvey. It was most closely aligned with, and was the forerunner of, Walter Rodney, Stokely Carmichael, and Black Power in the Caribbean. Theirs was a more radical, violent, and black-focused vision that ran alongside and sometimes over more traditional views. Placing Mau Mau in the Jamaican context reveals these additional levels of intellectual thought that are invisible without its presence. It also forces us to rethink the ways we periodize pan-Africanism and consider how pan-African linkages operated in the absence of direct contact between different regions.

The two jurisdictions with the greatest volume and complexity of laws dealing with usury are the United States and Israel. England, the wellspring of our common law, and one of present-day Israel's legal fonts, did away with all regulation of interest over a century ago. All of continental Europe contains only two or three jurisdictions which apply legal limits to interest on loans. The communist countries present a special situation since private loans at interest have no official place in the economic system. Islamic countries, like Pakistan, constitutionally frown on interest but it is present in practice, thereby embarrassing the secular authorities. However, the extent of legal experience with loans at interest in all other jurisdictions combined does not rival that wealth of elaborate study which is to be found in judicial decisions and legislative documents in American and Jewish law. It is, therefore, of interest to examine from a comparative standpoint the approach to usury taken by United States' courts and by Jewish legal authorities to see in which respects they differ and are similar.