The expansion of Europe has been a much-discussed process. Unfortunately the publicists' and historians' interest has commonly been limited to surface aspects of power, to political, economic, and intellectual penetration. Yet a closer acquaintance reveals the existence of a yet deeper layer of hostile infiltration, a subtler and more subversive onslaught on native values and traditions. The “underground” portions of western expansion have hitherto rather escaped notice, let alone analysis, although among their victims their force was felt deeply if confusedly. Thus an anonymous journalist writing in Russia late in 1896 pointed to that melting away of native guideposts under the western impact when he lamented that “under the influence of historical conditions and progress many phenomena which distinguished Russian nationality are now changing and therefore prove no longer to be genuine and unchangeable…” No hallowed custom, no authority remained unimpaired, even though the surface structure of society and government was preserved and the sovereignty of the state untouched. The termites of western influence were eating away the substance and left only facades. And the invisible portion of western power, its ability to serve as a universal model, proved in the long run even more devastating than armies, battleships, or stocks and bonds.

Since 1967 when Guy Swanson's challenging book, Religion and Regime, was published there have been several reviews attacking it on fairly specific points, but none of these reviews seems really to examine his basic premises and means for testing those premises. While the present reviewer has neither the space nor in some instances the knowledge to deal with all aspects of this comprehensive book, she has examined in some detail Swanson's basic thesis and model in order to show where they need modification. With greater care and flexibility in categorizing individual political units and by modifying Swanson's idea of immanence, his model could indeed help explain more than the official position on religion in a given state during the Reformation period. It could also be used in explaining the spread of Protestantism, whether or not it was officially accepted, and it could even be applied to the spreading of medieval heresies.

History often reveals itself at the margins. Hegemony becomes tangible at its peripheries, claims to legitimacy are most emphatically articulated where challenged, and rules are best observed in their breach. For this reason, historians have long been drawn to the study of border zones where sovereignty was contested or subverted rather than tacitly accepted. This work by historians is complemented by, although rarely integrated with, research in other disciplines—most notably in anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science. Social scientists have been particularly interested in the question of economic organization, of how individuals and groups structure commercial exchanges in conditions of insecure property rights and unreliable recourse to official contract enforcement. Such research is frequently motivated by public policy concerns, especially the complex issue of institution-building in transition economies and so-called crisis states. While generally more circumspect about the prescriptive powers of their discipline, historians will nonetheless recognize that the defining characteristics of a contemporary crisis state—limited authority of a central government, weak institutions, ineffectual bureaucracies, widespread corruption—also apply to most, if not all pre-modern polities. Therefore, the study of actors on the fringes of political and legal regimes holds the potential to produce important theoretical insights into the construction of alternative, private-order institutions that are of significance beyond a particular period, region, or methodology.

This article examines the question of how architects in São Paulo during the 1950s and 1960s addressed the political nature of their work, and more specifically the connections between their practice and the lives and politics of the urban poor in the context of a rapidly expanding metropolis of the Global South. More specifically, it assesses how they elaborated strategies to articulate the semiotic and material practices of Brutalism and the political repertoire of national developmentalism, initially in its democratic and later in its authoritarian form. The article argues that these architects deployed two semio-material strategies to operationalize the articulation between that political repertoire and the field of architecture: metaphorical indexicality and the impetus for the industrialization of construction. The image of the urban poor reinforced by that political repertoire was marked by a severe distance from their empirical life experiences, which deeply affected the practices of design and construction that progressive architects advanced.

At the turn of the twentieth century, most of the world’s pearls were extracted from rich oyster and coral reefs on the northern Indian Ocean rim. This paper returns to the sites of extraction, studying imperial maps made from 1889–1925 to delineate oyster reefs on the seafloor. Building from the submarine up, I draw on environmental, animal, and history of science studies to explore the work of mapping oceanic, animate space. Attending to the role of divers, whose labor was required to make the seafloor visible, and the lifecycles of oysters, which changed over time, I argue that the seafloor represents a kind of unruly terrain, out of both the reach and control of imperial authorities. The paper’s final section meditates on reading humans as part of Indian Ocean landscapes and the possibilities this offers for further comparative, transnational work in a materialist vein.

When the insurrection of February 1848 chased Louis-Philippe from the throne and brought a provisional republican government to power, the Parisian workers who had made the insurrection suddenly found themselves at the center of the political stage. As the heroes and victors of the revolution, they immediately won important concessions: the declaration of the right to work (the ‘droit au travail’), the opening of the National Workshops, and the establishment of the Luxembourg Commission—a body composed of representatives of all the capital's trades, chaired by the socialist theorist Louis Blanc, which was to discuss the organization of labor and make proposals to the government. The workers responded to this revolutionary situation with a monumental outpouring of words and action, attempting to construct a new social and political order based on labor and its rights. In this paper I shall try to describe and interpret one prominent feature of the workers' projects for revolutionary transformation: their use of language and of organizational forms that were apparently borrowed from the corporate system of the old regime.

This article constitutes a critique of abstraction as an analytic tool. The argument advances the idea that formalizing practices are indexical; that is, the way abstractions are realized necessarily incorporates features of the context in which they are produced. The expression formalizing practices refers to a series of actions or operations that make quantification, rationalization, and standardization possible. Entailed in all these procedures is an attempt to select and isolate features that exemplify a specific phenomenon or social process, or in the case of standardization, that stipulate its contours and dimensions. These features are presumed to be immanent from the start, but in fact, formal representations are carefully crafted, finely tuned instruments. In order to clarify these practices, I delineate three phases of their construction: the conceptual phrase, the choice of analytic strategy, and the specification of its formal representation. In other words, this approach suggests the value of examining formalizing projects as crucibles where cultural assumptions and practical reasoning are condensed into formulae. These ideas are explored in relation to the use of time and motion studies employed in early socialist Hungary to determine the new socialist wage system. While a decidedly local story, the implications of the analysis are much broader. The possibility of adopting this approach to the study of other formalizing practices, such as algorithmic systems and digital databases, is suggested. The analysis also raises questions about the commensurability of long-held concepts in social theory.

In Australia, applicants for native title—legal recognition of proprietary interest in land devolving from traditions predating colonization—must meet a stringent standard of continuity of social identity since before the advent of Crown sovereignty. As courts and the legislature have gravitated toward an increasingly strict application of the continuity doctrine, anthropologists involved in land claims cases have found themselves rehearsing an old debate in Australian anthropology over the degree to which post-contact patterns of subsistence, movement, and ritual enactment can support inferences about life in precontact Australia. In the 1960s, at the dawn of the land claims era, a handful of anthropologists shifted the debate to an ecological plane. Characterizing Australia on the cusp of colonization as a late Holocene climax human ecosystem, they argued that certain recently observed patterns in the distribution of marks of social cohesion (mutual intelligibility of language, systems of classificatory kinship) could not represent the outcome of such a climax ecosystem and must indicate disintegration of Aboriginal social structures since contact. Foremost among them was Joseph Birdsell, for whom linguistic boundaries, under climax conditions, would self-evidently be congruent with boundaries in breeding pools. Birdsell's intervention came just as the Northern Territory Supreme Court was hearing evidence on the value of dialect as a marker of membership in corporate landholding groups in Yolngu country, and offers an object lesson in how language, race, mode of subsistence, and law come together in efforts to answer the questions “Who was here first?” and “Are those people still here?”

In 1950, the Venezuelan Professor Mariano Picón Salas directed a historical seminar in the College of Mexico, concentrated on one region which he called Latin America. Subsequently, in response to comments from Brazilian collaborators, the program was broadened so as to aim at a comprehensive view of the histories of all the Ibero-American nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose was to discover whether there were not periods with comparable characteristics in the histories of the various countries.

The Second World War became a world war only in December 1941. By that time not only the extent but also the character of its warfare had changed, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Thus 1941 was even more of a turning-point in the history of the Second World War than 1917 had been in the history of the First. Most historians of the Second World War would agree with this assessment. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that relatively little interest has been devoted to the history of the everyday lives of European peoples during the years 1939–41, during what could be called in retrospect (perhaps hopefully so) the Last European War.

The massive and ongoing exodus to cities from the countryside, a fact of life throughout Latin America today, includes Brazil. Although as late as 1960 that nation was a primarily agricultural country, over two-thirds of the population presently live in urban centers.