THE POLITICS OF CONVERSION Conversion from one to another of the Biblical religions makes for complex, various and unpredictable politics, as the first three essays of this issue illustrate. (See also Lucette Valensi, “Inter-communal Relations and Changes in Religious Affiliation in the Middle East [Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries],” 1997:251–69.)

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 1639 Manuel Bautista Pérez, along with ten others, were executed by order of the Spanish Inquisition's Lima office for secretly following Jewish beliefs.The classic study of the Inquisition in the viceroyalty of Peru is José Toribio Medina's Historia del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima, 2 vols. (Santiago, 1956). For a summary of the auto-de-fe where Manuel Bautista Pérez was executed, see vol. 2, 45–146. More recent studies of the Inquisition in Peru include Paulino Castañeda Delgado and Pilar Hernández Aparicio, La Inquisición de Lima, (Madrid, 1989); Gabriela Ramos, “La privatización del poder: Inquisición y sociedad colonial en el Perú,” in H. Urbano, ed. Violencia y Poder en los Andes, (Lima, 1991), 75–92; Idem, Gabriella Ramos, “La fortuna del inquisidor: Inquisición y poder en el Perú (1594–1611),” Cuadernos para la historia de la evangelización en América Latina, (1989), n. 4, 89–122. See especially Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “Recent Works on the Inquisition and Peruvian Colonial Society, 1570–1820,” Latin American Research Review 31:2 (1996), 43–63, for a current and comprehensive bibliography.Analyses centered on Peru's New Christian population include Boleslao Lewin, El Santo Oficio en América 1950; Alfonso Quiroz, “La expropiación inquisitorial de cristianos nuevos portugueses en Los Reyes, Cartagena y México (1635–1649),” Histórica 10 (1986), 237–303; and Gonzalo de Reparaz, Os Portugueses no Vice-Reinado do Peru: Seculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon, 1976). Lewin describes the Inquisitorial processes against New Christians with a focus on anti-Semitism; Reparaz presents information from various sources about the Portuguese in Peru; Quiroz relates the indictment of New Christians to the Inquisitors' need to acquire funds to support their operation. In prison for over five years, Pérez was under considerable pressure to confess to “Judaising”: had he admitted to being a crypto-Jew and repented, his life would probably have been spared. Yet he refused. As a result of Pérez's “obstinacy,” so the Inquisitors declared, he was condemned to die.

This essay is a preliminary attempt to place nineteenth century Ottoman conversion policies in a comparative context in relation to both earlier Ottoman centuries and other imperial polities, viz.: the Spanish and Russian. The present study has three aims. First, to ask some practical questions about the fact and nature of the conversion process. Second, to try to ascertain whether there is some pattern to the various cases occurring in the archival documentation for the turbulent years between the declaration of the Tanzimat in 1839 and the Reform Edict of 1856. And third, to put the late Ottoman attitude to conversion and apostasy into a broader comparative framework than has hitherto been attempted.This paper is the first fruit of a larger project that will examine conversion and apostasy in the late Ottoman Empire from the Tanzimat era through to the end of the Empire in 1918.

Two decades after the abolition of slavery, fear-inducing stereotypes of black men emerged in the U.S. South and Cuba that had not been pervasive before emancipation or in its immediate aftermath. Simultaneously, white antiblack violence reached unprecedented levels with the lynching of more than twenty-five hundred blacks in the U.S. South between 1884 and 1930, and the massacre of several thousand blacks in Cuba in 1912.Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence. An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 48–49; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 19–44; Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share. The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 197, 225. Yet beyond this common trajectory toward racial stereotyping and violence, important differences existed in the ideas of these two former slave societies about the place blacks should occupy in freedom, the kinds of images that were applied to them, and the nature of the violence exercised against them.

The Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements arose in the first decades of the twentieth century, an era of social and political unrest, and they were initially the center of intense controversy in Britain.Much has been written on the Baden-Powells and the Scout organization, but little has been done on either the Guides or on gender in either movement. Also, most works deal specifically with the first two decades of the movements, rather than with the interwar period. The major official histories of the Scouts and Guides include Henry Collis, Fred Hurll and Rex Hazlewood, B-P's Scouts: An Official History of the Boy Scouts Association (London: Collins, 1961); Rose Kerr, The Story of the Girl Guides (London: Girl Guides Association, 1954); and Alix Liddell, The Girl Guides, 1910–1970 (London: Frederick Muller, 1970). Robert Baden-Powell has been the subject of several biographies and the Chief Guide, Olave Baden-Powell, has written an autobiography that is quite useful. The best biography is the recent one by Tim Jeal, The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell (New York: William Morrow, 1990). The analytical works on the movements are limited to work on the Scouts by Martin Dedman, “Baden-Powell, Militarism, and the ‘Invisible Contributors' to the Boy Scout Scheme, 1904–1920,” Twentieth Century British History 4:3 (1993), 201–23; John Gillis, Youth and History (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory (New York: Pantheon Press, 1986); John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1977); Allen Warren, “Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Britain, 1900–1920,” English Historical Review 101 (1986), 376–98; and Paul Wilkinson, “English Youth Movements, 1908–1930,” Journal of Contemporary History 4:2 (April 1969), 3–23. Allen Warren has written several insightful articles, including, “Mothers for the Empire,” in Making Imperial Mentalities, ed. J. A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 96–109; “Citizens of the Empire,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John Mackenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 232–56; and “Popular Manliness: Baden-Powell, Scouting and the Development of Manly Character,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, eds. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 176–98. Good studies of working-class boys are: Michael J. Childs, Labour's Apprentices: Working-class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Hambledon Press, 1992) and Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). For the post-World War I period, see: David Fowler, The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain (London: Woburn Press, 1995). Two classic studies of middle-class girls are: Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981) and Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982). For works specifically dealing with American Scouting, see Jeffrey P. Hantover, “The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Masculinity,” Journal of Social Issues 34:1 (1978) and David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). By the 1920s, however, they had become an established part of what came to be seen as the British “way of life.” The movements also began a sustained international expansion, winning acclaim from educators, government officials, social organizations, and even the League of Nations. Yet this extension of the Scout and Guide program into other countries produced problems both abroad and at home, as contradictions appeared in the ideologies and activities of the two groups. Practically speaking, they both faced difficulties in accommodating different races, religions, languages, and nations in the new global brother/sisterhood.

In the general election of 1886 Dadhabai Naoroji (1825–1917), one-time Bombay mathematics professor and longtime Parsi merchant-entrepreneur, ran on the Liberal ticket for the constituency of Holborn and lost, with a total of 1,950 votes against 3,651 cast in favor of the Tory candidate, Colonel Duncan.R. P. Masani, Dadhabai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India (London: George Allen Unwin, 1939), 247. Naoroji's candidacy received little publicity outside Holborn itself and indeed, but for Naoroji's second bid for a parliamentary seat in 1892 the Holborn debacle might have gone unnoticed in the annals of parliamentary history, as did the attempts of two compatriots: David Octerlony Dyce Sombre, who was elected for Sudbury in 1841; and Lal Mohan Ghose, who ran as a Liberal candidate for Deptford just a few years before Naoroji.Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 (London, Pluto, 1986), 78; see also S. R. Mehrotra, The Emergence of the Indian National Congress (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 405 and ff. Dyce Sombre (1808–1851) was a person of mixed Indian and European ancestry who, despite the fact this his election was “controverted” the next year, did sit and vote on several bills. I am indebted to Michael Fisher for this information. See his entry on Dyce Sombre in The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Even so, Naoroji's accomplishment—i.e., election to the House of Commons as the spokesman for a colonial territory that many contemporaries, even those who were sympathetic to the cause of India, scarcely recognized as a legitimate nation, let alone a viable electoral constituency—remains one of the last untold narratives in the high political history of the Victorian period.Though he ran for a London constituency and was its official representative, Naoroji was also, and consistently, viewed as “the representative for India” to the House of Commons. This omission persists despite the availability of information on Naoroji's career in Britain through the work of Rozina Visram and others, not to mention the attention given to it in the contemporary Victorian press. More remarkable still, Naoroji's bid for parliamentary representation as an Indian for “India” remains obscure despite recent attempts to understand how thoroughly empire helped to constitute “domestic” politics and society across the long nineteenth century.See for example Jonathan Schneer's London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), which devotes an entire chapter to Naoroji but only briefly mentions the “Blackman” incident.

A great deal of research over the past decade or so has been concerned with understanding the processes of objectification of “custom” or “traditional culture” in Melanesia and other parts of the South Pacific, reifications which have accompanied, or are accompanying, the emergence of new ethnic and national identities (see, for instance, Jolly and Thomas 1992b; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990a; Norton 1993). As Foster (1992:284) among others has noted, colonialism has been viewed in much of this research as the key factor giving rise to these hypostatisations of culture, especially hypostatisations involving objectifications of entire “traditional” ways of life as cultural wholes.