The very complexity of compagnonnage has always served to protect and foster the well being of its members despite the prohibitions issued against this workingmen's association by French authorities from the seventeenth century until 1848 when such bans were briefly lifted. However, the same secrecy and intricacy that enabled compagnonnage to evade official attacks has frequently shielded it from historical investigation. Thus, although there have been studies of compagnonnage, none has really attempted to explain the relationship between the association's rituals and mythology and its more apparent labor activities such as ‘fixing the price of work’ and ‘ruining the masters.’

In a recent paper in this journal, Bernard Wong (1978) compares the assimilative experiences of Chinese in New York City and Lima, Peru. He concludes that the Lima Chinese are substantially more assimilated than their New York counterparts and attributes this distinction in part to differences in the attitudes of the larger societies in which the two Chinese communities are embedded. Discriminatory immigration and miscegenation laws and endemic racism in the United States inhibited the assimilation of the New York Chinese, while a substantially lower level of racial prejudice and official discrimination in Peru facilitated the assimilative process there.

The process of proletarianization and its role in the shaping of working class consciousness has captured the attention of French social historians over the last ten years. Until recently, works on French labor history generally neglected the formation of the working class to concentrate on the origins of national working-class parties or trade unions; thus, general histories of the political ‘workers’ movement' abound, to the detriment of occupational or regional studies. As early as 1971, Rolande Trempé's thèse asserted that the transition from godfearing peasant to socialistic proletarian had only just begun when a man put down his hoe and took up a pickaxe. In Les mineurs de Carmaux, Trempé showed the evolving social and political conditions which led coalminers in southwestern France to espouse trade unionism and socialism. The recently published thése of Yves Lequin, Les ouvriers de la region lyonnaise, provides another benchmark in the study of nineteenth-century working class history. Lequin reveals that, for the pre-1914 period in the Lyonnais region of France, the dynamics of proletarianization were more important in promoting worker militancy than its end result, the appearance of an industrial proletariat.

The geographical distribution of separatist movements in the world today is, and always has been, highly skewed. At any point in history such movements arise only in particular states, and—within these states—only in particular regions. One task of a general theory of separatism is to account for this skewed geographical distribution. Mr. Sloan seems to think that the answer to this problem is ‘imperialism’, tout court. He apparently believes that any region subject to dependent development is likely to spawn separatist movements (hence his discussion of Vermont). According to Mr. Sloan ethnicity has no causal status in a theory of separatism. Thus, to pay it heed is to mistake an effect for a cause.

The Japanese in Brazil may be called “an associational people in an unorganizational society.” More than fifty years ago, Oliveira Vianna, a pioneer in Brazilian social sciences, remarked: “The institutions of social solidarity are extremely scanty among our people. Here men live, as a rule, isolated either within the large estates or within their family circles. … The non-solidarity is complete. We cannot discover any trace of association among the neighbors for the sake of common utility” (Vianna 1920: 169–70).

Michael Hechter does not respond to the basic issue of whether or not a social scientist, in seeking to demonstrate that ethnic rebellion in an internal periphery of an industrialized nation can be explained only in terms of ‘internal colonialism,’ ought first of all to equip himself with some adequate and explicit theory of imperialism itself. Rather than deal directly with the specific criticisms which follow from his neglect of such an approach, Hechter contents himself with the dismissal of a proposition—attributed in his first paragraph, without citation, to me—the simplistically fallacious character of which I never doubted or denied.

This paper is derived from the authors' detailed studies of two groups of nineteenth-century families—eighteen families in Argentina and twenty-four in Chile. The studies revealed such remarkable similarities in the evolution of the two groups that it is possible to propose a broad generalization in respect to the social organization and national formation of both countries: there was, in each country, a three-generation sequence during which a number of families came together to form clusters that became the controlling entities of a region. Their base for political and economic control was either the existing capital city or a city that had been designated as the capital by these families.

Schooling is now a routine part of childhood in Western Europe, but this has not, of course, always been the case. The historical process of incorporation into school systems was one which affected the children of some social groups earlier than others and which occurred earlier in some regions than in others. In Western Europe, the contrast between the Protestant North and the Catholic South has proven to be significant in schooling history as in so many other realms: in general the South was less literate and less schooled than the North apparently from the sixteenth century until the accomplishment of universal school attendance and literacy around the beginning of the twentieth century.

The still modest literature devoted to the history of the family in Brazil offers two conflicting interpretations of elite family organization. On the one hand, scholars have often ascribed an exaggerated organizing propensity to the elite extended family or parentela. Gilberto Freyre's early identification of ‘patriarchal cohesion’ as the foundation of Brazilian national organization persisted as the conventional wisdom until very recently. For Freyre, the elite patriarchal family assumed a ‘civilizing’ mission by imposing solidarity and order in an otherwise disorganized social milieu. Other commentators have been less impressed with the elite family's achievements over time. For them, Brazil's great families were disorganized, destructively violent, and even ‘schools of vice.’ Oliveira Viana, who probably best summed up the limitations of elite family organization, argued that the extended family (clã parental) lacked a common life except in crisis situations when its solidarity was only ephemerally evident.