Sexual division has been an obvious and enduring characteristic of wage work, much studied on both sides of the Atlantic. Gender roles, household forms, and community welfare have been made and remade by changing access to paid work. The theoretical literature on gender segregation in the labour force is rich, but economists and feminist theorists have been interested in sexual divisions as general features of the economic or sex/gender system rather than as boundaries between tasks forged in defined contexts by particular clashes of interest. Whether in specifying the social groups that benefited by gender division, the systematic relationships that generated the boundaries, or the traits upon which lines of partition were drawn, most analysts have dealt with gender division as a characteristic of the work force as a whole.

In Latin America missions have traditionally played a large role in conquering and incorporating native populations into dominant society. Most studies of the missionary enterprise have focused on the colonial period, when the missions reached their high point. The Jesuit missions in Paraguay and the Franciscan missions of central and northern Mexico, for example, ruled over vast territories and thousands of Indians. Although these institutions and their leaders have been widely studied because of their importance and visibility for colonial Latin America, it is not often recognized that missions continued to play a crucial role in the frontier development of the region even after the Spanish and Portuguese had been driven from the continent. Throughout the republican period, missionaries from many orders and creeds became critically important actors who, to a large degree, determined the shape of relations between native peoples and national society. This is quite clear even today in the Amazon basin, where missionaries often provide the natives' first exposure to Europeanized society.

The ‘revolution’ from 1944 to 1954 prompted important changes in rural communities in Guatemala. The extension of many government services to rural areas for the first time, the involvement of political parties in village politics, and the growth of a rural labour federation all altered the political, economic, and social organization of rural Guatemala irrevocably. Changes became even more dramatic and more significant after 1950 with the growth of a national peasant league and the passage of a comprehensive agrarian reform law in 1952. Despite its importance, the changes that came to rural Guatemala with the revolution are not well understood and the shape of the‘revolution in the countryside’continues to be debated.

For nearly forty years scholars have wrestled with the seventeenth-century “general crisis.” Certain facts are not in dispute. The first half of the seven- teenth century saw a widespread slowing and eventual halt to the steady increases in population and prices that had begun around 1500. In addition, rebellions and revolutions shook regimes from England to China. What is contested is the root cause, the connections, and the significance of these events.

The French celebration of the centenary of Victor Hugo's death in 1985 included new editions of his works, biographies, an exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris, all that you would expect in honor of his life and art. But Hugo's death and funeral also drew the attention of some scholars, and forgood reason. Beginning on 18 May 1885, when what proved to be his final illness was announced, the newspapers were filled with reports and rumors about Hugo's condition. Following his death on 22 May journalists concentrated on what has been called the funeral of the century. Two million peoplecame to see Hugo's body lying in state at the Arc de Triomphe, and anenormous crowd viewed the procession to the Panthe on where he was buried.

Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations raises intriguing questions about the ways in which various countries' economic fates have been affected by the activities of what he calls distributional coalitions and vested interests. According to Olson, the development of such strategically placed groups has often enabled relatively small segments of society to impede the workings of a country's productive and distributive processes by distorting their functions to serve essentially their own interests more than the broader community interest. This ensures the perpetuation of a beneficial position for themselves, but at the cost of creating rigidities in the economic system that, in the long run, bring about in-built resistance to change, loss of competitiveness, and ultimate stagnation (Olson 1982:74–81). In itself this is not an especially remarkable proposition, but Olson has developed it into an unusually rigorous and at the same time illuminating theoretical edifice. His data have been drawn mainly from studies of the developed nations, the theory being used to explain macro-level economic performance rather than the workings of microlevel institutions, firms, or industries. But there is no compelling reason why his theory cannot be used just as fruitfully to illuminate the situation in developing countries. It may also be applicable to the micro-level analysis of institutions or industries there as well as the macro-level of national economies. Here we propose essentially to apply it to both, using Olson's basic theory as an explanatory guideline in an investigation into the causes of declining productivity in a single industry-the sugar industry-in one developing country-Indonesia.

In the last few years, work in social history and the history of women has centred on the transition to capitalism and the great bourgeois political revolutions—also variously described as industrialization, urbanisation, and modernisation. Throughout this work runs a steady debate about the improvement or deterioration brought about by these changes in the lives of women and working people. On the whole, sociologists of the 1960s and early 1970s and many recent historians have been optimistic about the changes in women's position, while feminist and Marxist scholars have taken a much more gloomy view.1 There has been little debate between the two sides, yet the same opposed arguments about the impact of capitalism on the status of women crop up not only in accounts of Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but also in work on women in the Third World, and cry out for critical assessment.

In the small provincial cities of the eastern Netherlands, the annual election of magistrates and town councilors was perhaps the most important public ritualof the year under the old regime. The elaborate and often solemn ceremony symbolized ancient chartered liberties—even when results of the co-optative elections were a foregone conclusion—and thus served to reinforce the community's sense of corporate identity. In 1786, however, in the midst of astruggle for control of the city, the annual Petrikeur in Deventer got out of hand. The day started out normally enough with the traditional worship service in the Grote Kerk, but after the black-robed members of the town council had passed in procession across the square to the stadhuis, a group of dissident councilors, who called themselves Patriots and were implacably opposed to the influence of the stadhouder in municipal politics, attacked aportrait of Prince William III of Orange, the stadhouder who in 1675 first insinuated himself into the electoral process.

The rise of working-class movements has recently been subjected to a great deal of historical scrutiny. Although this literature treats a variety of topics, much of it is devoted to different aspects of socialism: the radical, reformist, or utopian nature of socialism, the sociological roots of the movement among artisans and industrial workers, and the creation of an alternative, or socialist, subculture. One reason socialism has been investigated so intensively is that historians have assumed that socialism represented the authentic working-class ideology. Implicitly or explicitly, scholars have conveyed the idea that socialism alone promoted class consciousness, that socialism led workers to realize that they formed a distinct group and had to act together to defend their interests. Other movements among workers have been considered to be conservative and, as such, have been discounted as unrepresentative of workers' interests.

When historians turn to the social sciences for help with the task of ordering their data or making their sources speak more clearly, the results can be rewarding in unexpected ways. So it is if one applies the twin concepts profession and professionalization to the German context-in particular, to the history of German engineers in the nineteenth century. At first sight, an idea like the “professionalization of the German engineers” seems straightforward enough. In tandem with the growth of Germany's science-based industries and unparalleled system of technical education, it suggests the emergence of the men who occupied the critical positions in these institutions and embodied technological progress. A notion such as the “rise of the German engineering profession,” therefore, stirs visions of a grand metamorphosis, in which the land of poets and thinkers—and of Junkers, bureaucrats, and mandarins—turned into the world of Siemens, Porsche, Mannesmann, Bosch, Diesel, Daimler-Benz, etc.