Doctrinal differences within the military profession have long been a central feature of the development of tactics and strategy, and in earlier periods of history there have been controversies over the appropriate employment of certain arms and units, such as the relative merits of infantry in line or column and the use of cavalry for firepower or shock, as, for example, discussed by Oman (1929) and Quimbey (1957). More recently there has been the question as to the effectiveness of so-called ‘Strategic Bombing’, and the tendency of U.S. doctrine to undervalue the morale factor of guerrillas in their military calculations (Wilson 1970: 142–146).

Who do you think the Mennonites are ? What do you think their future will be ? These were the questions I most commonly encountered among older ‘Russian’ Mennonites in Canada. The ethnographer who enters the field expecting to ask questions is a little disconcerted to be quizzed by informants. It is worse, however, when one is expected to pronounce upon their history or to make prophetic statements concerning their future! Yet the questions were asked in all sincerity; suddenly I was placed in the role of the expert and expected to issue a final judgement on Mennonite identity. I soon learnt to be very cautious of providing answers, particularly to the first question. The question obviously involved a search for a Mennonite identity and it was clear that this had a long and troubled history. For a hundred years ‘Russian’ Mennonites have been searching for an identity acceptable both to themselves and to the wider world. This paper will attempt to explain how and why Mennonites have sought different identities at different periods in their history.

This paper is about migration from a small Cycladic island (1) to Athens, the capital city of Greece, and chiefly concerns those male migrants for whom migration entails a change from agricultural labour to work in the building trade. The first part of the paper briefly sets the depopulating island of Nisos in the context of Greek rural depopulation, migration within and from Greece, and the growth of Athens. Migration from Nisos from 1840 to 1940 fitted into traditional expectations about an island-man's wage-earning activities at a certain stage in his life and is therefore interpreted here as supporting established island institutions. Migration since World War II and the Greek civil war (1945–49) is interpreted as transforming island life and even threatening the continued existence of a viable community. The second part of the paper gives an account of the involvement of Nisiot migrants in the building trade as workmen, subcontractors and property-owners, and discusses the tensions which have arisen between members of old-established migrant families and more recent migrants enriched by the building boom.

For all the controversy that continues to surround the course of events in France between the summoning of the Estates-General and the fall of Brienne in the summer of 1788 and the summoning of the Convention and the fall of the monarchy in the summer of 1792, it is nowhere in dispute that they constituted a revolution— that is, in the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. III.7), ‘a complete overthrow of the established government in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it’. Indeed, they constituted such an overthrow in a manner and to a degree without precedent. Neither the English Civil War (and still less the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688) nor the War of American Independence are properly comparable with them. In calling the French Revolution ‘unnecessary’, therefore, I am not seeking to minimize either its importance (of which more later) or its novelty. Nor do I maintain that the problems by which the ancien régime was confronted could have been resolved by any scheme of reform which would have preserved intact the existing forms and distribution of power. I mean only that the Revolution was unnecessary in two different senses: first, it only took place as it did because of a wholly unfore-seeable series of coincidences; second, its eventual outcome in terms of the broad difference in social structure between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century France would have happened in any case. These assertions, moreover, are not—or so I hope to show—as controversial as they may seem: properly stated, both should be equally acceptable to ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ historians alike.