GLOBALIZATIONS World markets and nation-states have been the strong forces of history for the last two centuries, interacting in complex ways. Are markets getting the upper hand over states? Many argue that the current quantum leap of global economic integration has brought about conditions that are altogether different from those of the past. The first two papers, examining effects of an earlier globalization which began in the mid-nineteenth century, tend against that view.

The academic world has undoubtedly become smaller in recent decades. Chinese-, Spanish-, English-, Arabic-, French-, Russian-, German- and Italian-speaking academics, intellectuals, and feuilletonists discuss ‘the end of history' or ‘the clash of civilizations.' We all seem driven by the cycles of boom and bust that govern the planetary intellectual marketplace. New concepts such as ‘modernization' or ‘post-modernity' periodically appear in the centers of academic and political power, then diffuse through mechanisms of persuasion and mimicry, until they become part of mainstream discourse—only to disappear ten or fifteen years later under the impact of other key concepts that come to conquer the minds of a new generation of scholars and intellectuals. Nowadays, such processes of diffusion and convergence are called globalization. Indeed, globalization itself is such a buzz word that seems to have achieved hegemonic status in the social science vocabulary.

Bruce Sterling's novel, Islands In The Net, opens with a scene on a Gulf of Mexico beach. Laura, the novel's protagonist, jogs along the seaside, “in pure animal ease, like an antelope,” when suddenly she trips and falls, snagged by “a black, peeling length of electrical cable. Junked flotsam from the hurricane, buried in the sand” (Sterling 1989:1). It is also flotsam of another era. Tugging on the cable to find its source, she unearths a video-cassette recorder, corroded by “twenty years of grit and brine” (p. 2). The novel's opening occasions, for the protagonist and the reader, reflection on modern communications, capitalism, and media. It is also an unsubtle foreshadowing of what will become of Laura as the novel progresses. On a mission to root out shady dealings in offshore “data havens,” like Grenada and Singapore, Laura eventually finds herself ensnared by the interlinking corporate connections bridging her world of “legitimate” business enterprise with the havens' illicit world of “bad” capitalism and illegitimate trade. Digging deeper, she uncovers the gritty, briny truth about her own corporation and, indeed, an entire corporate order in which the line between legitimate and illegitimate corporate activity simply vanishes into virtual space.

The study of African Christianity by social historians and social scientists currently flourishes after a period in which it excited relatively little interest.For useful recent surveys see: Terence Ranger, “JSAS and the Study of Religion”, Journal of Southern African Studies 25th Anniversary Conference, “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Regained,” York University (1994); Norman Etherington, “Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, 2 (1996), 201–19; Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar, “Religion and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 36, 2 (1998), 175–201; Adrian Hastings, “African Christian Studies, 1967–1999: Reflections of an Editor,” Journal of Religion in Africa 30, 1 (2000), 30–44. Its revival lies, first, in the re-emergence of what can broadly be defined as intellectual history after a period of materialist dominance which focused research on issues of underdevelopment, dependency and political economy. Since the late 1980s Africanist scholars have been exploring the missionary contribution to ideas about ethnicity, environment, and gender. Secondly, at the same time, partly as a result of the closure of classical research fields, and partly through the belated recognition that the interaction of African cultures and mission Christianities was the supreme anthropological topic, social anthropologists began to turn to work on mission archives. Here the publication initially of a provocative series of articles by Jean and John Comaroff, and then the first of their two-volume study of the London Missionary Society among the Southern Tswana, led the way.Ranger, “JSAS and the Study of Religion,” 3. Jean and John Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 13 (1986), 1–20; “Through the Looking Glass: Colonial Encounters of the First Kind,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988), 6–32; The Colonization of Consciousness in South Africa, Economy and Society 18 (1989), 267–95; Of Revelation and Revolution Vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997). This revived scholarly interest in African Christianity has evolved in two interrelated ways: there is a growing interest in studying the construction of specifically religious identities, and greater attention is paid to texts produced by African Christians themselves which, with a few notable exceptions, have been hitherto ignored by scholars.An important exception was Wyatt Macgaffey's use of the official catechism of the Kimbanguist Church, in Modern Kongo Prophets. Religion in a Plural Society (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1983).

Among the many unexpected lessons that await the reader of James Mooney's (1991 [1986]) classic account of the Ghost Dance, none is more striking than the one contained in his description of his first meeting with Jack Wilson, the Paiute man also known as Wovoka the messiah. By the time Mooney recounts this meeting, the reader is prepared to encounter a sacred personage of awesome stature. After all, this is the man whose millenarian teachings of the return of the dead and of the lifeways of the past had spread across the West and Midwest and had been blamed for the “Sioux Outbreak” that led to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. It was that massacre that set Mooney to investigating the Ghost Dance, and it was because of Wovoka's alleged role in fomenting the “outbreak” that Mooney found himself on New Year's Day 1892 in Mason Valley, Nevada looking to meet the messiah.

Are our minds becoming numb to images of death and violence? Though this question could hardly be settled even by the most extensive public polling techniques, it is of grave concern to theorists of modern visual media. It has become almost common sense that something momentous has happened in the proliferation of mechanical reproduction and electronic simulation, transforming our very sensory faculties to dangerous and largely disempowering effect. Some of the most radically historicizing media theory written in recent years concerns the alteration of our senses by discourses of vision or technologies of mass- mediated visuality (Crary 1990; Buck-Morss 1994; 1997; Feldman 1994; Levin 1993). These writings often turn on arguments about violent ruptures in modernity between the body qua body and the body as represented visually, especially where it concerns the depiction of the abject, such as in graphic violence and death. An over-kill of body-imagery circulates in what may seem like a postmodern “hyperspace” without corporeal bearings (Jameson 1991), flowing in “global mediascapes” with little regard to the limitations of time and space (Appadurai 1996), in flattened simulacra divested of multi-dimensional sensory embodiment (Buck-Morss 1994; 1998; Feldman 1994), and in an apparatus which enforces the privilege of the realm of vision over all other sensory channels (Crary 1990; Levin 1993). Two-dimensional reproductions swirl over the surface of the planet, carrying impressions of the body in violence and in death, graphic images that repeat themselves with such serial regularity that we are possibly becoming inured to them, and ever further distanced from the suffering they represent. Where our capacity for empathy, outrage, and compassion disappears, there also goes our ability to initiate sane reactions to insane actions.

This essay begins from a question that is often asked in practice but rarely in theory: What is the relationship between the good citizen and the good man or woman? This problem was a particular concern of ancient theorists of the polis, for whom it made little sense to consider the goods of the person apart from the goods of the community. I consider the question here in the context of nationalism, which has variously been described as a modern form of religion, of community, of belief system and social tie. Under all such descriptions, the nation—in all of its imagined breadth and scope—demands our sacrifices through the institutions that represent it. We sacrifice in the name of an ultimate good, of which we believe our own goods to be a part. It is possible, then, that the same question that animated thinkers of the polis may also help us to understand the triumph of the nation-state. Indeed, I argue here that it is our failure adequately to theorize the ethical dimensions of nationalism that has masked from us the institutional sources of nationalism's successes.The question about the relationship between citizenship and ethics is one that Alasdair MacIntyre poses in passing in works on social science theory and practice (MacIntyre 1998:56) and on the exhaustion of contemporary ethics (MacIntyre 1984:133). Although the question is a general one and does not require acknowledgement, anyone familiar with MacIntyre's work will recognize that the following argument takes at least some part of his as a foundation.

Twice, almost unconsciously (for there is no Mediterranean in the index), a contributor to the compilation of essays entitled Britain and Ireland, 900–1300. Insular Responses to European Change remarks with surprise that the commerce found in the high Middle Ages in the Irish Sea reminds him of the Mediterranean further south (see pp. 42, 64). It is not the first time this improbable comparison has been made. About 1200, Gerald of Wales, a prolific writer and ambitious ecclesiastical careerist, had already made such a juxtaposition, though for him what was most striking was how different the two bodies of water were. For Gerald, the true Mediterranean was easier to navigate in winter and less subject to dangerous tides in all seasons than the treacherous Irish Sea.Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica, 2.1, 2.3; Expugnatio Hibernica, 1.2, 1.35. Both texts are available in convenient English translation: The History and Topography of Ireland (Hamondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982). Still, Gerald's texts brim over with references to ships and people traversing the waters of the Irish Sea, which suggests that sea was more like the Inner Sea between Europe, Africa, and Asia than Gerald admitted. After all, both seas are enclosed by land, both are relatively small (though the Mediterranean is much deeper and about ten times bigger than the Irish Sea), and both have long facilitated communication. It is thus less surprising to find that in Peter Brown's mesmerizing account of The Rise of Western Christendom the importance of the Irish Sea for Ireland's unique early medieval development is emphasized by calling this appendage of the North Atlantic a “Celtic Mediterranean of the north,” in other words, it is a manageable body of water through which communication was easy enough for “Celtic” economic and cultural unity to arise along its shores.P. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 81. Brown was, perhaps unwittingly, following a tradition among British geographers. H. MacKinder, in Britain and the British Seas (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1902, 20), already spoke of the Irish Sea as a “British Mediterranean.” Between the fifth and ninth centuries, when medieval Irish culture reached an apogee, the Irish Sea was bustling, conveying abundant goods and ideas rather as happened in the Romans' “very own sea” (mare nostrum) in the relaxed centuries of Roman peace. Some early medieval writers who had a more direct experience of the “Irish Ocean” (Oceanus Hibernicus) might have dissented from Brown's image of tranquil navigability, but Brown is, nevertheless, right.The Voyage of St. Brendan (available in English in The Age of Bede, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1988), perhaps the most famous account of medieval Irish navigation, presents the seas as highly unpleasant, dangerous places. Nor should it be forgotten that the early medieval Irish ascetic practice of abandoning oneself to the sea was considered a penance. Many sailed the waters between Britain and Ireland. St. Patrick is only the most famous to have completed the voyage (at least three times) in the postclassical centuries, bringing with him a typical Mediterranean export, Christianity. Mediterranean pottery and that distinctive Mediterranean machine, the watermill, crop up often enough in medieval sites in Ireland to prove the Irish Sea was no barrier.See C. Rynne, “Hydropower in Medieval Ireland,” in Working with Water in Medieval Europe, ed. P. Squatriti (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 1. In fact, borrowing a neologism from a fresh and stimulating survey of the pre-modern Mediterranean, we may say the Irish Sea enjoyed great “connectivity” in pre-industrial times.<+>5 This means that, as Brown postulated, beyond the transport of luxuries over long distances in the Irish Sea, many small-scale, short-range exchanges took place along its shores, across its waters, in its harbors, and quite far inland from its coast. Redistribution on such a scale was possible only thanks to the sea waters. The sea wove together a tapestry of interdependence, forming a true economic and cultural region.

This is a good moment to step back briefly and consider the growing interest in patronage, networking, and other forms of personalized political and economic association in Soviet history. The significance of such relations has grown pressingly evident in the murky, mafia-ridden post-Soviet era, and scholars have begun to search for their origins in the short but explosive and complex history of the Soviet state and society. This growing historical interest is in a sense part of a worldwide trend, as the accelerated processes of globalization force us all to face the many political and economic difficulties involved in moving toward a market economy that works for everyone. Prominent among these difficulties is precisely that complex agglomeration of personal ties that are generally lumped together as “corruption” by irate economists and policy-makers. These forms of association, however, have profound social, cultural, and historical roots that deserve a good deal more thought if we are to understand where they fit into the contemporary dynamics of economic transformation.

Brett Christophers puts post-colonial and feminist theories and Foucault's writings to intelligent use in this carefully documented account of an Anglican mission. The author, a geographer, evinces a special concern with space and human placement on the land, but his methods here are historical. Christophers gives a fair and textured depiction of a missionary whom his contemporaries regarded as exemplary, but whose success was hampered both by logistical and political forces outside his control. Scholars whose focus is missionaries, as well as those interested in Canada's past, including that of its so-called First Nations, will appreciate this balanced blend of theory and history.

“In the myddest of our lyvynge / Death compaseth us rounde about.” These lines from a popular medieval hymn, transmitted in eleventh-century St. Gallen, serve as a fitting epigram to Craig Koslofsky's study on The Reformation of the Dead. In this well-argued, stimulating book, the author traces the fate of the dead in early modern Germany from the eve of the Reformation to the eighteenth century. He approaches “the history of death” (Philippe Ariès) from the social order of the living. Drawing on the anthropology of ritual, Koslofsky explores the art of dying, funeral rites, and the topography of burial places. In a series of fascinating episodes Koslofsky skillfully applies the insight that “liminality” provides an “opportunity” to act (p. 8). In Leipzig in 1536, for instance, various urban groups clashed over what was perceived as a threat to traditional burial practice when Duke George of Saxony mandated that, for the sake of hygiene, the dead were to be interred outside the city walls. This ordinance instigated varied responses and severe resistance. University professors insisted on their right to be buried intramurally. Mendicant monasteries expressed fears of losing control over religious life in the city. The whole dispute occurred in an atmosphere of heightened confessional strife. Burial in places other than the churchyard signified either a dead person's dishonorable status or allegiance to Reformation ideas (though Duke George was Catholic). A tenuous settlement was reached when the Duke granted privileges to professors and required the payment of extra fees for city burials.

This volume by Şevket Pamuk of Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, probably best known for his earlier work entitled The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade, Investment and Production (CUP, 1987), is a significant addition to the literature on the interface of early modern imperial and monetary systems. Dealing with the political economy of the Ottoman empire over its sprawling life-span, the book traces the evolution of the relationship between the Ottomans and money, from the time that early Ottoman coinage emerged in the 1320s from under the Byzantine shadow, to the nineteenth- century integration into the Gold Standard, and the financing of the First World War. The long span covered is divided for purposes of expositional convenience into five periods, respectively 1300–1477, 1477–1585, 1585–1690, 1690–1844, and finally 1844–1918. Interestingly, despite Pamuk's own background as a specialist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is the second and third periods that are most extensively treated, between chapters 4 and 9. Yet, there is enough here for those concerned with both the earlier and later periods to be satisfied that they have not been short-changed by the book's ambitious title.