The magnitude of contrasts within modern empires is incontrovertible. In the opinion of some scholars, the range of human experience they encompassed is so immense that it is impracticable to study adequately even one empire in its entirety. This premise has contributed to the formation of clusters of scholars with circumscribed areas of interest, whose research demonstrates unequivocally the distinctive characters of the various societies under each empire's jurisdiction, and the diverse effects of imperial policies upon them. Other scholars elect to concentrate upon the imperial macrocosm, but their work often highlights imperial differentiation too. Analyses such as those which hinge upon a core-periphery nexus and focus upon antitheses within metropolitan and colonial relationships are inherently inclined to give prominence to contrasts within an empire. Some studies, moreover, convey the impression of an improbable degree of cohesion and identity of interest within the metropolitan community and within each different colonized group of an empire's subjects. The revolts against the West, against the Dutch, the British, the French, and so on, helped to promote and reinforce this idea. These revolts also revealed that amongst peoples under imperial subjection there was a degree of identification with each other, in their relationships to members of the metropolitan society.

A century ago the phrases “darkest Africa” and “the dark continent” were encountered often in European and American literature. The darkness, one would suppose, was in the minds of the writers, signifying their general ignorance of African geography and ethnography. Yet I doubt if many who spoke of darkest Africa thought of it in quite those terms. For most of them, the darkness was in the minds of the Africans themselves; a metaphor for their moral backwardness and for their ignorance of the higher arts of civilization. African darkness thus contrasted with European and American enlighten-ment—and the contrast provided moral justification for Europe's mission civilisatrice.

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as slavery was disappearing elsewhere in the New World, slave-based plantation production of sugar in Cuba reached remarkable heights of technological sophistication and output. In 1868 Cuba produced 720,250 metric tons of sugar, more than 40 percent of the cane sugar reaching the world market in that year. Yet just as production reached these levels, the abolition of slavery in Cuba was initiated, beginning a process of slave emancipation that was to last nearly twenty years. Yet just as production reached these levels, the abolition of slavery in Cuba was initiated, beginning a process of slave emancipation that was to last nearly twenty years. This concurrence of events raises the question, What was the relationship between slavery and the development of sugar production, and why did emancipation in Cuba take place when and as it did?

For comparative history to be meaningful, the phenomena compared must possess important and comprehensive unities of character. In his “Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838”, which appeared in the October 1981 issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History, O. Nigel Bolland accepts this maxim in theory; he ignores it in practice.

The preceding article by William A. Green does not make clear the basis upon which he criticizes my October 1981 comparison of Belize and the British sugar colonies. He begins by saying that the “phenomena compared must possess important and comprehensive unities of character” and writes later that “it is the presence of similar people performing similar functions under similar circumstances that renders comparative analysis valuable. These identities did not prevail between Belize and the British sugar colonies.” Belize, he writes, had a “unique system of domination” (his emphasis). Is the problem, then, that there are no “unities of character,” that “identities did not prevail,” or that Belize was “unique”? Every case is unique, surely, yet comparisons are made in social, as in natural, science between selected common factors which appear under similar, but not identical, conditions. There exists a range between John Stuart Mill's formulae called The Method of Agreement, in which one compares two situations which differ in every respect save one, and The Method of Difference, in which one compares two situations which are alike except in one respect, but Green seems to think only the latter is acceptable.

Every year, around the time of the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the New York Times asks a Big Name anthropologist to contribute an op-ed piece on the state of the field. These pieces tend to take a rather gloomy view. A few years ago, for example, Marvin Harris suggested that anthropology was being taken over by mystics, religious fanatics, and California cultists; that the meetings were dominated by panels on shamanism, witchcraft, and “abnormal phenomena”; and that “scientific papers based on empirical studies” had been willfully excluded from the program (Harris 1978). More recently, in a more sober tone, Eric Wolf suggested that the field of anthropology is coming apart. The sub-fields (and sub-sub-fields) are increasingly pursuing their specialized interests, losing contact with each other and with the whole. There is no longer a shared discourse, a shared set of terms to which all practitioners address themselves, a shared language we all, however idiosyncratically, speak (Wolf 1980).