A superficial view of what happens when a large number of people forsake their former religion for a new one is that some of the old beliefs become mixed with the new. It is a commonplace to hear that folk Catholicism is mixed with pagan survivals, or that newly converted African Christians are “not real Christians” or “have a veneer of Christianity”, because they have not totally abandoned all that they once believed. Such a judgment, however ethnocentric, would be pardonable in a European missionary who held a particular view of Christianity, which itself furnished a clear criterion of “real Christianity”. But similar opinions are often expressed by sociologists and anthropologists who profess themselves neutral with respect to religious belief. They are usually interested in “acculturation” or “culture contact” and consider it of great moment to be able to say how far any particular belief or practice lies along a continuum whose poles are marked “traditional” and “acculturated”. Such assumptions underlay Malinowski's much criticized scheme for the analysis of culture-contact in Africa and the great bulk of the work, by Linton, Wallace, Lanternari and others, on independent religious movements. This tradition of interpretation is still very much alive.

The years of colonial rule in Malawi (formerly Nyasaland) were characterised by the imposition of a political and social system whereby a superior European authority attempted to exercise its will over a territory already populated by Africans. This enforced colonial relationship determined the pattern of political change within the Protectorate, so that any variation in the fundamentals of the relationship was bound to have important repercussions on the total colonial situation. From the earliest years of British rule in Malawi, Africans sought to modify or alter the colonial relationship and it is this sort of African sentiment and activity in reaction to alien control and domination that has come to be regarded as manifestations of nationalism not only in colonial Malawi but also in the other ex-colonial territories of Africa. Thomas Hodgkin, for example, has lumped under the general rubric of ‘nationalism’ “any organisation or group that explicitly asserts the rights, claims and aspirations of a given African society (from the level of the language-group to that of ‘Pan-Africa’) in opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form and objectives”. Others, however, although appreciating the deep roots of nationalism have tended to confine the use of the term to the post-1945 period with its emergence of nation-wide movements seeking self-government and independence. They have argued that to include every social movement of protest against alien rule as a part of nationalism obscures the political meaning of the concept, blurs the important distinctions that can be made among African responses to the colonial situation, and makes comparative analysis difficult.

In recent years sociological work in the field of stratification and social mobility has become, in at least one sense of the term, impressively cosmopolitan. National sample surveys which include data on inter-generational occupational mobility have been carried out in every major Western nation and in a good many non-Western societies as well, and those have inspired some ambitious comparative analyses of social mobility. This development, as S. M. Miller puts it, has had the virtue of making "the study of mobility one of the few fields of sociology which has overcome national parochialisms”. True as this is, however, it must be said that there are forms of parochialism other than national. Much contemporary research into social mobility suffers from one of these - a parochialism of time rather than of place, as it were, the parochialism of presentism. My purpose here is to suggest what is lost as a result of that parochialism, and to argue that a sense of the past, an ability to see his subject in historical depth, is not a luxury but a necessity for the student of social mobility.

There is a curious awkwardness about discussions of “types” in comparative politics. Aristotle and Montesquieu taught us to proceed by classifications of regimes, and the current generation of computer enthusiasts have offered us more and more powerful tools for the handling of wide ranges of attributes of political entities and for the establishment of complex multi-dimensional typologies. Yet as soon as we are confronted with a concrete table of alternative types and look over the lists of cases assigned to each cell, our first reaction is almost immediately to add further distinctions, to reject the imposition of similarities across historically distinct units. The student of politics is torn between two sets of super-ego demands: he feels an obligation to reduce the welter of empirical facts to a body of parsimoniously organized general propositions but he also feels under pressure to treat each case sui generis, as a unique configuration worthy of an effort of understanding all on its own. This is of course a dilemma common to all social sciences but is particularly difficult to handle in the study of such highly visible, amply documented macro-units as historical polities. Students of census records, elections and survey data have an enormous analytical advantage: they deal with large numbers of anonymous units and can therefore proceed with the analysis of their data with a minimum of interference from exogenous “noise”. The student of comparative politics is roughly in the position of a social scientist asked to analyze the census records or the survey responses of a set of close friends: he cannot prevent himself from bringing into his analysis of the coded data on the punched cards a wide range of uncoded “surplus” information acquired through years of acquaintance with the subjects. The standardized sample survey derives great methodological strength from its programmatic insistence on equality, anonymity and distance in the treatment of the information collected: the data are given once and for all in the protocols or on the IBM cards and there is no allowance for fuzzy interaction with the subjects outside that framework.

Economic historians are concerned lest practitioners of allied disciplines draw unwarranted conclusions from the lessons of economic history. It is for this reason that it is worthwhile to examine the applicability of the American model of economic growth for developing countries.

The flourishing of Catharism in southern France was accompanied by marked prosperity among southern French Jews. While the Cathari were openly professing their heresy and winning converts in the courts of influential nobles, the position of the Jews was noticeably ameliorating. The Jews of Languedoc, for example, held land in franc alleu, collected tolls, and occasionally even worked as bailiffs. Indeed, their social and political status compared favorably with that of their co-religionists in any part of Europe.