Like other dramatic and discontinuous historical processes, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 possesses the inherent fascination to sustain yet another rehearsal of its basic course of events. The present one differs from others in several ways. It does not center on samurai heroes and villains contesting foreign incursion. Instead it identifies fully four groups that acted during the late Tokugawa era, the years 1850–68, known by the generic periodizing word bakumatsu—“the end of the bakufu,” that is, of the shogun's government situated at Edo. It presents each group according to the experiences and motives of its members. It points to the interactions between the four narrative structures, the plots or mythoi, but without homogenizing them into a unitary historiographical line. It also recognizes the necessary prefiguration of the historian's field but tries nevertheless to convey the perceived intentions of the four groups of historical actors.

In a manner somewhat unusual in anthropological discourse, most writers on the Maa-speaking peoples of Tanzania and Kenya include an early section or chapter on what is often called “Maasai traditional history.” For example, in his pioneering work, “An Administrative Survey of the Masai Social System,” Henry Fosbrooke (1948) devotes a leading and major section to Maasai history and, in a later publication, he deals explicitly with what he calls a “tribal chronology” of the pastoral Maasai (Fosbrooke 1956a). Similarly, Thomas Beidelman, in an equally pioneering article, pays considerable attention to the historical connections of the Ilparakuyo (Baraguyu) section of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania (1960). It is among the Ilparakuyo that I have carried out most of my work in Maasai studies, and they are the primary focus of the present discussion (Rigby 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981).

Amidst the disruption of rapid social and economic change in contemporary developing nations, political order has been a fragile commodity. The simultaneous, urgent demands of integrating nations, constructing states, institutionalizing participation, and satisfying revolutionary expectations have overwhelmed most third world regimes, and liberal democratic ones in particular. The dependence of constitutional democracy on moderation, tolerance, and restraint in political behavior has been especially difficult to reconcile with the desperate, consummatory character of politics in nations where public agendas and personal expectations grossly exceed available resources and rewards.

Because in retrospect we know that fascism never took in the United States, we are likely to overlook aspects of the American experience that nurtured what might well be described as protofascist proclivities: our hardy nativist tradition, from the Know-Nothings to the second Ku Klux Klan, cultivated attitudes that strikingly paralleled many of the characteristics of European fascism during the interwar period. American nativism, one would have been tempted to argue, should have served as a seedbed for the growth of an aggressive American fascism during the crisis of the 1930s. Yet it did no such thing.