This small but extraordinary document casts light on the ways in which slaves and former slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who, though illiterate or barely literate themselves, nevertheless used writing to press for what they wanted or thought they had a claim to. Poor Brazilians generally could not read or write, nor could many who were far better off, but slaves and former slaves are the subject here because written culture impinged on them in particular ways. In many of their writings freedom is a repeated theme—getting it and using it—but not the only one. Occasionally, a slave appealed through the courts to be removed from an abusive master's authority. Former slaves who accumulated property of their own might pass it on to heirs named in a will. Petty commerce and personal business involving money and receipts drew unlettered slaves and freed people into countless informal written transactions.

In 1931, the Chinese minister of finance, Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong), reached an agreement with the League of Nations on a Program of Technical Cooperation with China. The program was intended to provide the Nationalist government—the republican government that ruled China from 1927 to 1949—with much-needed technological and financial aid in support of its nation-building effort. As a result, the League sent a number of experts to China. The first group focused mostly on public health, education, water conservation, and transportation (Zhang 1999). In 1933, however, the original agreement was revised and expanded to include economic development, with special emphasis on agriculture. In this context, a new group of League specialists visited China. Among them were three experts in rural cooperative societies: the Briton William Kenneth Hunter Campbell, the Italian Mario Dragoni, and the German Max Brauer.

Two rulers, one in Africa, one in Asia, are about to undergo the ceremony of baptism following first contact with the Portuguese maritime expansion—but they insist that the rite be conducted in secret. The African ruler is a regional governor (the Mani Soyo) of the Congo King Nzinga Nkuwu who has just converted in 1491. The high king's diplomatic exchanges with the sea captain Diogo Cão had not elicited any real sensation of vulnerability to Portuguese imperial designs, yet he had been happy to convert nonetheless. Now the Mani Soyo is about to follow suit, but he will not have any of his subordinates witnessing the ritual because he does not want them benefiting from the enhanced status and power that the ritual could bestow. In the highlands of Sri Lanka some fifty years later, the King of Kandy is equally intent on keeping his baptismal rites hidden from public view. But his reasons are strikingly different. He does this “lest his people should kill him.” When news of the baptism did leak out rioting followed, and the king had to spread the story that it had all been a ploy to deceive the Portuguese.

There are several analytical strands through which historians and demographers understand the evolution of twentieth-century population politics and expertise. One is the history of the declining birthrate, nationalism, pro-natalism, and modern degeneration anxieties, including histories of eugenics. A second strand is the story of global overpopulation, its mobilization as a mid-twentieth-century issue in Cold War politics, the dominance of the idea of demographic transitions and political economy, and subsequent links between aid, development, family planning, and various international agencies. A third is the history of reproductive and bodily rights, feminism, and birth control, which has been analyzed with respect to the history of technology, the history of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the history of nationalism, and to some extent the history of internationalism. The political economy aspects of the population question tend chronologically to bookend the feminist narrative, with Malthus at the late eighteenth-century end and Cold War political economy of third world development at the twentieth-century end. A fourth strand is a burgeoning intellectual history of demography, social science, and economic theory.

The overarching argument of this paper is not a new one; others have made it in various forms. The argument suggests, in Bernard Cohn's simple formulation, that metropole and colony should be treated in a unified field of analysis. Reconstituting the analytical frame in the manner Cohn suggests has a range of implications not only for the study of colonialism but also, and perhaps more importantly, for understanding current geopolitical conjunctures. The suggestion diverges from the conventional analytical approach that divides and demarcates the world into separable entities—whether they be described as the mutually exclusive categories of metropole and colony, Europe and its Others, a set of distinct nations, first and third world, or indeed of areas and regions—and studies these distinct entities in isolation from, or in comparison with, each other. In contrast, Cohn's proposition asks for an analysis of how such demarcations are produced and of how, rather than being discrete entities with autochthonous formations, they are co-produced through a complex array of related and relational historical events. It is a call, in other words, to shift the analytical framework from one that functions, implicitly or explicitly, on the basis of comparison, to one that operates on the basis of co-production. Such an approach, this essay demonstrates, is especially necessary for a thoroughly historicized understanding of nation-state formation, particularly since the nation-state constitutes a preeminent category of and for comparative analysis.

At the heart of the problematic of colonialism lies a deceptively simply question: why did the colonized put up with their subjection? I say deceptively simple because, while there is an obvious answer on which practically all researchers are agreed—that is, European ‘power’—its nature, sources, and mode of implementation have always been hotly debated.

In 1840, the General Committee for Public Instruction in Bengal, presiding over the ‘Anglicist’ educational policy enunciated five years earlier, declared, “the ultimate object which we have in view is to infuse into the student, possessed of talents and leisure, a taste for literature and science,” all of which would “hasten the regeneration of the country.” The Committee observed with satisfaction that English education was proving very popular with the middle classes, but also noted, “At present, education is for the most part appreciated only for the direct returns it yields.” The Committee clearly hoped that over time education would come to be appreciated for other reasons. In the meantime, its instrumental value constituted a useful and even necessary inducement. A few years later, this same body reported many more students were entering and completing school, thus achieving their goal of attaining “the qualifications requisite to perform the mechanical duties of a writer [a clerk].” But, they continued, “our object to raise the character of the people by education and not by their purses is still far distant.”

In recent years, Latin American history has been awash in an exciting wave of scholarship on the history of science and medicine. Historians are exploring Latin American reactions to foreign medical, sanitary and scientific missions; the creation of national research institutions; the impact of epidemics on conceptions of urban space, politics and social control; the role of indigenous and folk cures in modern public health campaigns; and the relation of transnational eugenics movements to national anxieties about race, among other fertile topics. Pioneering medical historian Marcos Cueto dubs this focus “scientific excellence on the periphery”—the idea that surprising avenues of research and innovation occurred in societies generally deemed “underdeveloped,” especially in modern scientific activities and outlooks.

In the bleak spring of 1916, a military note expostulated about the slowness with which the Government of India was finding coolies and porters for British forces in Mesopotamia. At first, labor could be obtained only from tribals of the Santhal Parganas and Chota Nagpur and by tapping Indian jails: “Could there possibly have been a greater opportunity for India with millions of men not usable as soldiers, to take a larger share in the war, or even a larger share in helping its own Indian Army? From all accounts India was burning to get such a chance, yet what happened? The honour of India was upheld first by aborigines and then by convicts.”

A special correspondent for the leading Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram wrote from Alexandria on 28 May 1936: “One of the effects of the Al-Bosfur nightclub murder in Cairo is that its circumstances have led to an interest in the problem of ‘al-futuwwat’ [sing., al-futuwwa] and how much power and influence (al-sat˙wa) they have in the capital and in other Egyptian cities.” The murder referred to was that of a popular singer and dancer, Imtithal Fawzi, by a band of assassins led by failed businessman and weight-trainer Fuad al-Shami. I argue here that this murder can be read as an instance of a larger event, which might be inscribed in the following way: a moment that irrevocably branded the public figure of futuwwa with the additional meanings of thug, mobster, and nefarious villain—bal ˙tagi. This is not the conventional way of registering this moment; indeed, the modern transformation of al-futuwwa is rarely considered as a historical event. It is not my aim here to affirm or deny the outcome of this transformation, nor am I suggesting that the normative conception of al-futuwwa as an Islamic ideal of masculinity had never before had any negative connotations. Rather, I posit—and want to interrogate—a changed historical relationship in the constitution of al-futuwwa, in which the nature of history itself was radically transformed and contributed to the formation of a new politics and a new subject of politics. As part of the hegemonic rise of this field of politics and its subject, history typically shows, or simply presumes, that other life-worlds, like that of the futuwwat and their particular form of power, were rendered exceptional and ultimately obsolete. In a larger project from which this article is drawn, I explored the gendered constitution of that new cultural and political hegemony. I labeled the gender norm that emerged at the intersection of colonial modernity and nationalism as effendi (bourgeois) masculinity, which I located in a new constellation of practices and discourses around the desirable, modern body. The present essay is in part an effort to de-center this bourgeois figure and the terms of its narration, which I unwittingly reproduced in the original study by rendering the event of the futuwwa's transformation as a bit part within a larger story of ostensibly greater national and historical import.

“Iglesia me llamo” (“church is my name”) was the only phrase uttered over and over by numerous criminals during judicial interrogations that took place at various times throughout the Iberian kingdoms that ultimately became Spain, and their American colonies. This expression meant that even after committing heinous crimes, those outlaws received shelter at local churches and thereby felt entitled not to disclose any information to justice officials about their conduct. Such criminals were confident that it would not be easy to remove them from the church for punishment. Indeed, groups of wrongdoers turned churchyards, churches, their cloisters, and their adjoining cemeteries into permanent residences. They were alleged to move freely in and out of church buildings under cover of night and to bring friends, lovers, and liquor in for enjoyment. Their presence terrorized neighbors and passersby, and inconvenienced priests and parishioners alike.

Although Italian colonialism began to claim scholars' attention in a systematic way from the 1970s on, colonialism's epilogue—decolonization—remains largely ignored for the Italian case. What scholarship has been produced on the decolonization process after fascism's defeat tends either to focus on the details of the international treaty debates by which Italy's former possessions received independence or became trusteeships (the domain of diplomatic history), or to consider whether Italy constitutes a “postcolonial” space (the realm of cultural studies). Analyses of the latter variety note the general lack of public consciousness about Italy's colonial past or postcolonial present. Pinkus, for example, describes the cultural consequences of decolonization in terms of a nonevent: “The term nonevent suggests, indeed, that the lack of any traumatic severing of Italy's colonial appendages has contributed to the lack of a full-scale national reevaluation of the country's colonial past.” In an evocative analysis, Pinkus interprets Antonioni's 1962 film L'eclisse (The eclipse) as symptomatic of the eclipsing of the memories of colonialism's end. In the postwar period, she claims, such memories became displaced onto Italy's “conquest” of its urban peripheries (Italy's “deserts”) and their transformation into large-scale residential neighborhoods. Yet Pinkus conflates the recent silence about decolonization with silence about decolonization at the time of events, assuming the “lack of any traumatic severing of Italy's colonial appendages.” One visible (at least at the time, if not subsequently) and little explored aspect of the “trauma” of decolonization was the repatriation of Italian nationals from the ex possedimenti, or former possessions.

Emile Durkheim assembled a team to promote his vision for sociology, but he and Mauss were in many ways a double act, like Marx and Engels. There was room for only one leader of the movement, so we speak of the Durkheimians and the Marxists. Mauss and Engels each assumed leadership of the movement they jointly founded after their partner's death, but the intrinsic inequality of the partnership was made worse in Mauss' case by age difference, kinship seniority, and his inability to write books of his own. The publication of an abridged English translation of Marcel Fournier's Marcel Mauss: A Biography (2006 [1994]) allows us to reconsider his historical relationship with Durkheim, as well as his legacy for anthropology, history, and the social sciences today. French scholarship on Mauss is, of course, much more advanced than its Anglophone counterpart and it is less confined to academic anthropology. Fournier's 800-page collection of Mauss' Écrits politiques (1997) remains virtually unknown to English-speakers and the collective organized in his name, the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales (with its journal, revue du MAUSS), continues the eponymous founder's commitment to integrating progressive politics and intellectual work over a wide range of issues. In both cases, The Gift (1990 [1925]) has iconic significance as Mauss' most discussed work; but, as Sigaud (2002) has already pointed out, the Anglophone academy, with assistance from one or two leading French anthropologists, has taken up its message in ways that depart seriously from the author's original intentions.