Megasthenes was an eyewitness to the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, maker of the first India-wide empire (from ca. 321 BCE). The army with which he made that empire depended largely upon the supply of men, horses, elephants, and oxen, a sector which may be called military livestock. Megasthenes’ account of this large sector of government expense and the policies under which it operated gives important testimony about the causes of Chandragupta's success, namely the maintenance of a royal monopoly of horses, elephants, and arms, payment of the soldiers in peacetime and war, the demilitarization of the farmers, and the separation of the soldiers from the land. Over the long run of Indian history, from the Mauryan Empire to the present, the environmental roots of the political order lay in the complementary distribution of horse and elephant country, to the dry west and humid east of a line running down the middle of the Subcontinent; that is, respectively, the valleys of the Indus and the Ganga. The dominating power of India has always had its capital in elephant country, the valley of the Ganga, in cities from Pataliputra (Patna) to Kanauj to Delhi, in a position from which to control the eastward flow of horses and the westward flow of elephants to other states.

It was the unanimous opinion of the early Orientalists of British India that India had no history, at least in the sense of historical writings. Like every consensus, it contained many variations of detail, as we shall see, but as the view of experts it was widely influential for a long time. For example, R. C. Majumdar gave a thoughtful version of this view at the beginning of the multivolume History and Culture of the Indian People (Majumdar 1951) by Indian scholars, published shortly after independence. But the consensus was eroded by the rise of what we may call the “colonial knowledge” paradigm, which asserted a close connection between European rule and European knowledge of India. It tended to discredit the old consensus and to lighten the specific gravity of Orientalist knowledge, simplifying it as an object of historical explanation. This development has cleared an opening, in recent decades, for a rush of new studies tending to create an opposing consensus, that India did have history of a kind, it being the task of scholars to explicate what kind, exactly, that was (for example, Pathak 1966; Warder 1972; Thapar 1992; Wagoner 1993; Ali, ed. 1999; Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 2001; Guha 2004; Mantena 2007). This in itself has been very much to the good, by reopening questions that had been closed by the old consensus. The old consensus itself, by contrast, was dismissed without much examination, and was attributed to colonial interest, cultural misunderstanding, or insufficient grasp of Indian languages and literatures. The old consensus now is seen as a simple ideological projection, easily explained and dismissed, with little complexity or interest for historical investigation. But this simplifying action of the prevailing paradigm renders invisible some of the very real effects of the old consensus, effects whose explanation can be very valuable to us. In order to gain the benefit it holds we have to take it seriously, trying both to explain it historically and to decide whether or in what way it is true.

Having brought my editorship to an end just before the CSSH fiftieth birthday—having, you might say, just stepped out of the maelstrom—it might be worthwhile to seize the occasion to analyze, in tranquility, what at the time was just too intense, too difficult but also too deeply satisfying an experience to put into words. Without a doubt, being editor of CSSH was the most gratifying job I ever had, but why? How to bottle the maelstrom?

CULTURE POWER Being in the habit of taking the temperature of anthropology from time to time (Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” CSSH 1984: 174–90; “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” 1995: 173–93; Webb Keane, “Self-Interpretation, Agency and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy,” 2003: 222–48), we take a keen interest in the health of the culture concept. News of its demise may be exaggerated, judging by the first article, which draws our attention to its worldwide spread and tries to account for it.

POWER FLOWER Imperial science and its collaborations, its landscapes, and its audiences is the theme of many interesting studies of late, including several pieces in this journal, such as Robert Shanafelt, “How Charles Darwin Got Emotional Expression out of South Africa (and the People who Helped Him)” (2003: 783–814), and Saul Dubow, “Earth History, Natural History, and Prehistory at the Cape, 1860–1875” (2004: 107–33). The first essay examines the practice and narrativizing of flower-collecting under imperial conditions.

DISPLACED PERSONS Territorial states create population displacements, if only by drawing boundaries. The longing that links displaced peoples and the places to which they seek to return is a potent force in history. The first two essays concern themselves with situations of return and re-emplacement, the first in Germany, the second in Rwanda.

MAKING SENSE Three essays show how attending closely to the ways in which sense is produced can help us make better sense of things.

BECOMING NATIONALISTS Two articles explore ways of coming to nationalism from the margins, so to say.

SOCIAL HISTORIES OF FOOD Three elegant articles, devoted to ancient, medieval, and modern times, exemplify very different ways of treating the social history of food.

PERFORMING HISTORY History performed is always tendentious, and unable to cloak itself in the dress of the impartial judge while being the zealous advocate. The first three articles seek to understand how exactly these advocacies are constructed, by, respectively, the warring churches of a Sicilian town, the commodification of Jordanian hospitality, and a coronation ceremony in Zambia.

Ethnographies of Debt. Debts are social relations, as the first two essays remind us, whether between persons or countries. Debts that are not meant to be repaid serve to maintain dependency relations between persons; conversely, the way to resolve dependency between the states of North and South may be debt forgiveness.

RELIGIONS AND NATIONS Three essays examine the vexed relations of religions and nations in the modern era, when the people becomes an electorate and the nation becomes foundational for the state. Religions, once so powerful in forming communities and underwriting the authority of states, have different, more troubled histories within nation-states. (See also, “The State and religion,” the subject of a pair of articles by Joseph R. Strayer and Rushton Coulborn in the very first issue of CSSH, 1:1 [1958], 38–57.)

ECONOMIES AND STATES The two strong forces that regulate the modern world are in tension with one another: The nation-state divides the world into a couple hundred units, comparable and different; while the economy integrates the world into a single system of exchange and, in doing so, penetrates and overwhelms national boundaries. Can the nation survive the economy, we wonder? The first pair of essays probe the uneasy relations of economies and states in the last two centuries.

The Grew Years. It is astonishing that CSSH, now entering its fortieth year, has had only two editors in its entire existence till now, our founder Sylvia Thrupp and Raymond Grew (with an assist from Eric Wolf for one year). Ray Grew's editorship was the longer, having begun with volume 16 in 1974. As he steps down and returns to the bosom of the Editorial Board against all entreaties to continue in the role he has performed so intelligently and with such grace for twenty-four years, we salute his editorship by dedicating this volume to him.

CITIZENS The emergence and spread of the concept of citizenship as the body of persons making up the membership of a state and enjoying uniform political status, and the incompletenesses of its actualizations, forms an especially productive terrain for scholarship just now, as may be seen in the first two essays.