A Favourable Horoscope: ‘If a son is born when the Sun is in the terms of Mercury, he will be successful and have great power … He will be brave and tall and will acquire property and moreover will be married to his own sister and will have children by her.’

This paper is an empirical study of the cultural context and historical development of the division of labour by sex in the farming systems of two peoples of the West African cocoa belt: the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and the Beti of South-Central Cameroun. It examines the way in which cocoa as an export crop has been integrated into two different indigenous economies, one in which farming was predominantly a set of tasks for males in the pre-cocoa era, and the other in which farming was women's work.

The religions of contemporary Middle American Indian communities fall neatly enough under the descriptive category we call ‘syncretic’. Myths and rituals, integrated experiences for the participant believers, betray to the outside observer their Spanish and Indian antecedents. This indicates a methodology of analysing the ongoing flow of religious life into its smallest constituent parts—colours and gestures, sacred objects and sacred locations, the structure and language of invocations—the more precisely to identify the ingredients of the ‘mixed’ religion we see being lived out. When enquiry moves to the process of imposition and selection by which the mix was initiated, in the early days of Spanish-Indian contact, the same familiar methodology lies ready to hand: Spanish Catholicism, and what is known of the traditional Indian religion, can be analysed into elements, those elements arranged in parallel, and the likely ease of transferance inferred, being judged to be the highest where a match seems good and where evidence from the ethnographic present appears to offer confirmation.

Sociologists and anthropologists who have studied millennial movements in a comparative perspective have almost completely ignored the movements among Jews in the Diaspora. Historians have studied particular Jewish messianic outbursts and have also provided general surveys of Jewish millennial expectations and ‘false’ messiahs, but none have offered a systematic analysis of possible social causes and few have made any comparison with non-Jewish millennial movements. Gershom Scholem, the author of Sabbatai Sevi, by far the most outstanding work on Jewish messianism, puts the weight of explanation on the immanent development of ideas in Judaism and tends to discountenance possible social causes.

Lord Cromer, British Consul-General in Egypt and virtual ruler of the country, was fond of arguing that Egypt could never become a homogeneous, unitary nation state, like Britain or France. Because of its location astride the Suez Canal and at the meeting point of Africa and Asia, the country, Cromer believed, would always attract large foreign populations and would be of vital importance to foreign powers. Its institutions must take account of diverse interests and peoples. To be sure Cromer used this vision self-seekingly, denying Egyptian nationalists many of their demands for increased self-government. But he had to heed the foreigners in Egypt, for they had become an influential group in the nineteenth century. A booming economy, peace and political stability, uninterrupted except for the short-lived ‘Urābī revolt (1879–1882), the fashioning of European law courts, called the Mixed Tribunals, administering French law through foreign judges, and then the presence of British troops and administrators from 1882 onwards all conspired to make Egypt seem an attractive Middle Eastern country to British, French, Belgian, Italian, Greek, Armenian, and Syrian immigrants.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a new reform movement rose to challenge the nation's economic oligarchy. It drew its support from an expanding urban middle class and from influential intellectuals and publicists. The party that gave political voice to these interests was led by a popular leader no ted for his vague but alluring rhetoric. He made skillful use of the press and of his party machinery. He and his followers sought to control large economic interests (an important railroad regulation law was passed in 1907) and to democratize the machinery of government (a major electoral reform law was passed in 1912).