The garment industry is a good example of the relative autonomy of academic fields. Two histories of the industry are being written simultaneously but separately. One is a history of women; the other, a history of immigrants. Two types of workers have indeed come to the sweatshops, and each have had distinct reasons for doing so. The nineteenth century saw the shift from tailormade to ready-made garments, from the (hand-held) needle to the sewing machine, from tailors and dressmakers to garment workers, and from more to less skill in the making of clothing. The ready-to-wear revolution was also accompanied by a global shift in the sewing labor force, from men to women and from natives to immigrants. The story is a complicated one, yet one which has most often been told in parallel fashion.

What has been called the early modern military revolution may be described most simply as the replacement of small cavalry forces by huge gunpowder infantry armies. The revolution was a diffusionary process with a relatively well-understood chronology and geography. The innovations at its core began in northern Italy in the later fifteenth century and spread throughout central, northern, and eastern Europe in the three centuries that followed. Seen in this way, it was a unique and unitary phenomenon. Thus we speak of the military revolution, an episode in world history, instead of several different revolutions in the constituent parts of Europe. Nonetheless, the course and impact of the revolution were different in the regions it eventually affected.

At an exhibition in 1992 at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., “Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration,” one room among the four devoted to Ming China was called “Lamaist Art.” In the coffee-table book produced for the exhibition, with reproductions and descriptions of over 1,100 of the works displayed, however, not one painting, sculpture, or artifact was described as being of Tibetan origin. In commenting upon one of the Ming paintings, the well-known Asian art historian, Sherman E. Lee, wrote, “The individual [Tang and Song] motifs, however, were woven into a thicket of obsessive design produced for a non-Chinese audience. Here the aesthetic wealth of China was placed at the service of the complicated theology of Tibet.” This complicated theology is named by Lee with the term “Lamaism,” an abstract noun that does not occur in the Tibetan language but which has a long history in the West, a history inextricable from the ideology of exploration and discovery that the National Gallery cautiously sought to celebrate. Lee echoes the nineteenth-century portrayal of Lamaism as something monstrous, a composite of unnatural lineage, devoid of the spirit of original Buddhism (as constructed by European Orientialists). Lamaism was a deformity unique to Tibet, its parentage denied by India (in the voice of British Indologists) and by China (in the voice of the Qing empire), an aberration so unique in fact that it would eventually float free from its Tibetan abode, an abode that would vanish.

In the beginning of the world we had the forge and we forged things, we had weavinglooms and we wove our clothes, we had oracle huts where we consulted the oracle, and we had boats from which we caught fish. We had no guns. We had no cowrie-money (akwá). If you went to the market you took beans in order to exchange them for sweet potatoes. You exchanged something specific for something else. Then the king brought the cowrie-money. What did the king do in order to bring the cowrie-money? He caught people and broke their legs and their arms.

Demographers have often lamented their field's reputation as one of “all methods and no theory.” Pushed by advances in computer technology and pulled by the appeal of being the “hardest,” most scientistic of the social sciences, the field has grown ever more sophisticated in mathematical technique. At the same time, theory has languished, becoming increasingly narrow and divorced from the realities of a rapidly changing post-Cold War world (McNicoll 1992). Leading members of the field routinely bemoan this state of affairs, though proposals for remaking the discipline are rarely offered (Preston 1993; Keyfitz 1993).

The experience of modernity is one that cuts across national boundaries. Regardless of where it occurs, modernization—defined here as the nexus of changes that includes technological innovation, economic rationalization, demographic change, the bureaucratization of the state, and the triumph of science—has certain inevitable consequences. To live in a modern society means to live in a constantly changing world, in which the forces of modernity have dissolved old forms of community, altered traditional notions of work, undermined social hierarchies, produced new social spaces, and transformed the sights, sounds, and even smells of everyday life. Modernization also engenders its own response. Societies in the throes of rapid modernization inevitably have their critics: individuals who for a variety of reasons object to the myriad of changes that accompany this process. Recoiling from the present, these antimodernists take refuge in an often idealized past, longing for what they believe to be a simpler, purer way of life.

The histories of Germany and the United States became deeply entangled in the century of total war. After (re)unification on the battlefield in the midnineteenth century, both countries underwent rapid transformations through national programs of industrialization based on new products and technologies and emerged as great powers with global pretensions at the beginning of the twentieth century. An initial, and somewhat hesitant, confrontation in World War I was followed by a period of oscillation and confusion during the 1920s and 1930s, as leading elements in the two economies sought grounds for collaboration even as the political development of the two nations diverged, one moving toward fascism, the other toward a liberal democratic renewal. This produced the deeply ideological collision of the Second World War, which resulted in an equally dramatic turnabout, as the Germans endured what Americans then most feared, a grim (albeit partial) communist takeover, and the United States became the staunch ally of the German west in its faceoff with the east. Recently this close partnership has turned into a more perplexed and occasionally suspicious friendship, as the familiar terrain of the cold war is ploughed up. This is a history of extreme reversals is tied inextricably to war and preparations for war.

Nature is seen by humans through a screen of beliefs, knowledge, and purposes, and it is in terms of their images of nature, rather than of the actual structure of nature, that they act. Yet, it is upon nature itself that they do act, and it is nature itself that acts upon them, nurturing or destroying them.

Rappaport (1979:97)

Palestine, under British mandatory rule since the end of the First World War, was an arena of confrontation between Arabs and Jews over land, immigration, and political power, as well as over place and position in the labor market. This article will deal with the split labor market of mandatoryPalestineand the actors within it. The analysis will make use of the split labormarket theory of Edna Bonacich. In her theory she posits a situation in whichtwo groups of labor, belonging to different ethnic and national origins, meet in the same labor market. The more advantageous ethnic group has been able, due to its past history and its more advantageous position within world capitalist development, to ensure a higher value for its labor but considers itself threatened by the presence of the less advantageous groups, whose labor has lower value and thus greater attraction to employers who aim to maximize their profits. The theory then goes on to develop the different ways in which cheaper labor might serve to displace and substitute higher-priced labor and the strategies pursued by the latter in recurring attempts to maintain its relative advantage.

Reading Ivo Andric's colorful short story, “The Vezir's Elephant,” suggests a weakness in state rule consistent with a Eurocentric image of Ottoman backwardness. In the story, just as Bosnian peasants familiarized themselves with the habits of one Turkish official, he would be removed, transferred to another province and replaced by a new official with new whims and wishes. Throughout the sixteenth and a large part of the seventeenth centuries, a more or less firmly established rotation system was part of the Ottoman state mode of social control. Patrons and clients, and patrons among themselves remained foreign and unfamiliar. The resulting level of uncertainty in the provinces disrupted patron-client ties.

The modern world is composed of unstable landscapes in which boundaries, horizons, and attendant possibilities of living in the world change with dizzying rapidity. Likewise, the experience of modernity is often described in terms of peoples' attenuated attachments to the places they inhabit (Jameson 1991; Harvey 1989; Soja 1989). Such tenuous, at times chimeric, connections between persons and places, to up the ante between subjectivity(ies) and the place-bound artifice of habit and custom, pose some pressing analytical challenges to those who are interested in cultural description.

In 1821 the newly appointed director and rector of the Imperial Kazan University received the following instructions from the government in St. Petersburg: “It is of utmost importance for the government that the education of its people be based on a firm foundation of the Christian religion, that the evil spirit of our time, the all-destructive spirit of free thinking, does not penetrate the sacred temples, where the happiness of the future generations must be secured by teaching the contemporary youths.” The fact that Orthodox Christianity was at the heart of Russian imperial identity is not surprising, but the fact that such an identity was to be uncompromisingly forged in the Kazan region, where most of the residents were non-Russians of different faiths, is noteworthy.

Mysteriously, some sense justice when others sense injustice. … The desire to sense justice in events may cause people to look to law as an instrument to control… events. Then justice has preceded law. Law is made a part of events and is itself then viewed as promoting or blocking justice, depending on the role it plays and also depending on the perceived self-interest of the participants in, or viewers of, the events [Hartzler 1976:4].

If women's biology is their economic destiny, nowhere is this destiny more inexorable than in anthropological representations of the sexual division of foraging labor. Physically weak, immobilized by nursing children, engrossed in the provisioning of reliable plant foods, redolent with odors that drive away the game, and subject finally to the axiom that specialization everywhere increases productivity, the foraging woman who gathers but does not hunt seems multiply inevitable, the product at once of logistical necessity and evolutionary selection.

It is frequently said that, while historians are theoretically naïve, sociologists are insensitive to the particularities of specific historical situations; and that this insensitivity can seriously affect the usefulness of theory. What follows is an attempt to marry the critical insights of sociologists on a central issue, the state, with the sensitivity of historians to the modalities and particularities of the exercise of political and social power in a particular context, seventeenthcentury England. The result, it is hoped, is an account that benefits from the strengths of both.