In the second half of the nineteenth century, objects from India were repeatedly assembled for display at international exhibitions, known then and now as world fairs. Their transience and ephemerality set world fairs apart as extraordinary phenomena in the world of collecting. They are special because, despite the permanence they imply, they do not last; they come and they go. Their buildings are constructed, and then, by international charter, they are deconstructed. They are also special because they place objects in the service of commerce and in the service of the modern nation—state, with the inevitable imperial encounters that these two forces promote. In doing so, they yoke cultural material with aesthetics, politics and pragmatics.

The Egyptian delegation to the Eighth International Congress of Orientalists, held in Stockholm during the summer of 1889, traveled to Sweden via Paris and paused there to visit the World Exhibition. The four Egyptians spent several days in the French capital, climbing twice the height (they were told) of the Great Pyramid in Alexandre Eiffel's new tower, and exploring the city and exhibition laid out beneath. Only one thing disturbed them. The Egyptian exhibit had been built by the French to represent a street of medieval Cairo, made of houses with overhanging upper stories and a mosque like that of Qaitbay. “It was intended,” one of the Egyptians wrote, “to resemble the old aspect of Cairo.” So carefully was this done, he noted, that “even the naivt nn the bildings was made dirty.”

The recent influx to the United States of a new large wave of immigrants from Hispanic America and Asia has reinvigorated immigration and ethnic studies, including those devoted to the analysis of the origins and process of international migrations. The accumulation of research in this field in the last fifteen years has brought about a shift in the theoretical paradigm designed to interpret these movements. The classical approach explains the mass flow into North America of immigrants (from Southern and Eastern Europe, in the period 1880 to 1914), as an international migration interpreted in terms of push and pull forces. Demographic and economic conditions prompted individuals to move from places with a surplus of population, little capital, and underemployment, to areas where labor was scarce and wages were higher (Jerome, 1926; Thomas, 1973; Piore, 1979; Gould, 1979). This interpretation views individual decisions and actions as the outcome of a rational economic calculation of the costs and benefits of migration. Recent studies of international population movements have reconceptualized this problem, recasting the unit(s) of analysis from separate nation-states, linked by one-way transfer of migrants between two unequally developed economies, to a comprehensive economic system composed of a dominant core and a dependent periphery— a world system that forms a complex network of supranational exchanges of technology, capital, and labor (Castells, 1975; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Kritz, 1983; Sassen-Koob, 1980; Portes, 1978; Portes and Walton, 1981; Wood, 1982). In this conceptualization, the development of the core and the underdevelopment of the peripheral societies are seen not as two distinct phenomena, but as two aspects of the same process—the expanding capitalist world system, explained in terms of each other. Generated by the economic imbalances and social dislocations resulting from the incorporation of the peripheries into the orbit of the core, international labor migrations between the developing and industrialized regions are viewed as part of a global circulation of resources within a single system of world economy. This interpretation shifts the central emphasis from the individual (and his/her decisions) to the broad structural determinants of human migrations within a global economic system.

In 1868, a clergymen told the annual congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science that “he had long lived in the town of Liverpool, and had been placed in circumstances there which made him frequently regret that there were no places in which women could find employment. The great want was of employment for every class of women, not only for the higher class, but for those placed in humbler circumstances.” At earlier conferences, however, a number of speakers described the abundant opportunities for female employment in other Lancashire towns. Census figures make it clear that the reason lay in the different industrial bases of these towns.

The role of language in the processes of state formation and challenges to state authority is insufficiently understood. What interests do rulers have in unifying their realms linguistically? Under what conditions do subjects from upper and lower strata in linguistically distinct regions of a state change their language repertoires in accordance with the dictates of rulers? To what extent is language change a response to political, as opposed to economic or demographic, factors? Under what conditions do languages that face extinction become the object of revival movements?

I During the 1970s, residents in Scotland and the Basque region of Spain began to vote in large numbers for nationalist candidates. Almost overnight the Scottish National Party and a collection of three Basque parties became important electoral forces, expanding their shares in general elections by more than 15 percent of all ballots cast (see Tables 1 and 2).

A Populist newspaper in North Carolina commented in 1890 that agrarian unrest was common just about everywhere, in “high tariff and low tariff” countries as well as in “monarchies, empires, and republics.” Historians of this discontent have neglected the international dimension of protest that was so striking at the time. The countries that produced the most vigorous agrarian movements, Germany and the United States, have been especially well protected from the scrutiny of comparison. One reason for this neglect is that scholars in both countries emphasize their nations' peculiarities and capacity to make their own histories. The most influential study of American Populism, for instance, is still John D. Hicks' The Populist Revolt (1931). Hicks ascribed the movement to the closure of the frontier, the “safety valve” once thought to be the special feature of American history. Most scholars today reject the “Turner thesis,” but continue to see populism as uniquely democratic. Just as American Populists have been celebrated as “good guys,” German agrarian leaders have been demonized. The marked anti-Semitic aspect of agrarian movements in the 1890s has led historians to link them more or less directly to national socialism, the arguably unique “outcome” of German history. Whatever the sources of this exceptionalism, the constrained view has distorted the understanding of a crucial historical conjuncture.

Since the military coup that toppled the government of Sylvanus Olympio in Togo, West Africa, no less than seventy African leaders throughout sub-Saharan Africa have been overthrown by the armed forces. In the first two decades of independence alone, there were forty successful coups, not to mention the countless coup attempts (Meredith, 1984; Kitchen, 1985)