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Between the 1910s and 1930s, male migrants from colonial Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) contested South Africa's internal and external barriers to free movement by asserting their rights as British subjects. On the principle that 'fair play' and 'justice' extended throughout the British empire, these men claimed an entitlement to migrate, work and live 'unmolested' across South Africa. This article foregrounds the early political agendas of these men, demanding a 'liberal' empire that sanctioned the intra-imperial migration of its black subjects. By examining a number of crises, it demonstrates how 'loyalty' to 'Britishness' was differentiated and particularist, being publicly deployed when the ostensibly 'British' principle of 'free labour' was undermined by the process of South African state formation. While radical Nyasa internationalists used British-informed lexicons of freedom to demand a more universal approach to free movement, early Nyasa nationalists invoked British colonial borders to justify a particular, restricted vision of intra-imperial migration that excluded non-British black immigrants. By exploring these differences, the article questions what we mean by 'free movement' and shows that ideas of imperial citizenship were not only reclaimed 'from the bottom up' by Nyasas but also deconstructed and instrumentalised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have begun to think about the emergence of the early modern 'state' in complex and creative ways, far from the conventional focus on overweening central bureaucracies. One component of this discourse is the role of criminal law and criminal prosecution, which, it has been argued (particularly by English scholars), assisted state-forming processes by providing a universal interface between ruler and ruled, and by demarcating common patterns of behaviour. This paper attempts to apply these ideas to the case of early modern Scotland—whose decentralised legal system and reputation for judicial barbarity has tended to discourage research—through detailed analysis of the judicial activities of the Privy Council. Focusing on the reigns of Charles II and James VII & II, the paper assesses the Council's theoretical competence as a criminal court, and also reconstructs its day-to-day activities in terms of the kinds of cases tried, the varieties of punishment imposed, and the use of alternative mechanisms such as judicial commissions. The paper argues that the Restoration Privy Council was clearly able to utilise its judicial powers as a state-building tool, despite the general diffuseness of judicial authority in Scotland. It is suggested, therefore, that the Scottish data confirms the utility of criminal prosecution in early modern projects of state formation, underlining historians' need to conceptualise the process in broad, multi-faceted terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a comparison between Jewish and Sahrawi nationalism, the article introduces James Scott's theorization of state-evading and state-making societies to the study of Zionist state formation. Given the state-evading features of Jewish Diaspora life (physical dispersion, segmentary kinship, acephalous social structure), the article argues that Zionism might best be compared to the state-making projects of other state-evading communities (including Kurdish, Berber, and Sahrawi nationalism). As an example for this comparative research agenda, the article explores the case of Sahrawi nationalism: While POLISARIO, the national liberation movement of Western Sahara, was consciously modelled after Third World insurgencies in Algeria and Palestine, the Sahrawi proto-state (the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) applies a model of state-driven nation-building that corresponds closely to the statism (mamlakhtiyut) of the Zionist state-in-the-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of scholars have analysed lynching in Latin America as a response to the recent upsurge in insecurity and crime in the region. This article turns our attention to historical and deeper socio-political undercurrents behind this practice. Drawing on several cases of lynching that took place in post-revolutionary Puebla, the article argues that, rather than signalling state absence, the occurrence of lynching expressed communities' reactions towards a state presence that was perceived as intrusive and illegitimate. It furthermore shows that lynchings emulated the brutality and visibility of extralegal forms of violence perpetrated by public officials at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 1959, the newly-constituted Pakistan Academy of Rural Development received permission to create a 'laboratory', that is, to conduct experiments in rural development upon peasants in Comilla, East Pakistan. This paper explores the enmeshing of post-colonial state formation and Cold War American development practices through an examination of how the Academy's built environments, everyday practices and discourses were shaped by agricultural and contraceptive technologies. It examines how the Academy transformed a Gandhian ashram into a display and distribution centre for these technologies, and how technologies informed the Academy's discourses on peasant religiosity and shaped peasant understandings of state and empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A response by the author to reviews of his book "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States," is presented with topics including archaic forms of state and pre-industrial societies and formation of the archaic state and impact of ecological diversity on the earliest agrarian states.

We apply a typology of exile to factions involved in the Mexican and Russian Revolutions of the early 20th century. Our typology is based on Grubačić and O’Hearn’s theory of exile, which seeks to explain how alternative social institutions based on mutual aid, substantive reproduction, and egalitarian, direct democracy come into being and sustain themselves. We argue for exile as a determinant of revolutionary outcomes and the state (de)formation process and that we must understand exile-in-rupture as a moment when structures are at maximal flux due to the existence of exilic factions. By doing so, we offer a novel approach to understanding revolutions and state (de)formation based upon the alliances between exilic and incorporative factions. Through descriptions of loyalty bargains made, maintained, and broken during the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, we demonstrate how factions representing autonomy and exit are excluded from the resulting political-economic order post-Revolution, while their energy and power are leveraged during revolution itself. Based on this, we argue that exile is a key component of radical strategy, but that it is often precariously based on loyalty bargains that underpin it. Due to exile’s precarity, revolutions are foreclosed by reincorporation into the capitalist world-system as states are (re)formed by incorporative factions. Therefore, exile is both a necessary and contingent component of revolution and state (de)formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to papers featured in the current issue is presented, with topics including property rights in Romania before World War I, state formation of Greece and public health and the military in Bulgaria.

The article investigates the resurgence of feminist activities in contemporary Ireland, led by the arts and activist spheres, which speak to and are supported by transnational feminisms. Topics covered include the legacy of the 1916 Easter Rising as a defining moment in the creation of the Irish state that struggled for independence from British colonialism, the execution of the Rising's leaders and the state-formation that follows, and the roles played by Irish theatre makers in the Rising.

State formation below the national scale remains under-researched. In this article, the reconstitution of the local history of an upland region of Laos - Sepon - reveals a process of state formation from a territorial margin. Contrary to James C. Scott’s thesis on state-evading peoples, members of a local ethnic minority population - the Phuthai - have been part of the making of the state over centuries. In addition to the material aspects of state-making, this article explores its intangible components that are often neglected in analyses of state formation. This wider lens is particularly applied to the Communist state-making efforts in Sepon during the American-Vietnam War. These have had the unintended consequence of producing a new class that replicates age-old social hierarchies and have resulted in Sepon, and probably other upland areas of contemporary Laos, being more socially inequitable than the Communist Revolution intended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship develops in relation to the specific way in which the colonial state and local societies reshaped each other. This article traces the history of that relationship in Indonesia over the last two hundred years. At first, a central colonial state with insufficient resources to enforce its will negotiated halfway accords with a host of local rulers. Villagers ‘belonged’ to their patrimonial ruler, with the choice to submit or run away. By the early twentieth century, the state began to develop its technical means to bring about major economic and social changes, but only in densely populated areas with agrarian potential. Capitalism there began to disrupt village life and loosen clientelistic bonds. An indigenous constituency emerged for relatively autonomous citizenship. After independence in 1945, state politics there were (left-)populist rather than liberal. Where the state had fewer interests, however, the central state presence remained thin. The nineteenth century halfway house was reinvented and stabilized. Local leaders more easily gained monopolistic control over economic resources, allowing them to enforce clientelistic forms of citizenship. Central state elites were happy to grant local autonomy there, since it also relieved them from direct citizen pressure on their own prerogatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most theories of state formation emphasize the advantages of legal uniformity for the development of early modern states. The Bourbon monarchy in eighteenth-century Spain demonstrates alternative possibilities because Philip V created a more unified legal system in the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon in 1707 only to reinstate the distinctive Aragonese civil law in 1711. Philip pursued this change in policy because the difficulties caused by changing Aragonese civil law undercut his support among the local elite, while reinstating these laws increased the dependence of these elite upon the success of the king in the War of Spanish Succession (1700–1714). Philip V’s policies following 1711 demonstrate a consistent interest in securing the support of the local elite over the desire to unify the divergent civil laws throughout his kingdoms. For these reasons, selective legal diversity proved a compelling approach to governing. The persistence of these regional variations in law contributes to broader theories of state formation by demonstrating the potential benefits of legal diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historiography of the U.S. state and political history during antebellum period. Topics, including the historian William Novak's perspective on U.S. state power, U.S. public administration, the state's role in public health, commerce and security and U.S. state formation, are discussed.

This article examines the silenced history of popular leftist movements in mid-twentieth-century Saudi Arabia. Specifically, it takes up the co-constitutive relationship between popular politics and state formation, a relationship that has done much to shape contemporary Saudi Arabia. We often associate Saudi Arabia with regime politics rather than bottom-up social forces, and with radical Islam rather than radical leftist politics. This article argues that the politically reactionary, religiously conservative, authoritarian monarchy that we are familiar with today, and with which we associate "Islamic fundamentalism," was not always an inevitability. It was produced in the context of Cold War Arabia in response to the radical movements that challenged the strengthening forces of authoritarianism, US imperialism and unfettered oil capitalism in the 1950s. Through a critical reading of rarely utilized Saudi Arabian primary sources, the article engages the emergence of clandestine socialist, communist and Arab nationalist political parties that threatened Al Saud's monarchy, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) and US dominance in Arabia. It shows how together and separately, these reactionary forces crushed the popular movements, foreclosed progressive politics in Saudi Arabia and elided these events in Saudi and US historiographies in order to to maintain their interests in a tense Middle East caught in the web of Cold War politics. Unearthing the lost archives of the Saudi Left, this article presents a more complex social history of Saudi Arabia, one that situates the kingdom in the history of US imperialism and the global Left and forces us to reconsider the multiple forces complicit in producing the counterrevolutionary Saudi state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the remarkable metamorphosis of elites from warrior nobilities into well-mannered aristocrats in early modern Europe? Existing accounts emphasize the coercive force of emerging states or the novel enticements of royal courts. Well suited to the paradigmatic case of early modern France, such arguments fail to explain cases, like England, in which elites developed pacified lifestyles in the absence of a dominant royal court and largely prior to the monopolization of physical force. This essay shows that explaining such cases requires greater attention to the historical variability of elites’ own interests and strategies. I argue that European elites (also) developed pacified lifestyles insofar as they came to reproduce themselves through strategies that operated without their personal use of physical violence (including, but not limited to, royal courts). Such strategies were contingent on varying configurations of inter-elite and elite–non-elite relations. I employ this perspective to explain the marginalization of violent skills and codes in the lifestyles of early modern English elites, focusing empirically on the practice of hunting, a defining ritual of elite lifestyles. The hunting evidence suggests that the landed gentry were the first English elite to develop a pacified lifestyle. Yet the gentry were neither subject to the coercion of a centralized state nor incorporated into a court society. Instead, I show that the gentry—and later, the nobility and monarchy—developed pacified lifestyles because they came to reproduce themselves through legal strategies, the successful performance of which required nonviolent skills and habits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the Argentinian and Chilean state's colonization in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego arguing that for the making of their effective territorial sovereignties, the formation of private proprietorship was crucial. This process is understood by studying the expansion of British and German surplus capital, favored by a racialized criterion for accessing privileges and by the articulation of transnational networks of corruption that linked national authorities and local elites of European origin. Thus, the article argues, corruption built overlapping commercial and family associations that allowed both states to establish their presence in the zone. The article is mainly based on Argentinian, British and Chilean administrative sources, corporate files, memoirs and travelogues, genealogies and local and national press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on various historical documents, the article uses process tracing methods and analytic narratives to establish a relationship between historical contractual practices and state formation in nineteenth-century East Africa. I trace the process through which local political leaders historically sought to secure monopolistic deals over trade with foreign entrepreneurs through incomplete contracts for tangible economic goods (arms and slave trades, manufactured goods) and intangible political goods or services (security, knowledge, independence). By showcasing agents’ bargaining strategies in contractual agreements, the article sheds light on notions of sovereignty and independence articulated through public contracting in Africa’s political development. Historical understandings of notions of independence and sovereignty by procurement practitioners in East Africa provide seeds for thought in controversial debates about government outsourcing today. Is outsourced sovereignty always threatening? Can we outsource sovereignty and remain independent? These are perhaps the most important conceptual queries that make East Africa’s historical contractual experience pertinent today as new public-private partnerships for development, including government outsourcing, increasingly call for the use of private means to solve public problems in the developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the journal on topics including the relationships between the military, medicine, and the state in places such as the U.S., as well as state formation and the global history of military-related medicine and hospitals.

This article provides an outline of an alternative narrative of the Zionist road to statehood by reading the parallel histories of partition and state-making in the British Raj in India and Mandatory Palestine/Israel in tandem. After reviewing some of the recent scholarship on the subject, the article demonstrates how the reconstruction of an analogical prism among the historical actors can contribute to the understanding of the roots of partition politics transnationally. Lastly, it points at the way in which the analogical perspective became part and parcel of the bureaucracy and legislation developed post-partition by the new states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The formation of a state on Crete at the beginning of the second millennium bc has usually been considered under the secondary state paradigm. Most explanations rely on the role of conspicuous consumption and emulation mechanisms at a time when Cretan elites were exposed to the developed stratified systems of the east Mediterranean. A careful review of the data, especially those derived from funerary contexts, struggles to identify such dynamics but reveals a varied range of identities being negotiated and redefined simultaneously at the local and regional level. Informed by ethnographic parallels, an alternative model for Crete is proposed in which change is understood as a social phenomenon that involved a wide proportion of the population and brought broad benefits that sustained the adoption and development of the transformed systems. Crete is presented as a rich archaeological example that may also help in rethinking similar processes in other parts of the Mediterranean and further afield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Civil War (1861–1865), the United States faced a problem of “reconstruction” similar to that confronted by other nations at the time and familiar to the US since at least the Mexican–American War (1846–1848). The problem was one of territorial and political (re)integration: how to take territories that had only recently been operating under “foreign” governance and integrate them into an expanded nation-state on common structural terms. This paper considers the significance of education in that process of state (re)formation after the Civil War, with particular attention to its role in federal territories of the US West. Specifically, this paper analyses the role that education-based restrictions on citizenship, voting rights and office-holding played in constructing formal state power in the cases of five western territories: Hawaii, Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. A focus on the significance of education in these cases both advances and challenges literature on the “hidden” and decentralised structure of national policy-making in the US. It adds to that literature by illuminating how education served as an indirect tool of national policy in the West, effectively shaping the structure of power in other policy domains. At the same time, by focusing on the US West, the present analysis challenges the idea that national governance in the US was particularly “decentralised” or “hidden”. It highlights instead: (1) the role of colonial racialism in shaping national responsibility and authority for education in the US; and (2) the significance of education as both an alternative and a corollary to war in establishing US colonial power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through an examination of the political and legal debates over the role of road building in Mexico between 1920 and 1938, this essay shows how these debates became a symbol of nationalist "progress" after the military phase of Revolution. During this time, the Mexican state confronted foreign commercial interests as federal, state, and local officials launched construction efforts for new motorways. Legal and bureaucratic reforms emphasized national sovereignty over Mexico's transportation infrastructure, challenging private ownership of roads and limiting foreign investment in the highway system. Road building represented an important moment of historical continuity between the liberal regime under Porfirio Díaz and the revolutionary states that followed. This article contributes to the scholarly literature on state formation in Mexico, concentrating on how government officials, the courts, and everyday citizens shaped the country's politics of economic development and regional mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The best guarantee of protecting the rights of Christian minorities on the European territory of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century was nothing else but the establishing of own nation-states, where the Christian population could lead his life without being ruled or controlled by the Ottoman Empire. This process found support and was assisted by the Great Powers. It means, that one form of the humanitarian intervention was the state-building instructed or assisted from abroad. One of the unexpected experiences of the Balkan Wars 1912/1913 was that the members of the Balkan League committed genocides and other kinds of mass violence against other Nationalities and the Muslim population of the peninsula. Among other things the Albanian state-building project of the Great Powers aimed to prevent further genocide and other acts of violence against the Albanian population and other refugees from Macedonia and to put an end to the anarchy of the country. The main international organisation to directly represent the great powers in the new Albania and to be responsible for the state-building process was the International Commission of Control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the relationship between new oil-palm plantations and state-formation in Pomio, a remote rural district of East New Britain Province (Papua New Guinea). I am particularly interested in the kinds of spaces of governance produced by the new oil-palm plantations and how this contributes to state formation and territorialisation in Pomio. Plantations in Pomio do not became state-like spaces as a result of top-down processes alone, but also because of active worker initiatives. By contributing to state formation in this way, the inhabitants of Pomio also make claims on what the state should be like. While plantations become governable and state-like spaces, they do not produce simply governable subjects, nor do they produce a uniformly governable territory, but an uneven space in which some places are more governable than others. The inhabitants of Pomio move between these places in their pursuit of different goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extended Eastern Himalayas has been a region of India at the crossroads of the flow of ideas and commodities of states like Tibet and Assam. Yet the trajectory of its culture developed unique features in an ecological niche negotiating and interacting with other cultures. The article, while positing it within the larger Southeast Asian contours of culture seeks to look at present Arunachal Pradesh as a distinct region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like their larger counterparts, even the smallest states in the world have delegated powers and competences to subnational units. The present article aims to examine why these microstates, which are themselves smaller than the average municipalities of larger states, apparently recognized a need for political decentralization, and why their decentralized jurisdictions have remained in place. Building on the literature on the origins and persistence of federalism, the analysis reveals that the choice for decentralization in European microstates was made largely according to patterns suggested by the general literature, whereas insular identities and colonial legacies provide the strongest explanations for the origins of federalismin theAfrican, Caribbean, and Pacific cases. On the basis of two case studies of St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean and Palau in Oceania, it is found that the persistence of federalism can be explained by means of both historical-institutional and rationalist arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the system for organizing resources created by the Swedish state in the sixteenth century was formed by, and intersected with, local societies. By looking at the organization of the local administration and economic production within crown demesnes and estates, this article nuances and broadens the understanding of the early phases of the fiscal-military state. It shows that notions about gender and especially the gender division of labour were important for the organization and further development of the state in its endeavour to mobilize and transform resources. This article argues that gendered divisions of labour and traditional ways of organizing work and administration played a crucial role in the first phases of early modern Swedish state formation; women's work affected the organization of the state and vice versa. By looking at the emergence of the male official and the all-male bureaucracy from a gender perspective, and by emphasizing the household as an organizational form, the present study contributes to the understanding of both state formation and gender relations in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the way paved for the reconstruction of the ‘Armenian homeland’ notion. It considers the emergence of modern ‘national’ history of Armenians, the settlement of the Armenians in the South Caucasus or Transcaucasia, the liquidation of the (Caucasian) Albanian Catholicosate and the impact of the change of the church identity of the monophysite Caucasian Albanians living between the Kur and Araz Rivers on the change of their ethnic identity as factors instrumental in this reconstruction. The examination of this process is especially important for understanding the factors, which played a crucial role in the construction of the Armenian Republic in the South Caucasus in 1918 and its territorial claims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do some states fail to establish the capacity of legal regulation among significant sections of their population, and instead allow alternative norms of social order to take the place of those promoted by the state? Existing models of state building in the sociological literature treat the building of modern bureaucratic authority as a political process in which weak state authority results from a state's inability to defeat rival bases of power. On the other hand, neo-institutionalist theory highlights the significant effects that institutional environments have on organization building, but its elaborations of state building have mainly emphasized processes of the diffusion of world society models as central to the making of the modern nation-state. Both models fail to explain how limitations in new states' capacities to govern populations emerge in cases when states fulfill conditions specified by each model. I use the case of state building in the Albanian highlands to show that jurisdictional struggles and resistance that emerge out of distinct cultures of legality are key to understanding why organizationally capable states may fail to establish durable mechanisms of governance among marginal social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

South Carolina was a staggeringly weak polity from its founding in 1670 until the 1730s. Nevertheless, in that time, and while facing significant opposition from powerful indigenous neighbors, the colony constructed a robust plantation system that boasted the highest slave-to-freeman ratio in mainland North America. Taking this fact as a point of departure, I examine the early management of unfree labor in South Carolina as an exemplary moment of settler-colonial state formation. Departing from the treatment of state formation as a process of centralizing “legitimate violence,” I investigate how the colonial state, and in particular the Commons House of Assembly, asserted an exclusive claim to authority by monopolizing the question of legitimacy itself. In managing unfree laborers, the colonial state extended its authority over supposedly private relations between master and slave and increasingly recast slavery in racial terms. This recasting of racial slavery rested, I argue, on a distinction, pervasive throughout English North America, which divided the world into spheres of savagery and civility. Beneath the racial reordering of colonial life, the institution of slavery was rooted in the same ideological distinction by which the colonial state's claims to authority were justified, with the putative “savagery” of the slave or of the Indian being counterpoised to the supposed civility of English settlers. This article contributes to the literatures on Atlantic slavery and American colonial history, and invites comparison with accounts of state formation and settler colonialism beyond Anglo-America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is a step towards a rethinking of the emergence of the modern state in Europe. Traditionally, war has been viewed as the central mechanism of state formation. This approach claims that war caused the emergence of the modern state in two significant ways: 1) by consolidating the politically fragmented world of the middle ages through conquest; and 2) through the pressure of competition in a Darwinian international system, which forced the polities of Europe to create the bureaucratic structures fundamental to the authority of the modern state. This article seeks to undermine the first of these mechanisms by showing that the territorial consolidation of Europe was a logical result of dynastic lordship. I seek to show that the consolidation of territory and authority into fewer and fewer hands was a direct consequence of dynastic successional practices and therefore that the emphasis on coercion in European political development has been overplayed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past twenty-five years, the government of Myanmar (Burma) has consolidated control over large parts of Shan State, neutralizing much of the threat posed by armed groups and strengthening its hold over revenue extraction. During this period Myanmar has retained its position as the world's second largest producer of illicit opium, much of which is converted into heroin within the country's borders. This article explores the relationship between state-building processes and the illicit opium/heroin economy in Shan State since 1988. The author has four aims. First, to reassess the theoretical assumptions that equate illicit economies with state fragility and demonstrate instead why illicit drug economies can become embedded in processes of conflict reduction and state consolidation. Second, to explain why establishing control over Shan State has become so important to the Myanmar government's state-building ambitions. Third, to analyze how the state's engagement with the drug trade has become a vital part of its attempts to consolidate control, in terms of financing military expansion and brokering deals with strongmen who are able to govern local populations. Finally, to assess how these strategies embody a form of “negotiated statehood” in which the state's growing control has been defined by attempts to manage, rather than monopolize, the means of coercion and extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines a petition drawn up by Robert Ayleway, an official within the Irish fiscal-military state in 1692, in connection with charges of corruption and incompetence during the Williamite Wars (1689-91). Ayleway's petition, and his wider career, demonstrate that he was part of a process of English and Irish state formation that had begun well before 1688, driven by informal patronage networks as much as by formal bureaucratic developments, creating an entrenched interest group of officials that nevertheless came into conflict after 1689 with new officers, many of them foreign, who came to Ireland in William III's train. Both sides suspected the loyalty of the other, but the petition reveals that Ayleway saw himself, with some justice, as a competent and loyal official who had used his private means to serve the public in a way that had also advanced his own private interests, suggesting something of the ethos of officials within the new Irish (and English) fiscal-military state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Uganda, contested relations between the central government and sub-national regions have, since independence, shaped state formation and national identity in fundamental ways. Today, the country is characterised by regionally uneven state presence, and distinct sub-national identities and ongoing contestation over territorial demarcations, loci of authority and political identities. This article explores the politics of territory, identity and authority in three Ugandan regions in this context, in order to analyse the implications for exclusion and conflict at the sub-national level. This involves struggles over the territorial and administrative demarcations of and within regions; the loci and scope of authority with regards to these units; struggles over access to land; and the (non-)recognition of various cultural–political identities in these regions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the ‘politics of scale’ of how identity is linked to territory in the quest for self-determination by actors on the Christian side of the ethno-religious conflict in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Ethnic and political relations are framed with reference to scale, such as ‘the local’ and ‘the regional’, in ways that support claims for territorial control on an ethnic and religious basis. The experience of lack of access to the state is seen to be grounded in community identities. Furthermore, the state relates to citizens through religious and neo-customary authorities as a way to localise authority. This is connected to an idea that neo-customary institutions represent ‘the local’. It is argued in this article that these institutions are just as entangled in various constructions of scale as the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a comparative macro-level overview of political development in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt. It examines their evolution from the colonial period through several distinct phases, showing how differences in their origins were followed over time by a certain convergence towards a common post-populist form of authoritarianism, albeit still distinguished according to monarchic and republican legitimacy principles. On this basis, it assesses how past state formation trajectories made the republics more vulnerable to the Arab uprising but also what differences they make for the prospects of post-uprising democratisation. While in Morocco the monarch's legitimacy allows it to continue divide-and-rule politics, in Egypt the army's historic central role in politics has been restored, while in Tunisia the trade union movement has facilitated a greater democratic transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the development of football in interwar Romania, stressing its role in the dissemination and grounding of Romanian nationalism. I show how, due to its modular form, the game of football was deeply involved in the efforts of centralizing, territorializing and naturalizing the Romanian nation-state of the interwar period. The founding of the leading Romanian sports club at the University of Cluj and the selection of the national representative for the Paris Olympics of 1924, in conjunction with the institutional infrastructure developed to nationally regulate and control the game, are used to present the acute tensions between local/regional and national aspirations and projects, with a strong ethnic component, that have shaped the history of the game in Romania. I argue that the increasing calls for the full Romanianization of football in the 1930s have their immediate roots in these tensions and frictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the history of the Imperial Ministry of Finance (Reichsfinanzministerium) which operated in Germany from 1919 to 1945 and attempts to position the institution as a counterworld within 20th-century public finance. German budgetary policy is analyzed and the impact of the shift from bureaucracy to dictatorship on the ministry is described, the history of German state-building is examined, and information is offered on structural changes in the ministry wrought by the National Socialist party of Germany.

The article discusses Kurdish nationalists' efforts to form a state and the Kurdish autonomous movements in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran, referencing Kurdish history from World War I through the early 21st century. An overview of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, including in regard to their profession of loyalty to Iraq while pursuing autonomy, is provided.

The Roman Empire and barbaricum were inextricably linked throughout the Roman Iron Age. By late antiquity, Germanic-speaking trans-Rhenan areas were inundated with imperial influence. Migration was two-way and in various forms, all of which, including large-scale ‘folk movement’, were normal: part and parcel of the imperial frontier’s dynamics. The counter-intuitive conclusion is drawn from this that the relationship between the existence of a formal frontier and significant migration is quite the opposite of the one we have grown used to imagining. The collapse of the frontier took with it the mechanisms for migration. Therefore I have to modify my 2007 epigram that ‘the end of the Roman Empire produced the Barbarian Invasions and not vice versa’. The end of the Roman Empire put an end to the barbarian migrations. This conclusion helps us contribute more responsibly to modern debate on migration. It also contributes to a discussion of the formation of Germany. The end of migration changed the political dynamics of the regions between Rhine and Baltic. The latter became more inward-facing and from these, eventually, emerged ‘Germany’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses how the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York has been portrayed in Antebellum American travel literature, focusing on how travel literature fit into the U.S. print culture and helped promote a national identity. Other topics include how travel literature influenced state formation in the early 19th century, the history of the Military Academy in the 19th century, and the role of the Hudson River in enticing tourists to West Point.

By a consideration of geography and environment, this essay raises questions about migration, settlement, and state formation in the Ganga plain from the first millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE. It asks why Indo-Aryan speakers continued to migrate from north-western parts of South Asia towards the Ganga plain during the first millennium BCE and precisely what route they followed. To understand better these largely misunderstood historical problems related to migration and settlement, the essay casts doubt on the utility of geographers' tripartite division of the Ganga plain, proposing instead a division based on aridity and rainfall. Such a division helps explain why the transitional zone between the drier and the more humid areas of the Ganga plain became the linchpin of migratory movements, state formation, and urban development since at least the middle of the first millennium BCE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories that offer a historicized account of international relations often consider the late middle ages as a period of fundamental change. Territorial political units, geographically defined borders, and distinctions between internal and external gradually developed and became increasingly important. As a result international relations were not only governed by competition between individual lords, by feudal networks, or by imperial and papal universalism, but also by the agency of newly developing geopolitical units, such as kingdoms, territories, towns, and local lordships. On the basis of the Guelders War of Succession (1371-1379) this paper offers a snapshot of this process of transition, demonstrating the dense and composite nature of international relations during the fourteenth century in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on analyzing the transcultural statehood between Europe and Asia on the basis of law. Various topics discussed include state formation in the British India in 19th century, rule of law in British India, constitutionalism in the region, imperial sovereignty and professional status of barristers in India.

This article analyses the candidacy of King John III Vasa in the royal elections of Poland-Lithuania in 1573 and 1575. Although the ‘Polish-minded’ policy of John Vasa is commonly known in earlier historiography, Swedish and Finnish historians have not given much attention to John III’s election campaigns in Poland-Lithuania in the 1570s. This article contemplates John III’s candidacy and rejection from the perspective of Poland-Lithuania. The royal elections are analysed as a political decision-making process by the Polish-Lithuanian estates. Thus the article emphasizes the existence of past alternatives and conditions of decision-making in early-modern history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the phenomenon of women immigrant teachers during the 1950s in Israel, an issue which incorporates several research topics: migration, gender, and teaching. It asks whether the popular saying: "Teaching is women's work," was true in regard to Israel during this time period. In order to do so, this article examines the choices and actions of those women, all of whom were trying to cope with their new situation and to integrate successfully into the host society. A large portion of women immigrant teachers found jobs in immigrant villages and development towns. From an educational point of view, these women were not the strongest link in the pedagogical chain, and yet they were asked to assist in the formation of a new society. By doing so, they chose to become agents of acculturation and carried out leadership functions; they became empowered, and quickly shed their weak, immigrant women status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 15 years, northwest Cambodia has seen dramatic agrarian expansion away from the central rice plain into the peripheral uplands fuelled by peasant in-migration. Against this background, we examine the nature of relations between the peasantry and the state. We first show the historical continuities of land control processes and how the use of violence in a post-conflict neoliberal context has legitimised ex-Khmer Rouge in controlling land distribution. Three case studies show the heterogeneity of local level sovereignties, which engage the peasants in different relations with authority. We examine how these processes result in the construction of different rural territories along the agricultural frontier and argue that, in this region of Cambodia, the struggles between Khmer Rouge and neoliberal modes of land control are central to state formation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent literature on British colonial rule in Africa has increasingly emphasised the ways in which relatively cautious colonial states were formed in processes of engagement and accommodation with local societies. This article uses the example of a major rebellion against colonial authority in southern Darfur in 1921 to demonstrate the ways in which these processes of local engagement might themselves feed into rebellion against state authority, rather than secure colonial rule. The rebellion was inspired by Mahdist millenarian belief, but the involvement of local societies in both the rebellion and its repression was also shaped by patterns of local rivalries into which the colonial state had entered as an additional actor. The article also reminds us, more broadly, that spectacular violence and local accommodation were not distinct modes of colonial governance but rather continually intertwined in processes of colonial state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic success of Court Jews during the late 17th and the 18th centuries is one of the major phenomena of early modern Jewish history in Central Europe. After long and controversial debates on the causes of this development and its consequences for Jewish society as well as for the formation of modern economy and state building in Europe, recent studies mostly focus on cultural aspects. This article argues for reintegrating the economy of Court Jews into the broader field of public finance and for rethinking the significance of Jewish merchants and bankers in comparison to other groups of public creditors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]