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Pool, I. D. (1990). : On telecommunica-tions in a global age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Robinson, A. (1995). The story of writing:Alphabets, hieroglyphs, and pic-tograms. London: Thames & Hudson.Ruhlen, M. (1994). The origin of language: Tracing the evolution of themother tongue. New York: John Wiley.Standage, T. (1998). The Victorian internet: The remarkable story of thetelegraph and the nineteenth century’s on-line pioneers. New York:Berkley Books.Winston, B. (1998). Media technology and society: A history from the tele-graph to the Internet. London: Routledge.Wright. R. (1991, April). Quest for the mother tongue. Atlantic Monthly,267(4), 39–68.Yates, J. (1989). Control through communication: The rise of system inAmerican management. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress.Communism andSocialismAt the core of modern socialism and Communism liesan ancient vision of an ideal human communitycharacterized by abundance, equality, freedom, coopera-tion, and harmony. Elements of this vision have surfacedrepeatedly—in the message of the Hebrew prophets, inmillenarian movements in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere,and in the small utopian communities of early-nineteenth-century Europe and America. (In general terms, Com-munism refers to a political system that abolishes privateproperty, and socialism to a system of collective owner-ship of the means of production and distribution.)MarxismModern socialism took shape in the industrializing soci-eties of Western Europe during the nineteenth century. Asa set of ideas, this socialism is forever connected to thewritings of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Having witnessedindustrial capitalism during its early and harshest phase,Marx set out to analyze that phenomenon and to chartits future development.Through the wonders of moderntechnology, Marx argued, industrial capitalist societieshad potentially solved the ancient problems of scarcityand poverty.They could now produce more than enoughto meet the material needs of their citizens. In this sense,industrial capitalism was an enormously progressivedevelopment in human affairs, and he praised its achieve-ments lavishly. But this vast potential was blocked by thefatal ﬂaws of capitalism—private property, growinginequalities, bitter class conﬂict, worsening cycles of eco-nomic expansion and recession, competitive and indi-vidualistic values. Such societies, Marx believed, wouldself-destruct in a vast revolutionary upheaval, led by thefactory working class (the proletariat), which was impov-erished and exploited by the capitalist system. Then thevast productive possibilities of modern economies wouldbe placed in service to the whole of society in a rationallyplanned and egalitarian community, bringing an end toclass conﬂict, to national rivalries, and to the endemicpoverty and inequalities of the past.This was socialism,and to Marx it marked the end of the sorry history of end-less class struggle and opened the way to a bright and cre-ative future for humankind.Socialist MovementsMarx’s ideas inspired socialist movements of workers andintellectuals amid the grim harshness of Europe’s indus-trialization in the second half of the nineteenth century.Socialists established political parties in most Europeanstates and linked them together in international organi-zations.These parties recruited members, contested elec-tions as they gained the right to vote, agitated for reforms,and in some cases plotted revolution. While establishedelites felt enormously threatened by socialist movements,nowhere in the most advanced capitalist countries of En-gland, Germany, France, or the United States did Marx’spredicted revolution occur. Through democratic pres-sures and trade unions, workers gradually raised theirstandard of living while the beginnings of “welfare state”reforms softened the harsh edges of capitalism. Marx hadnot appreciated this capacity of capitalist societies toreform themselves. Furthermore, nationalism drew theloyalties of workers to their own countries rather than tothe international working class, as Marx had imagined.Socialist revolutions did occur in the twentieth century,but in places where Marx would have least expectedcommunism and socialism 401
ing power, these Communist revolutionaries sought to“build socialism,” which meant creating modern societiesthat were distinctly different from their capitalist coun-terparts. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin (ruled1929–1953) and China under Mao Zedong (ruled1949–1976) represent by far the most important exam-ples of this process.Putting Marxism into PracticeThe ﬁrst step involved the ending of old inequalities.Wealthy landowners had their property expropriatedand distributed to the peasants. In China, teams ofyoung revolutionaries were sent to the country’s many vil-lages, where they mobilized local peasants to confrontlandlords, to seize their property, and, not infrequently,to kill them. Privately owned industries were nationalizedwithout compensation to their owners. Communist gov-ernments in both countries took immediate steps toguarantee equal rights for women within marriage and inpublic life, ending the legal disabilities that they had longsuffered.Since the Soviet Union and China were overwhelm-ingly agricultural societies, creating socialism in the coun-tryside was a priority for both of them.The distributionof land to the peasants, although revolutionary, washardly socialist because it left both countries with largenumbers of small privately owned family farms.To Com-munist leaders, this was neither modern nor efﬁcient, andit opened the door to a revival of capitalism and ruralinequality as some farmers prospered while othersbecame impoverished. The solution in both the SovietUnion in the late 1920s and early 1930s and China dur-ing the 1950s lay in large collective farms in which land,animals, and tools were held in common.The process ofenlisting peasants into these collective farms unfoldedwith great violence and amid much resistance in theSoviet Union and was accompanied by a horriﬁc faminecaused by the heavy demands of state authorities forgrain.The Chinese Communist Party, with deep roots inthe rural areas, accomplished basic collectivization much402 berkshire encyclopedia of world historythem—in a Russian Empire just beginning to industrial-ize when the Communist regime came to power in 1917,in backward and impoverished China (1949), in a Cubadependent on sugar production in 1959, and in Vietnam,which was emerging from French, Japanese, and Ameri-can imperialism at the end of the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s. In these countries, revolutionaries called them-selves “Communists,” to distinguish themselves from“social democrats” in the West who still continued tostruggle peacefully through political processes.After seiz-Karl Marx on the StateThe Commune—the reabsorption of the statepower by society as its own living forces instead ofas forces controlling and subduing it, by the pop-ular masses themselves, forming their own forceinstead of the organized force of their suppres-sion, the political form of their social emancipa-tion instead of the artiﬁcial force—appropriatedby their oppressors (their own force opposed to anorganized force against them)—of society wieldedfor their oppression by their enemies. The formwas simple like all great things….The generalsuffrage,till now abused either for the parliamen-tary sanction of the Holy State Power, or a play inthe hands of the ruling classes, only employed bythe people to choose the instruments of parlia-mentary class rule once in so many years, nowadapted to its real purposes: to choose by thecommunes delusion as if administration and polit-ical governing were mysteries, transcendent func-tions only to be trusted to the hands of a trainedcaste—state parasites, richly paid sycophantsand sinecurists, in the higher posts, absorbingthe intelligence of the masses and turning themagainst themselves in the lower places of the hier-archy. Doing away with the state hierarchy alto-gether and replacing the haughty masters of thepeople with always removable servants, a mockresponsibility by a real responsibility, as they actcontinuously under public supervision.Source: Marx, K. (1971). Drafts for The Civil War in France. In D. McLellan. TheThought of Karl Marx:An Introduction. (pp. 193). New York: Harper & Row, Pub-lishers, Inc. (Original work published 1871)
more peacefully, though theretoo an enormous famine brokeout in the late 1950s, whenMao Zedong pushed for evenlarger collective farms, knownas communes, and for a morecomplete social equality. Inboth countries, the agriculturalsector grew only slowly as itserved to subsidize massiveindustrialization programs.Communists everywherewere modernizers, intent oncreating industrial societies.Furthermore, they argued that they had found a superiorpath to industrialization that would avoid the exploita-tion, instability, and inequalities of capitalism.The key toCommunist industrialization was state ownership andplanning. Under a series of ﬁve year plans, Communistplanners decided where factories and mines would belocated, what they would produce and in what quantities,where they would ﬁnd their supplies, to whom theywould sell their products, and at what price.After a fash-ion, it worked! Industrial growth rates in both the SovietUnion (1930s) and China (1950s) were extremely rapid.The U.S.S.R. in particular became a fully industrializedsociety in little more than a decade, strong enough to out-produce and defeat the Nazis in World War II.But Communist industrialization also created a newelite of managers, bureaucrats, and technical expertswho gained privileged positions in society, thus under-cutting the supposed egalitarianism of socialist societies.While Stalin largely accepted these inequalities as tem-porarily necessary for modern development, MaoZedong was increasingly troubled by them and launchedrepeated campaigns to root out materialism, self-seeking,and feelings of superiority in China’s ofﬁcial elites.Among the unique features of Communist societieswas the extent to which party and state authorities pen-etrated and controlled the society. Since agriculture wascollectivized and industry nationalized, virtually everyonewas employed by state. Furthermore, the leaders of theCommunist Party established the policies that the statebureaucracy was supposed to implement. Educationserved as a major vehicle for inculcating the party doc-trines and Marxist thinking into the population. Organi-zations catering to the interests of students, women,workers, and various professional groups were all con-trolled by the party. The multitude of private voluntaryorganizations that characterize democratic capitalist soci-eties had no counterpart in Communist countries.The Search for EnemiesBut the Communist societies of the Soviet Union andChina were laced with conﬂict. Under both Stalin andMao, those conﬂicts erupted into a search for enemiesthat disﬁgured both societies. In the Soviet Union thatprocess culminated in the “Terror” of the late 1930s inwhich tens of thousands of prominent Communists,including virtually all of Lenin’s top associates, and mil-lions of more ordinary people were caught up in thiswave of terror. Based on suspicious associations in thepast, denunciations by colleagues, connections to foreigncountries, or simply bad luck, these people were arrested,usually in the dead of night, then tried and sentencedeither to death or to long years in harsh and remote laborcommunism and socialism 403The Kremlin in the1880s. In the twentiethcentury it became aprimary symbol of the Soviet Union.
camps know as the Gulag. Close to a million people wereexecuted between 1936 and 1941. Perhaps four or ﬁvemillion more were sent to the Gulag, where they wereforced to work in horrendous conditions and died inappalling numbers.Victimizers too were numerous as theTerror consumed the energies of a huge corps of ofﬁcials,investigators, interrogators, informers, guards, and exe-cutioners.While the search for enemies in the Soviet Unionoccurred largely in secret and under the clear control ofthe state, in China it became a much more public process,particularly during the “Cultural Revolution” of 1966–1969. Mao became convinced that many within theCommunist Party itself had been seduced by capitalistvalues of self-seeking and materialism and were no longeranimated by the idealistic revolutionary vision of earliertimes. And so, he called for rebellion against the Commu-nist Party itself. Millions of young people responded and,organized as “Red Guards,” set out to rid the country ofthose who were “taking the capitalist road.” The outcomewas chaos and violence that came to the edge of civil war,and Mao found himself forced to call in the military torestore order and Communist Party control. Both theSoviet “Terror” and the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”badly discredited the very idea of socialism and con-tributed to the ultimate collapse of the Communist exper-iment at the end of the century.The End of the CommunistExperimentThe demise of world Communism was both rapid andlargely unexpected, and it occurred in various ways. InEastern European countries, where Communist govern-ments had been imposed by Soviet military force afterWorld War II, popular movements in 1989 swept awaydespised governments with stunning rapidity. The dra-matic breaching of the Berlin Wall, which had long sep-arated East and West Berlin, became the enduring symbolof these movements. In the U.S.S.R., Mikhail Gor-bachev’s efforts to reform Communism (1985–1991),404 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyNo Uprising in PolandThe extract below is from an editorial that appeared inthe Polish newspaper Trybuna Ludu on 25 October1956, two days after the start of the Hungarian Upris-ing.The editorial writer hastened to make clear that thePolish people would not be joining their Hungarianneighbors in rising up against socialism or the SovietUnion.In these exciting and uncommon times the Polishworking class has clearly made its voice heard. Thisclass leads the nation not by someone’s appointmentor decree, but by virtue of its position in society. Inthese exciting and unusual days, it is evident that theleading role of the Party has been tangibly conﬁrmed.The Party has been united as never before with theclass which gave it birth, with the peasant masses,with the student youth, with the progressive intelli-gentsia, and with the Polish People’s Army.The Partyis united with the nation.We perceive the strength of this bond, hearingwith deep emotion the clear and wise voice of ourworking class, our people, and our soldiers.This voice supports the leadership of the Partyelected in accordance with the will of the people. Itsupports the correction of abuses, further democrati-zation, and all the strengthening of the alliance andfriendship with the Soviet Union and all people of thegreat socialist family on the basis of the Leninist foun-dation of equality and mutual respect for the sover-eignty and independence of each country.Love for the fatherland and the cause of socialismhave burst forth in Poland with a bright ﬂame. Thepolitical maturity and discipline of the working classarouse admiration.But, as in the time of any great mass movement,evidences of irresponsibility and thoughtlessness,diverging from the current of reform, are revealed ina few places.It would be naïve to think that the forces whichhave been attempting to poison this great, renovating,and pure current with the poison of anti-Soviet dem-agogy have capitulated.Source: Lincoln, W. B. (1968). Documents in world history, 1945–1967 (p. 126). SanFrancisco: Chandler Publishing Company.
reducing state control over the economy and permittingunprecedented freedom of expression, backﬁred badly.His reforms sent the economy spiraling downward andstimulated nationalist and anti-Communist movementsthat led to the complete disintegration of the countryitself in 1991 and the repudiation of its CommunistParty. In China, the Communist Party retained power butabandoned many Communist economic policies duringthe 1980s and 1990s, ending collectivized agriculture,permitting massive foreign investment, and allowingmany private or semiprivate businesses to operate freely.These reforms sparked an enormous boom in the Chi-nese economy that contrasted sharply with the economicdisasters that accompanied the disintegration of theSoviet Union.Scholars continue to debate the reasons for the quitesudden end of the Communist era in world history. Inlarge measure, the fundamental failure of Communismwas economic. By the 1980s, it was apparent that theeconomies of major Communist countries were stagnat-ing, clearly unable to compete effectively with the moredynamic economies of the capitalist West.This perceptiondrove the reform process in both the Soviet Union andChina. A further factor was the erosion of belief. An ear-lier idealism about the potential for building socialismhad largely vanished amid the horrors of Stalinism andMaoism, replaced, especially in the U.S.S.R., by a self-seeking cynicism.The collapse of Communism, like its revolutionarybeginnings, had global implications. It marked the end ofthe Cold War, which had dominated international life inthe second half of the twentieth century and had threat-ened a nuclear holocaust. As the bipolar structure of theCold War era faded away, the United States emerged asthe world’s single superpower, bringing with it newcharges of an American global empire in the making. Fur-thermore, the end of Communism signaled the closure ofa century-long global debate about socialism and capi-talism as distinct and rival systems. Market economiesand capitalist ideologies had triumphed, at least tem-porarily. In Eastern Europe and more tentatively in theformer Soviet Union, the demise of Communism alsoallowed the ﬂowering of more democratic political sys-tems. Despite the continued dominance of Communistparties in China, Cuba,Vietnam, and North Korea, expec-tations of a socialist future had largely disappeared every-where and the Communist phenomenon in world historyhad ended.Robert W. StrayerSee also Cold War; Comintern; Eastern Europe; Lenin,Vladimir; Revolution—China; Revolution—Cuba; Rev-olutions, Communist; Russian-Soviet Empire; Stalin,JosephFurther ReadingChang, J. (1991). Wild swans: Three daughters of China. New York:Anchor Books.Chen,Y.-T. (1980). The dragon’s village:An autobiographical novel of rev-olutionary China. New York: Penguin Books.Chukovskaya, L. (1999). Soﬁa Petrovna. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni-versity Press.Dommen, A. J. (2001) The Indochinese experience of the French and theAmericans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Viet-nam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Ferdinand, P. (1991). Communist regimes in comparative perspective. Sav-age, MD: Barnes and Noble Books.Fitzpatrick, S. (1982) The Russian revolution, 1917–1932. Oxford, UK😮xford University Press.Fowkes, B. (1993). The rise and fall of Communism in eastern Europe.New York: St. Martin’s Press.Grass, J., Corrin, J., & Kort, M. (1997). Modernization and revolution inChina. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.Heng, L., & Shapiro, J. (1983). Son of the revolution. New York: VintageBooks.Hinton, W. (1984). Shenfan: The continuing revolution in a Chinese vil-lage. New York: Random House.Lawrence, A. (1998). China under Communism. New York: Routledge.MacFarquhar, R. (1997). The politics of China:The eras of Mao and Deng.New York: Cambridge University Press.Meisner, M. (1999). Mao’s China and after. New York: Free Press.Perez-Stable, M. (1998). Cuban revolution: Origins, course, and legacy.New York: Oxford University Press.Read, C. (2001). The making and breaking of the Soviet system. New York😛algrave.Rosenberg,W. G., & Young, M. (1982). Transforming Russia and China:Revolutionary struggle in the twentieth century. New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press.Spence, J. (1999). The search for modern China. NewYork:W.W. Norton.Strayer, R. (1998). Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.Suny, R. G. (1998). The Soviet experiment. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.Ward, C. (1993). Stalin’s Russia. London: Edward Arnold.communism and socialism 405Of course, we do not want socialism in Latin America to be an imitation or a copy. It must be a heroic creation.We must inspire Indo-Americansocialism with our own reality, our own language. That is a mission worthy of a new generation.•José Carlos Mariátegui (1928)
ComparativeBorders andFrontiersAlthough people often use the terms frontier, bound-ary, and border interchangeably, and in some formsof usage the terms can be regarded as synonyms, histo-rians have emphasized important distinctions betweenfrontiers and boundaries. Frontiers are above all zones ofinteraction. They can arise as a result of cross-culturalencounters, population movements, and the absence ofstate authority or an effective monopoly of violence.Historian Leonard Thompson has deﬁned a frontierthusly: “In our usage, a frontier is an area of interpene-tration between societies. It contains three elements: a ter-ritorial element, a zone or territory as distinct from aboundary line; a human element, comprising peoples ofinitially separate and distinct societies; and a process ele-ment by which relations among such peoples commence,develop, and eventually crystallize. A frontier opens withthe ﬁrst contact between members of these two societies.It closes when a single authority has established politicaland economic dominance…” (Lamar and Thompson1981, 87).In contrast, boundaries are established by states to sep-arate their subjects and territories from other politicaljurisdictions. Political geographer Ladis Kristof deﬁnes aboundary as the “outer line of effective control exercisedby the central government” (Kristof 1959, 270). Bordersare legal and political infrastructures created by states tomaintain boundaries and regulate movement. Frontiersand boundaries have been important factors in globalhistory, but a truly global survey of their impact has notyet been written.FrontiersAlthough the term frontier can be traced as far back asmedieval Spain, it has most frequently and famously beenapplied to North American history. For more than a cen-tury historians in the United States have debated the “roleof the frontier” in U.S. history. In 1893 the U.S. historianFrederick Jackson Turner spoke of “the” frontier as a“meeting point between savagery and civilization,” the“edge of free land,” and “the line of most rapid and effec-tive Americanization.” He argued that in frontiers onecould witness in rapid succession various forms of socialevolution such as hunting, trading, ranching, farming, andﬁnally manufacturing. Such characteristics of the UnitedStates as democracy, individualism, and idealism could,in his opinion, be attributed to the frontier experience.Many of Turner’s conclusions have been disputed, disre-garded and replaced by more nuanced models of inter-action between settlers and indigenous populations inNorth America, but the frontier still persists in popularimagination and popular culture. Turner himself sawcomparative possibilities for analyzing frontier inﬂuencesbeyond North America: “For a moment at the frontier thebonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is tri-umphant…each frontier did indeed furnish a new ﬁeldof opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of thepast.” His concept of the frontier has been applied withvarying degrees of success to such diverse areas as Aus-tralia, South Africa, Russia, and the Roman empire.In 1952 Walter Prescott Webb, a Texas historian whohad previously studied the Great Plains, published astudy that attempted to apply the frontier model on aglobal scale. The discovery of America by Columbus, inhis opinion, opened up a “Great Frontier” for Europeanexpansion. The West, he argued, enjoyed unparalleledaccess to land and resources, creating an economic boomthat lasted for centuries.The closing of the Great Frontier,however, presented a new challenge to the West. Withland for settlement no longer available and resources nolonger easily accessible,Western society, together with itscapitalism, democracy, and individualism, faced the pos-sibility of uncertainty.World historian William H. McNeill revisited thenotion of the Great Frontier in 1983. He focused onEuropean settler societies in certain areas of the world406 berkshire encyclopedia of world history
and evaluated the ways in which frontier conditionstransformed the societies and economies created as aresult of the migration of Europeans across oceans andacross the Eurasian steppe (the vast, usually level and tree-less tracts in southeastern Europe or Asia) after 1500.TheGreat Frontier was characterized by a dichotomy betweenfreedom and compulsion. In some cases the frontier pro-moted freedom and equality (the Cossacks, Europeancolonists in North America), whereas in others the avail-ability of land and relative shortage of labor led toenslavement or enserfment of workers. McNeill’s workhelped to frame frontiers in such a way that no single out-come could be considered characteristic of frontierprocesses.Most recently anthropologist Igor Kopytoff has ap-plied the frontier concept to broad expanses of Africanhistory. In various places and periods networks of localfrontiers formed a great process in African history. As aresult of famines, conﬂicts, ecological pressures, andentrepreneurial pursuits, individuals and groups departedtheir settlements to take up residence in “no-man’s lands”beyond the jurisdiction of established communities. Afterthey were successfully established, they formed a nucleusof a new group, which could serve as a magnet for thedisaffected groups and individuals from neighboringsocieties. Given the right conditions (distance, ecologicalbarriers, inability of existing societies to extend control),new polities (political organizations) emerged at themargins of existing polities. Some of these new politieseventually became powerful enough to form new politiesand absorb their older neighbors. Kopytoff’s model effec-tively distanced frontiers from predetermined outcomes:“The frontier is permissive rather than determinant, itdoes not create a type of society, but provides an institu-tional vacuum for the unfolding of social processes”(Kopytoff 1987, 14).Thus, each frontier provides the pos-sibility of generating multiple outcomes.Comparative frontier studies have gradually aban-doned the Eurocentric models promoted by Turner andhis students. Historians in the United States still debateTurner’s legacy, with some even rejecting the term fron-tier because of its cultural baggage, but many sophisti-cated studies of cross-cultural interaction, ecological trans-formation, and settlement owe an intellectual debt toTurner.Applied on a global scale, the frontier concept providesa lens for examining how the forces of environment,cross-cultural interaction, and adaptation can create newcommunities and societies. Furthermore, frontiersdemonstrate how important processes of change canoriginate at the margins of existing societies and howperipheries can become new centers.The Question of Ancient BordersAlthough people often consider borders to be character-istically modern, recent research by Italian historianMario Liverani has documented their existence in inter-national relations of the ancient Near East. During thelate Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE) interstate relationsdeveloped between emerging states in Anatolia (in mod-ern Turkey), Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the lands adjacentto or between those states. Many of the rulers of suchancient states claimed to be universal rulers, but theynonetheless delineated ﬁxed borders of effective control.In the ideology of kingship, the ruler should continuouslyexpand his territory to the ends of the known world.Because the process of expansion would never be com-plete, rulers often erected commemorative monuments atthe extremities of the territories they had conquered ortraversed. Liverani writes: “if we view the border as anelastic perimeter that follows the outward movements ofthe king, the stela [a stone slab or pillar used for com-memorative purposes], which has his name and imagecomparative borders and frontiers 407Remains of a portion of Hadrian’s Wall andan entranceway in Scotland. The wall wasmeant to keep the Romans from expandingthe boundary of their Empire further north.
inscribed upon it, acts as a substitute for his presence”(2001, 34).

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Borders in the ancient Near East were ﬁxed by treatiesbetween two equal parties or victor and vanquished.Existing treaties mention features of the landscape, namesof cities, and lists of settlements subject to each ruler. Amajor question was the distribution of revenues, or whowould pay tribute to whom.Treaties also deﬁned penal-ties for raiding, promoted cooperation to return run-aways, and included terms of trade. Safe conducts—documents guaranteeing the right to travel across aruler’s territory without bureaucratic hindrance fromminor ofﬁcials—originated in Near Eastern diplomacy tofacilitate the movement of representatives of a ruleracross foreign territories.We should not view these ancient boundaries of con-trol, however, as the exact equivalent of modern territo-rial borders. Rulers were mainly interested in controllingstrategic points. Liverani states: “The territory controlledby the state resembles an ‘oasis’. . . there is no need fora boundary line, but rather for ‘gateways’ channels ofcontrolled communication with other states (or other in-habited areas) beyond the depopulated belt” (Liverani2001, 52). Remote border posts acted as a ﬁlter to letdesirable things pass on into heart of the state and tokeep out undesirable things.Imperial BoundaryMaintenance in EurasiaIn global history the Eurasian steppe has been the sceneof various attempts by sedentary societies to create artiﬁ-cial barriers to impede the movement of more mobilesocieties.These barriers required large investments of re-sources, and in some ways they foreshadowed the func-tional role of modern borders in managing and control-ling movement.Various states have used physical barriersin attempts to control the mobility of both their subjectsand foreign adversaries.As late as the seventeenth century,Russia used the Belgorod Line, an earthen and woodenbarrier created to prevent nomadic attacks, to also limitthe outward movement of its subjects from serfdom tofreedom in areas of the steppe beyond state control.In the historiography (the writing of history) of west-ern Eurasia, the remnants of Roman military fortiﬁcationshave long attracted the attention of scholars. Europeanhistorians were intrigued by the possible function ofstructures such as Hadrian’s Wall, which stretches virtu-ally from sea to sea across Great Britain and once fea-tured three layers of barriers: ditches, walls andwatchtowers, and military roads, forts, and mobilepatrols. One Roman source explains that the purpose ofthe wall was “to separate the Romans and barbarians”(Jones 1996, 47). The sixth-century Byzantine historianProcopius could even imagine the wall as a dividing line,beyond which human habitation was literally impossibledue to pestilential air. Although boundary maintenancestructures have been imagined as zones of extreme exclu-sion, the evidence points to a much more complexpicture.Because Roman frontier forts and garrisons ringed thediverse edges of the Mediterranean world, historianshave tried to make sense of the role of border fortiﬁca-tions in diverse terrains. Military historian EdwardLuttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, pub-lished in 1976, argued that a Roman uniﬁed system ofdefense in depth was developed by the Flavian emperors(second century CE) and subsequent emperors and wasapplied strategically to the empire’s vast frontiers. Histo-rians have debated whether these barriers indicate anaggressive or defensive posture, whether strategic think-ing on an empire-wide level can in fact be documented,whether far-ﬂung infrastructures were ad hoc (concernedwith a particular end or purpose) local measures or werecentrally planned, whether Roman ideology could everadmit a limit to expansion, and whether Greek traditionsof building military barrier walls inﬂuenced Romanactions. Discussions have centered even on the meaningof the word limes, which some historians have used todescribe the frontier defense “system,” but which othersthink referred only to military road networks. Because the“barbarian” invasions played a role in the fall of theRoman empire in the West, discussions of frontier forti-ﬁcations have implications for broader questions of impe-rial decline/transformation. Textual evidence is limited,408 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyTravel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreigncountries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vaguecuriosity about one of those.•Mark Twain (1835–1910)
but hundreds of miles of fortiﬁcations and thousands ofarchaeological sites in Africa, Asia, and Europe haveyielded new information. At the very least the Romansseem to have been operating strategically in similar waysin different regions, in some cases setting the agenda, inother cases reacting to circumstances. Although barriersclearly were designed to deal with medium-intensitythreats and were supported by intricate systems of gar-risons and communication networks, the contemporarysources do not explicitly deﬁne the parameters of grandstrategy.Rather than separate Romans from “barbarians,” theboundary fortiﬁcations often facilitated contact betweenRomans and their neighbors. Archaeologist Peter Wellshas documented the impact of Roman expansion alongthe Rhine: “The Roman expansion into temperate Europecan be productively viewed as a process that involvedinteraction between peoples, negotiation with politicalleaders, and sometimes combat” (Wells 1999, 95).Archaeology, inscriptions, and texts demonstrate thatthe lines between Romans and their neighbors weremore blurred than previously thought. Many non-Romans were living in Roman territories and employedby the Roman army. Even groups living far beyond theborder in an expansive frontier zone were inﬂuenced byRoman culture and participated in trade networks.Objects traded hundreds of miles from the farthestRoman forts suggest connections rather than separation.Historians examining more than two millennia ofinteraction between China and Inner Asia have faced sim-ilar problems of interpretation. Here, too, walls providevisual evidence of ancient divisions, but these walls aresubject to varying interpretations. In his classic studyInner Asian Frontiers Asian studies expert Owen Latti-more spoke of the Great Wall of China as a dividing lineordained by the environment. It roughly approximatedan ecological fault line between lands to the south, whichwere conducive to agriculture, and to the north, whichwere the domain of pastoral nomadism. For him theGreat Wall was a kind of “optimum limit of growth” forthe Chinese empire, but he emphasized that a linearboundary could not be established (Lattimore 1951,238, 240). He focused attention on the struggle for con-trol of marginal lands and a series of transitional zonesbetween “full Chinese order” and “full steppe order” (Lat-timore 1951, 498).Historian Andrew Waldron has convincingly arguedthat “there was no single Great Wall in the Chinese past”(Waldron 1988, 69) and that pre-nineteenth-century Chi-nese observers rarely spoke of a single structure. Euro-pean notions of a “Great Wall of China” evolved duringcenturies, inﬂuencing modern Chinese perceptions andculminating in the myth (developed during the late nine-teenth century) that the “Great Wall” is the only human-made object visible from outer space.Waldron traces howsimple earthen fortiﬁcations (ﬁrst mentioned in 656 BCE)emerged, were uniﬁed in a system of walls under the Qindynasty (221–206 BCE), and ﬁnally, many centuries later,became identiﬁed as an ancient structure ranging formore than 9,000 kilometers. These ancient walls werevariously built, abandoned, repaired, and abandonedonce again. Furthermore, wall building was only one ofmany strategies for dealing with the nomads. Further-more, we can draw no direct correlation between wallbuilding and the weakness of the Chinese state. Finally,the massive brick and stone walls that are commonly vis-ited by tourists near Beijing were built relatively late, dur-ing a new period of wall building by the Ming dynasty(1368–1644).Recent scholars have likewise looked at interactionsacross the Chinese walls. The walls themselves werenever able to enforce a complete dichotomy between theMiddle Kingdom (China) and the “outer darkness”beyond its borders. Several studies have demonstratedhow nomadic confederacies thrived because of interac-tion with China. Anthropologist Thomas Barﬁeld hasargued that the success of nomadic confederacies de-pended upon a ruler’s abilities to secure resources fromChina. To do this, he might organize raids or act as anintermediary between China and the steppe. Often no-madic confederacies avoided conquering Chinese terri-tory and preferred to use their power to extract resources,subsidies, or access to trade. Historian Sechin Jagchid hasargued even that trade was the “essential element thatcomparative borders and frontiers 409
determined whether peace or war existed along China’snorthern frontier” and has traced key institutions such asfrontier markets, tribute, bestowals (acts of gift giving),and exchanges of brides between Chinese and nomadicrulers (Jagchid and Symons 1989, 1).The resources necessary for boundary maintenancewere enormous, and infrastructures were expensive tomaintain. Policies such as diplomacy or trade proved tobe cheaper and, in some cases, more effective. Even wallscould not stop cross-cultural interaction because popu-lations that appeared to be distinct when viewed from theperspective of the center were in fact often blurred whenviewed at the margins.Borders as a GlobalFrameworkBoundaries and border infrastructures have not neces-sarily been pervasive in global history. In fact we do notknow even how common boundaries were in certainparts of the world before the modern period. Many soci-eties recognized some form of boundaries and createdfortiﬁcations, but these were not necessarily linear or ter-ritorial borders in the modern sense.The rise of Islam provides an interesting example ofboundary conceptualization. Islamic political theory doesnot seem to have recognized the notion of politicalboundaries. According to Ralph Brauer, boundaries werenoncanonical in Islamic law. Islamic jurists conceptual-ized the world as divided into two irreconcilable realms:the Dar al Islam (land of Islam) and the Dar al Harb(land of war). In theory Islam was expected to be everexpanding until the Islamic community was coterminous(having the same or coincident boundaries) with thewhole world. Sanction for jihad (holy war) against non-Islamic states makes the boundaries of Islam permanentlyin a state of ﬂux. Although Islamic statecraft recognizestemporary peace agreements with non-Muslims and brief,strategic concessions, in Islamic statecraft there wasapparently no such thing as a permanent boundary.Thisunique approach might be explained by the fact that410 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyEstablishing BordersThe Treaty of Nipchu (Nerchinsk) of August 1689sought to establish and maintain peace on the borderbetween China and Russia.Article I. The river Gorbitza, which joins the Schilkafrom its left side near the river Tchernaya, is to formthe boundary between the two Empires.The bound-ary from the source of that river to the sea will runalong the top of the mountain chain [in which theriver rises].The jurisdiction of the two Empires will bedivided in such a way that [the valleys of] all the riversor streams ﬂowing from the southern slope of thesemountains to join the Amur shall belong to theEmpire of China, while [the valleys of] all the riversﬂowing down from the other [or northern] side ofthese mountains shall be similarly under the rule ofHis Majesty the Czar of the Russian Empire. As to[the valleys of] the other rivers which lie between theRussian river Oud and the aforesaid mountains—running near the Amur and extending to the sea—which are now under Chinese rule, the question ofthe jurisdiction over them is to remain open. On thispoint the [Russian] Ambassadors are [at present]without explicit instructions from the Czar. Hereafter,when the Ambassadors on both sides shall havereturned [to their respective countries], the Czar andthe Emperor of China will decide the question onterms of amity, either by sending Plenipotentiaries orby written correspondence.Article II. Similarly, the river Argun, which ﬂowsinto the Amur, will form the frontier along its wholelength. All territory on the left bank is to be under therule of the Emperor of China; all on the right bankwill be included in the Empire of the Czar. All habi-tations on the south side will be transferred to theother.Article III. The fortiﬁed town of Albazin, built byHis Majesty the Czar, is to be completely demolished,and the people residing there, with all military andother stores and equipment, are to be moved intoRussian territory. Those moved can take all theirproperty with them, and they are not allowed to suf-fer loss [by detention of any of it].
linear boundaries were not practical in the desertnomadic culture that inﬂuenced early Islam. Thefourteenth-century Arab historian ibn Khaldun, for exam-ple, portrays Islamic states as surrounded by borderzones rather than lines. Early Ottoman expansionseemed to conﬁrm the notion that Islamic states shouldonly expand their borders and dictate terms of surrenderto their opponents, but eventually expansion stalled andpragmatism set in. After the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699)Ottoman diplomats recognized mutually delineated polit-ical borders between Islamic and non-Islamic states, cre-ating a precedent for participation of Muslim countries inthe modern international system.The Modern InternationalSystem of BoundariesAlthough various aspects of modern borders have ancientantecedents, the modern international system of territo-rially conceived sovereign states is usually traced to thePeace of Westphalia, which was concluded in October1648.The text of the treaty did not speciﬁcally deal withthe question of borders, but it did establish a principle ofterritorial inviolability. The treaty recognized its signato-ries as equal, regardless of size, religious confession, orprevious imperial afﬁliation. It also conﬁrmed each ruler’ssovereignty over his or her subjects. By diminishing thepower of Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire,it set the stage for an international system of states thatregulate their affairs through common and mutuallyacknowledged patterns of diplomacy and internationalcooperation.This system, with mutually recognized bor-ders and state sovereignty within them, was graduallyexpanded and applied to various parts of the world.As historian Peter Sahlins demonstrated, the territori-alization of the state in Europe was a long and tortuousprocess. Sahlins examined the history of the borderbetween Spain and France in one area of the PyreneesMountains between 1659 and 1868. Even after the twostates agreed in principle on partitioning the CerdanyaValley between them, ecclesiastical, ﬁscal, seignorialcomparative borders and frontiers 411Article IV. Fugitives [lit., runaways] from either sidewho may have settled in the other’s country previousto the date of this Treaty may remain. No claims fortheir rendition will be made on either side. But thosewho may take refuge in either country after the dateof this Treaty of Amity are to be sent without delay tothe frontier and at once handed over the to chief localofﬁcials.Article V. It is to be understood by both Govern-ments that from the time when this Treaty of Amity ismade, the subjects of either nation, being providedwith proper passports, may come and go [across thefrontier] on their private business and may carry oncommerce [lit., buy and sell].Article VI. All the differences [lit., quarrels] whichmay have occurred between the subjects [of eachnation] on the frontier up to the date of this Treatywill be forgotten and [claims arising out of them will]not be entertained. But if hereafter any of the subjects[lit., traders or craftsmen] of either nationality pass thefrontier [as if] for private [and legitimate] business and[while in the foreign territory] commit crimes of vio-lence to property and life, they are at once to bearrested and sent to the frontier of their own countryand handed over to the chief local authority [military],who will inﬂict on them the death penalty as a pun-ishment of their crimes. Crimes and excesses com-mitted by private people on the frontier must not bemade the cause of war and bloodshed by either side.When cases of this kind arise, they are to be reportedby [the ofﬁcers of] the side on which they occur to theSovereigns of both Powers, for settlement by diplo-matic negotiation in an amicable manner.If the Emperor of China desires to engrave [onstone] the Articles of the above Treaty agreed upon bythe Envoys for the determination of the frontier, andto place the same [at certain positions] on the frontieras a record, he is at liberty to do so. Whether this isto be done or not is left entirely to the discretion ofHis Majesty the Emperor of China.Source: Treaties, Conventions, etc. between China and Foreign States. (1908) III. Miscel-laneous Series, no. 30. Shanghai, China: Imperial Maritime Customs,Vol. I: 3–7.
(manorial), and local jurisdictions did not necessarilycoincide with state borders.The creation of the border asan institution was often tied to local interests and griev-ances, which local people used to seek responses andresources from the national capitals.Although notions of“territorial violations” already had emerged during thelate eighteenth century, the border was only vaguelydemarcated and rarely patrolled. France ﬁrst attempted toseal off its border in 1822 to prevent an epidemic, andonly by 1868 was a well-marked linear boundary estab-lished. Sahlins has tried to dispel the notion that borderswere imposed from above on unwilling populations.Not enough detailed studies are available for us todetermine whether the Spanish-French example was typ-ical even for Europe. Nonetheless, the rough contours ofthe emergence of international borders are evident. Dur-ing the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth cen-tury) maps became essential to the delineation of politicalboundaries, and rulers began to deﬁne the limits of theirterritories with more and more precision. Correspond-ingly, borders began to be delineated with increasing pre-cision. Usually established by bilateral treaties, borderswere demarcated in the landscape (most often by markson rocks, trees, or special boundary markers) by com-missioners representing each state in the presence of localwitnesses. The general tendency of the eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries was to try to create rational andorderly boundaries (straight lines appeared for the ﬁrsttime on maps) that coincided with existing jurisdictionsor natural landmarks such as rivers. Early efforts at migra-tion control, which were not always necessarily enforcedat the borders, aimed to limit the entry or exit of certaingroups categorized as undesirable: beggars, carriers ofcommunicable diseases, and politically suspect individu-als such as spies, traitors, and revolutionaries.During the second half of the nineteenth century bor-der infrastructures in Europe became more elaborate.Passports, which originated as diplomatic safe conducts,were not originally indicative of citizenship and were notuniversally required for international travel until WorldWar I. As states increased their grasp over their territories,more ofﬁcials were posted along border roads and in bor-der towns. Often border guards and customs agents car-ried out ﬁscal and political surveillance of travelers, butthey possessed neither the ability nor inclination toinspect every border crosser or to document every entryor exit (exceptions existed, such as Russia, which zeal-ously monitored movement across its borders). Duringthe last decades of the nineteenth century some Europeancountries moved toward controlled entry policies: docu-menting the entry and exit of each traveler, whether citi-zen or foreign national. State efforts to regulate move-ment were largely conﬁned, however, to ports, trains, andmain roads. During the last decades of the nineteenthcentury some countries passed laws distinguishing for-eigners from native citizens in order to protect locallabor markets from foreign competition.During the early twentieth century borders becamepervasive on a global scale.Virtually the whole globe wasparceled into sovereign jurisdictions, whether inhabitedor not. Each state became territorially deﬁned, and eachgovernment was authorized under international law todetermine whom to admit. Passports became required for movement across international borders. Twentieth-century borders were strongly shaped by the activities ofthe European colonial powers. For example, in their raceto claim huge chunks of Africa after the Congress ofBerlin during the period 1884–1885, the European colo-nial powers ignored existing cultural divisions, drewstraight lines across formidable features of the landscape,and even laid claim to territories that had never been seenby Europeans. Antarctica is now the only continent thatdoes not have functioning international borders. By inter-national agreement, most states agreed to renounceclaims of territorial sovereignty in Antarctica.During the 1930s states enacted the ﬁrst attempts toachieve total control over their borders. Extreme bound-ary maintenance policies (most notably in Nazi Germany,the U.S.S.R., other socialist states, and areas along polit-ically sensitive tracts in other parts of the world) wereoften instituted for ideological reasons. State efforts tolimit unauthorized movement across boundaries werefacilitated by two advances in technologies for impedingmovement: barbed wire (developed on the U.S. plains to412 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyIf a chieftain or a man leave his house, garden, and ﬁeld and hires itout, and some one else takes possession of his house, garden, andﬁeld and uses it for three years; if the ﬁrst owner returns and
control cattle during the late nineteenth century) andantipersonnel land mines (developed during the U.S.Civil War).The Soviet border infrastructure, dubbed the “Iron Cur-tain” during the Cold War, was the earliest and mostextensive of these structures. Although the Bolsheviksespoused internationalism, they also embraced borders.Early Soviet boundary maintenance began during theRussian CivilWar (1917–1920) when secret police unitswere given jurisdiction over the internal lines of demar-cation between Soviet areas and the various “counterrev-olutionary” governments within the boundaries of the oldRussian empire. Fears of encirclement by aggressive cap-italist enemies eager to undermine the Soviet state, cou-pled with economic pressures to stem the ﬂight of special-ists and millions of disaffected citizens, led Soviet leadersto solidify border patrols. By around 1930 more than50,000 kilometers of Soviet borders were being guardedby forty thousand border guards who were assigned to tenborder patrol districts. Borders tended to be more heav-ily patrolled in the west and in densely populated areas inother parts of Eurasia. In those areas patrol density aver-aged 2.5 men per kilometer of border,but fewer resourceswere devoted to areas in Asia or the far north that wereremote and difﬁcult to cross because of extreme terrains.An expensive and expansive infrastructure utilized patrolsby land, air, and sea, networks of local informants, watch-towers, land mines, tens of thousands of miles of trackingstrips (areas that were cleared of inhabitants and vegeta-tion and specially maintained to make surveillance possi-ble and footprints visible), thousands of miles of barbed-wire fences and, eventually, electronic signalizationsystems. Militarily sensitive areas might also be mined toprevent “border violations.” Access to border zones wasrigidly controlled, and Soviet citizens could enter theseareas only with ofﬁcial permission. As a result of thesemeasures, unauthorized entry and exit became virtuallyimpossible between the 1950s and 1991.These measureswere replicated in Soviet satellite states, most notably inGermany’s Berlin Wall (1961–1989).Although many such extreme borders disappearedwith the end of the Cold War, many remained in placeafter 2000. Such borders continued to be maintainedbetween India and Pakistan, between the two Koreas, inIsrael, parts of the former U.S.S.R., China, and so forth.Economic migration has spurred the construction of newborder infrastructures in certain areas.Administrative bar-riers to movement (primarily entry visas and residencerestrictions) still limit and regulate movement from devel-oping (or “southern,” Third World) countries to industri-alized countries.Although the European Union abolishedborder controls among its member states in 1999, itstrengthened its external borders in southern and easternEurope. In particular, a highly sophisticated border infra-structure (a twenty-ﬁrst-century Berlin Wall) was createdto protect Spanish enclaves in Morocco from mass migra-tion.The U.S.-Mexico border,which was only sporadicallypatrolled for much of the twentieth century, has becomean increasingly complex border infrastructure. During thelate 1990s border sectors near major metropolises such asSan Diego, California, and El Paso,Texas, were equippedwith walls, infrared scopes, underground sensors, andincreased mobile and air patrols. By 2004, 9,600 kilo-meters of U.S. land borders were patrolled by roughlyeight thousand ofﬁcers, a ﬁgure that rivals the density ofSoviet border patrol deployments during the 1930s.Thus,globalization did not bring about a “world withoutborders” during the waning years of the twentieth century.Brian J. BoeckFurther ReadingArtemiev,V. P. (1957). The protection of the frontiers of the U.S.S.R. InS.Wolin (Ed.), The Soviet secret police (pp. 260–279). New York: Fred-erick Praeger.Barﬁeld, T. J. (1989). The perilous frontier: Nomadic empires and China.Cambridge, UK: Basil Blackwell.Biggs, M. (1999). Putting the state on the map: Cartography, territory,and European state formation. Comparative Studies in Society and His-tory, 41(2), 374–411.Brauer, R.W. (1995). Boundaries and frontiers in medieval Muslim geog-raphy. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.Chandler, A. (1998). Institutions of isolation: Border controls in theSoviet Union and its successor states, 1917–1993. Montreal, Canada:McGill-Queen’s University Press.Faragher, J. M. (Ed.). (1994). Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner:The sig-niﬁcance of the frontier in American history, and other essays. NewYork: H. Holt.comparative borders and frontiers 413claims his house, garden, and ﬁeld, it shall not be given to him, but hewho has taken possession of it and used it shall continue to use it.•Hammurabi (eighteenth century bce)
Gerhard, D. (1959).The frontier in comparative view. Comparative Stud-ies in Society and History, 1(3), 205–229.Jagchid, S., & Symons, J. (1989). Peace, war, and trade along the GreatWall: Nomadic-Chinese interaction through two millennia. Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press.Jones, M. E. (1996). Geographical-psychological frontiers in sub-RomanBritain. In R. W. Mathiesen & H. S. Sivan (Eds.), Shifting frontiers inlate antiquity (pp. 45–57). Brookﬁeld,VT: Aldershot.Kopytoff, I. (Ed.). (1987). The African frontier:The reproduction of tradi-tional African societies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Kristof, L. K. D. (1959).The nature of frontiers and boundaries. Annalsof the Association of American Geographers, 49, 269–282.Lamar, H., & Thompson, L. (1981). The frontier in history: North Amer-ica and southern Africa compared. New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress.Lattimore, O. (1951). Inner Asian frontiers of China. New York: Ameri-can Geographical Society.Liverani, M. (2001). International relations in the ancient Near East,1660–1100 B.C. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave.Luttwak, E. N. (1976). The grand strategy of the Roman empire from theﬁrst century A.D. to the third. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress.Martinez, O. J. (1988). Troublesome border.Tucson: University of ArizonaPress.McNeill,W. H. (1983). The great frontier: Freedom and hierarchy in mod-ern times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Nugent, P., & Asiwaju, A. I. (1996). African boundaries: Barriers, con-duits, and opportunities. New York: Pinter.Sahlins, P. (1989). Boundaries: The making of France and Spain in thePyrenees. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Torpey, J. (2000). The invention of the passport: Surveillance, citizenship,and the state. New York: Cambridge University Press.Waldron, A. (1988). The Great Wall myth: Its origins and role in mod-ern China. Yale Journal of Criticism, 2(1), 67–104.Waldron,A. (1990). The Great Wall of China: From history to myth. Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Webb,W. P. (1952). The great frontier. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin.Wells, P. S. (1999). The barbarians speak: How the conquered peoplesshaped Roman Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Whittaker, C. R. (1996).Where are the frontiers now? The Roman armyin the East. Journal of Roman Archeology, 18, 25–41.ComparativeEthnologyComparative ethnology (cross-cultural research) is asubﬁeld of cultural anthropology. Anthropologists,psychologists, and sociologists who conduct cross-cultural research are interested primarily in developingand testing theories of human culture, society, and behav-ior by comparing the behaviors and customs of culturesaround the world.The focus is on universal theories thatexplain all or some aspect of culture or behavior in allplaces at all times, rather than theories whose explana-tory reach is only a single culture or a single geographicor cultural region. Cross-cultural research is similar tocross-national research (practiced mainly by political sci-entists and economists), which uses modern nation-statesrather than cultures as its unit of study.Cross-cultural research emerged as a distinct form ofanthropological research during the late nineteenth cen-tury but did not garner much attention until the 1940s.By then a large quantity of ethnography (information oncultures and ethnic groups) had been gathered for hun-dreds of cultures around the world, providing the rawdata for cross-cultural study. In the typical cross-culturalstudy, a researcher sets forth a theory or theories to betested, selects a sample of cultures from around theworld to be studied, collects information on the topics ofinterest from ethnographic reports on the cultures, con-verts the textual information to numeric codes of variablevalue, and then uses statistical tests to test the theory ortheories.With more and more ethnographic data available inthe decades after World War II, cross-cultural researchbecame more popular, with several hundred studies onkinship, child development, family life, war, religion, eco-nomics, and politics published during the 1960s and1970s.These two decades were also a period of matura-tion for the ﬁeld as many new research techniques weredeveloped to make for more careful research and moretrustworthy results.Among the pioneers in the ﬁeld werethe anthropologists George Peter Murdock at Yale,Harold Driver at Indiana University, Raoul Naroll atState University of New York at Buffalo, and John andBeatrice Whiting at Harvard. During the 1980s, as cul-tural anthropology became more focused on speciﬁc cul-tures, on the study of meaning, and on action research toassist and protect endangered peoples, cross-culturalresearch declined in popularity.414 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyCall it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe,call it a family.Whatever you call it, whoeveryou are, you need one.•Jane Howard
Cross-cultural research has always been controversial,with many anthropologists who prefer intensive ﬁeldresearch with a single culture being uncomfortable withan approach that is based on library research, the use ofsecondary data, and statistical analysis and that producesbroad generalizations that emphasize similarity ratherthan diversity across cultures. Nonetheless, severaldecades of cross-cultural research have produced a num-ber of important generalizations, especially signiﬁcant forworld history:1. About 50 percent of cultural change around theworld during the last two centuries can be attributedto peaceful interaction between different culturesand about 50 percent to contact through warfareand domination.2. The type of economy in a society is an importantdeterminant of how parents raise their children andof adult personality. For example, in agricultural soci-eties where cooperation is important, people will bemore compliant, and they will raise their children tobe obedient. In foraging societies where independentaction is valued, adults will be more independentand will raise their children to be self-reliant.3. Cultural evolution has been a powerful force inhuman history, with more efﬁcient control of energyand a larger population typically leading to special-ization and differentiation in the institutions of asociety.4. Maintaining a large military force to deter enemiesor potential enemies more often produces war thanpeace. Peaceful contact such as through trading orparticipation in joint religious rituals more often pro-duces peace.5. From a cross-cultural perspective, there is no suchthing as “female status.” Rather, female status is acomplex set of beliefs and behaviors, with womenoften having high status and much inﬂuence insome domains such as the household economy orreligion and little status and inﬂuence in otherdomains such as the military.6. Ethnocentrism, the belief that one’s culture is supe-rior to all others, is found in all cultures. It tends tobe less pronounced among neighboring culturesthat are similar in many ways.7. All societies have a basic economic concern withcontrol over and access to natural resources.8. All societies have a clear division of labor by sex,with some work assigned exclusively to men andother work to women. Men tend to do work thatrequires much strength, whereas women tend to dowork that is compatible with child care.9. Although egalitarian (relating to human equality)societies have existed, in the modern world all soci-eties are socially stratiﬁed, often into social classes,meaning that not all groups have equal access to asociety’s resources.10. A considerable amount of radical cultural changethroughout history is the result of religious move-ments. These movements often develop in times ofsocietal stress and are led by charismatic ﬁguresoften deﬁned as prophets.11. The evolutionary ideas of the nineteenth century thatsuggested that human society evolved through timefrom a state of lesser to greater civilization have nomerit.David LevinsonSee also AnthropologyFurther ReadingEmber, C. R., & Levinson, D. (1991). The substantive contributions ofworldwide cross-cultural studies using secondary data. Behavior Sci-ence Research, 25, 79–140.Levinson, D. (1977).What have we learned from cross-cultural surveys?American Behavioral Scientist, 20, 757–792.Levinson, D., & Malone, M. J. (1980). Toward explaining human culture.New Haven, CT: HRAF Press.Murdock, G. P. (1949). Social structure. New York: Macmillan.Naroll, R., & Cohen, R. (Eds.). (1970). A handbook of method in culturalanthropology. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.Whiting, B. B., & Whiting, J.W. M. (Eds.). (1975). Children of six cultures:A psycho-cultural analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.comparative ethnology 415The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.•James G. Frazer (1854–1941)
ComparativeHistoryMany historians rooted in their ﬁelds of time andplace defend the uniqueness of the events, institu-tions, and processes they study. However, sometimes theyneglect to recognize the ways in which their explanationsand interpretations depend on principles of understand-ing that connect what they see in their particular cases toother phenomena.The uniqueness asserted by historiansis often of a phenomenon that is itself broken down intoparts that we understand because they resemble familiarideas and practices from other times and places. Theexplanations and interpretations in all case studiesdepend in various ways on certain general principles thatare themselves distilled from comparisons among otherhistorical experiences.What is known as comparative his-tory involves more explicit comparison that consciouslyidentiﬁes similarities and differences.The European ContextOne of the ﬁrst historians in the twentieth century tostress the importance of the comparative historicalmethod was Marc Bloch, the great French scholar ofmedieval and early modern Europe. In an essay entitled“A contribution towards a comparative history of Euro-pean societies,” published in 1928, Bloch identiﬁed twomain contexts in which comparisons are an importanttool for historians. First, he noted that in widely separateplaces in early history there seemed to be similar practicesamong what he called “primitive peoples.” Studies of earlycultures conducted in the 1920s interpreted such simi-larities as signs of a common universal history. The sec-ond context for using a comparative method, and the oneto which he devoted most of his attention, involves areasclose to one another where mutual inﬂuences or com-mon origins for ideas and institutions are obscured by lin-guistic differences and national historiographicaltraditions. Bloch argued that the study of feudalism andmanorial organization, for example, must span Europegenerally rather than just one European nation, since thesimilarities and differences among practices suggest arange of related practices common to many places.According to this view, focusing only on French or Ger-man cases might lead the researcher to look for localexplanations for practices that in fact were the result ofmore widely applicable factors in European society.In another essay, “A problem in comparative history:The administrative classes in France and Germany,” alsopublished in 1928, Bloch analyzes feudal political rela-tionships and uncovers both similarities and differences,in the process identifying what he considers features ofGerman law that are signiﬁcantly different from otherlegal systems in Central and Eastern Europe.The Global ContextMore recent scholarship on both political and economichistory has employed comparative methods to analyzehistorical change within Europe and on a more globalscale. Some scholars have looked at particular categoriesof complex events, like revolutions. Theda Skocpol’swidely read States and Social Revolutions (1979) presentsa series of similarities and differences among the French,Russian, and Chinese revolutions to argue that revolu-tions, although each arises out of a distinctive historicalsituation, share certain traits that account for their dra-matic political changes. Another text, Jack Goldstone’sRevolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World(1991) identiﬁes a series of common problems in Eng-land, France, China, and the Ottoman Empire that createsimilar crises from which emerge distinct patterns of rule.Large revolutions are few in number, and plausible com-parisons are therefore limited. Larger numbers of com-parisons become possible when political changes moregenerally are studied.Charles Tilly (1975, 1992) explains the formationand transformation of European states since roughly1000CEaccording to the relative abilities of rulers toamass resources and make war. Beginning amid atremendous diversity of political units, in Tilly’s account,some states stress mobilizing commercial revenues whileothers are better able to build armies by taxing the land.416 berkshire encyclopedia of world history
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mostsuccessful states are those that can both gain wealth andmonopolize the use of force.Tilly’s work suggests varia-tions among European states in a dynamic process ofpolitical transformations.Another inﬂuential approach to the formation of mod-ern states highlights the changing bases of politicalauthority in societies with hereditary rulers and in soci-eties in which rulers appeal to their subjects for legiti-macy. Reinhard Bendix (1978) has studied changingauthority relations between states and subjects as the keyaxis along which to observe the turn toward modernstates in which people achieve popular sovereignty. LikeTilly, Bendix portrays variations among countries that allundergo parallel processes of political change. However,both scholars also recognize connections among theircases: Tilly’s polities are all part of a larger European statesystem, and Bendix tracks the spread of ideas and insti-tutions basic to modern states from their points of originto other places. Bendix’s approach takes him beyond hisEuropean cases of England, France, Germany, and Rus-sia: he analyzes Japan as an example of a country towhich political concepts ﬁrst forged in Western Europesubsequently spread.In contrast to studies that remain within Europe orexplore the export of practices from the West to otherregions, Victor Lieberman (1997, 2004) has suggestedthat similar processes of change were taking placebetween the mid-ﬁfteenth and mid-nineteenth centuriesacross the East-West divide; he compares Burma, Siam,and Vietnam with France, Russia, and Japan, arguing forsimilar processes of political, economic, and culturalchanges in each case. Lieberman’s identiﬁcation of par-allel dynamics of political and social change within andbeyond Europe has been an important contribution toreframing the discussion about European historicalchange.Complementing Lieberman’s insights is anotherapproach to the particularities of European state forma-tion that contrasts the European examples with thedynamics of political evolution in another major politicalsystem, the Chinese agrarian empire. R. Bin Wong hasshown that the challenges faced by state-makers inEurope were in many ways distinct from those con-fronting Chinese rulers. According to Wong (1997,2002), the responses to these challenges were inﬂuencedin Europe by the claims elites could make upon theirrulers, whereas in China they were guided by the com-mon commitments rulers and elites made to sustainsocial order.Overseas colonial empires represented yet anotherkind of state that deﬁned a set of relations between ametropole and its periphery. Nineteenth-century colo-nialism suggests a different way in which European statesreached other parts of the world: not as the benign pur-veyors of political principles and models of government,but as overlords who divided up large parts of Africa andAsia as an extension of state competition in Europe.According to Lauren Benton (2002), these competingcolonialisms produced a range of similar developments,including the introduction of various forms of pluralismas a means to accommodate cultural differences—sometimes in ways that led to an acceptance of colonialrule in many nineteenth-century colonies.Learning from European colonization programs, theJapanese state began to build its own colonial empire inthe late nineteenth century.The Japanese results, however,were different from the colonial empires of Western pow-ers, which had their colonies spread over vast distances.The Japanese colonial empire, beginning with Taiwanand Korea and later Manchuria, was viewed by many inthe Japanese government as a tightly knit regional polit-ical and economic order designed to support Japan andsecure it from threats posed by Western powers. From anEast Asian perspective, the Japanese empire representedthe creation of a new kind of political order replacing themuch looser symbolic order of tributary relations cen-tered on the agrarian empire. In place of ritual presenta-tions of tribute and commercial exchanges under thetributary order, colonial empire imposed legally deﬁnedand bureaucratically organized control over subject pop-ulations who were subjected economically to extractiveand unequal relationships to the colonizer. Both Chineseagrarian empire and Japanese colonial empire differedcomparative history 417Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us ofnothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constantand universal principles of human nature.•David Hume (1711–1776)
from European empires in two ways—ﬁrst,

bundet

Europeanscompeted with each other and divided territories amongthemselves in different world regions; and second, thedistances from imperial center to periphery were farlonger for Europeans than in East Asian cases. Neitherthe Chinese world order nor the Japanese colonial empirethat succeeded it were simply subordinated to a Europe-centered system of international relations; rather, aunique and evolving system of regional political relationspersisted among East Asian states even as they becamemore connected to the powerful political and economicsystem centered on both sides of the Atlantic. Such hemi-spheric distinctions suggest that interpretations of mod-ern political change as exclusively or even primarily theexpansion of a Western system of international relationsare incomplete and misleading.Assessing the Europe-centered ApproachThese interpretive difﬁculties notwithstanding, muchinﬂuential work in world history has been done by trac-ing the expansion of European power across the globe—in fact, historians have tended to view nineteenth- andtwentieth-century international relations as the mostrecent chapter in a story of Western political and eco-nomic domination. Most all interpretations of large-scalechanges largely build upon directly or indirectly the workof Karl Marx and Max Weber. The systemic features ofthis European expansion form the basis of ImmanuelWallerstein’s modern “world-system” (1974, 1980,1989).Wallerstein’s seminal work, inspired by Marxist in-sights, makes brief comparisons between the interna-tional system centered on the European world from thesixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries and systems inplace elsewhere in the world, before asserting that by theend of the nineteenth century, any fundamental East-Westdistinctions were subordinated to what had become themodern, Western-dominated world-system. Therefore,most analyses inspired by Wallerstein’s work focus on theEurope-centered system and its expansion, without muchattention to the dynamics of change within other systems.Part of the intellectual foundation of Wallerstein’sworld-system is the work of French historian FernandBraudel, one of whose major writings, the three-volumeCivilization and Capitalism: 15th–18th Century (1992),identiﬁes the distinctiveness of European capitalismthrough comparisons with merchants and markets in dif-ferent parts of Asia. Such comparisons follow a long tra-dition of efforts by seminal thinkers to explain thedistinctiveness of Europe and its patterns of political andeconomic transformation by identifying contrasts withnon-European parts of the world. In the nineteenth cen-tury most observers, including revolutionary ﬁgures likeKarl Marx, believed that outside Europe lay stagnant soci-eties with unchanging economies. Most educated West-erners exposed to cultures in Africa and Asia regardedthese places as inferior to the West; while some were rec-ognized as descendants of great and powerful ancient civ-ilizations, on the whole they were seen as shallow andbroken remnants of their past greatness.Max Weber, the early-twentieth-century master of his-torical comparisons, looked to religion and ethics as thearena in which different attitudes toward money and mar-kets took shape. He noted that in the Christian West,these attitudes formed in a way that led to the rise of cap-italism, while in other religious traditions they did not(1958).Weber’s famous observations about a “Protestantwork ethic” have been qualiﬁed, however, by more recentscholarship documenting what appear to be functionallysimilar beliefs in other religious traditions (e.g. Bellah,1957; Rodinson, 1974). Comparisons of a broader andmore general kind between Europe and other parts of the418 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyA ParableIf all you know is maple trees, your concept of“leaf” looks exactly like a maple leaf, a greenthing with pointy lobes. Then you meet an oakleaf. And you adjust your previous conception. A“leaf” in your mind is now a green thing withlobes, but the lobes are not necessarily pointy.Then you encounter an elm leaf, and discoverthat the lobes can be reduced to mere serrationsaround the edge of the green thing.Source: Comparative History. Retrieved from www.umass.edu/wsp/comparative
world have continued to highlight differences, whetherformulated within a clear Weberian framework (Hall,1985) or presented in a more ad-hoc and storytellingmanner (Landes, 1998).Marxist interpretations have also argued for distinctiveEuropean political and economic practices, as shown intwo inﬂuential works of the 1970s. Perry Anderson’s two-volume study of European state formation, Passagesfrom Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the AbsolutistState (1974), went back to classical antiquity to give along-term view of how absolutist states were formed cen-turies later; his appendices on China, Japan, and theOttoman Empire reviewed much of the available researchto suggest how a Marxist analysis of these cases could befashioned to complement what he had done for Europe.Robert Brenner also wrote an inﬂuential study compar-ing English agrarian social relations with those on theEuropean continent (1976); he argued that it was Englishsocial relations that made possible increased agriculturalproductivity and surpluses that ﬁnanced the formation ofcommercial capitalism. After his conclusions were chal-lenged by English, French, and Dutch data, Brennershifted his arguments from class relations to the latemedieval state (1982) and later to an explanation specif-ically of Dutch materials (2001). More recently, in workwith Christopher Isett (2002), Brenner has returned tohis initial formulation about agrarian class relations andgone well beyond Europe to look at an economicallyactive part of eighteenth-century China, attempting toargue that differences in social relations cause differ-ences in agricultural productivity.The Brenner-Isett effort is part of a debate with Ken-neth Pomeranz over explaining what the latter has calledthe “great divergence” between Europe and the rest of theworld (Pomerantz, 2001). Pomeranz shows similarities inthe performance of the advanced agrarian economies inAsia, especially China, and in Europe; in order to explainthe subsequent divergence in economic fortunes, hestresses Europeans’ economic gains, especially in terms ofresources, from the particular ways in which they devel-oped production in the Americas. On the other hand,where Brenner and Isett afﬁrm different agrarian socialrelations as basic to differences in trajectories of eco-nomic change, David Landes stresses what seem largelycultural factors.Together Brenner, Isett and Landes afﬁrmthe continued contemporary appeal that the ideas ofMarx and Weber have for historians who make broadcomparisons among large parts of the world.A distinct addition to these comparisons is highlightedby Andre Gunder Frank, who aggressively argues (1998)for connections among the world’s economic regions andasserts that China was at the center of the world’s econ-omy between 1500 and 1800, taking in large amountsof silver to fuel its expanding commercial economy. Incontrast, R. Bin Wong suggests that the economic linksmade possible by the silver trade did not encourage thekinds of division of labor and movements of capital andlabor that would come to characterize international tradeafter the mid-nineteenth century; he argues that a com-parison of the early modern world economy with whatfollows offers important differences as well as parallels(Wong 2002).Beyond the East-West DivideMany uses of the comparative method in historical stud-ies occur across the East-West divide of Eurasia. But therehave also been comparisons that set this vast land massoff from still other continents. The anthropologist JackGoody has argued that societies across Eurasia, fromJapan to England and most points in between, sharedstructurally similar kinds of kinship systems, demo-graphic regimes, and social structures. For him the majordivide globally is between Eurasia and sub-SaharanAfrica, where kinship and social structures differed fromthose of Eurasia largely due to small populations relativeto land and the implications of this situation for tech-niques of economic production and social control (1971,1976).Within this broad framing he has repeatedly crit-icized ideas about European uniqueness (1990, 1998).Jared Diamond has drawn a related contrast betweenEurasia and other continents in Guns, Germs, and Steelcomparative history 419Human history becomes more and more a race betweeneducation and catastrophe.•H. G. Wells (1866–1946)
(1997), suggesting that Eurasia had a geography well-suited to farming and animal domestication; this in turnsupported more densely populated areas where morecomplex governments, sophisticated systems of commu-nication, and increased resistance to diseases all devel-oped. Diamond has very little to say, however, about thecauses of variations within Eurasia, the terrain acrosswhich historians making comparisons have usuallymoved. The great sweep of Diamond’s history acrossspace and through time depends on some basic com-parisons between environmental and biological traits ofEurasia and other continents. Many books on environ-ment and biology in world history, like Alfred Crosby’sEcological Imperialism, stress connections made by Euro-pean expansion rather than comparisons among differentcases.Yet, common themes in environmental history canbe seen through comparisons, as John Richards demon-strates in The Unending Frontier (2003). This history ofthe environment of the early modern world includes com-parisons of agricultural settlement patterns on Taiwan,mainland China, and Russia; land use patterns in theAmericas; and the hunting and ﬁshing industries.Comparative methods have been used implicitly orexplicitly in historical studies for a long time. Explana-tions and interpretations of a particular phenomenondepend on comparing the case at hand with more famil-iar examples of the same or at least similar phenomena.Among historical works that are explicitly comparative,certain European experiences have often been taken as abenchmark against which to measure performance else-where.Whether Marxist or Weberian, this approach hasmotivated the search for similarities and differencesbetween European patterns of political, economic, andsocial change and those in Africa, the Americas, and Asia.Many such efforts stress the differences that make Europethe historical paradigm, while others argue, in a relatedfashion, that historical change elsewhere in the worldinﬂuenced by European principles and practices tends toresult in comparable outcomes. Critics of what is usuallya cheerful view of convergence often contend that West-ern expansion has been destructive, putting many popu-lations into subordinate economic and political condi-tions.Yet, many recent historical comparisons have alsomoved beyond simple dichotomies, highlighting in morenuanced ways both similarities and differences and theway they interact to produce unique historical outcomes.R. Bin WongFurther Reading Anderson, P. (1974). Lineages of the absolutist state. London: New LeftBooks.Barkey, K., & von Hagen, M. (Eds.). (1997). After empire: Multiethnicsocieties and nation-building: The Soviet Union and the Russian,Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Bellah, R. (1957). Tokugawa religion: the values of pre-industrial Japan.Glenco, Il: Free Press.Bendix, R. (1978). Kings or people: Power and the mandate to rule. Berke-ley: University of California Press.Benton, L. (2002). Law and colonial cultures: Legal regimes in world his-tory, 1400–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press.Bloch, M. (1967). Land and work in medieval Europe. New York: HarperTorchbooks.Braudel, F. (1992). Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, volsI-III. Berkeley: University of California Press.Brenner, R. (1976). Agrarian class structure and economic developmentin pre-industrial Europe. Past & Present, 70, 30–76.Brenner, R. (1982). Agrarian roots of European capitalism. Past & Pre-sent, 97, 16–113.Brenner, R. (2001). The Low Countries in the transition to capitalism.Journal of Agrarian Change, 1.2, 169–241.Brenner, R., & Isett, C. (2002). England’s divergence from China’sYangzi delta: Property relations, micro-economics, and patterns ofdevelopment. Journal of Asian Studies, 61.2, 609–662.Crosby, A. (1993). Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion ofEurope, 900-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press.Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel:The fates of human societies.New York: W. W. Norton.Frank, A. G. (1998). ReOrient: Global economy in the Asian age. Berke-ley: University of California Press.Goldstone, J. (1991). Revolution and rebellion in the early modern world.Berkeley: University of California Press.Goody, J. (1971). Technology, tradition, and the state in Africa. New York😮xford University Press.Goody, J. (1976). Production and reproduction:A comparative study of thedomestic domain. New York: Cambridge University Press.Goody, J. (1990). The oriental, the ancient, and the primitive: Systems ofmarriage and the family in the pre-industrial societies of Eurasia. NewYork: Cambridge University Press.Goody, J. (1998). The East in the West. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.Hall, J. A. (1985). Powers & liberties:The causes and consequences of therise of the West. Oxford, UK: Blackwell..Landes, D. (1998). The wealth and poverty of nations: Why are some sorich and others so poor? New York: W. W. Norton.420 berkshire encyclopedia of world history[History is] a useless heap of facts.•Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773)
Lieberman,V. (1997).Transcending East-West dichotomies: State and cul-ture formation in six ostensibly disparate areas. Modern Asian Stud-ies, 31, 463–546.Lieberman,V. (2004). Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Contextc.800-1830, vol. 1 Integration on the Mainland. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.Pomeranz, K. (2001). The great divergence: China, Europe, and the mak-ing of the modern world economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.Richards, J. (2003). The unending frontier:An environmental history of theearly modern world. Berkeley: University of California Press.Rodinson, M. (1974). Islam and capitalism (B. Pearce,Trans.). London:Allen Lane.Skocpol,T. (1979). States and social revolutions:A comparative analysisof France, Russia, and China. New York: Cambridge University Press.Tilly, C. (Ed.). (1975). The formation of national states in Western Europe.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–199.Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world-system: Capitalist agricultureand the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century.New York: Academic Press.Wallerstein, I. (1980). The modern world-system II: Mercantilism and theconsolidation of the European world-economy, 1600–1750. NewYork: Academic Press.Wallerstein, I. (1989). The modern world-system III: The second era ofgreat expansion of the capitalist world-economy, 1730–1840s. NewYork: Academic Press.Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (T. Par-sons, Trans.). New York: Scribner.Wong, R. B. (1997). China transformed: Historical change and the limitsof European experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Wong, R. B. (2002).The search for European differences and dominationin the early modern world: A view from Asia. American HistoricalReview, 107.2, 447–469.ComputerComputers have transformed work, communication,and leisure activity, and they promise future changesof equal magnitude. For many years, computer technol-ogy was dominated by groups in the United States,because that nation had the largest single market and itsgovernment invested heavily in military applications andfundamental science and engineering. But many nationscontributed to the technological basis on which com-puting arose, and with the development of the WorldWide Web computing became a global phenomenon.computer 421Mechanical PredecessorsProgrammable digital computers were developed justbefore the middle of the twentieth century, but the moregeneral history of devices that help people think goesback to prehistoric times, when someone ﬁrst carvedmarks on a stick to count the cattle in a herd or mark thedays in the phases of the moon. Complex additions andsubtractions were done in ancient days by arranging peb-bles in piles on the ground, and our word calculatederives from the Latin word calculus or pebble. Themost complex known “computer” of classical civilizationis the remarkable geared Antikythera device, which appar-ently was designed to predict the motions of the sun,moon, and planets. Found in a shipwreck on the bottomof the Mediterranean Sea, it is believed to date fromabout 80 BCE.Computing has always been closely allied with math-ematics, and the invention of logarithms by the Scottishmathematician John Napier around 1614 was a majoradvance for practical calculating. With a mechanical cal-culating device, it is much easier to add than to multiply,and subtraction is much easier than division. Logarithmsturned multiplication into addition, and division into sub-traction, at the cost of looking up numbers in vast booksof tables that themselves had to be calculated by hand.From Napier’s time until the introduction of transistor-ized electronic calculators around 1970, a book of loga-rithm tables was a standard tool for engineers andscientists.They were cumbersome to use, so for quick esti-mates slide rules were employed. A slide rule is an ana-log calculating device based on logarithmic scales markedalong rulers that slide past each other. The term analogrefers to the analogy between the abstract numbers andcorresponding physical distances along a line.Digital mechanical calculators that represented num-bers as precise digits were also developed—for example,by the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pas-cal in 1642. A common approach was to connect a seriesof wheels, each of which would turn in ten steps for thedigits 0 through 9. A legend has developed that theeccentric English dilettante Charles Babbage was the
father of computing because around 1835 he designed amechanical calculator that could be programmed withpunched cards. Science ﬁction writers William Gibsonand Bruce Sterling wrote a novel imagining that Babbagesucceeded in building it, launching a golden age ofBritish scientiﬁc and technological dominance but mag-nifying social problems. However, in reality Babbagefailed, and historian Doron Swade estimates that hisinﬂuence on the development of electronic computerswas insigniﬁcant.The ﬁrst comprehensive digital data-processing systemusing cards was developed by the American engineerHerman Hollerith, who began patenting his ideas in the1880s. By 1902, when his machines were used toprocess the vast sea of information collected in the 1900U.S. census, they already incorporated electric relays thatcould do conditionals (if-then operations).The Mainframe EraThere is considerable debate among historians overwhich programmable, electronic digital computer wasﬁrst or most inﬂuential. By 1941, professor John Atana-soff and graduate student Clifford Berry had created ademonstration machine at Iowa State University, butthey did not develop it further. In Britain, a special-purpose electronic computer called Colossus begancracking German codes in 1943, but its design was keptsecret for more than three decades. Perhaps the mostinﬂuential early electronic digital computer was ENIAC(Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), com-pleted at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 by ateam headed by physicist John W. Mauchly and engineerJ. Presper Eckert.ENIAC’s primary job was calculating accurate artilleryﬁring tables for the U.S.Army. In the frenzy of World WarII, many new models of long-range guns were being pro-duced, and soldiers in the ﬁeld needed complex tables totell them how to aim to hit a target at a certain distanceunder various conditions. It was impossible to ﬁre theguns under all the likely conditions, so data from somejudiciously chosen test ﬁrings were used to anchor elab-orate sets of mathematical calculations. Vannevar Bush,who was the chief science advisor to President Roosevelt,had a huge mechanical analog computer, the differentialanalyzer, built for this purpose in 1930. In theory, anelectronic computer would be much faster and moreaccurate, but there were serious questions about whetherit could be sufﬁciently reliable, because before the devel-opment of transistors they were built with vacuum tubesthat tended to burn out. ENIAC weighed 30 tons, cov-ered 1,800 square feet, and contained 18,000 vacuumtubes.ENIAC’s data input and output employed Hollerith’spunch cards, a method that remained one of the standardapproaches through the 1970s. However, programmingwas done manually by setting hundreds of rotaryswitches and plugging in wires that connected electroniccomponents. Mauchly and Eckert designed a successorthat could store a program in its memory. They formed a small company, launched a line of machines calledUNIVAC, and then sold out to a private company in1950. This example typiﬁes mid-twentieth-century com-puting. The technology for large and expensive main-frame computers was developed with governmentfunding for military purposes and then transferred to thecivilian sector where it was used by large corporations for422 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyComputer SkepticsThe transition from mainframe and enterprisecomputing to the proliferation of the personalcomputer (PC) revolutionized the world in count-less ways, from increased work efﬁciency to theability to access the World Wide Web from virtuallyany desktop or wired café. However, not everyonewas so optimistic about the PC, as the quotesbelow demonstrate:“There is no reason for any individual to have acomputer in his home.”—Ken Olson, Digital Equipment (1977)“The Macintosh uses an experimental pointingdevice called a mouse. There is no evidence thatpeople want to use these things.”—John Dvorak, Editor, PC Magazine (1984)Source: Retrieved from http://www.sysprog.net/quothist.html
ﬁnancial record-keeping and similar applications. Muchof the research work was done at universities, and theavailability of a few mainframe computers on campusgave scientists the chance to adapt them to many researchpurposes.The Personal ComputerThe birth of the computer industry involved nothing lessthan development of an entire computer culture, includ-ing programming languages and compilers to control themachines, networks and input-output devices to transmitinformation between users and machines, and newcourses in universities leading to the emergence of com-puter science and engineering as a distinct ﬁeld. Foryears, the dominant model was expensive mainframecomputers with batch processing of data—computerruns that were carefully prepared and then placed in aqueue to await time on the mainframe—although therewere some experiments with time sharing in which sev-eral individuals could use a computer simultaneously inreal-time. Then, in the mid-1970s, both inside informa-tion technology companies and outside among electron-ics hobbyists, the personal computer revolution offered aradically new concept of computing.In April 1973, Xerox corporation’s Palo Alto ResearchCenter ran its ﬁrst test of the Alto, the prototype desktoppersonal computer. Alto innovated many of the tech-nologies that would become standard for home andofﬁce computers, including the mouse, windows andicons on the screen, desktop printing with many differentfonts, incorporation of images and animations, and localarea networks that allowed individuals to send ﬁles backand forth between their machines. Xerox was not able toexploit the technology at the time, because of the highcost and low performance of microelectronics. In the1960s, Gordon Moore, a founder of the Intel computerchip corporation, propounded what has become knownas Moore’s Law, the observation that the performance ofcomputer chips was doubling every eighteen or twenty-four months. Alto’s technology ﬁnally hit the home mar-ket when the ﬁrst Apple Macintosh was sold in 1984,soon followed by Microsoft’s Windows operating system.Before any of the big information technology compa-nies offered personal computers to the public, hobbyistswere building their own from kits, notably the Altair ﬁrstannounced in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electron-ics magazine.A technological social movement, drawingon some of the cultural radicalism of the 1960s, quicklyspread across America and Western Europe, although inretrospect it is difﬁcult to estimate how much this radi-calism contributed to the rapid advance of the computerrevolution. It is true that Apple was founded in a garagecomputer 423One of the many video-game arenas in Koreain 2004. This is alocation of regularcompetitions betweenKorea’s ﬁnest video andcomputer gamers. InKorea, these events aretelevised, and thecompetitors treated likemovie stars.
by two friends, and Bill Gates dropped out of college tohelp his buddies found Microsoft. For a few years after theApple II computer appeared in 1977, an individual couldwrite a commercially viable software program and start asmall company to market it. But the greatest advancesafter the mid-1980s again required the combination ofmassive government funding and large corporations.Internet and the World Wide WebInternet was born in 1969 as ARPAnet, a research net-work funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agencyof the U.S. government that connected computers at theUniversity of California at Los Angeles, the StanfordResearch Institute, the University of California at SantaBarbara, and the University of Utah. In 1972 it was ﬁrstdemonstrated to the public, and in the same year itbegan carrying e-mail. More and more educational insti-tutions, government agencies, and corporations beganusing the Internet—and ﬁnding new uses for it—until bythe end of the 1980s it was an essential tool for researchand had begun to demonstrate its value for business andpersonal applications. For example, in 1978 Roy Trub-shaw and Richard Bartle invented the ﬁrst online fantasygame or MUD (Multiple-User Dungeon) at Essex Uni-versity in England, and in 1989 Alan Cox at the Univer-sity College of Wales released his own version onto theInternet.In 1990 at the high-energy physics laboratories of theConseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN)near Geneva, Switzerland,Tim Berners-Lee developed theﬁrst hypertext browser and coined the term World WideWeb. Early in 1993, University of Illinois student MarcAndreessen at the National Center for SupercomputingApplications, funded by the U.S. National Science Foun-dation, programmed the ﬁrst version of Mosaic, the easy-to-use browser that would introduce millions of peopleto the Web. Both the Netscape and Microsoft InternetExplorer browsers were based on Mosaic, and it is esti-mated that more than 10 percent of the world’s popula-tion used the Internet in 2002.The mainframe-timesharing concept of the 1970s hasevolved into a client-server architecture. A server is a ded-icated computer, often large, that houses centralizeddatabases (in companies, universities, or governmentagencies) or connects directly to the Internet. Originally,clients were dumb terminals with little or no computingpower of their own, but today they are powerful personalcomputers connected to the server and able to access its424 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyHow to Stop Worrying andLearn to Love the Internet This piece ﬁrst appeared in the News Review sec-tion of The Sunday Times on 29 August 1999.For instance, “interactivity” is one of those neol-ogisms that Mr. Humphrys likes to danglebetween a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reasonwe suddenly need such a word is that during thiscentury we have for the ﬁrst time been dominatedby non-interactive forms of entertainment: cin-ema, radio, recorded music and television. Beforethey came along all entertainment was interac-tive: theatre, music, sport—the performers andaudience were there together, and even a respect-fully silent audience exerted a powerful shapingpresence on the unfolding of whatever dramathey were there for.We didn’t need a special wordfor interactivity in the same way that we don’t(yet) need a special word for people with onlyone head.I expect that history will show “normal” main-stream twentieth century media to be the aberra-tion in all this.“Please, miss, you mean they couldonly just sit there and watch? They couldn’t doanything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolatedor alienated or ignored?”“Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad.Before the Restoration.”“What was the Restoration again, please,miss?”“The end of the twentieth century, child.Whenwe started to get interactivity back.”Source: Adams, D. (1999). Retrieved from http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html
resources. A very different approach has arisen recently,called peer-to-peer architecture—for example, the music-ﬁle-sharing programs like Napster that link personalcomputers over the Web, in which each computer simul-taneously functions as both server and client. The gridcomputing concept distributes big computation jobsacross many widely distributed computers, or distributesdata across many archives, eroding the distinctionbetween individual computers and the Internet.The Era of UbiquitousComputingComputers today are found nearly everywhere, embed-ded in automobiles and grocery store checkout counters,or packaged as pocket-sized personal digital assistantsthat allow a user to send e-mail or surf the Web fromalmost anywhere.They have begun to take over the rolesof traditional devices such as telephones and televisions,while other devices have become accessories to comput-ers, notably cameras and music players. Old forms ofcomputing do not die, but expand. Children’s toys nowhave vastly greater computing power than ENIAC, butENIAC’s direct descendents are supercomputers capableof doing dozens of trillions of calculations per second.Computer science continues to advance, and nan-otechnology promises to sustain Moore’s Law for per-haps another twenty years, halting only after the smallestelectronic components have shrunk to the size of a singlemolecule. Two decades of doubling every eighteenmonths means improvement by a factor of 8,000. Thatwould imply the computing power of today’s desktopcomputer packaged in a shirt button and costing a dime.What will people do with such power?In 2003, the Interagency Working Group on Infor-mation Technology Research and Development of theU.S. government identiﬁed the following “grand chal-lenges” that computing could address in the followingdecade: ■ Knowledge environments for science and engineering;■ Clean energy production through improved combustion;■ High conﬁdence infrastructure control systems;■ Improved patient safety and health quality;■ Informed strategic planning for long-term regionalclimate change;■ Nanoscale science and technology: explore and ex-ploit the behavior of ensembles of atoms and mole-cules;■ Predicting pathways and health effects of pollutants;■ Real-time detection, assessment, and response to nat-ural or man-made threats;■ Safer, more secure, more efﬁcient, higher-capacity,multimodal transportation system;■ Anticipate consequences of universal participation ina digital society;■ Collaborative intelligence: integrating humans withintelligent technologies;■ Generating insights from information at your ﬁngertips;■ Managing knowledge-intensive dynamic systems;■ Rapidly acquiring proﬁciency in natural languages;■ SimUniverse [educational computer simulations]:learning by exploring; and■ Virtual lifetime tutor for all.William Sims BainbridgeSee also Mass MediaFurther ReadingAustrian, G. D. (1982). Herman Hollerith: Forgotten giant of informationprocessing. New York: Columbia University Press.Bainbridge, W. S. (Ed.). (2004). Berkshire encyclopedia of human-computer interaction. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire PublishingGroup.Berners-Lee, T., & Fischetti, M. (1999). Weaving the Web. New York:HarperCollins.Freiberger, P., & Swaine, M. (1999). Fire in the valley:The making of thepersonal computer (2nd. ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.Gibson, W., & Sterling, B. (1991). The difference engine. New York:Bantam.Gillies, J., & Cailliau, R. (2000). How the Web was born. Oxford, UK😮xford University Press.Grudin, J. (2004). History of human-computer interaction. In W. S. Bain-bridge (Ed.), Berkshire Encyclopedia of human-computer interaction.Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group.Interagency Working Group on Information Technology Research andDevelopment. (2003). Grand challenges: Science, engineering, andcomputer 425It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightenedthe day’s toil of any human being.•John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
societal advances requiring networking and information technologyresearch and development.

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Arlington, Virginia: National Coordina-tion Ofﬁce for Information Technology Research and Development.Lavendel, G. (1980). A decade of research: Xerox Palo Alto Research Cen-ter. New York: Bowker.Metropolis, N., Howlett, J., & Rota, G.-C. (Eds.). (1980). A history ofcomputing in the twentieth century. New York: Academic Press.Mollenhoff, C. R. (1988). Atanasoff: Forgotten father of the computer.Ames: Iowa State University Press.National Research Council. (1999). Funding a revolution: Governmentsupport for computing research. Washington, DC: National AcademyPress.Price, D. J. S. de. (1959).An ancient Greek computer. Scientiﬁc American200(6), 60 –67.Stern, N. (1981). From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly computers. Bedford, MA: Digital Press.Swade, D. (2000). The difference engine: Charles Babbage and the questto build the ﬁrst computer. New York: Viking.Waldrop, M. M. (2001). The dream machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the rev-olution that made computing personal. New York: Viking.ConfucianismConfucianism, more a social and ethical philosophythan a religion, originated with Confucius (551–479BCE), whose name represents a Latinization of KongFuzi, meaning Master Kong. With Daoism and Bud-dhism, it was one of the three ways of thought in tradi-tional China. The era in which Confucius lived was onein which other major philosophers and founders of reli-gious traditions also lived, including Siddhartha Gau-tama (the Buddha, c. 563–c. 483BCE) in India, Zoro-aster (c. 628–c. 551BCE) in Iran, the Hebrew prophetsin Palestine, and Thales (627?–547BCE.) in Greece. Heshares with these ﬁgures the role of deﬁning the classicalheritage of the subsequent civilizations in those regions.In response to conditions of large-scale warfare, diaspo-ras, and rapid social change, all ﬁve eras producedhumankind’s ﬁrst conscious responses to factors ofglobal impact. The responses were ethical in nature andshared a human-centered belief in the human ability toforge new answers. The parallelism of developmentsin these ﬁve areas, constituting as it does a distinctiveworld epoch (which the philosopher Karl Jaspers called426 berkshire encyclopedia of world historythe Axial Age) intrigues the historical imagination tothis day.Early ConfucianismConfucius ﬁrst sought ministerial rank in Lu, one ofnumerous states constituting a not-yet-uniﬁed China.Failure at that turned him toward teaching. It is as ateacher that he was remembered, and a philosophy ofstatehood (sponsored by the state) formed around histeachings. He initiated three traditions: teaching anywho would learn (the democratic temper), being a privateteacher (education for its own sake), and valuing thetransforming inﬂuences of history, arts, letters, and music(liberal education).Confucius wrote no books, but his teachings are col-lected in the Analects (Lunyu), a collection of 479 sec-tions of sayings attributed to him by three generations ofstudents and disciples. Disparate in subject, timeframe,and personal nuance, the work is uniﬁed by the fact thatall its utterances have to do with Confucius. This workstands at the center of the Confucian tradition not onlyin China but in the entire East Asian context. Theseventeenth-century Japanese Confucian thinker Ito Jinsaicalled it the most profound book in the universe.Basic PrinciplesThe three principal ideas in the Analects are ren, yi, andli. Ren means interpersonal humane regard, from whichﬂows the entire Confucian social philosophy, in which aperson sees his or her own humanity in another person.Yi is the impulse to do the right thing, to be ren. Li is thecomposite of all decorum and manners from the mun-dane to the loftiest of rites, the outward manifestations ofren and yi. These qualities underlie the Confucian inter-personal philosophy, and, along with the important qual-ities of trustworthiness (xin) and loyalty (zhong), give lifeto his view of state and society as consisting of the ﬁvecardinal relationships: ruler-ruled, father-son, husband-wife, elder brother-younger brother, and friend-friend.Confucius viewed the family as the microcosm of thestate and the state as the macrocosm of the family. Hisphilosophy is this-worldly.When queried about his view
of religion and the spirits, he said, “Not yet servinghumans, how can one speak of serving the spirits” (Lunyu(analects), xianjin chapter).Mencius and XunziEarly Confucianism had two other philosophers: Men-cius (c. 371–c. 289 BCE) and Xunzi c. 298–c. 230 BCE),disciples of Confucius who lived some two hundredyears after the master. Each with a work carrying hisname, the two propounded the idealistic and realistic ten-dencies, respectively, inherent in the master’s teachings.Both works are examples of elegant Chinese prose. Men-cius argued philosophically that human nature wasinnately good. From this premise, the Mencian programfor humanity valued persuasion over coercion, exemplaryaction over dictated rules, and moral factors over utili-tarian motives. Mencius appreciated the people as arbiterof moral rule, and in a three-tier order of importance,ranked them above the agrarian economy and the ruler.From this ordering, subsequent generations derived jus-tiﬁcation for a right of the people to rebel.Mencius’s contemporary, Xunzi, on the other hand,argued that human nature was rapacious and untrust-worthy and that morality was acquired by imposing thestrictest rules of decorum and control. Good action wasto be ritually coerced. Xunzi’s teachings encouraged aview of Confucius as a transmitter of ancient normsrather than as a moral exemplar. This realistic strain ofConfucianism lends encouragement to Legalism, anotherphilosophy that ﬂourished in China at this time. Legal-ism, however, demanded strict laws and harsh punish-ments without hesitation.State ConfucianismWith the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), China went froma multi-state arrangement of power based on private andpersonal loyalties to centralized, bureaucratic rule basedon public law.With the changeover from the Qin dynastyto the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), early Han rulersneeded a reason of state different from the brutal legalismon which the Qin was based. The ﬁrst Han emperor(Han Gaozu, reigned 206–195 BCE), a powerful and illit-erate wielder of power, had the acuity to ask the Confu-cian scholar Lu Jia (d. 170 BCE) to discourse on why theQin failed and Gaozu had succeeded. Lu Jia presentedhim with twelve lectures (Xin Yu, or New Discourses), theburden of which was that the Qin ruled with inhuman-ity and that Gaozu could enjoy a long rule by observingmoral scruples. In 195 BCE, Gaozu paid a ceremonialvisit to the grave of Confucius, a symbolic union of brutepower and Confucian reasoning. Another Confucianscholar, Jia Yi (201–168? BCE), was asked by the Hanemperor Wen (Han Wendi, reigned 179–157 BCE) topropound on the same theme. Jia Yi’s efforts (Xin Shu, orNew Writings) brilliantly discussed the faults of the Qinand a vast range of topics on the art of ruling.Thus Con-fucian ethics and moral behavior entered Chinese politicsof state. The grand fusion of moral and political powercame when Emperor Wu (or Han Wudi, reigned 140–87BCE), listening to Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BCE), fullyinstituted Confucianism as a state religion. Dong’s work(Chunqiu fanlu, or Luxuriant Dew of the Spring andAutumn Annals) expounded on the role of the scholar ingovernment, whom he claimed was the only appropriateperson—not the priest and not the people—to know theconfucianism 427Confucianism UnderAttack: Dadao Kongjiadian!Confucianism, more a social and ethical philos-ophy than a religion, originated with Confucius(551–479 BCE), and, along with Daoism andBuddhism, was one the three ways of thought intraditional China.In the twentieth century, however, Confucian-ism was the focus of sharp criticism, as many ofits values and teachings were rejected by Chinesemodernists.This trend is traced back to the MayFourth Movement of 1919, when Chinese intel-lectuals called for their countrymen to “over-throw” (dadao) the stultifying ritualism of “Con-fucius and Sons” (Kongjiadian). The ChineseCommunist party stepped up this direct assault,especially in the 1950s and 1960s.Source: Chander, S. (1988). Globalizing chinese culture, localizing Buddhist teach-ings: the internationalization of foguangshan. Journal of Global Buddhism Online,retrieved from http://www.globalbuddhism.org/3/chandler0201.htm
ways of heaven, earth, and man. Dong envisaged theruler, advised by the scholar, as the link between thosethree realms. He incorporated ancient yin-yang thought(a system based on complementary opposites, as inpositive-negative or male-female) into the emerging Hanintellectual universe, giving Confucianism properties of asecular religion. The Chinese son of heaven (theemperor), as the ﬁrst scholar of the land, from then onperformed solemn Confucian rites of state. For the nexttwo millennia, by virtue of such institutions as the civil-service examination system, censorial admonition, andimperial universities, the Chinese government fullydeserved the adjective Confucian.China after the Han was divided, politically and geo-graphically. The north supported Buddhism, and theConfucian state could only survive in the south, and thereonly intermittently. China was reunited under the short-lived Sui dynasty (581–618), which favored Buddhism.The Sui, which reuniﬁed China in the name of Confu-cianism, exhibited strong Buddhist features in its ideo-logical outlook. For six hundred years, from the late Hanto the Tang dynasty, Buddhism and Daoism permeatedChinese life. Intellectual, aesthetic, and religious impulseswere greatly stirred by these two outlooks, which com-peted robustly with Confucianism. In those centuries,these three persuasions together shaped the eventualChinese cultural outlook: Confucianism supporting a suc-cessful public life, Buddhism supporting a religious life ofcompassion, and Daoism satisfying a psyche freed forimaginative excursions. But in the late ninth century, withthe success of the Tang state and government, attentionwas focused once again on Confucianism.Neo-ConfucianismBeginning with such late Tang thinkers as Han Yu (d.824) and Li Ao (d. 844), philosophical attention turnedto human nature. Centuries of Buddhist and Daoistinﬂuences awakened within Confucianists an interest inthe languages of metaphysics and metempsychosis (themovement of the soul after death into a new body). Aseries of thinkers appeared during the Song dynasty(960–1279) to take up the task of explaining the uni-verse, a task that had hitherto been the province of Bud-dhism and Daoism. Song thinkers like Zhou Dunyi(1017–1073), Shao Yong (1011–1077), Zhang Zai(1021–1073), the brothers Cheng Yi (1033–1107) andCheng Hao (1032–1085), Lu Jiuyuan (1139–1193),and ﬁnally Zhu Xi (1130–1200) excited their age withintellectual vigor and perspicacity. Two schools emergedin Neo-Confucianism. One, the Cheng-Zhu named forCheng Yi and Zhu Xi, who did the most for it, saw aphenomenal world of disparate objects and appear-ances, which they labeled qi and a noumenal world ofultimate organizing principles (li) behind the qi. Theother school (xin), led by Cheng Hao and Lu Jiuyuan,viewed the universe as a organism, whole in itself, withthe organizing principle of qi (matter-energy or mind; adifferent word from the previous qi) explaining micro-and macrolevels of human existence. The ﬁrst schoolpropounded a dualism that explained the seeming dis-parities between phenomena and their ultimate princi-ples; the latter dispenses with the dualism and offers themind, or matter-energy, as the means of uniting theknower and the known, thereby stressing human intu-itive faculties. The two schools are known also as the li(principle) and xin (mind) schools.Song philosophical efforts gave Confucianism a meta-physics and a way to explore one’s mind and psyche.Buddhist and Daoist inﬂuences ebbed, and Neo-Confucianism supported Chinese state and society for thenext seven hundred years. Metaphysics and metempsy-chosis, however, were not the real goal of this Confucianrevival, which aimed primarily at appropriating elementsof Buddhism and Daoism to buttress its emphasis onhuman ethics. Using the new dualism, Neo-Confucianismcould now point to individual human nature (qi) andideal human nature (li), thus exhorting moral actionthroughout Chinese society toward higher ideals. At alllevels of Chinese society, whether manifested in villagerules or in the imperial civil-service examinations, and inall intellectual endeavors, whether literary composition orhistorical inquiry, there was now a Confucian norm toemulate.Thus, while Neo-Confucianism was dynamic inthe making, it produced subsequent centuries of intellec-428 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyHold faithfulness and sincerity as ﬁrst principles.•Confucius (551–479 bce)
tual, ideological, and pedagogical formalism in China,and its inﬂuences were pervasive in Korea,Vietnam, andJapan.Modern Fate and NewConfucianismAs China met the onrush of modern civilization frommid-nineteenth century on, Confucianism came underattack for having supported the entire Chinese bodypolitic and social hierarchy. Intellectuals such as Hu Shi(1891–1962), Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), Wu Yu(1872–1949), and Lu Xun (1881–1936) called for itsabolition, chanting “Crush the Confucian Establishment(Dadao Kongjiadian)!” and hailing “Science” and “Democ-racy.” This iconoclasm produced in reaction a twentieth-century neo-traditionalism, nurtured by the call of ZhangZhidong (1837–1909) in 1898, when China was at thenadir of national strength in face of foreign encroach-ments, to preserve Chinese culture for substance (ti) andexploit Western culture for application (yong).While thelogic of this saying is faulty in reserving for one cultureonly morality and for another only instrumentality, it waseminently satisfying emotionally. Chinese who fearedand bewailed the passing of Confucian efﬁcacy embracedthe sentiment. Thinkers in the twentieth century such asLiang Soumin (1893–1988) and Xiong Shili (1884–1968) constituted the ﬁrst generation of the New Con-fucianism (Xin rujia).After 1950, a second generation of New Confucianistsarose in Hong Kong in contradistinction to intellectualsboth on the Communist mainland and in Nationalist Tai-wan. Amidst manifestos and educational endeavors,scholars such as Tang Junyi, Xu Fuguan, and MouZongsan envisaged a new Confucian synthesis combin-ing Confucian moral life with Western modes of living.Their message brought forth a third generation of intel-lectuals, mostly university professors who wrote in thepublic sphere from the 1970s.This trend coincided andsometimes coalesced with the rise of an enthusiasticbelief that Confucianism was compatible with capitalism.Economic leaps in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, HongKong, and Japan—all nations historically touched byConfucianism—gave them the sobriquet of tigers ordragons of capitalist success.The position was that theywere successful capitalist economies because of Confu-cianism.Whether mainland China for two millennia didnot develop capitalism in spite or because of Confucian-ism has not been satisfactorily answered by the claimants.The bursting of the economic bubble in the late 1990ssomewhat shook their faith in this belief.As modern society’s rampant individualism has takenits toll on the collective conscience, New Confucianismhas gained adherents who defend its collective ethicagainst individualism and debate its merits with pro-ponents of individualistic human rights. The debatecontinues.Daniel W.Y. KwokSee also Confucius; MenciusFurther ReadingChan, W. (1963). Source book in Chinese philosophy. Princeton, NJ😛rinceton University Press.Chang, C. (1957). The development of Neo-Confucian thought. New York:Bookman Associates.de Bary,W.T., & Bloom, I. (Ed.). (1999). Sources of Chinese tradition:Vol.1 (2nd ed). New York: Columbia University Press.de Bary,W. T., & Lufrano, R. (Ed.). (2000). Sources of Chinese tradition:Vol. 2 (2nd ed). New York: Columbia University Press.de Bary, W. T., & Weimin, T. (Ed.). (1998). Confucianism and humanrights. New York: Columbia University Press.Fingarette, H. (1972). Confucius: The secular as sacred. New York:Harper & Row.Fung,Y. (1952-53). A history of Chinese philosophy (D. Bodde, Trans.).Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Legge, J. (1960). The Chinese classics:Vol. 1. Confucian Analects, the greatlearning, the doctrine of the mean. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univer-sity Press. (Original work 1893–1895)Legge, J. (1960). The Chinese Classics:Vol. 2.The works of Mencius. HongKong: Hong Kong University Press. (Original work 1893–1895)Mote, F. (1971). The intellectual foundations of China. New York: Knopf.Nivison, D. S., & Wright, A. F. (Eds.). (1959). Confucianism in action.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Schrecker, J. (1991).The Chinese revolution in historical perspective. NewYork: Praeger.Shryock, J. (1932). The origin of the state cult of Confucius: An introduc-tory study. New York and London: The Century Co.Weber, M. (1951). The religion of China (H. H. Gerth, Trans.). Glencoe,IL: Free Press.Wright, A. F. (Ed.). (1960). The Confucian persuasion. Stanford, CA: Stan-ford University Press.confucianism 429
Confucius(551–479 bce)Chinese teacher and philosopherConfucius, or Kongzi as he is called in Chinese, wasan itinerant scholar, teacher, and sometime minorofﬁcial in his home state of Lu during the latter part of theZhou dynasty (1045–221 BCE), when the Chinese cul-ture area was divided into a large number of competingstates.The very limited success he had as a political andmoral reformer in his own lifetime contrasts sharplywith the enormous inﬂuence his teachings had in futurecenturies, not only as the philosophical basis for ofﬁcialgovernment doctrine and basic social morality in the uni-ﬁed Chinese empire after the second century BCE, but alsoin the surrounding area of Chinese cultural inﬂuence,notably in Korea,Vietnam, and Japan.After the establishment of systematic contact withEurope in the seventeenth century, he became a world ﬁg-ure under the Latinized version of one of his honoriﬁcnames in China, Kong Fuzi. Europeans saw in Confuciusa distant inspiration and corroboration for the rationalhumanism of the Enlightenment. More recently, with anew wave of Confucianism carrying the sage to acade-mies, classrooms, and business schools in the West, hehas become both an Eastern contributor to global cul-tural synthesis and the presumed root cause for the cul-tural dynamic behind the so-called East Asian economicmiracle of the late twentieth century.Clearly these later reincarnations relate more to Con-fucianism than to the historical person, but howevermuch they partake of the spirit and historical needs oflater times, Confucius, the very human, nonmessianicman of the ﬁfth century BCE, is the starting point.There is an enormous amount of lore and legendabout Confucius’s life, but most of it is historically unre-liable. The contemporary textual evidence is limited toquotes from the Master and anecdotes about his life thatwere compiled by his students into a fairly short book,the Lunyu, or Analects. Less reliably, his thought may alsobe reﬂected in a history of his home state of Lu, the Chun-qiu, or Spring and Autumn Annals, which he allegedlyauthored, and in several early Zhou dynasty texts which,because of his supposed editorship, became known as theFive (Confucian) Classics.Certainly these earlier texts, ﬁve centuries old in Con-fucius’s time, inﬂuenced his thought. He was a self-professed traditionalist, holding up the supposed unityand virtue of the early Zhou dynasty and its de factofounder, the Duke of Zhou, as models for Confucius’sown dissolute time of constant interstate warfare and adisintegrating social order. On that point, it is importantto note that Confucius came from a social stratum thathad fallen from its original position as a warrior aristoc-racy to become scribelike functionaries for the increas-ingly powerful independent states of the later Zhouperiod. As ritual specialists based on their knowledge ofthe early Zhou texts, men of Confucius’s class preservedand cultivated the cultural unity of China in a time ofpolitical disintegration. For Confucius, li (social ritual)was the essential civilizing basis for the social and polit-ical order; only through li could the individuals realizetheir basic humanity.The patriarchal nature of the socialorder embodied in li was taken for granted.430 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyA highly stylized portait of Confucius thatoften appeared in Western publications.
In all of this Confucius appears to have been a con-servative or even reactionary thinker who wanted to goback to an idealized past in which members of an edu-cated elite had both status and power. But a call to revivethe past can be a charge to the present. In some ways,Confucius was a remarkable innovator.First, there was his emphasis on morality and concernfor the welfare of the common people, a theme furtherdeveloped by his most famous posthumous disciple,Mencius (or Mengzi, c. 372–c. 289 BCE). Politically, thiswas expressed in the famous “mandate of Heaven,” whichmade the ruler of “all under Heaven”—that is, of a polit-ically uniﬁed Chinese culture area—responsible to anonanthropomorphic supreme deity or cosmic principle(Heaven) for maintaining social harmony though non-selﬁsh virtuous rule. Failure to do so could terminate aruling house through the people’s exercise of the so-called“right of rebellion,” further explicated two centuries laterby Mencius.This was Confucius’s ﬁrst check on tyrannical rule.Thesecond, and ultimately more important, was his empha-sis on cultivating knowledge and morality through edu-cation. Confucius fundamentally undermined the hered-itary principle in a stratiﬁed society by taking poor as wellas rich students. We can assume that his more impover-ished students were the children of good families fallenon hard economic times rather than common peasants,but in the long run this practice of offering a literate,moral education to train people for political leadershiplaid the social foundation for the political order of impe-rial China. The ultimate product of such an educationwas the junzi, originally a term for hereditary noblemen,but for Confucius a term that signiﬁed an educated, cul-tivated, and morally centered “noble man.”Confucius’s teachings, carried on and developed as theRu school in the centuries after his death, were made theofﬁcial doctrine of the imperial state during the Handynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), partly as a backlash againstthe harsh absolutism of the short-lived Qin dynasty(221–206 BCE). Though much changed in subsequentperiods, Confucius’s moral emphasis would form thebasis for personal self-cultivation and social harmony inthe world’s most enduring political structure and culturalformation—not a bad legacy for a frustrated politicianturned teacher.Ralph CroizierSee also ConfucianismFurther ReadingCreel, H. G. (1949). Confucius: The man and the myth. New York:Harper Brothers.Fingarette, H. (1972). Confucius: The secular as sacred. New York:Harper & Row.Hall, D. L., & Ames, R. (1987). Thinking through Confucius. Albany:State University of New York Press.Jensen, L. (1997). Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese traditions anduniversal civilization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Lau, D. C. (Trans.). (1992). Confucius: The analects.Ni, P. (2002). On Confucius. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/ThomsonLearning.Wei-ming, T. (1985). Confucian thought: Selfhood as creative transfor-mation. Albany: State University of New York Press.Congo See KongoCongress ofViennaThe Congress of Vienna was a series of meetingsinvolving most of the European heads of state heldin Vienna, the capital of the Austrian empire, betweenSeptember 1814 and 9 June 1815. The purpose of theCongress was to redraw the map of Europe after years ofchaos resulting from the Napoleonic and French revolu-tionary wars (1792–1814). Its proceedings were ini-tially dominated by the four powers of the victoriouscongress of vienna 431Study the past if you would deﬁne thefuture.•Confucius (551–479 bce)
allied coalition that had defeated Napoleon. Britain wasrepresented by foreign secretary Viscount Castlereagh(Robert Stewart). Prussia was represented by foreign sec-retary and chancellor Prince Carl von Hardenberg, Rus-sia by Czar Alexander I (1777–1825), and Austria byPrince Klemens von Metternich (1773–1859), whoemerged as the architect of the Congress. The defeatedFrench were represented by Charles-Maurice de Talley-rand (1754–1838).Although Metternich acted as host, there was no for-mal opening of the Congress, and meetings began in Sep-tember as delegations arrived. While the major statesdebated the key issues, delegates from lesser Europeanstates dealt with issues such as navigation rights andattended lavish receptions held by the Austrian govern-ment. The Congress dissolved after the signing of theFinal Act, 9 June 1815.PreliminariesWith his armies defeated Napoleon Bonaparte resignedas emperor of France on 11 April 1814 and went intoexile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. Allied armiesoccupied Paris and the prerevolutionary Bourbon dy-nasty was restored to the throne of France. Louis XVIII(brother of the beheaded Louis XVI) became king, withTalleyrand as foreign secretary. The four allies signed apeace treaty with the new French government on 30 May1814 known as the First Peace of Paris. Under the termsof the treaty France’s borders were rolled back to whatthey had been in 1792.The ﬁnal clause in the treaty alsospeciﬁed that all states engaged in the current war shouldmeet in Vienna to resolve outstanding territorial issues.Territorial ArrangementsMetternich’s major objective at the Congress was toensure that France was surrounded by states strongenough to contain any future French attempts at expan-sion. Metternich wanted to create a balance of power inEurope that would maintain stability. The Congress ofVienna went on to formalize many territorial arrange-ments previously agreed upon by the four major alliedstates.The Kingdom of the Netherlands, which includedBelgium and Holland, was created as a strong state onFrance’s northeastern frontier. The Italian state ofPiedmont-Sardinia played a similar role on France’ssoutheastern frontier. In central Europe Napoleon’s Con-federation of the Rhine was abolished and replaced bythirty-nine German states grouped loosely together as theGerman Confederation, with its capital in Frankfurt.TheConfederation included German-speaking areas of Prus-sia and Austria. It also superseded the three hundred-plusGerman states that had existed under the auspices of theHoly Roman Empire prior to the French revolution.Prussia was given land on the west and east banks of theRhine river in order to garrison an army that couldmarch quickly on France in case of an emergency. Austriawas meant to have the dominant role in the GermanConfederation and the Austrians were given presidency ofthe Confederation. Austria was also to be the dominantpower on the Italian peninsula. Austria retained posses-sion of the wealthy northern Italian province of Lom-bardy and was granted control over the neighboring andequally wealthy province of Venetia. Members of theAustrian royal family, the Habsburgs, were placed onmost of the thrones of the remaining Italian states toensure Austrian dominance and keep the French out.The Congress recognized British possession of severalimportant overseas territories conquered during theNapoleonic wars. Britain gained the island of Helgolandin the North Sea, Malta in the Mediterranean, the CapeColony of southern Africa, the island of Ceylon offIndia’s southern tip, the islands of Mauritius, Seychelles,and Rodriguez in the Indian Ocean, and the islands ofSaint Lucia, Trinidad, and Tobago in the Caribbean.Many of these possessions were economically lucrativeand gave Britain control over key shipping routes.The Congress acknowledged the status of Switzerlandas an independent and neutral state. Finally, territorialchanges were undertaken in Scandinavia. The king ofDenmark, too long an ally of Napoleon, lost his posses-sion of Norway to Sweden. Sweden, in turn, was forcedto give Finland to Russia.432 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyThe skill of making, and maintaining commonwealths, consisteth in certain rules,as doth arithmetic and geometry; not, as tennis-play, on practice only; which rules,neither poor men have the leisure, nor men that have had the leisure, have hithertohad the curiosity, or the method to ﬁnd out.•Hobbes (1588–1679)
The Poland–Saxony DisputeA disagreement over eastern Europe very nearly dis-rupted the Congress.

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Alexander I made clear that hewanted to gain control over all of Poland, including Pol-ish provinces previously ruled by Prussia. By way of com-pensation, the Prussians were to be given the wealthyGerman kingdom of Saxony. The Austrians and Britishprotested, fearing the growth of Prussian and Russianpower in central and eastern Europe. The dispute soonescalated to serious proportions. Talleyrand saw anopportunity to split the victorious alliance and regainFrench inﬂuence in Europe. He sided with the British andAustrians, and on 3 January 1815, the three powerssigned a secret alliance. Each signatory pledged 150,000troops in the event of war. However, Europe had sufferedenough war and a compromise was found. Russia gainedmost, but not all, of Poland. Prussia gained about 40 per-cent of Saxony, with the rest remaining independent.The Final Act and Long-Term ImpactIn late February Napoleon escaped from exile and landedin France on 1 March 1815. Napoleon forced LouisXVIII to ﬂee Paris, raised an army, and went to war againwith the allies. However this had little impact on the Con-gress of Vienna.The Final Act was signed on 9 June, andNapoleon was defeated for the last time at the Battle ofWaterloo on 18 June 1815.Most historians agree that the Congress of Vienna cre-ated a durable peace in Europe. Although wars broke outamong individual European states in the nineteenth cen-tury, there was no general war until 1914, a reﬂection ofthe fact that no one power left Vienna with unresolvedgrievances. Britain was arguably the big winner, havingwon dominance over shipping routes all around theglobe, setting the stage for Britain’s remarkable imperialexpansion in the nineteenth century.Paul W. DoerrSee also Austro-Hungarian Empire; Napoleonic EmpireFurther ReadingAlbrecht-Carrié, R. (1973). A diplomatic history of Europe since the Con-gress of Vienna. New York: Harper and Row.Alsop, S. (1984). The Congress dances. New York: Harper and Row.Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1962). Metternich and his times. London: Dar-ton, Longman and Todd.Bridge, F., & Bullen, R. (1980). The great powers and the European statessystem, 1815–1914. New York: Longman.Chapman, T. (1998). The Congress of Vienna: Origins, processes andresults. New York: Routledge.Ferrero, G. (1941). The reconstruction of Europe:Talleyrand and the Con-gress of Vienna, 1814–1815. New York: Putnam.Grimsted, P. (1969). The foreign ministers of Alexander I: Political atti-tudes and the conduct of Russian diplomacy, 1801–1825. Berkeley:University of California Press.Gulick, E. (1955). Europe’s classical balance of power: A case history ofthe theory and practise of one of the great concepts of European state-craft. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Kissinger, H. (1957). A world restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and theproblems of peace, 1812–1822. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin.Kraehe, E. (1963). Metternich’s German policy. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.Nicolson, H. The Congress of Vienna: A study in allied unity: 1812–1822.London: Constable.Rich, N. (1992). Great power diplomacy, 1814–1914. New York:McGraw Hill.Webster, C. (1931). The foreign policy of Castlereagh, 1812–1815. Lon-don: G. Bell.Constantine the Great(reigned 306–337 ce)Roman emperorThough not baptized as a Christian until he lay uponhis deathbed, for the bulk of his reign Constantinefavored Christians by promoting them into the Imperialadministration and giving them a variety of tax breaksand ﬁnancial incentives—all to the disadvantage of mem-bers of other religions (notably the pagans); by presidingover their Ecumenical Councils and settling doctrinal dis-putes among them—including the ﬁrst state-sponsoredpersecutions of Christian “heretics”; by restoring andbuilding churches (such as the original St. Peter’s inRome and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, bothconstantine the great 433

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based on pagan examples such as the great temples ofArtemis at Ephesus and Jupiter at Baalbek) that set thestyle for Christian architecture and iconography fornearly two millennia; and, most important, by raising hissons—who reigned after him for another thirty years—as Christians, thus ensuring Christianity’s victory overpaganism.The son of the Western Emperor Constantius Chlorus(reigned 305–306 CE), Constantine was acclaimed em-peror by the legions in Eboracum (modern York, En-gland) after his father’s sudden death. A series of civilwars ensued, ending with Constantine in sole control ofthe empire by 324 CE. In 330 he founded a new—andovertly Christian—capital in the ruined city of Byzan-tium, renaming it “Constantinopolis” (Constantinople,now Istanbul) after himself, which proved strategicallyimportant; in fact, it protected medieval Christendomfrom Islamic conquest. In 337 on his way to attack thePersians, Constantine died of natural causes at about theage of ﬁfty-two near ancient Nicomedia, and was buriedas a Christian in Constantinople.Though his mother (canonized as St. Helena) had longbeen a Christian convert, before the Battle of the MilvianBridge (312 CE), Constantine and many of his soldiersseem to have been devotees of Mithraism, a pagan mys-tical religion associated with sun worship but holdingsome doctrinal and ritual similarities to Christianity,including the symbol of the cross. Accounts differ some-what, but on the eve of battle with his rival Maxentius atthe Milvian Bridge, Constantine claims that he saw across against a bright sun and the words “In hoc signovincit” (“By this sign shall you conquer”). Instructing hissoldiers to afﬁx this cross symbol to their shields, Con-stantine won the battle—and the Western empire.Somewhat later, under the inﬂuence of his mother andher confessor, the Christian bishop Eusebius, Constantinebecame persuaded that his vision came not from Mithrasbut from Jesus Christ, the Christian god. The resultingEdict of Milan (313CE) granted Christianity ofﬁcial tol-eration and marked the end of the pagan Roman empire.Though Constantine’s vision has often been seen as a cyn-ical ploy to gain Christian favor, the very small number ofChristians in the empire, especially in the western half(about 5 percent of the empire’s overall population wasChristian, and most of lived in the eastern half), suggeststhat the vision and conversion should be seen instead asa bit of clever politicking on the part of the then-persecuted Christians to gain favor, if not ascendancy, inthe empire. In this Constantine did not disappoint.Besides promoting Christians into all levels of theRoman administration, Constantine issued a variety ofedicts and orders giving Christians ﬁnancial rewards andlegal immunities not enjoyed by others. He also prohib-ited gladiatorial games and animal sacriﬁces, and in 330CE, to ﬁnance the building of his new capital of Constan-tinopolis, ordered the ransacking of the pagan temples of434 berkshire encyclopedia of world historySelection from Eusebius: The Conversion of ConstantineNow it was made in the following manner. A longspear, overlaid with gold, formed the ﬁgure of thecross by means of a transverse bar laid over it. On thetop of the whole was ﬁxed a wreath of gold and pre-cious stones; and within this, the symbol of the Sav-iour’s name, two letters indicating the name of Christby means of its initial characters, the letter P beingintersected by X in its centre: and these letters theemperor was in the habit of wearing on his helmet ata later period. From the cross-bar of the spear wassuspended a cloth, a royal piece, covered with a pro-fuse embroidery of most brilliant precious stones; andwhich, being also richly interlaced with gold, pre-sented an indescribable degree of beauty to thebeholder. This banner was of a square form, and theupright staff, whose lower section was of great length,bore a golden half-length portrait of the piousemperor and his children on its upper part, beneaththe trophy of the cross, and immediately above theembroidered banner.The emperor constantly made use of this sign ofsalvation as a safeguard against every adverse andhostile power, and commanded that others similar toit should be carried at the head of all his armies.Source: Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (Vol I). 2nd series. (1990). New York:Christian Literature Co.
their treasures—bronze doors, gilt idols, and even theirgold-shingled roofs—which disastrously affected thepagan cause. He even engaged in the ﬁrst persecution ofnon-Christians by Christians. Between this clearfavoritism and instructing his children in the new faith,Constantine sent the message that the route to power,inﬂuence, and riches now lay through Christianity.To his horror, Constantine found that rather than auniversal monolithic hierarchy, the Christian “church”consisted of mostly independent house-churches looselyconfederated with no standardized doctrine, ritual, orscripture. As reported by Eusebius, Constantine consid-ered himself a bishop, a new kind of Christian PontifexMaximus, or priest-king, charged with the protectionand promotion of Christianity—an example followed byhis successors for the next millennium and more.To thisend, as soon as he gained control of the whole empire,he called Christian leaders to a council at Nicaea (325 –326 CE), where his insistence on standardizing beliefs andpractices deﬁned “orthodoxy” and pushed Christianityinto a monolithic hierarchical autocracy; his insistence onstandardization also led to the ﬁrst state-sponsored per-secution of Christians (the “Donatists”) by Christians, set-ting yet another dubious example for his successors.Constantine was both the best and the worst thing thatever happened to Christianity.Without him, Christianitywould never have become the critical cultural, political,and religious force that it did, since nowhere has itbecome a majority religion without state-sponsoredfavoritism and persecution. Constantine’s insistenceon hierarchical autocracy, an orthodoxy of ritual anddoctrine, and the persecution of nonbelievers ensuredChristianity’s triumph (and some of its greatest crimes).It also laid the foundation for three critical events in Euro-pean and world history—the Papal Revolution, the Cru-sades, and the Protestant Reformation. WithoutConstantine’s conversion, the modern world as we knowit would not exist.Jerome S. ArkenbergSee also Byzantine Empire; Roman EmpireFurther ReadingDrake, H. A. (2000). Constantine and the bishops:The politics of intoler-ance. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Elliott,T. G. (1996). The Christianity of Constantine the Great. Scranton,PA: University of Scranton Press.Jones, A. H. M. (1979). Constantine and the conversion of Europe.Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.Lieu, S. N. C., & Montserrat, D. (1998). Constantine: History, historiog-raphy and legend. London: Routledge.MacMullen, R. (1984). Christianizing the Roman Empire A.D. 100–400.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.MacMullen, R. (1997). Christianity and paganism in the fourth to eighthcenturies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Rousseau, P. (2002). The early Christian centuries. London: Longman.ConsumerismConsumerism involves a devotion to the acquisitionof goods not needed for basic, or even embellished,subsistence. It is further associated with a desire for nov-elty, even a commitment to faddism, rather than con-tentment with established styles sanctioned by tradition.The spread of consumerism, socially and geographically,is one of the most signiﬁcant developments in world his-tory over the past two to three centuries. Growing com-mitments to consumer culture represent not only a signof economic change and growing prosperity, but also asigniﬁcant shift in values.BeginningsConsumerism is not, of course, entirely modern. Elites invarious societies indulged in aspects of consumerismfrom the advent of civilization if not before.Bursts of con-sumerism occurred, for example, at various points in Chi-nese history, as wealthy landowners and aristocrats builthouses with showy furniture and fancy gadgets, andshowed off a parade of eye-catching costumes.The passionof Roman elites for Chinese silks was an example of con-sumerism, and so was the domestic indulgence in jewelrycommon in wealthy Muslim homes in the Middle East.There were, however, several constraints on consum-erism in traditional societies. One was the poverty of theconsumerism 435

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majority of the population, which precluded signiﬁcantconsumerist commitments. Even elites frequently shiedaway from full-blown consumerism, particularly in thesense of avid interest in novelty as opposed to establishedstyles. Religious objections often surfaced, and manysocieties devoted surpluses to glittering religious expen-ditures more than personal consumerism. Many societiesperiodically enforced sumptuary laws, which punisheddisplays that were nontraditional or that threatenedestablished social boundaries. Leading consumerists inChina were sometimes actually put to death by a gov-ernment intent on maintaining traditional styles and val-ues. Consumerism, in other words, was not an automaticresult of wealth.Modern ConsumerismUntil fairly recently, historians treated consumerism (ifthey paid any attention at all to what was sometimes seenas a frivolous topic) as a result of industrialization.As out-put and living standards rose, people were encouraged touse surplus to buy new goods. While this relationshipretains partial validity, major discoveries in the past twodecades locate the effective origins of fully modern con-sumerism in Western Europe in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries. A craze for buying new things andkeeping up with the latest fashions spread widely in West-ern society, affecting urban populations particularly butcreeping into the countryside as well—as with domesticmanufacturing workers in eighteenth-century Switzer-land who deﬁed village customs by indulging in urban-style clothing. Massive markets for secondhand clothingdeveloped, for people who had the consumerist urge butnot the money to follow through easily, and thefts of fash-ionable clothing rose as well. Not only clothing buthousehold furnishings and tableware reﬂected growingconsumerist interests, and there were also some intrigu-ing sidelights, like the frenzy for tulip buying (includingpaintings of tulips) that swept through Holland in the sec-ond quarter of the seventeenth century.This modern consumerism had three characteristics.First, it was cross-class.While social distinctions were notobliterated, one of the joys of modern consumerisminvolved buying the same kinds of styles as one’s betters—if perhaps of lower quality. Many social critics notedthis feature, bemoaning (and exaggerating) the loss of the436 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyConsumer Movement:Ralph NaderRalph Nader has become one of the most contro-versial ﬁgures in U.S. politics.As a law student atHarvard in 1958, Nader penned “The Safe CarYou Can’t Buy,” an article that was published inthe Nation, a prominent journal. He wrote:It is clear Detroit today is designing automobilesfor style, cost, performance, and calculated obso-lescence, but not—despite the 5,000,000 report-ed accidents, nearly 40,000 fatalities, 110,000permanent disabilities, and 1,500,000 injuriesyearly—for safety.Nader soon moved on to Washington, wherehe began his career as a consumer advocate. In1965, he published Unsafe at Any Speed, a best-selling indictment of the auto industry and itspoor safety standards. Largely because of his in-ﬂuence, Congress passed the 1966 National Traf-ﬁc and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Nader was alsoinﬂuential in the passage of 1967’s WholesomeMeat Act, which called for federal inspections ofbeef and poultry and imposed standards onslaughterhouses, as well as the Clean Air Act andthe Freedom of Information Act, which allows cit-izens access to much of the information held bythe U.S. government.Nader has not been alone in his ﬁght. Nader’sprinciples caught on, and soon activists, knownas “Nader’s Raiders,” joined his modern con-sumer movement.They continue to press for pro-tections for workers, taxpayers, and the environ-ment and fought to stem the power of largecorporations. Though no doubt controversial,Nader has been a strong force for social changethat beneﬁts millions of citizens.Source: Retrieved from http://www.infoplease.com/spot/ralphnader1.html
ability to tell a person’s social station by looking at his orher clothes. Consumerism also crossed gender lines.Women were often unduly blamed for frivolous con-sumerism—men participated heavily as well—but it wastrue that women found considerable self-expression inconsumerism. New interests in tea sets and silverware, forexample, followed from women’s new authority to regu-late mealtimes in the family, and furniture and clothingoften sparked interest.Second, modern consumerism involved a new appa-ratus of shops and commercial inducements. Scholarshave found the basic elements of consumerist apparatuspresent in places like Britain in the later eighteenth cen-tury. Not only did shops spread, but owners becameadept at arranging goods in enticing window displays;they offered loss leaders to lure people in for bargains asa result of which they would also end up buying othergoods; they advertised widely, often using aristocrats totestify to the qualities of products like razors or teas.Josiah Wedgwood, a leader in pottery production ineighteenth-century Britain, kept careful track of the shopsthat sold his goods, experimenting with new styles butwith enough market research to learn what ones werecatching on, what ones should be pulled back.There wereeven early signs of consumerist leisure: Commercial cir-cuses, for example, began in France in the late seven-teenth century (though they had been known earlier inAsia). By the late eighteenth century otherwise traditionalrural festivals were beginning to import entertainers fromthe cities.Third, modern consumerism acquired new meaningsfor the people involved. Of course it reﬂected Europe’sgrowing prosperity (for those with some property—notyet for everyone). It also reﬂected new levels of interna-tional trade. Mass enthusiasm for imported sugar hasbeen labeled the ﬁrst instance of modern Western con-sumerism, while the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuryinterest in tea and coffee helped support the larger enthu-siasm for new tableware. But cultural change wasinvolved as well. For many people, religious focus wasdeclining, and consumerism was an outlet for growingsecularism. A more commercial society blurred classlines, while population growth jeopardized establishedplace. Many children, for example, could no longer counton inheriting land or artisanal shops from parents.Theymight do all right ﬁnancially—working for wages indomestic manufacturing for instance—but they did nothave access to conventional social markers. Con-sumerism, as a means of showing a new kind of identityand success, could play a crucial role in this context.Growing interest in romantic love, another current of theeighteenth century, also contributed to the commitmentto acquisition, particularly, of course, in personal apparel.Additionally, modern consumerism involved a new desirefor personal comfort.The use of umbrellas, for example,provided shelter from bad weather, though some Britishstalwarts objected to this “unnatural” indulgence asumbrella purchases became common in the eighteenthcentury. Historians debate the precise mix of factorsinvolved, but they agree that consumerism reﬂected seri-ous values changes, and not simply the imposition ofnew lures by greedy shopkeepers.It is clear, ﬁnally, that modern consumerism precededindustrialization in the West, helping in fact to promoteit through heightened demand for products like clothing.Growing enthusiasm for cotton cloth, one of the motorsof early industrialization, reﬂected not only its cheapnessbut also the ability to dye it in bright colors, catching theeye of eager consumerists.Industrialization and Social CritiquesConsumerism and industrialization combined to pro-mote further changes in commercial apparatus. A clusterof shops in Paris merged in the 1830s to form theworld’s ﬁrst department store, and the spread of this kindof outlet marked the further progress of consumerism ona global basis. By the 1860s and 1870s, scientists andpopularizers were also noting a brand-new consumeristdisease, kleptomania, both in Western Europe and theUnited States, with middle-class women the most com-mon victims. Here was a sign, if a deviant one, of theconsumerism 437The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstentionfrom buying ultimately determines what should be produced and inwhat quantity and quality.•Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973)

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kind of personal passion that modern consumerismcould entail. Emotional deﬁnitions changed. Envy hadtraditionally been criticized as a debasing emotion, but bythe late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries it beganto be praised as a motivation for healthy consumerism.Modern consumerism made many people uncomfort-able, which is not surprising given the magnitude ofchange involved. From the late eighteenth century on-ward, criticism dogged the phenomenon. Religious au-thorities objected to secularism—though by the late nine-teenth century some mainstream Christian groups cameto terms with consumerism, noting that a good appear-ance was one of God’s blessings. Social critics of courseattacked the presumptions of the lower classes and theweaknesses of women. Emile Zola’s novel Germinal wasa long harangue against department stores and women’sfrailty, which distorted family budgets and led to ruin.Medical authorities might get into the act, noting the badhealth effects of too much indulgence (particularly, ofcourse, in food and drink). Socialists sometimes opposedconsumerism in the name of purer proletarian tastes; butsometimes they merely insisted that workers be given themeans to join in consumerism. Anticonsumerism wasalso an element in anti-Semitism in Western Europe, withJews blamed for department stores and other lures todepraved taste.While some of these reactions eased overtime—there was less anticonsumerism in the West by thelater twentieth century—they remain a factor.Global ConsumerismModern consumerism began to spread beyond WesternEurope during the nineteenth century.The United Statesfollowed European fashions in its imports of clothing andfood from the 1840s onward, though there had beensome signs of consumerist interest earlier. The purchaseof watches in rural New York, in the 1820s, has beentraced to a desire to copy English fashion, only later lead-ing to an actual interest in keeping more accurate track oftime. Department stores spread to major Russian citiesby the 1850s, indicating a new upper-class interest in styl-ish consumerism. Japan’s opening to the West involvedquick assimilation of many consumer interests. Depart-ment stores began to mark the fashionable Ginza districtin Tokyo by the 1890s.The same kinds of outlets showedup in Western-inﬂuenced Shanghai by the early twentiethcentury. These geographical extensions of consumerismwere not automatic. Asian department stores often mixedtraditional displays with Western-style consumerism.They offered concerts and other lures to demonstrate thatconsumerism was culturally acceptable. Even with this,many locals stayed away, convinced that there was noth-ing in these outlets that they wanted; and of course therewas massive criticism of consumerism not only along thelines already present in the West, but on grounds of itsdebasing foreignness. As before, the spread of con-sumerism involved really new values, including an inter-est in challenging existing social lines and powerstructures, and the process did not occur overnight.The spread of consumerism also brought new possi-bilities for protest.A number of boycotts developed, seek-ing to use denials of consumerism as a means ofattacking foreign intervention or other issues.The BostonTea Party, before the American Revolution, was a con-sumerist protest of sorts. By the 1920s Indian national-ists and others frequently used boycotts of foreignproducts to attack British imperialism, with some success.African Americans employed boycotts in places like Bal-timore during the interwar period to protest racial injus-tice. Boycotts were involved in attacks on apartheid inSouth Africa in the 1980s. By this point, also, humanrights groups frequently spurred boycotts against multi-national companies accused of shoddy labor practices inThird World countries. Other kinds of consumer move-ments in the twentieth century sought protection againstfraud and poor quality.The Twentieth Century and BeyondConsumerism intensiﬁed in the twentieth century. Again,both apparatus and motivation were involved. Advertis-ing became slicker, using new imagery and technologyand appealing more deeply to emotion. The ﬁrst real438 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyThe poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result ofnatural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently,
advertising agency arose in the United States, in the1870s; the phenomenon spread to Europe during theearly twentieth century. Not only growing prosperity butalso growing discontent with work promoted new levelsof consumerist interest. Many factory workers, bored ornervous on the job, turned to consumer pleasures to com-pensate.The same pattern could affect middle-class peo-ple, increasingly employed in large, faceless bureaucraciesand unable to claim traditional satisfactions in personalentrepreneurship.The new wave of consumerism, from the late nine-teenth century onward, fueled by these developments,involved the increasing commercialization of holidays likeChristmas. It involved the growing participation of chil-dren, surrounded from infancy with store-bought itemslike teddy bears (named for the American president).Experts began to urge parents to use toys and other con-sumer items to encourage good behavior. Consumerismalso spread widely to the ﬁeld of leisure, as most massleisure came to involve purchased pleasures and specta-torship, from sports to movies.Western leadership in twentieth-century consumerismincreasingly involved American initiatives, as the UnitedStates became the world’s leading consumer society. Bythe 1990s, however, Japan claimed a share in pioneeringconsumer fashions, as the sale of “cool” products becamethe nation’s large single export category.By the later twentieth century, also, consumerism in-creasingly intertwined with a global youth culture. Manyyoung people found participation in consumer fads ameans of expressing themselves against parental andother adult control. Again, consumerism had meanings,in terms of power relationships and personal expression,that went beneath the surface. The idea of participatingin cosmopolitan styles, and being seen in the process,provided signiﬁcant incentives for many young people.The geographical spread of consumerism continued, ofcourse. Soviet Russian society attempted to “co-op” con-sumerism, with state-run department stores like GUM;but the merger never entirely worked, and consumeristdissatisfaction with communism played a role in the col-lapse of the system. Urban African participation in con-sumerism began at least by the 1920s; Chinua Achebe’snovel No Longer at Ease, set in 1920s Nigeria, deals withthe inroads of consumer culture on traditional family val-ues. Latin American participation increased: by the latertwentieth century a trip to Disney World in Florida, com-plete with shopping spree, was a standard expression offamily success and doing right by one’s children.The ideaof Christmas shopping spread to Muslim Istanbul, whilethe purchase of gifts and cards was increasingly added tothe religious celebration of Ramadan.Access to consumerism remained uneven, of course.Many rural areas in Asia and Africa were barely touched,and this fact added to the increasingly important rural–urban divide in countries like China. Outright resistancecontinued as well.The rise of religious fundamentalismsfrom the 1970s onward represented in part a protestagainst consumerist values, including their frequent asso-ciation with sensuality and sexual license. Many post-communist Russians resented consumerist displays bythe “new Russian” middle class, partly, of course, fromenvy but partly from an older belief that community shar-ing should take precedence over individual expression.The process of assimilating consumerism has continuedinto the early twenty-ﬁrst century.Peter N. StearnsFurther ReadingAbelson, E. (1989). When ladies go a-thieving: Middle-class shoplifters inthe Victorian department store. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Berg, M., & Clifford, H. (Eds.). (1999). Consumers and luxury: Consumerculture in Europe 1650–1850. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univer-sity Press.Brewer, J., & Roy P. (1993). Consumption and the world of goods. NewYork: Routledge.Campbell, C. (1987). The romantic ethic and the spirit of modern con-sumerism. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.Marchand, R. (1985). Advertising the American dream. Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press.Slater, D. (1997). Consumer culture and modernity. Oxford, UK: BasilBlackwell.Stearns, P. N. (2001). Consumerism in world history:The global transfor-mation of desire. London: Routledge.Tobin, J. (1992). Re-made in Japan: Everyday life and consumer taste ina changing society. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.consumerism 439the modern poor are not pitied…but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the ﬁrst culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.•John Berger (b. 1926)

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ContainmentApolicy aimed at containing, or restricting, a hostile orpotentially hostile power through use of diplomacyand possibly force is referred to as containment. Histor-ical examples of containment include the coalitionsdesigned to contain French power in Europe during theeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, or Chineseattempts to contain Vietnamese and Soviet inﬂuence inSoutheast Asia after 1975. Containment can also be seenin the actions of Britain on the eve of World War II. Dur-ing the mid-to late 1930s the British government pursueda diplomatic strategy known as appeasement in dealingwith Nazi Germany. However Hitler proved unappeas-able and uninterested in long-term peaceful solutions.TheNazi occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939meant the end of appeasement. Instead the Britishresorted to containment by issuing a series of territorialguarantees to countries in Eastern Europe, most notablyPoland. According to the guarantee, should Poland ﬁnditself attacked by Germany, Britain would come to itsdefense. In this manner, the British were attempting tocontain German power in Europe.The Germans attackedPoland on 1 September 1939 and Britain declared waron Germany two days later.The term “containment” hasmany historical examples but is usually associated withthe policy followed by the United States toward theUSSR during the Cold War.Origins of Cold WarContainmentThe months immediately following the end of the WorldWar II saw deterioration in relations between the West-ern powers and the Soviet Union, who had formerly beenallies in the war against the Axis states. British andAmerican statesmen watched in alarm as the Sovietssolidiﬁed their control over Eastern Europe. The Sovietsseemed to be threatening Turkey and Iran, while a Com-munist insurgency in Greece steadily gained force. TheAmericans and British also blamed the Soviets for theslow pace of talks over the future of occupied Germany.An atmosphere of mistrust and unease settled over East–West relations.George Kennan and ContainmentOn 22 February 1946 George Kennan (b. 1904), a staffmember of the American embassy in Moscow, and long-time Soviet expert, sent a document analyzing Soviet pol-icy to his superiors in Moscow. Kennan’s analysis becameknown as the “Long Telegram,” and was published in1947 in the inﬂuential American journal Foreign Affairs.The journal editors attributed the article to “Mr. X,” eventhough it was generally known that “Mr. X” was actuallyGeorge Kennan. Kennan’s analysis of Soviet foreign pol-icy found widespread support in Washington and soonbecame the theoretical basis of containment.Kennan believed that the USSR, for ideological andhistoric reasons, was an inherently expansionist power. Inorder to justify their tyranny, Kennan argued, the Sovietleaders had to convince their people that the USSR wasthreatened by hostile capitalist powers.The Soviets wouldseek to expand territorially because that had been the pat-tern of Russian history. Surrounded by hostile nomadictribes, living on an open, vulnerable plain, Russian rulershad found security in conquest. As well, Communist ide-ology demanded that workers in foreign countries be “lib-erated.” Kennan noted that if the Soviets were confrontedat one point they would simply retreat and seek to ex-pand somewhere else. Kennan thought that the Sovietscould not be trusted in negotiations.They might agree totactical concessions but would never give up on their his-toric mission. However, Kennan did not believe that theSoviets wanted war, since they took a long-term view andwere content to wait for historical trends to play them-selves out. Since the collapse of capitalism was inevitable,according to Communist theory, there was no need totake dangerous risks. Kennan recommended that theUnited States pursue “a policy of ﬁrm containment,designed to confront the Russians with unalterablecounter-force at every point where they show signs ofencroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stableworld” (Kennan 1947, 581). Kennan speculated that if440 berkshire encyclopedia of world history
the USSR were unable to expand then long-term internalpressures would force drastic changes in the Sovietsystem.Critics of ContainmentKennan’s views, although popular in the government,provoked some criticism when made public.Walter Lipp-mann, a popular syndicated newspaper columnist andforeign affairs commentator of the time, wrote that con-tainment would involve the United States in numerousconﬂicts around the globe. The resources of the UnitedStates would be overextended and worn down. Others onthe political left criticized containment on the groundsthat they opposed any confrontation with the USSR.HenryWallace, a member ofTruman’s cabinet and a for-mer vice president under Roosevelt, publicly broke withTruman and said that Soviet policy was driven not byexpansionism but rather by fear. Containment would onlyworsen the situation. In 1948Wallace ran against Trumanin the presidential election, but ﬁnished a poor fourth.Containment StrategiesKennan’s views provided the basis for many Americanpolicies toward the USSR in the years to come. Early in1947 the British government informed Washington thatit would be unable to continue aid to the government ofGreece, which was then ﬁghting a bitter civil war againstthe Greek Communists. Since it was assumed that theSoviets were supporting the Greek Communists, Wash-ington feared that the fall of the Greek governmentwould bring Soviet power to the shores of the Mediter-ranean. On 12 March 1947 President Harry Truman, ina bid to gain Congressional support for a $400 millionaid package to Greece and Turkey, proclaimed what hascome to be known as the Truman Doctrine.Truman saidthat he believed that “it must be the policy of the UnitedStates to support free peoples who are resisting attemptedsubjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out theirown destinies in their own way” (Dunbabin 1994, 83).Truman added that American help should focus on eco-nomic and ﬁnancial aid.containment 441The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degradedinto politicians.•Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)At the same time concern in Washington over thegrowth and popularity of West European Communistparties led to the conclusion that a slow economic recov-ery from the war was contributing to the appeal of theCommunists. Accordingly on 5 June 1947 United Statessecretary of state George Marshall announced a programof extensive economic aid to European states in need.Formally known as the European Recovery Plan, it ismore popularly remembered as the Marshall Plan. TheUSSR and its satellite states refused to participate, statingthat they were not about to open their economies andsocieties to U.S. trade and U.S. auditors. Over the nextfour years most Western European states requested Mar-shall Plan assistance, with totals reaching more than $17billion. The Marshall Plan was fundamental to the WestEuropean economic recovery of the postwar era, al-though Communist parties in France and Italy remainedpopular for many years.Although Kennan had emphasized nonmilitary eco-nomic and diplomatic strategies for containment, andhad participated in the drawing up of the Marshall Plan,the intensiﬁcation of the Cold War meant that militarycontainment came to the fore. In August 1949 the USSRsuccessfully tested an atomic bomb, breaking the UnitedStates monopoly on atomic weapons. In October 1949the Chinese Communists, led by Mao Zedong, came topower in China. Finally, on 25 June 1950 the armies ofCommunist North Korea invaded South Korea. AlthoughSouth Korea had never previously been seen as vital toUnited States strategic interests,Truman decided that hecould not stand by.The United States entered the war onthe side of the South Koreans and soon became boggeddown in a bloody three-year stalemate.Earlier in 1950 the United States government hadundertaken a comprehensive review of its global defensestrategies. The review, completed by September, wasobviously inﬂuenced by the events of 1949 and theKorean War. Known as NSG-68, the review recom-mended a massive buildup of American atomic and con-ventional defense forces.The document almost certainlymarked a turn toward a military emphasis in contain-ment. Kennan later protested that by “counter force” he
had meant more than just military force, but such dis-tinctions were quickly lost in the heated atmosphere ofthe Cold War.Truman did not run in the 1952 presidential election,which was won by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.During the campaign the Republicans bitterly criticizedcontainment for abandoning the people of EasternEurope to a tyrannical political system. John FosterDulles, soon to be Eisenhower’s secretary of state, prom-ised to “roll back” Soviet inﬂuence in Eastern Europe. ButDulles recoiled from the idea of war, and so could do lit-tle more than continue containment after 1952. Dullesknew that a direct attempt to intervene in the Soviet East-ern bloc would provoke full-scale war. Instead, Dullesassumed, especially after Stalin died in 1953, that forcesof nationalism in Eastern Europe would do the job inbringing down the Soviet system. Yet another review ofAmerican defense strategy, carried out in 1953, came tothe same conclusion. However, the Americans did esca-late the propaganda war by improving the broadcastcapabilities of Radio Free Europe.Containment after KoreaThe Korean War also posed continuing serious questionsabout what exactly containment meant. Was the UnitedStates to become involved in every single conﬂict aroundthe globe where Communism was perceived to be athreat? Were some areas of the globe more valuable tothe United States than others? Some commentators,such as Henry Kissinger, have pointed out that contain-ment was essentially a defensive, reactive policy thatconceded the initiative to the other side. Others haveargued that proponents of containment grossly over-rated the Soviet military threat, which in the early 1950swas still minimal in terms of atomic weapons. Contain-ment was also said to have underestimated the usefulnessof long-term negotiations in solving East-West problems.During the 1950s supporters of containment con-jured up the metaphor of a row of dominoes to illustratewhat might happen if containment failed in any givenarea. The successful toppling of the ﬁrst domino meansthe whole row will fall. A successful Communist takeoverin any one country might prompt a whole series oftakeovers, resulting in an eventual direct threat to theUnited States itself.The logic of containment resulted atleast partially in American involvement in the VietnamWar in the early 1960s. Some feared that the loss ofSouth Vietnam would topple other Southeast Asianstates, so the United States became involved in a secondmajor land war in Asia since 1945. The result was acostly and bitter conﬂict, deep social division in theUnited States, and the eventual military defeat of SouthVietnam in 1975.With military containment discredited, U.S. presidentsstill had to struggle with how to respond to perceivedSoviet gains in what was seen as the zero-sum nature ofthe Cold War. In Angola and southern Africa in the late1970s, and in Afghanistan and Central America in the1980s, Washington relied on proxy forces to combatSoviet inﬂuence. The United States found dissidentgroups and organizations opposed to Soviet-backedMarxist states. Such organizations were then armed andsupported by the U.S. Examples include the Contrarebels in Nicaragua, the mujahideen resistance factions inAfghanistan, and the UNITA movement in Angola.The obvious decline of the USSR in the late 1980sprompted much retrospection on Kennan’s original ideasand the ways in which they had been used, or misused.In 1987 Foreign Affairs reprinted Kennan’s article in itsentirety. Some saw Kennan as a far-sighted and perceptiveobserver of the USSR, while others decried what they feltwas the distortion of his ideas and the high cost of mili-tary containment over the years.Historically containment, in the context of the ColdWar, will be remembered as a doctrine that did much todeﬁne the ‘battle lines’ of the Cold War.The wars foughtunder the banner of containment had a tremendousimpact of the peoples of Asia and Africa. However, con-tainment will also remain an important diplomatic toolin the new century and in the near future will most likelybe applied to perceived ‘rogue’ states.Paul W. Doerr See also Diplomacy442 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyHistory is ﬁlled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairsand wooden shoes coming up.•Voltaire (1694–1778)
Further ReadingAmbrose, S. (1994). Eisenhower. New York: Simon and Schuster.Dunbabin, J. (1994). The Cold War:The great powers and their allies. NewYork: Longman.Gaddis, J. (1982). Strategies of containment: A critical appraisal of post-war American national security policy. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.Gaddis, J. (1987). The long peace: Inquiries into the history of the ColdWar. New York: Oxford University Press.Hogan, M. (1989). The Marshall Plan: America, Britain and the recon-struction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. Cambridge, UK: Cam-bridge University Press.Immerman, R. (Ed.). (1990). John Foster Dulles and the diplomacy of theCold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Judge, H., & Langdon, J. (1996). A hard and bitter peace: A global historyof the Cold War. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.Kennan, G. (1947). The sources of Soviet conduct. Foreign Affairs, 25,570–582.Kennan, G. (1967). Memoirs: 1925–1950. Boston: Little, Brown.Kissinger, H. (1994). Diplomacy. New York: Simon and Schuster.May, E. (1993). American Cold War strategy: Interpreting NSC 68.Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.Mayers, D. (1990). George Kennan and the dilemmas of U.S. foreign pol-icy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Steel, R. (1981). Walter Lippmann and the American century. New York:Vintage.Ulam, A. (1968). Expansion and coexistence:The history of Soviet foreignpolicy, 1917–1967. New York: Praeger.Yergin, D. (1977). Shattered peace: The origins of the Cold War and thenational security state. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin.Contraceptionand Birth ControlThe history of birth control enables us to understandthe global reverberations of an agenda for wider dis-semination of contraceptive information in the earlytwentieth century. For most part, advocates of birth con-trol in countries such as India, Japan, South Africa,Canada, Great Britain, and the United States came fromprivileged social, cultural, and economic backgrounds.Advocates of birth control found eugenic, Malthusian,and demographic arguments most compelling in makinga case for national and international support for birthcontrol and contraception. Some advocates also linkedthe demand for birth control to improved maternalhealth and national well being.No history is complete without a set of historicalactors; important participants in the debates on birthcontrol dating from the 1920s onwards included suchplayers as Mary Burgess, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay,Raghnunath Dhondo Karve, A. R. Kaufman, Edith How-Martyn, Eileen Palmer, Narayan Sitaram Phadke, Aliyap-pin Padmanabha Pillay, Margaret Sanger, Ursala Scott,Kato Shidzue, Marie Stopes, and Elsa Woodrow. As theabove list—which does not purport to be complete—suggests, far from being a solely Western phenomenon,the demand for birth control was a complex interconti-nental movement, with an active cohort that supportedand sometimes competed with one another’s work acrossnational boundaries. This cohort of activists collectivelycreated a global propaganda effort to gain acceptance fortheir controversial demand both within and beyond theirnations.Domestic resistance and political realities made itimportant for many advocates to seek a larger global plat-form to win support for their cause. For instance, inter-national prominence and recognition greatly facilitatedthe work of Margaret Sanger, a U.S. activist, since shefaced strong opposition against birth control in theUnited States due to the Comstock Act (1871), which for-bade any dissemination of contraceptive knowledgethrough the postal system. A similar law banning birthcontrol was passed in Canada in 1892 and was notrepealed until 1969. There were no legal bans imposedon birth control in India, Japan, or Great Britain duringthis time.International Conferencesand PublicationsThe early advocates of birth control worked on a globalplatform and were in dialogue with one another from asearly as the 1920s, exchanging and borrowing ideas.Their modes of intellectual exchange included organizinginternational conferences such as the International BirthControl Conference, held in London in 1922 and in NewYork in 1925. Indian advocates such as GopaljeeAhluwalia attended both these conferences, as did manyother participants from across the globe. Another largecontraception and birth control 443First Law of Socio-Genetics:Celibacy is not hereditary.•Unknown
population conference was organized in India in 1936;Sanger was among those invited.The early advocates also published journals thatbecame important intellectual sites for internationalexchange and discussion on the subject of contraceptionand birth control. Some of the important journals pub-lished from London, New York, Madras, and Bombay(now Mumbai) in the 1920s and 1930s were Birth Con-trol News (United States) Birth Control Review (UnitedStates), Madras Birth Control Bulletin (India), and Mar-riage Hygiene (India). Again, this is not a comprehensivelist, but one that makes clear the rich international vari-ety of publication on the subject. Advocates solicited arti-cles for these journals internationally, and many of thesejournals carried speciﬁc information on birth controlwork and clinics around the world.Birth control advocates also published a large numberof monographs and books on the subject, which circu-lated globally. Books by Sanger and Marie Stopes (aBritish activist) were read by birth control advocates inIndia, South Africa, Japan, Britain, and United States.Besides being read by a large body of birth control advo-cates, these books were also read by lay people seekingto control their own fertility. Many private individuals inIndia and South Africa who read books by Sanger andStopes wrote to them asking for further clariﬁcation onthe methods discussed in their books. Stopes’s MarriedLove and Wise Parenthood: The Treatise on Birth Controlfor Married People, both published in 1918, circulatedwidely in South Africa and other parts of the British em-pire. Sanger’s books Motherhood in Bondage and TheNew Motherhood were popular around the world. Inter-national birth control activists also endorsed one an-other’s books; Sanger, for instance, wrote a forward forNarayan Sitaram Phadke’s 1927 Sex Problem in Indiawhich gave this book greater credibility in the eyes ofdomestic readers in colonial India.Financial andTechnological Support Birth control activists sought ﬁnancial support for theirwork from donors across the globe. Stopes, for instance,wrote letters to Indian princes in 1927 asking them tosupport her clinical work in London, while the Indianadvocate Aliyappin Padmanabha Pillay requested ﬁnan-cial help from the London Eugenic Society to continuethe publication of his journal Marriage Hygiene. Sangerwrote to C. P. Blacker, of the London Eugenic Society, torequest funds for her India visit in 1935. Sanger’s visit toJapan in 1922 was ﬁnanced by the Japanese magazineReconstruction. For her part, Kato Shidzue, a Japanesebirth control advocate, went to the United States in1937 to raise money for her work in Japan. She touredin the United States speaking about birth control.Besides ﬁnancial networks that crossed nationalboundaries, reproductive technologies were also trans-ported globally. Stopes supplied contraceptives to SouthAfricans in the 1930s. Stopes’s Society for ConstructiveBirth Control and Racial Progress (SCBC) offered to trainbirth control activists from India and South Africa. Manyadvocates also visited Sanger in the United States hopingto gain technical training on the subject. Elsa Woodrow,from the Cape Town Mother’s Clinic Committee in SouthAfrica, contacted Stopes in 1931, seeking advice on howto set up a clinic and the costs associated with it. Herorganization associated itself with the SCBC and orderedcontraceptive supplies from Stopes.The Mother’s WelfareSociety of South Africa got ﬁnancial support from Stopesin 1938–1939. On her various visits to India, Sangerand her assistant Edith How-Martyn carried contracep-tive technology with them, which they distributed to thevarious clinics in India. They also presented advocateswith gynecological plaques, which were used by doctorsand advocate to demonstrate the use of different contra-ceptive methods.Discursive ParametersEarly advocates of birth control drew upon a range ofintellectual ideas to make a strong case for the dissemi-nation of contraceptive information. Many advocatesfound it beneﬁcial to deploy a numerical argument, rely-ing heavily upon census ﬁgures that were increasinglybecoming available in most countries during the earlytwentieth century. For instance, the colonial census of444 berkshire encyclopedia of world history
1931 in India revealed a sharp rise inpopulation. This data was used promotea Malthusian argument for birth controlas a remedy for controlling spiralingdemographic growth. Nationalist advo-cates of birth control were also quick todraw a connection between nationalpoverty and size of the nation’s popula-tion. None of the early advocates of birthcontrol called for resource redistributionto alleviate national poverty, however.Interestingly enough, Mohandas Gandhi,who strongly opposed the use of anychemical and mechanical contraceptivedevice, appears to have been one of theﬁrst to call for resource redistribution asa solution to India’s growing populationproblem. He was strongly opposed tobirth control on moral and philosophicalgrounds, and debated with Sanger onthe subject in 1936.Indian feminists such as Kamala-devi Chattopadhyay joined Sanger andStopes in making a case for birth controlas a means of improving women’s mater-nal health. Lower maternal and infantmortality ﬁgures, it was argued, wereimportant indicators of national well-being. Birth control activists also arguedthat lower fertility ﬁgures were a sign ofmodernity, especially for non-Westernnations, which were seen to have higherfertility ﬁgures than Western nations suchas France and Canada. Fertility ﬁgures in France andCanada had been declining from the late nineteenthcentury onwards, which led to a strong opposition tobirth control in those countries.Tension between Rhetoricand TechnologyExamining the writings of the various advocates of birthcontrol would leave one with the impression that theyhad something concrete to offer in terms of contraceptivetechnology. However, on a closer examination it seemsthat the international birth control movement was longon rhetoric but short on technology, especially before theinvention and testing of the contraceptive pill in 1960.In the period between 1930 and 1950 birth controlactivists greatly differed among themselves about themost appropriate contraceptive technology. Sanger andLydia DeVilbiss were promoting a spermicidal douchecontraception and birth control 445An advertisement from the 1921 World Almanac forMargaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race in whichshe advocates birth control.
powder that had been was tested in Britain.The powderwas in use in some of the southern states in the UnitedStates. It was marketed in India too. There were com-plaints against the powder, however; in India womencomplained about vaginal irritation and also about thedifﬁculty in using this method given the lack of privacy intheir working-class homes. In the face of these com-plaints, Pillay recommended condoms as the most reliableform of contraceptive. Stopes, in the meantime, claimedthat she had discovered the ideal method for working-class women of London and for poor women in India andSouth Africa. The method Stopes was promoting was acotton waste pessary dipped in olive oil.This method wasnot endorsed by Indian doctors and advocates.In India, practitioners of Ayurveda, a traditional Indiansystem of medicine, advertised their products in vernac-ular magazines such as Madhuri and Sudha in the 1930s,while biomedical journals such as The Indian MedicalGazette carried advertisements for various commerciallymarketed contraceptives. Most of these advertisementsprovided addresses of local chemists who carried theseproducts, but some advertisements in Indian medicaljournals gave only a London address, which indicatesthat birth control technologies circulated globally andthat consumers shopped in a global market. However, itshould also be pointed out that consumers of theseglobal products, especially in countries such as India,were primarily members of social and economic eliteswho could afford to pay for the product and its interna-tional postage cost.Counterhistories of Birth ControlIn the late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries,scholars have shifted their focus away from celebratingthe work of birth control pioneers and have begun exam-ining how this work was experienced by less powerfulsocial and economic groups in different countries. NativeAmerican groups in the United States have spoken outagainst contraceptive technologies, which they arguehave been used to police their sexuality rather than toempower native women to make informed reproductivechoices. The history of birth control movement in Indiahas bought to light the call of the Indian feminist leaderBegum Hamid Ali for the sterilization of the “unﬁt” in herenthusiasm for controlling India’s population. LikewisePuerto Rican scholars tell a sad history of Puerto Ricanwomen who, without knowing and without giving con-sent, became the guinea pigs used for testing the contra-ceptive pill in the 1950s.These revisionist histories forceus to examine the real human costs that underwrote theefforts to manage human fecundity.Future Agenda forReproductive HealthFeminist scholars working on reproductive health issuesare constantly asking themselves what the future agendafor reproductive health should look like. Feministresearchers, policy makers, and activists all agree that thesuccess of contraceptive technology in the future will liein democratic approaches, attentive to local needs andbeliefs, seeking to empower women in making informedchoices.Sanjam AhluwaliaSee also Women’s Reproductive Rights MovementsFurther ReadingAccampo, E. A. (1996). The rhetoric of reproduction and the reconﬁgu-ration of womanhood in the French birth control movement, 1890–1920. Journal of Family History, 21(3), 351–371.Ahluwalia, S. (2000). Controlling births, policing sexualities: History ofbirth control in colonial India, 1877–1946. Unpublished doctoral dis-sertation, University Of Cincinnati.Anandhi, S. (1998). Rethinking Indian modernity: The political economyof Indian sexuality. In M. E. John & J. Nair (Eds.), A question ofsilence? The sexual economies of modern India. New Delhi, India: Kalifor Women.Bullough,V. L. (Ed.). (2001). Encyclopedia of birth control. Santa Barbara,CA: ABC-CLIO.Chesler, E. (1992). Woman of valor: Margaret Sanger and the birth con-trol movement in America. New York: Anchor Books.Gandhi, M. K. (1947). Self-restraint versus self-indulgence. Ahmsdabad,India: Navajivan Publishing House.Ginsburg, F. D., & Rapp. R. (1995). Conceiving the new world order:Theglobal politics of reproduction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: CaliforniaUniversity Press.Gordon, L. (1990). Woman’s body, woman’s right: Birth control in Amer-ica. New York: Penguin Books.446 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyMen, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights,and nothing less.•Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
Hopper, H. (2004). Kato Shidzue: A Japanese feminist. New York:Longman.Malthus, T. R. (1914). An essay on population (Vol. 1). London: J. M.Dent and Sons.McLaren, A., & McLaren, A. T. (1997). The bedroom and the state: Thechanging practices and policies of contraception and abortion inCanada, 1880–1997. Toronto, Canada: Oxford University Press.Musallam, B. F. (1983). Sex and society in Islam: Birth control before thenineteenth century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Nueshul, P. (1998). Marie C. Stopes and the popularization of birth con-trol technology. Journal of History of Technology, 39, 245–272.Porter, R., & Hall, L. (1995). The facts of life:The creation of sexual knowl-edge in Britain, 1650–1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Raina, B. L. (1990). Planning family in India: Prevedic times to early1950s. New Delhi, India: Commonwealth Publishers.Ramirez de Arellano, A., & Seipp, C. ( 1983). Colonialism, Catholicism,and contraception: A history of birth control in Puerto Rico. ChapelHill: The University of North Carolina Press.Ramusack, B. N. (1989). Embattled advocates: The debates on birth con-trol in India, 1920–1940. Journal of Women’s History, 1(2), 34–64.Smith, A. (2002). Better dead than pregnant: The colonization of nativewomen’s reproductive health. In J. Silliman & A. Bhattacharjee (Eds.),Policing the national body: Race, gender and criminalization. Cam-bridge, MA: South End Press.Soloway, R. (1982). Birth control and the population question in England.Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.Contract LawContract law is the body of law which regulates andenforces promises and exchanges, for either imme-diate or future performance, between two or more con-senting parties and provides legal remedies if one or moreof the parties break these agreements. As such, contractlaw fulﬁlls a moral, social, and economic function. Themoral function of contract law is rooted in the premisethat promises made are to be kept, which is almost uni-versally recognized in customary law, as well as to vary-ing extents in positive law. Socially, contract law is ameans for regulating and deﬁning social relationships,such as in the case of marriage contracts, or contractsbetween different social orders or castes. Economically,contract law facilitates commerce by providing a form oflegal guarantee of remedies for broken contracts, whichfacilitated the development of long-term trade, as well asthe use of negotiable instruments, such as letters of creditand bills of lading.The Moral Function of ContractsThe legal scholar Harold J. Berman wrote that the West-ern ideal of contract law began with the theory that “apromise created an obligation to God” (Berman 1986,112). Not only does the canon law of the Jewish, Islamic,and Christian faiths afﬁrm this idea, nearly all cultureshave a form of contract premised on the moral notion thatpromises are to be kept. In traditional India and China,contracts were often adjudicated in terms of moral prin-ciples (dharma in Hinduism; li in Confucianism); a con-tract which violated general rules of morality or equitycould be ruled invalid, even if the acts were otherwise licit.Roman law mandated that contracts be “clothed,” that is,parties must have had a tangible purpose or reason(causa) for entering into a contract.Therefore,Roman lawemphasized the binding nature of the promises madebetween parties, and in determining the legality of a con-tract, jurists in the Roman law tradition privileged theends, or the reasons for creating the contract over themeans by which the contract was created. Medieval canon-ists added an element of Christian morality to contract lawwhich held that the ﬁnal purpose of a contract,regardlessof the intermediate expectations of the parties, must con-form to moral principles. The Civil Code of Napoleon(1804) mandated that a valid contract was one to whichparities voluntarily agreed, and that was done for licit pur-poses; the form of the contract was secondary to the ends.In Anglo-American common law, principles of equityapplied as well, and the doctrine of unjust enrichmentmeant that courts could order quasi-contract actions,which are court ordered adjustments to contracts that aremeant to restore equity between the parties, to recoversums from those unjustly enriched on behalf of plaintiffs.The Social Function of ContractsFor most of the history of traditional China and Japan,there was no formal contract law, although other laws,such as imperial or feudal laws, could be used to seek legalprotection and remedies in contract disputes. Moreover,customary law in China and Japan served the purposes ofcontract law 447
substantive contract law.This customary law was closelybound to the social structures of each society: the Confu-cian familial and clan hierarchy in China and the feudalsystem of traditional Japan. In China, the Confucianideal of the family, which dictated strict obligationsbetween individual family members, relationships ofwhole family units to each other, and to the society as awhole, superseded any individual contractual relation-ships. In other words, contractual relationships werebound ﬁrst by the Confucian system, and only secondar-ily by the individual agreement. Traditionally in China,recourse to the courts was considered the very last resortin a contract dispute; arbitration was almost alwayspreferable, because an irresolvable dispute signiﬁed asmall breakdown in the traditional Confucian order. Sim-ilarly in Japan, contract disputes were almost always sub-ject to mediation, except that where in China the familyor clan formed the basis of arbitration, in Japan the feu-dal village more than the family was the operative unit. Inthe West, contract law formed part of a broader law ofobligations which similarly deﬁned social relations. Theintricacies of the Roman system of patronage meant thatRoman law considered “like” contracts (obligationes exquasi contractu), such as the giving of gifts, to be a sourceof legally binding relationships. Even in modern businesspractice, as Stewart Macaulay has observed, contracts areless a means of regulating exchange than a method ofbuilding relationships, and a breach of contract is a seri-ous break which “often results in a ‘divorce’ ending the‘marriage’ between the two businesses, since a contractaction is likely to carry charges with at least an overtoneof bad faith” (Macaulay 1963, 65).The Economic Functions of ContractsThe English legal scholar Henry Maine wrote that a shiftfrom “status to contract” was fundamental to the creationof modern social and economic systems (Maine 1917,100). In other words, modern (i.e., Western) legal sys-tems, contractual relationships, and economic systemsdepended on the social equality of the parties, the abil-ity to freely enter into exchanges, and the conﬁdence thelaw would enforce these exchanges. In ancient Greece,by comparison, although Athenian contract law allowed448 berkshire encyclopedia of world historyContract Law: A Brief OverviewContracts are promises between two parties that arelegally enforceable. The law provides remedies if apromise is breached (not honored) and recognizes theperformance of a promise as a duty. Contracts arisewhen a duty does or may come into existence,because of a promise made by one of the parties. Tobe legally binding as a contract, a promise must beexchanged for adequate consideration. Adequate con-sideration is a beneﬁt or detriment that a partyreceives which reasonably and fairly induces them tomake the promise. For example, promises that arepurely gifts are not considered enforceable becausethe personal satisfaction the grantor of the promisemay receive from the act of giving is normally notconsidered adequate consideration. Certain prom-ises that are not considered contracts may, in limitedcircumstances, be enforced if one party has relied tohis detriment on the assurances of the other party.In the United States, contracts are governed pri-marily by state statutory and common (judge-made)law, as well as by private law. Private law principallyincludes the terms of the agreement between the par-ties who are exchanging promises. This private lawmay override many of the rules otherwise establishedby state law. Statutory law (in the form of codes) mayrequire some contracts be put in writing and executedwith particular formalities. Otherwise, the partiesmay enter into a binding agreement without signinga formal written document.The Uniform CommercialCode, whose original Articles have been adopted innearly every U.S. state, represents a body of statutorylaw that governs important categories of contracts.Contracts related to particular activities or businesssectors may still be highly regulated by state and/orfederal law.On an international level, in 1988, the UnitedStates joined the United Nations Convention onContracts for the International Sale of Goods thatnow governs contracts within its scope.Benjamin S. Kerschberg
for absolute freedom to enter into contracts, in practicethis only applied to citizens of the polis. In the seven-teenth century, English jurists began to emphasize theconcepts of “consideration” and the “bargain,” which,although similar to the Roman concept of causa, dif-fered in that English common law generally did not con-sider either the ends of a contract nor the status of theparties involved. Instead, English law concentrated onthe bargaining between parties from which a considera-tion, an act or promise by which one party acts in con-sideration of a reciprocal action, creates a binding agree-ment. English common law also developed the doctrineof “strict-liability,” which placed an absolute bindingobligation on the parties regardless of the reason fornonperformance. In Paradine v. Jane (1647), a lesseewas still bound to pay rent to his landlord, although thedefendant’s lands and crops had been destroyed duringthe English Civil War, because the court ruled that con-tracts are entered into freely by the parties involved.Thisseemingly harsh measure, however, has been undeniablyimportant in the development of commerce and trade bymaking negotiable instruments, such as letters of credit,checks, and bills of exchange (all of which are essentiallycontracts which promise future payments), a more efﬁ-cacious way of transferring large sums of money, becauseno matter how many parties that negotiable instrumenthas passed, the recipient could expect payment because“strict liability” still bound the original issuer to the orig-inal contract.Historians and Contract LawThe intricacies and formalities of contracts and contractlaw have often been imposing to the point that many his-torians have disregarded contract law as a subject ofinquiry. However, contract law, even in its most formalexpressions, reﬂects the historical context in which thelaw was created, or contract disputes adjudicated. More-over, as the American legal scholar Lon L. Fuller observed,contract law is not only the positive law of contracts, butan expression of customary law, and thus “contract law. . .refers primarily, not to the law of or about contracts, butto the ‘law’ a contract itself brings into existence” (Fuller1969, 14).Thus, for the historian, contract law can yieldimportant information about culture, ideology, society,and economics and a valuable point of inquiry into thepast.Douglas B. PalmerFurther ReadingAtiyah, P.S. (1995). An introduction to the law of contract. Oxford, UK:Clarendon Press.Berman, H.J. (1986). The religious sources of general contract law: Anhistorical perspective. The Journal of Law and Religion, 4(1), 103–124.Berman, H.J. (2003). Law and revolution:Vol. 2.The impact of the Protes-tant Reformations on the Western legal tradition. Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press.Fuller, L.L. (1969). Human interaction and the law. The American Jour-nal of Jurisprudence, 14(1), 1–36.Gordley, J. (1991). The philosophical origins of modern contract doctrine.Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.Hansen,V. (1995). Negotiating daily life in traditional China: How ordi-nary people used contracts, 600–1400. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-versity Press.Macaulay, S. (1963). Non-contractual relations in business: A preliminarystudy. The American Sociological Review, 28(1), 55–67.Maine, H. (1917). Ancient law. London: J.M. Dent.Versteeg, R. (2002). Law in the ancient world. Durham, NC: CarolinaAcademic Press.Watson, A. (1995). The spirit of Roman law. Athens: University of Geor-gia Press.Zweigert, K., & Kötz, H. (1987). Introduction to comparative law:Vol. 2.The institutions of private law. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.Corvée LaborSee Labor Systems, CoerciveCreation MythsCreation myths are stories, or collections of stories,that tell of the origins of all things: of communitiesand landscapes, of the earth, its animals and plants, of thestars, and of everything that exists. They represent whatcreation myths 449Death is the universal salt of states; Blood is the base of allthings—law and war.•Philip James Bailey (1816–1902)
“history” has meant for most human communities. Cre-ation myths appear to have existed in all human societiesand they are deeply embedded within all the major worldreligions. By offering answers to questions about origins,creation myths provide maps of reality within whichpeople can learn about their place in the cosmos and theroles they are expected to play. As Barbara Sproul haswritten: “[C]reation myths are the most comprehensive ofmythic statements, addressing themselves to the widestrange of questions of meaning, but they are also the mostprofound. They deal with ﬁrst causes, the essences ofwhat their cultures perceive reality to be. In them peopleset forth their primary understanding of man and theworld, time and space” (1991, 2–3). Marie-Louise vonFranz writes: “[Creation myths] refer to the most basicproblems of human life, for they are concerned with theultimate meaning, not only of our existence, but of theexistence of the whole cosmos” (1972, 5).This article will discuss creation myths and the manystriking parallels that exist between traditional creationmyths and the foundation stories of modern societies,which are embedded within modern science and histori-ography. Are modern accounts of origins fundamentallydifferent from those of traditional societies? Or can they,too, be regarded as “creation myths”? Such questions areworth pursuing because they raise important questionsabout the nature of the truths that can be attained withinmodern historiography, particularly when, like world his-tory, it aspires to a coherent account of the past on manyscales.A Creation Myth ExampleCreation myths have taken many different forms. TheGenesis story within the Judeo-Christian-Islamic reli-gious tradition counts as a creation myth. So do the ori-gin stories found in the oral traditions of societies withoutwritten traditions.Appreciating the full signiﬁcance of cre-ation myths is difﬁcult because, like so many culturaltraits, their meaning is obvious to those brought up withthem, but opaque to outsiders. So the creation myths ofothers are almost invariably experienced as strange,exotic, and wrong. As the deﬁnition of myth in the Ency-clopaedia Americana points out,“a myth is understood inits own society as a true story. (It is only when it is seenfrom outside its society that it has come to acquire thepopular meaning of a story that is untrue)” (Long 1996,699). The difﬁculties of understanding a creation mythfrom outside can be appreciated from the followingextract. It comes from the account of a French anthro-pologist, Marcel Griaule, who is summarizing his con-versations with Ogotemmeli, a wise man of the Dogonpeople of Mali. Ogotemmeli had been authorized toreveal something of his society’s cosmology, but it is clearfrom the conversation that he was aware of speaking toan outsider, who might not understand or fully appreci-ate all he said, and Griaule himself was acutely aware ofthe difﬁculties of this complex process of translation.The stars came from pellets of earth ﬂung out into space bythe God Amma, the one God. He had created the sun andthe moon by a more complicated process, which was notthe ﬁrst known to man but is the ﬁrst attested invention ofGod: the art of pottery.The sun is, in a sense, a pot raisedonce for all to white heat and surrounded by a spiral of redcopper with eight turns. The moon is in the same shape,but its copper is white. It was heated only one quarter at atime. Ogotemmeli said he would explain later the move-ments of these bodies. For the moment he was concernedonly to indicate the main lines of the design, and from thatto pass to its actors. He was anxious…to give an idea ofthe size of the sun. “Some,” he said, “think it is as large asthis encampment, which would mean thirty cubits. But itis really bigger. Its surface area is bigger than the whole ofSanga Canton.” And after some hesitation he added: “It isperhaps even bigger than that.”. . .The moon’s function was not important, and he wouldspeak of it later. He said however that, while Africans werecreatures of light emanating from the fullness of the sun,Europeans were creatures of the moonlight: hence theirimmature appearance. . . .The god Amma,…took a lump of clay, squeezed it inhis hand and ﬂung it from him, as he had done with thestars. The clay spread and fell on the north, which is thetop, and from there stretched out to the south, which is thebottom of the world, although the whole movement washorizontal.The earth lies ﬂat, but the north is at the top. It450 berkshire encyclopedia of world history