Comparative Political History Research Articles

Partition's Legacies by Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook

Reviewed by: Partition's Legacies by Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook Gurharpal Singh Partition's Legacies By Joya Chatterji with an Introduction by David Washbrook. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. Since the publication of Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism, and Partition 1932-1947 (1994) and The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967 (2007), Joya Chatterji has emerged as one of the foremost historians working on the division of India. These works, which have become the standard texts on the subject, are now complemented by this copious volume, which brings together a collection of essays written over a period of twenty years in which the author examines broader themes that shaped this seminal moment in modern South Asian history. The collection is grouped into four categories: identities, decolonisation and nation-making; refugees, mobility and migration; immobility; and citizenship. It also includes an introduction by the late David Washbrook summarising how Chatterji has both anticipated and has been at the forefront of the changing theoretical landscape of the study of the Partition of India. The common theme that binds the volume is Chatterji's focus on Bengal—its history, people and post-1947 development in South Asia and beyond in the Bengali diaspora. There is much to admire in this rich, voluminous collection. Foremost, it offers an excellent example of how to use comparative political history to re-evaluate the Partition that is so often viewed as sui generis. Most essays in it follow a common structure by challenging existing conventional wisdom, formulating the research question, offering a solid empirical foundation for the arguments outlined, and the need for broader comparative reflection to make sense of Partition and its enduring processes. It is impossible to do justice to this collection, but I highlight four aspects that I found especially noteworthy. Chatterji's understanding of decolonisation with its rushed transfer of power reinforces her earlier readings that it was Congress' pursuit of a downsized India without the Muslim-majority provinces that precipitated the cataclysmic events of 1947. "The Congress party's single-minded Unitarianism," she observes, "forced a de-territorialised, variously imagined, 'Muslim nation' into a 'moth-eaten and truncated'state" (33-4). Related to this, the Congress engineered to control the processes and outcomes of the Boundary Commission, so much so that Mountbatten accepted the party's proposed terms of reference without demure, dismissing Jinnah's suggestion that the whole process should be overseen by the United Nations. Heavily influenced by the Congress, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, according to Chatterji, eventually "carved out Pakistan like an inexpert butcher from those parts of the empire the Congress leaders no longer wanted" (34). The essays on the refugees provide strikingly new insights not only into the reasons and nature of the migratory flows that took place but the complex interplay of government actions and individual and collective social capital. A new reading is offered of the settlement of refugees in West Bengal which is traditionally associated with the rise of the communist movement in the state and substantially explains the subsequent ghettoization of Muslims in a few districts and urban localities. And finally, there is much in the volume of the making of identities—historical, modern and diasporic—in shaping the politics of Bengal and the related contestations around citizenship in South Asia and overseas. A collection of this nature inevitably includes some generalisations that are difficult to sustain. Chatterji's contention that "no one expected the carnage that followed" (34) the British withdrawal is hard to justify because since 1940, if not earlier, the Sikh leadership had consistently warned of the consequences of the partition of Punjab if Sikh interests were marginalised. Throughout the 1940s, intelligence reports recognised the fact but the decision-making leadership was comfortable with dismissing Sikh demands as a "nuisance." In the event, Master Tara Singh's declaration after the Lahore Resolution that any scheme for Pakistan would have to cross an "ocean of blood" was much closer to the mark than the statements of Jinnah or Nehru that a transfer to power to the dominions of India and Pakistan would not be accompanied by mass migration. Similarly, it is difficult to see how the inter...

Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and the Comparative Political History of Pre-Eighteenth-Century Empires

This essay critically analyses the legacy of Eisenstadt’s The Political Systems of Empires for the comparative political history of preindustrial empires. It argues that Eisenstadt has given us a rich toolkit to conceptualize the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of empires by theorizing the structural relationships between social groups in large-scale polities and among such polities, and by analysing global patterns of development in the distribution of the sources of social power. The Political Systems of Empires provides an inventory of key questions and dynamics that a comparative history of power relationships in empires cannot ignore. This essay, furthermore, discusses three methodological problems in Eisenstadt’s work which have had a significant impact on comparative empire studies between the 1980s and the 2000s. The essay argues that certain shared features of comparative studies of pre-industrial empires help perpetuate Eurocentric analyses: the foregrounding of select empires and periods as ideal types (typicality), the focus on macro-historical structures and dynamics without the integration of social relationships and actions in historical conjunctures (the lack of scalability), and the search for convergence and divergence. These features need to be overcome to make Eisenstadt’s legacy viable for comparative political history.

A Comparative Political History: Israel, Geshur and the ‘Amurrite Age’

This article offers a comparative approach to political history in ancient Israel. It focuses on political refugees and prétendants to thrones ( kaltū) documented in the cuneiform tablet collection from Mari and demonstrates how the careers of kaltū transpired at the nexus of domestic and international politics. Thereafter, it treats the Absalom narrative and argues that Absalom's political aspirations, which led him to become a political refugee in Geshur, precipitated a waning in the relations between Israel and Geshur. The clearest evidence of the deteriorating relations between Israel and Geshur, it is argued, comes from the narrative concerning Absalom's revolt against David.

Constraining campaigning: the legal treatment of non-profit policy advocacy across 24 countries

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the findings of a 24 country study of the legal restrictions on the freedom of non-profit and charitable organisations to engage in public policy campaigning. The countries are divided into those which organise the legal status of non-profit bodies around the concept of a charity, and those that do not. The central finding is that all and only charity law countries have constraints on campaigning which are specific to non-profit bodies. The paper reviews a number of possible explanations for this, at the level of jurisprudential rationales which might show that it is necessary or at least rational for only the charity law countries to have developed such restrictions. To varying degrees, all are found wanting. It is suggested that no explanation based on an ‘inner logic of the law’ will serve to explain the phenomenon, and that future research might concentrate on comparative political history rather than on jurisprudence.

The Comparative Political History of Two Tribal Governments

The recent history of two American Indian tribal governments, the Navajo Nation, and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona, provide background for the examination of the paths followed by two tribal governments in seeking to establish and maintain legitimated self-rule within the federal governmental structure of the United States. The Navajo Nation has its capitol at Window Rock, on a reservation of 25,000 square miles, in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and a small area of southeastern Utah. The Navajo population is estimated between 160,000 and 170,000 people. It is the largest American Indian tribe in the United States. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona has the Pascua Pueblo Reservation, with a land area of 892 acres, near Tucson, Arizona, and off-reservation membership in four major villages, Yoem Pueblo in Marana, Guadalupe near Tempe, Barrio Libre in South Tucson, and Old Pascua in Tucson. All of the communities are in southern Arizona. The tribal enrollment was 8,200 at the time of the first election in June, 1988. These two Indian nations are unalike in many ways, but, then, no two tribes are alike, and each tribal government has its own unique history of how it came to be. Both tribes trace their ultimate origins to mythological events in the pre-columbian past. Both have been, in more recent history, included within the political boundaries of the Spanish colonial empire, the Mexican national state, and now the United States. The Navajo Nation retains a part of its ancestral homeland within the boundaries of its present reservation. The Pascua Yaqui communities are separated from their homeland in the Mexican state of Sonora by the United States/Mexican border. Each of these governments, whatever their historical origin, share the commonalities of having passed through the process of receiving federal recognition as a tribal entity (sovereign) from the federal government. These tribes, as all other tribes, have been forced to spend much of their time and energy either resisting negative federal policy or trying to obtain the benefits of favorable policy. Under recent policy as formalized in the Indian Self-Determination Act, P.L. 93-638, tribal governments have moved from being toy governments totally controlled by the federal government, to official establishment as parts of the American governmental structure of states, under the supremacy of the federal government (Wilkinson:1987,86). Some tribal goverments have used this status in some pragmatic ways to develop as governments utilizing the concept of tribal sovereignty of P.L. 93-638 policy to gain control over their own internal affairs. The Navajo Nation is one of those tribal governments which has developed in its particu56

The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History, by Robert A. Kann

The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History, <i>by Robert A. Kann</i>

The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History. Robert A. Kann

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History. Robert A. Kann Crane BrintonCrane Brinton Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 42, Number 1Mar., 1970 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/240519 Views: 1Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1970 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Stanley B. Winters The Forging of a Historian: Robert A. Kann in America, 1939–1976, Austrian History Yearbook 17 (Feb 2009): 2–23.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0067237800017161

Book Review: International Politics and Economics: The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History

Book Review: International Politics and Economics: The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History

American Political Science and African Politics

Within the past few years military coups have ended civil rule in ten African nations. These events, and similar earlier upheavals in the Sudan and East Africa, indicate the intense strain which their politics are enduring. Should social scientists remain mute while this process continues throughout the continent? Are there no general principles of political science and comparative political history which can be utilised to assist the new states to adjust, to control their social environments, and to avoid the abyss of authoritarianism? A potential alliance of military and bureaucratic élites in guiding the political destiny of much of Africa must now be viewed as probable.

The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History

The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History

The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History

The Problem of Restoration: A Study in Comparative Political History