Historians have long argued that humanitarianism—what Thomas Haskell once described as “alleviating the suffering of distant strangers”—first emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as part of a complex set of perceptual changes involving capitalist growth, Enlightenment ideas, and Christian values. Given these claims, it is no coincidence that humanitarianism has often been...
Economic growth in contexts of state weakness presents a puzzle. If the state’s provision of property rights is necessary for financial investment and related pro-growth behaviors, then why do we observe private investment and commercial transactions in settings where state institutions are far from reliable property guarantors? This study addresses...
This dissertation takes up Islam’s relationship to Black nationalism across the Atlantic diaspora of Muslims that I call “the Fugitive Islamicate.” Scholars most often have described this relationship as commencing in the twentieth century with the rise of “Black Muslim religion,” a U.S. religious movement that begins with Noble Drew...
The renewed scholarly interest in the connections between taxation, state building efforts, and long-term economic development has revitalized the study of historical tax systems. How did today’s states initially acquire ‘fiscal capacity’, and why was this process more successful in some places than in others? Since African tax systems are...
This study in media anthropology uses participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, and recorded broadcasts to analyze how people use FM radio technology in the Koutiala area of southeast Mali, and particularly how they use FM radio to produce locality by relating audience members to one another, to the dominant national culture,...