A new sociology of nationalism: The sociology of property and nation

In this essay, I will reflect upon what has been sociology's contribution to understanding the emergence and development of nationalism and how sociology can contribute to understanding nationalism's present and future through a property rights perspective. The essay will discuss, in particular, how historical sociological analysis of property rights and property rights regimes may be central to understanding nationalism past and future. After a general and brief discussion on the current, so‐called return of nationalism, the essay starts with discussion of some late enlightenment proto‐sociologists, suggesting that these writers actually analysed some crucial early dynamics of property and sovereignty which is central to understanding nationalism. The essay then moves on to suggests why a property rights focus might be a useful perspective to understanding nationalism in the 21st century.     

The origins of mercury gilding

A survey of almost 50 gilded objects in the British Museum has traced the occurrence of the mercury gilding technique from the later Roman and Sasanian Empires of the third and fourth centuries AD to the late Chou period in China of the third century BC. The technique appears to have been unknown during the Hellenistic period and under the Roman Republic and early Empire. Mercury gilding was identified by microscopic examination and qualitative emission spectrographic analysis.     

The geography and economic sociology of recent immigration to Italy

This article provides an overview of the geography and economic sociology of recent immigration to Italy. Its main purpose is to offer a contextual framework for the mainly place‐ and nationality‐specific studies which follow and make up the main contributions to this special issue of the journal. Throughout our account, stress is laid on the regional diversity of the immigrant experience within Italy, and on the diversity of migratory types and nationalities which have entered the country over the last twenty‐thirty years. In the final part of the article we make a brief analysis of the Italian political response to the country's relatively new status as a receiver of large‐scale immigration.     

The religious and romantic origins of psychoanalysis

The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis. By Suzanne Kirschner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 212 pp., $27.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.     

The intellectual origins of Leninism, 1977

This essay is a general introduction to the special number on recent research on Atlantic history. While the topics here presented are diverse, most focusing on the first French Empire, particularly in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authors share several common themes: (1) In Africa and the Americas, they seek to view the question of the Empire as a series of contested, temporary, and uncertain alliances and collaborations, in which negotiation rather than submission was most often the basis of power relations; (2) In the realm of political economy in theory and practice, the authors refuse pre-established notions of an Atlantic “community” of commodities and merchants functioning within an Atlantic “system.” Instead, they focus on closed networks of merchants functioning within the dynamics of merchant capitalism. (3) The authors seek alternatives to traditional approaches focusing on the nation-state and its institutions. Instead, they examine communities and regions in the Atlantic that include social elites, such as, merchants, the nobility, the gentry, and intellectuals, as well as neglected native peoples and forgotten spaces such as Africa.     

The origins of agriculture and its consequences

Flannery, Kent, ed. Guila Naquitz: Archaic Foraging and Early Agriculture in Oaxaca, Mexico. Orlando, Florida: Academic Press, 1986. xix + 538 pp. including references, index, tables, figures, and Spanish synopsis. $98.50 cloth.

Merbs, Charles F., and Robert J. Miller, eds. Health and Disease in the Prehistoric Southwest. Arizona State University Anthropological Papers No. 34. Tempe,: Arizona State University, 1985. xix + 402 pp. including chapter references, tables, figures, and photographs. $17.50 paper.     

The origins of salinity in metamorphic fluids

Evaluation of data on formation waters and metamorphic fluids sampled by drilling or preserved in fluid inclusions reveals little correlation between fluid salinity and metamorphic grade, but a strong link to original sedimentary setting. Sediments and metasediments deposited originally in shallow marine environments can contain fluids with a very wide range of salinities, but they are commonly near twice seawater salinity or higher. With increasing metamorphic grade, a very wide range of salinities may develop, with the highest levels tracking halite saturation. Oceanic and accretionary prism sequences yield low‐salinity fluids, close to seawater values, almost irrespective of metamorphic grade until extreme conditions are reached where removal of water may increase fluid salinity. The salinities of metamorphic fluids exert a fundamental control on both fluid phase equilibria and metal‐transporting capability, and appear, to a large degree, to reflect the original presence or absence of highly saline formation waters and/or evaporites in the initial sedimentary sequence.