This article traces the rise of the Lamlums, a family belonging to the Fawayid tribe in Egypt, between the 1830s and 1930s. As tribal shaykhs, the Lamlums’ trajectories are part of a larger historical process in which a new bedouin elite took shape in modern Egypt. How did the family amass their wealth and status between the early 19th and mid-20th centuries? What does the family history reveal about bedouins’ paths to social mobility in modern Egypt? Using Egyptian and British archives, newspapers, and oral traditions, I argue that the turbulent process of settling bedouin tribes and streamlining their organization in 19th-century Egypt allowed bedouin shaykhs to accumulate land and power in their capacity as bureaucrats. By the interwar period, changing political and economic conditions allowed newer generations of landed shaykhs to dislodge themselves from the bureaucratic net their predecessors had participated in. Throughout a century of bureaucratic (dis)integration and land accumulation, these shaykhs transformed the meanings of tribal authority. The Lamlums tell a wider story about the dialectic pull between bureaucracy and land, the unforeseen consequences of the settlement policy, and the malleability of the category of tribe.

Muslims in the Central African Republic have experienced extreme violence for more than a decade. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this article shows how the foundations for contemporary violence were created through colonial and postcolonial state-making. The civilizing mission of republican colonialism set Muslims apart. Lifestyle and mobility were never fully colonized; escape depicted difference. Nationalist liberation mythologies render Muslim citizenship as foreign, precarious, and subject to ongoing contestation. Pentecostalism, a lateral liberation philosophy presented as patriotism, provides power to anti-Muslim discourse. Violence against Muslims is situated in an accumulated “pastness” of state-making and struggle in Central African historiography.

Two important puzzles characterize the development of pre-modern Eurasian polities. First, most rulers convened councils of nobles, but only European monarchs expanded them to create parliaments. Second, war was common throughout Eurasia, but only in Europe did it correlate with the formation of parliaments. We advance a new argument about the emergence of parliaments that accounts for both stylized facts while integrating the literature highlighting the rulers' need to finance wars with that emphasizing the importance of the medieval communal revolution. Using novel data, we document a ‘no communes, no parliaments’ rule: monarchs established parliaments only after they had fostered the creation of self-governing towns (aka communes). We also show that war was a significant predictor of parliamentary births across medieval Europe – but only during a window of opportunity that opened after a polity had experienced the communal revolution.

Retracing closely the events of the life of George Frederic, king of the Miskitu (in present-day Honduras and Nicaragua) between 1816 and 1824, this article describes how this Miskitu actor sought to set up, by hiring British agents, the concrete realization of a Central American commercial and political independence project—understood here as a utopia. Although his project ended in failure, the actions of this little-known Miskitu king had repercussions in the Caribbean and beyond, even in the heart of the City of London. Concentrating on a marginal actor seldom considered by historians reveals how particular American Indigenous peoples sought to actively position themselves in the important commercial and political transformations affecting the Atlantic World in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

As the covert and clandestine practices of states multiplied in the twentieth century, so did these practices’ footprint in public life. This footprint is not just visual and material but sonic and aural, sounding the ‘secret state’ into being and suggesting ways of ‘listening in’ on it. Using multisensory methodology, this article examines Careless Talk Costs Lives, a UK Second World War propaganda campaign instructing citizens on how to practice discreet speech and listening in defence against ‘fifth columnist’ spies. This campaign reproduced the British secret state in the everyday: it represented sensitive operations as weaving in and out of citizens’ lives through imprudent chatter about ‘hush-hush’ activities and sounds you shouldn't overhear. The paradox at the campaign's heart – of revealing to people the kind of things they shouldn't say or listen to – made the secret state and its international operations a public phenomenon. Secret sounds therefore became entangled within productions of social difference, from class inequalities to German racialisation. Sound and listening, however, are unwieldy phenomena. This sonic life of the secret state risked undermining political legitimacy, while turning public space and idyllic environments into deceptive soundscapes – for international espionage, it seemed, sounded like ordinary life.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the building of the modern Turkish Republic was financed largely through the taxes extracted from the agricultural economy. Turkey’s economy was largely based on agriculture and accordingly the new state relied heavily on rural resources. Despite the abolition of the tithe, many other agricultural taxes increased remarkably. This paper examines the peasants’ everyday resistance to heavy taxes under the single-party regime in interwar Turkey. It shows that under an authoritarian single-party system, poor and small-income peasants used daily and mostly informal means to cope with the social injustice that resulted from the increasingly burdensome economic demands of the new state. In contrast to the existing accounts, which mostly regard the peasants as being atomized under the absolute control of the state, this paper portrays them as an active social dynamic that annulled the greater part of the taxes in practice and compelled the government to soften its heavy taxes. Based on new archival sources, such as gendarme records, politicians’ reports, citizens’ petitions, and newspaper reports, this paper reveals the peasants’ different forms of politics and the direct and indirect impact of such politics on the social and political transformation of the new Republic and on the modernization of Turkey overall.