[Extract …] In 1945, Bronislaw Malinowski urged anthropology to abandon what he called its “one-column entries” on African societies and to study instead the “no-man's land of change,” to attend to the “aggressive and conquering” European communities as well as native ones, and to be aware that “European interests and intentions” were rarely unified but more often “at war” (1945:14–15). Four decades later, few of us have heeded his prompting or really examined his claim.

The anthropology of colonialism has been a prolific yet selective project, challenging some of the boundaries of the discipline but remaining surprisingly respectful of others. As part of the more general political enterprise in the early 1970s, we re-examined how colonial politics affected both the theory and method of ethnography and the histories of our subjects.2 Influenced by the work of Andre Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, we investigated how the structural constraints of colonial capitalism not only shaped indigenous changes in community and class, but by turns destroyed, preserved, and froze traditional relations of power and production, and as frequently reinvented and conjured them up (Asad 1975b; Foster-Carter 1978; Scott 1976; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).