cized the old notion of "societies" as "things apart." This old notion
collapses as Cohen reviews Africa's past.

Rowe, too, shows how the social history of China, although still in
its infancy, is struggling to free itself from broad systems of explana-
tion borrowed largely from western social thought (such as the old
concept of the Asiatic mode of production). In his essay, the views of
the relationship between state and society which inform the work of
the other contributors take on their full significance. Rowe reviews
the gamut of politically and culturally based theories of what Witt-
fogel called "oriental despotism." He then points both to spatial
analyses of marketing areas and to studies of social intermediaries
as a means of understanding the reordering of traditional authority
structures. In the American case, I do not address the relationship
between a bureaucratic state and society as much as I examine the
relationship between the perception of national character and the
realities of social relations in the United States. I contrast the ideologi-
cal permanence embedded in the notion of "American exceptional-
ism" to the visions of change and conflicts. The social history of
America, like that of the other regions in this volume, shows how
patterns of conflict and systems of mediation evolve and produce
society.

The following chapters seek to reflect the richness of sources,
methods, and themes of social history. Perhaps social historians are
not fully prepared to dismantle their bulwarks which allow them to
operate within the limits of an agreed-upon ideology, a commitment
to a technique, or a well-circumscribed period and specialty. But the
need to move out of intellectually confining camps and to establish
broader connections is felt everywhere, and the growing recognition
that traditions stretching across what were once considered imper-
meable national boundaries make such an expansion imperative.
History is changing, and so is the place of social history within it.
The essays in this volume focus on ties between ideology and social
change, the links between culture and behavior, and the connections
between political and social processes. What this book calls for is a
creative use of social history to join large structural processes of
change to life at the local level. Each author draws from his own
work to suggest directions that promise eventually to establish this
connection. Although social historians have heretofore produced an
impressive vein of new knowledge, they must now integrate it within

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