China's consumer revolution: The 1990s and beyond

Since 1980 China's economic revolution has enabled more households to allocate labor to market‐related activities to earn more income. In 1992 an even greater surge in market economy growth took place when urban households began abandoning state‐related occupations and took their chances in the marketplace. The increase in consumer spending that followed reflects a new pattern of household spending for the first time in China since 1949: the share of spending for food relative to spending for other categories of goods and services is fast declining. This new trend, already strongly evident among high income‐earning households, is rapidly being replicated by other households as their incomes rise. During the 1990s new consumer patterns have emerged in the cities of the coastal provinces that strongly indicate that a consumer revolution is under way. This revolution has revived traditional gift‐giving between the Chinese people, thus facilitating the strengthening of their social, economic, and political ties and encouraging people to emphasize social and political stability.     

Hegemony and Autonomy

This article analyzes the concept of hegemony and examines its relationship to power and autonomy. Refuting the conventional belief that it is ideology that distinguishes hegemony, the article argues that it is autonomy that constitutes the distinguishing characteristic. Although hegemons tend to evolve into imperialists, hegemony involves leadership of an alliance, not domination by coercion. It is impossible to conceptualize hegemony without also including autonomy. In this conceptualization, the primary source of autonomy lies in a specific hegemonic system of domination that itself embodies the notion of autonomy for both the polity and its citizenry, a limiting construction that hinders the tendency toward imperialism. Such a system includes one type of autonomy that can be designated as autonomy within hegemony. In addition, the article discusses two other types of autonomy: counterhegemony and a largely power-based opposed hegemony. Thus, the article concludes, hegemony is a complex concept, with several types of manifestation, that can more usefully be understood in connection with autonomy and power than as a stand-alone concept.     

The reorientation of place legislation in England in the 1690s

Summary

Mediating Conflict in the Swiss Diets of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

The Helvetic Confederation developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a web of alliances between the most important urban and peasant republics (Orte) in the area of present‐day Switzerland. The only form of mediating conflicts laid down in the alliances was by tribunals of arbitration; but these were never recognised by all the Orte in the web of alliances and proved inadequate in the face of growing antagonisms and coalitions throughout the Confederacy. It became necessary to have recourse to political arrangements involving the interested parties. The forum for these arrangements was the Diets, meetings of deputies of all members of the Confederacy. These more or less represented the most important political forces. Difficulties arose only when there was no consensus in individual Orten and when the official deputies to the Diet represented only the magistrates (Obrigkeiten). In such cases it could happen, especially in matters of foreign policy, that individual groups went their own way and thwarted the decisions of the Diet. It usually took a long time to arrive at a consensus in the Diets because the deputies were bound by an ‘imperative mandate’ and the minority would mostly not accept the will of the majority. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries participation and the achievement of consensus were the conditions of joint action of the Helvetic Confederation.