Historically, tokugawa Samurai were a legal creation that grew out of the landed warriors of the medieval age; they came to be defined by the Tokugawa shogunate in terms of hereditary status, a right to hold public office, a right to bear arms, and a “cultural superiority” upheld through educational preferment (Smith 1988, 134). With the prominent exception of Eiko Ikegami's recentThe Taming of the Samurai(1995), little has been written in English in the past two decades regarding the sociopolitical history of the samurai in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. E. H. Norman's seminal work,Japan's Emergence as a Modern State, established the parameters of debate among American historians of Japan from the 1950s through the 1970s. Drawing on the Marxist historiography of prewar Japan, Norman interpreted the Meiji Restoration in terms of class conflict: a modified bourgeois revolution directed against a feudal Tokugawa regime, led by a coalition of lower samurai and merchants, and supported by a peasant militia (Norman [1940] 1975).

A novel form of international order was developed in the nineteenth century by international administrative unions such as the International Telegraph Union and the Universal Postal Union. This administrative internationalism posed a striking alternative to the international society of great powers, sovereignty, and forms of imperial domination, for the members of administrative unions included not only sovereign states but also semi-sovereigns, vassals, and colonies. Members were equal and bound identically to the union treaty and its international administrative law. This article examines the structure of unions and their politics of membership in the nineteenth century, and engages theories of global governance to argue that early administrative unions present a mode of international order different from theories of both global networks and the international system of neorealism.

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Rather than a simple transfer of words or texts from one language to another, on the model of the bilingual dictionary, translation has become understood as a translingual act of transcoding cultural material-a complex act of communication. Much recent work on translation in history grows out of interest in the effects of European colonialism, especially within Asian studies, where interest has been driven by the contrast between the experiences of China and Japan, which were never formally colonized, and the alternative examples of peoples without strong, centralized states-those of the Indian subcontinent and the Tagalog in the Philippines-who were colonized by European powers. This essay reviews several books published in recent years, one group of which share the general interpretation that colonial powers forced their subjects to "translate" their local language, sociality, or culture into the terms of the dominant colonial power: because the colonial power controls representation and forces its subjects to use the colonial language, it is in a position to construct the forms of indigenous and subject identity. The other books under review here are less concerned with power in colonial situations than with the fact of different languages, cultures, or practices and the work of "translating" between the twoparticularly the efforts of indigenous agents to introduce European ideas and institutions to their respective peoples.

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