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The Indian Ocean Island of Mauritius has a population made up of the descendants of migrants from France, India, Africa, and China. Mauritius has a multicultural and multi-ethnic population and these divisions impact upon Mauritian women’s rights and political mobilization in the country. Women were expected to support the men of their community and, in the mid 1940s, female suffrage was proposed by men from the elite and wealthy groups to win votes for their communities. There is no evidence of a women’s lobby for the franchise. Despite the controversy surrounding female suffrage, Mauritius had two women members of parliament following the election after proclamation of female suffrage. Under 19th-century Mauritian law the state treated women as the inalienable property of their husbands. The “Code Napoleon” or “Napoleon’s Civil Code of 1804,” adopted in 1808 in Mauritius, imposed the status of “minor” on a married woman and was characterized by severe patriarchalism, restricting women to the private domestic sphere. Despite these restrictions, women were not passive and they were drawn into the economic and political struggles of the early 20th century. One of the most vivid memories is that of Anjalay Coopen, a female agricultural laborer who was among the people killed during an uprising on the sugar estates in 1943. Mauritius became independent in 1968 and the role that women played in the negotiations leading to independence remains unclear to this day due to a paucity of research in this area, male domination of the political and historical writings of the country, and the fact that the Mauritian population was highly divided over independence. Women’s-movement activism peaked in the mid-1970s. This was when women’s organizations grouped together on common platforms to lobby for changes in the civil code and laws governing marriage and the Immigration and Deportation Act, which allowed for the deportation of foreign husbands of Mauritian women but not for foreign wives of Mauritian men. Women from different communities rallied together for equal rights for women, generating a strong national women’s movement.

Populist politics found fertile ground in the Andean nations both during the classic phase (1930s–1960s) and during the most recent wave of populism with its two ideological variants, neo-populism (Right) and radical populism (Left), from the 1990s to the present. During the classic stage, charismatic populist leaders forged new political movements that unified organized sectors of the popular and middle classes to challenge elite dominance of politics. These leaders captivated their followers with superb oratory and a political discourse that opposed the interests of ordinary people to those of the elite. Populist governments spearheaded processes of social and political reform that expanded the political arena and promoted economic nationalism and state-control of key resources such as oil. In Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela, they implemented agrarian reforms inspired by the Mexican post-revolutionary model. While less visible, the popular sectors (working classes, indigenous campesinos, and middle classes) contributed to the shape of populism by negotiating a place for themselves in national politics. The Andean experience calls into question structuralist theories that have established a link between classic populism and import-substitution industrialization, based primarily on the study of Brazil and Argentina. Populism in the Andes often went hand in hand with a push for the expansion of democracy, as for example in Venezuela, where Rómulo Betancourt rose to prominence by fighting against the decades-long dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez; and in Ecuador, where José María Velasco Ibarra came to symbolize the struggle for free elections. In Colombia, the populist challenge vanished with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948. In Bolivia, a new political party, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), brought its populist leader Víctor Paz Estenssoro to power with the support of the military and of armed workers, urban and rural. In Peru, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre faced almost three decades of political persecution, never reached the presidency, yet managed to transform his party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), into Peru’s strongest political force. The populism of the classic phase gave way to military governments during the 1970s and 1980s and to the eventual implementation of neo-liberal economic policies promoted by Washington. The second wave of populism that swept Latin America beginning in the 1990s began in the Andes. Neo-populists such as Peru’s Alberto Fujimori implemented neo-liberal reforms while still engaging in the type of clientelistic politics that is associated with populists. The so-called “Pink Tide” of radical populism included Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, all of whom promoted nationalist policies and expanded social programs to the poorest sectors of the population. Each was elected as part of a backlash against the neo-liberal economic policies of the 1990s, and each took an aggressive stand against the United States. Chávez also promoted an internationalist vision that harkens back most overtly to Bolivar, yet also to the ideas of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who had originally attempted to make APRA a continent-wide political movement.

Religious moderation is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when considering the history of the United States. Would one have spoken of the Puritans as moderates? Could one characterize the many great revivals and awakenings that coursed through colonial and early republican American in such terms? And what about the impertinence of Anne Hutchison, the audacity of Jarena Lee, the bold experiment of Prohibition, or the modern political fervor that accompanied the rise of the religious right? When compared to England and many other nominally Christian European nations, the United States generally figures as an example of religious zeal. Yet moderation holds a special place in American religious thought, and not just recently. Since the Protestant Reformation, at least, the concept of religious moderation has been inescapably entangled with concerns about the form and shape of government. Just how much religious “enthusiasm” is safe for a monarchy, a democracy, or a republic? wondered English political theorists in the 1600s and 1700s. Their concerns unavoidably carried to the “New World,” contributing to the persecution or marginalization of Quakers, Shakers, and other religious practitioners deemed too immoderate in their passions and, not infrequently, their gendered practices and sexualities. With the birth of the new republic, Americans also raised questions about the political valences of religious moderation when debating which residents of the nation could fully enjoy the rights of citizenship. Appeals to moderation were used for centuries to exclude not only religious minorities but also racial and ethnic minorities and women. And yet the contours of moderation were continually contested by both those who wielded power and those subject to it. Since the late 1800s, questions of religious moderation have also been intertwined with questions of modernity and the reconfiguration of public and private spaces. This was especially true with the rise of the fundamentalist movement in the early 1900s, a movement that opposed some of the modernist interpretive measures gaining currency among many American Christians, as well as the idea (increasingly popular over the course of the 20th century—particularly after the failure of Prohibition) that most forms of religion properly belong to the private realm. While fundamentalists were no less technologically savvy or educated than their theological opponents, their positions were nevertheless cast as anti-modern and immoderate, in that fundamentalists ostensibly held more closely to revelation than to modern science. This notion of fundamentalism as the incursion of immoderate anti-modernism, traditionalism, or enthusiasm into politics and public life has continued into the 21st century. While 21st-century arguments for religious moderation are most often directed at Muslims (who, in addition to conservative Christians, are frequently depicted as prone to trampling on the rights of those with whom they disagree), American history has no shortage of incidents involving pressures, often violent, on racial and religious minorities to moderate or privatize their ostensibly uncivilized behavior for the sake of the nation or even for humanity.