All the essays constituting the chapters of this book have previously appeared in print. If I were to start afresh on any of the topics they cover, I would make substantial changes. Nevertheless I have as far as possible left them in their original published form. Attempts to revamp articles written with a distinctive set of assumptions, to bring them into line with current intellectual fashions, are seldom successful; I prefer to let them stand as they are, products of identifiable theoretical stances and modes of exposition. I have also left unchanged my use, following the convention prevailing when the earlier essays were written, of masculine nouns and pronouns to indicate both genders; this obsolescent usage should serve to remind the reader, as it does me, that most of the essays were first drafted many years ago. It is not only fashions in theoretical concepts that change with the times. I have however placed a note at the head of each chapter, setting out the context in which the essay was written and drawing attention to later publications and events that bear on it.

Chapters 6 and 7, where colonialism is discussed, have been revised to the extent of replacing the present tense by the past, since the system they focus on has largely disappeared, despite its apparently firm prospects for the future at the time the essays were written. I have done the same with Chapter 4, for the social conditions I found in western Norway in 1952 changed radically a few years later following the collapse of herring fishing and the discovery of oil in the North Sea, changes that I touch upon in Chapter 5.