Many historians of China, particularly those based in North America, insist that the Qing dynasty's territorial expansion was imperial and comparable to the imperial expansions of other global empires. Other historians, particularly but not only those based in the People's Republic of China, continue to resist this interpretation. They argue that dynastic expansion in the Ming and Qing periods was simply a form of nation-state building, akin to similar processes in Europe. Rather than rejecting their claims as a product of Chinese nationalism, we argue that the term “empire” should be (re)understood as a global co-production, emerging from multiple intersecting histories and scholarly debates about those histories. Doing so challenges influential definitions of empire that rely on a distinction between empires and nation-states, highlighting their dual presence in both Euro-American and Chinese pasts (and presents). This move demands a rejection of periodizations that suggest that empires ceased to exist following the period of decolonization from 1945 to the 1970s. This opens up new avenues of historical and normative inquiry to acknowledge the modern continuity between empires and nation-states.

Like the European written genre history, court literature from the traditional kingdoms of Southeast Asia often relates historical events and possible or probable genealogies. Yet, like the myths of tribal peoples, these accounts are characterized by mythical elements and a somewhat repetitious style, and were recited aloud rather than read in private silence. But if we regard them as mixtures of historical and mythical elements, our understanding of their inner structure and meaning is inevitably compromised, for the notion of a mixture already imposes assumptions about the shape of the past and criteria of reality which are implicit in a historical consciousness. The form in which thought is couched, after all, is the thought, not a representation of something behind or outside it. This paper therefore attempts a rhetorical analysis of a Classical Malay text of the type called hikayat, one which dates from about the seventeenth century. It begins with an analysis of grammar and sentence structure, then moves to certain stylistic features of hikayat, contrasting them with some stylistic features of historical writing. I then comment on the context of texts—the meaning of audience, of performance, of language, of author—and end with some speculation about the notion of the past as revealed in Classical Malay hikayat.

Through investigating the construction of one of Japan's largest infrastructure projects during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), this article examines the formation of a technocratic regime of colonial development expertise that was an important pillar of Japanese imperial rule and continued to have powerful effects throughout postwar Asia. It analyzes how a particular form of technical expertise and the wider discourse of “Scientific Japan” as the modernizer of Asia were legitimated and naturalized, as well as how they operated as a system of colonial power. Japan and other East Asian regimes after the war continued to invoke forms of technocratic expertise with origins in the colonial era as part of their state-led development programs, often with adverse effects on their populations. Thus this article concludes that there is a continuing need to critique, historicize, and denaturalize such regimes of expertise invoked by networks of bureaucrats, businessmen, engineers, and experts.

Despite a large number of both historical and anthropological works on the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, a number of questions remain concerning this matrilineal and Islamic society. In a recent study, historian Ken Young articulated a growing consensus that the received models of Minangkabau social life are suspect, including the “idealised categories of nagari [village], adat [customs], matrilineal kinship, lineage property rights, and the autonomy of village communities governed by panghulu [titled men, Minangkabau spelling]” (Young 1994, 12). Anthropologists have been equally perturbed by what they consider to be inconsistencies in Minangkabau life, such as the contradiction between Islamic law and matrilineal adat (customary laws, beliefs, and practices concerning matrilineal kinship and inheritance). The inconsistency that I address in this essay lies in the contradictory representations of elite men's and elite women's power in Minangkabau literature.

A few months after the fourteenth Dalai Lama stated at the Kalachakra Initiation Ceremony in India in January 2006 that Tibetans should cease wearing clothing lined with endangered animal skins, Tibetans across the Tibetan Plateau destroyed millions of yuan worth of otter, leopard, tiger, and other pelts. Outsiders' interpretations of these events have flattened out the complexity of participants' motivations, which included not only religious and national loyalty, but also concerns about inequality wrought by capitalist development, framed through a lens of modern Chinese history. This paper traces heated debates among Tibetans about the burnings, including their implications for Tibetans' global reputation, the survival of Tibetan culture, and the possibility of a moral economy in an era of deepening commodification. It also explores the embodied, visual, and performative elements of the burnings through participants' videos. The role of local filmmaking efforts in spreading the burnings makes the accompanying videos especially relevant.

Let us imagine a graceful bronze image of Dancing Śiva before us. It was perhaps created by a Cola artist in eleventh-century Tamilnad to be installed in a temple to receive offerings of worship, and to parade around the town in a ceremonial palanquin on festival days. From there, this image might have followed any of several paths to stand before us now in a North American museum. Perhaps it was buried under a banyan tree in the fourteenth century when invading Islamic armies, feared for their iconoclasm, marched through the Kaveri delta on their way to Madurai. It could have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, during British rule, by a Tamil workman on a road crew, who showed it to the civil engineer, who brought it to the attention of the District Collector, who passed it on to the Director of Archaeology. In the twentieth century, perhaps, when an international market developed for such objects, it might have ended up in an auction room, a cosmic dance sold to the highest bidder. Or a government expert on culture might have selected it, after its long hibernation in the basement storehouse of its temple, as an image worthy to travel abroad as an ambassador of independent India in the international diplomatics of traveling exhibitions.

As early as the han dynasty, exegetes of the texts in the Confucian canon were preparing written commentary on them, and by the dynasty's end they were interspersing their glosses in the body of these texts as interlinear, running commentary. From this time on, few Chinese would have read any classic from the canon without commentarial companion. And, as Confucianism came to be identified over the course of the imperial period with the Chinese cultural tradition par excellence, the writing of interlinear commentary on the canon of texts became a standard, even dominant, mode of scholarly and philosophical discourse for Chinese literati. It was in commentary that these men would offer their reflections on the meaning of Confucian doctrine as it had evolved through the centuries and attempt to construct a philosophical or moral vision meaningful in a world far removed from that of the classical age.

The Pervasive Presence in Asia of ascetic practitioners—whether sedate, shorn, and robed monks or fierce, ash-smeared, naked yogis—has long fascinated Western observers and certainly nourished stereotypes of a mysterious, otherworldly, and impenetrable East. In India especially, the ascetic's figure has fueled the speculations of scholars, artists, tourists, and religious seekers for centuries (Oman 1905; Narayan 1988). Most depictions of Indian culture, whether indigenous or foreign, evocative or analytic, include portraits or analyses of world-renouncers.1 And yet with the notable exception of numerous fictional explorations (e.g., Bhattacharya 1978; Markandaya 1963; R K. Narayan 1980), the renouncer remains a figure whose existence comments on the human predicament but whose human thoughts and feelings remain opaque.

Sinhalese Buddhists state that their religion was founded by the Buddha, who was a human being and is now dead. Cognitively this position is held by every Buddhist from the most learned monk to the most ignorant layman. Yet they usually behave as if the Buddha appears to them as a powerful and omnibenevolent god, a supreme being who is still in some way present and aware. (Perhaps we might say that cognitively the Buddha is dead, but affectively he is alive.) For instance, if assailed by dangerous demons a pious Buddhist will recite the qualities of the Buddha and thus keep any malevolent forces at bay. If asked to explain the apparent inconsistency, Buddhists say that the gods and demons are restrained by respect for the Buddha—but it is respect for his memory or for his doctrine, not for his active power. Moreover, Buddhists have dealings with the Buddha in which they behave as if he were at least numinously present; in particular, offerings are made before statues of the Buddha.

A study of the interactions between the caste system and political democracy in India rejects the familiar theory that there is a dichotomy between a traditional society and a modern polity. On the contrary, it underlines the functional relevance of indigenous patterns of communication and differentiation to the process of modernizing. Where a relatively open society, by an act of conscious preference, resolves to undertake the task of building a modern nation through a democratic polity, the result is a progressive fusion of various elements. In India, under the impacts of Western education, nationalist movement, and adult franchise, the traditional community structure has continuously changed and adapted. What is important is the mutual exposure and adaptation of traditional and modern authority structures, communication media, and identification symbols. The new institutions establish their hegemony precisely by taking into their confidence the pluralities of the antecedent culture. Caste has been politicized, but in the process it has provided Indian politics with processes and symbols of political articulation.

This paper is primarily concerned with the institutional framework of economic policy formulation in China during the Northern Sung dynasty (960–1126). During this period there evolved a professional financial service whose members had a direct influence on economic legislation either as incumbents in fiscal offices or as members of Imperial advisory organs. The financial specialist was seen as possessing a specific body of expertise—administrative ability, talent in mathematics, a knowledge of classical Chinese monetary theory and familiarity with the history of economic policy. These attributes were tested in the civil service recruitment examinations and used as criteria for the recommendation and assignment of men to fiscal posts. The resulting consistency and predictability in legislation was a significant aspect of material progress in eleventh century China. The article is based on an extensive analysis of biographical information contained in chronicles, dynastic histories, records of conduct, and funerary inscriptions, as well as extant copies of examination questions and answers and edicts of appointment contained in the collected papers of Nordiern Sung writers.

The decline of the Mughal empire is usually considered to begin late in the reign of the emperor Aurangzib (1658–1707). The favorite explanations consist of circles, or even spirals, usually vicious in nature. One important interpretation sees the decline as originating from an increased taxation burden on the peasantry, who revolted in several areas, ultimately with such success that the empire was weakened. More money was needed to crush more revolts, so there was more oppressive taxation and so more revolts. This is less than convincing, for peasant revolts—whether or not led by zamindars locally important land-holders)—were more or less a constant in Mughal India. They were particularly prevalent in Gujarat and Bengal, but Hindustan was far from exempt. What we really need here is an attempt at a quantitative assessment of the number of revolts, and of participants in them, during the whole seventeenth century.

June 2018 was an intense time in Vietnam when one saw the role of social media in revealing and facilitating the (dis)congruity between connectivism, collectivism, and conservatism. On June 12, the National Assembly of Vietnam passed the controversial Cybersecurity Law by a landslide of 86 percent agreement despite widespread public dissent, including an online petition signed by more than sixty-five thousand people. The new Cybersecurity Law was said to further restrict the already limited freedom of expression in Vietnam and grant too much power to the police in surveying and punishing online citizens.

The 1915 Buddhist-Muslim riots in Ceylon are often attributed to religious animosity, but economic and political factors significantly influenced the environment in which the riots occurred and help to explain the drastic government reaction to the disorders. The Muslims involved, recent arrivals from India called Coast Moors, were primarily traders and moneylenders. Resentment against price increases and alleged profiteering developed among the Sinhalese Buddhists. Before 1915, communal tensions had grown, with many Sinhalese-language newspapers denouncing the Coast Moors for exploitation of the Ceylonese. A Buddhist temperence movement had become a channel for articulating nationalist sentiments and was viewed with suspicion by the colonial regime. Labor unrest and trade unionism had appeared in Colombo prior to the riots. There, the 1915 disorders were led by the most militant urban workers, particularly railway workers, and reflected working-class grievances over rising living costs and unemployment. Fear of German intrigue during the war, the spread of nationalism and terrorism from India, and urban working-class unrest led colonial officials to interpret the riots as a threat to British rule. The officials were divided on the severity of action required, but those favoring the most drastic measures prevailed.

From about 1373 to 1570, or for nearly two centuries, the kings of Ryukyu engaged in a prosperous and active trade between East and Southeast Asia. Several hundred Ryukyuan ships voyaged to Southeast Asian ports, from Siam to Patani, Malacca, Sumatra, Java, and elsewhere. These were in addition to, and indeed complementary to, hundreds of trading voyages to China, Japan, and Korea.

However, there are only scattered references to the Ryukyuan trading expeditions to Southeast Asia in Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean records. What is more, Ryukyuan chronicles compiled in the seventeenth century contain only fragmentary notices of these voyages. This was most puzzling to modern scholars, for other records showed that tremendous quantities of goods of southern origin were carried frm Ryukyu to China, Japan, and Korea in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indicating that there must have been a correspondingly large trade with southern regions. It had to be presumed that in connection with such trade, countless records and documents must have been compiled. And yet the official histories of Ryukyu made only passing mention of old contacts with countries in the southern seas.

An adequate understanding of the complex connections between changes in the social relations of production and changes in the bases of group formation demands an historical approach in which consciousness and its ideological products are viewed dynamically, not as the mechanically determined superstructural reflections of material relations but as an active and constituent components of everyday social life. The concepts required for such an analysis are developed here, drawing on the seminal work of both Marx and Weber, as well as on more recent scholarship, and are applied to recent changes in agrarian relations and ideological practice in Anuradhapura District, Sri Lanka.

The disciplinary dissection of Indian studies has divided Indologists into diverse academic unions, each with its own in-group jargon, research interests, and intellectual traditions. It has also created discontinuities in the units of analysis selected by scholars of different disciplines, which create in turn discontinuities between contemporary and historical studies of Indian society. Thus historians have generally not focused on caste or caste associations, while a central referent of anthropologists has been precisely the caste (jati) unit. Partly this reflects a difference in levels of analysis, the historian taking a more encompassing perspective while the anthropologist in the course of his fieldwork concentrates on the grass-roots social world of village India. Partly it reflects the bias of the historical discipline in general toward formal institutions and. toward political, as opposed to social, change.

This paper is intended to present in outline form a structural analysis of the total religious system of the Sinhalese of Ceylon.

The Sinhalese, excluding those few who are Hindu, Christian, or Muslim, are Theravada Buddhists who also indulge in a rich array of magical-animistic and other “non-Buddhist” practices. Descriptive accounts of these various practices are readily available in the literature. But until now no one has examined the various beliefs and rituals to see whether and how they are related to one another, to what extent they combine to form an integrated system of “Sinhalese religion,” and how this system actually functions. I will attempt such an examination by focusing on the primary religious ideals, their practical implementation, and the problems involved in this implementation. Perhaps the most crucial problem facing Sinhalese religion is that the central ideal, salvation, which legitimates all religious action, is itself practically unattainable. This fact must have far-reaching implications for the total religious system.

One of the functions of higher educational systems everywhere has been the recruitment of an elite; for until the mass-education experiments of the twentieth century, highly educated members of major historical societies have been the chosen few. Similarly, the content of higher education has formed a culture the monopoly of which has served to set the highly educated apart from the common man. Hence the system of higher education in most societies forms a well-recognized institutional avenue of approach, not only to a society's high literary culture, but to prestige and power as well. These important properties of higher educational systems suggest that the content of higher education may have a social utility for the educated elite quite apart from its informational value. In this paper we examine the relationship between the college curriculum and the social reform activities of the educated elite of one Indian province, Bombay, in the late nineteenth century.