This essay examines the circulation and consumption of foreign literature in socialist China, showing that even during the most xenophobic times of High Maoism, Chinese readers had access to foreign literature through a variety of channels. An unstated though widely shared commitment to the intrinsic value of foreign culture, I argue, reveals deeply ingrained cosmopolitan practices that belie a nationalistic surface rhetoric. To trace the interest in and commitment to foreign literature, this article inspects three distinct yet overlapping modes of literary circulation: the private sphere, the restricted public sphere of internal publications, and the open public sphere. Access to foreign literature was limited, but the flow of transnational culture never stopped, as editors and readers alike perpetuated an intellectual framework that was grounded in the valorization of transnational culture and that predated the People's Republic's founding in 1949. These findings call for a reevaluation of Chinese socialist cultural consumption and production from a transnational perspective.

This essay argues that to understand twentieth-century Khmer-Vietnamese ethnic antagonism, the contest for the lower Mekong Delta (in today's Vietnam) since the mid-eighteenth century has been key. It argues, however, that while this pre-1945 background can explain antagonism, it cannot sufficiently explain the violence between Khmer and Vietnamese that occurred after 1945. For that, the First Indochina War (1945–54) and decolonization marked a turning point. This period saw the creation of a dynamic of violence between Khmer and Vietnamese that hardened ethnic antagonisms, shaped the character of the war, and affected arguments over sovereignty. This dynamic of violence also contributed, in the long run, to a common Cambodian antagonism to the Vietnamese, including that of the Khmer Rouge.

The Indian social reform movement in the nineteenth century, like the political reform movement, remained unorganized on an all-India basis until the 1880's. Local groups functioned throughout the country in many cases along similar lines, but without regular and specific knowledge of each other. Virtually the only effort for social reform well publicized throughout the country had been Vidyasagar's Widow Remarriage movement, which however was never nationally organized and which found local support only when a reformer felt inclined to press for it; the founder himself lost interest in the cause long before his death in 1891. Unlike the political reformers, the social reformers gave no evidence, so far as the present writer knows, of concern about the absence of a national organization to direct and stimulate their activities. If it had any strength, such an organization would, in fact, embarrass them into a unity of principles and methods for which, before 1880, they were quite unprepared.

This article examines a text containing the late eighteenth-century family history of a line of South Indian “little kings,” or pāḷaiyakārars. The text provides the basis for a discussion of the Maṟavar caste of the Tirunelvēli region in southern Tamil Nāṭu and the notions held by this and other related groups concerning royal appropriateness and sovereign authority, political and social relations, and kingly privileges and gifts. Further, the text is seen as a cultural form of “history” that has an integrity of its own. Indeed, a structural analysis of the text reveals that the text can not be separated into “fanciful” and “historical” sections, and that underlying assumptions about the past are revealed by the form as well as the content of the text. The results of this analysis are seen to have significance not only for understanding how the past is viewed from within, but also for how it must be analyzed from outside the cultural context. Thus, ethnohistory is asserted to be not simply one agenda for “history” but a way of setting the actual agenda of “history.”

“In order to decide whether one can speak of a caste system in a society, one must ask: are status and power completely dissociated, can one find the equivalent of a Brahman/Ksatriya relationship? This question, though it may appear improper, has the virtue of immediately fixing a limit to Indian influence in South-East Asia. Important as this influence has been from the cultural and even social point of view, it would seem, roughly speaking, that nowhere in Indochina and Indonesia has the king been dispossessed of his religious prerogatives.”

This claim concerns the important question of the degree to which the Indian caste system can be, or has been, exported—a question that elicits deep-rooted and contentious problems inhering in our understanding of the nature of the caste system itself. Two propositions may here be identified and distinguished. The first is that, in India, kings—however powerful politically—did not formally possess religious or ritual authority; whereas in Indochina, however weak they were, kings formally possessed religious as well as political prerogatives. This is the contention cited above. The second is that, the first being true, it is also true that in Indochina kings possessed and exercised a degree of real control over social organization, by virtue of their ritual position (which was foreign to India): they were social engineers. In brief, they were oriental despots. The first proposition does not entail the second, but the two tend to go together; many writers have shown an inclination to accept the second, sometimes on the evidence of the first, sometimes on the evidence of facts about Indochinese kingdoms.

Political culture in India is not merely a reflection of community life-style. It is also the link between historical experiences of politics and model identities, on the one hand, and the needs of new political forms, on the other. Defined thus, it becomes not only an emergine national idiom, but also a cultural vector diat is gradually entering the community's life-style as a legitimate force of social change.

There are four historical stages in the development if the culture of Indian politics. The contemporary political culture also consists of four strands, each with its own psychological problems of adaptation and their typical cultural expressions. These strands are related, on the one hand, to the four corresponding historical stages and, on the other, to different levels of personality functioning in the model Indian. Within this framework, a new approach can be taken to the analysis of the major themes and symbols in Indian politics. It is possible, for example, to decompose some of the major themes into their stage-specific contents which, again, can be related to the larger adaptive problems faced by the community at different historical phases.

The purpose of this paper is to explore some salient characteristics of the Korean economy in historical context and to appraise the role of foreign influences in changing the economic structure of Korea since the beginning of Western influence. First, the historical background will be briefly surveyed in terms of evidence of the changes in factor supply, categorized as capital (especially social overhead capital), labor, land, and entrepreneurial factors. The causes of change will be identified with emphasis on causes external to the economic system. Second, the pattern of structural change and the nature of “disequilibrium” will be described and explained. The following items will be relevant for our consideration: dual structure, changes in output composition and occupational distribution, external disequilibrium (i.e., deficits in the balance of international payments, foreign aid), financial disequilibrium (i.e., deficit financing of the government, inflation, overvalued currency), and structural disequilibrium (i.e., unemployment, excess capacity in some sector of the economy). The conclusion summarizes our discussion briefly and speculates on Korea's economic future.

Some years ago, in his contribution to a collection of essays on the Supreme Court and the Indian Constitution, Pratap Bhanu Mehta emphasized the political significance of the Court, saying, “there is not a single important issue of political life in India that has not been, by accident or design, profoundly shaped by its interventions … the courts participate and collaborate in governing India” (Mehta 2006, 162). How exactly might this happen? In beginning to explore answers to this question, I want to focus on the formation of a distinct environmental jurisprudence and its relationship to the changing and dynamic qualities of a democratic polity in India. And in formulating my analysis I draw here on my current work on courts and the environment in India or how the environment came to be a legal object in India over the last century.

The present parochialism of Thai studies, although partial, suggests parallels with the situation of Modern Greek studies in the early 1970s. The cultural and political conditions attendant on both in the respective time periods—especially the prudery, emphasis on bourgeois notions of respectability, and restrictions on the scope and content of scholarship—suggest that a comparative framework, already emergent, would benefit both Thailand and Thai studies today. Thailand and Greece both represent conditions of “crypto-colonialism,” in which the combination of adulation and resentment of powerful Western nations produces a distinctive set of attitudes. Important cultural and political consequences flow from this shared condition, as is also contrastively demonstrated by the two countries’ very different recent histories. For example, censorship, once deeply intrusive but now virtually nonexistent in Greece, was instantiated by absent voices and official surveillance at the Thai studies conference at which this article was originally presented. A defensive posture, such censorship exposes an underlying sense of political weakness and cultural embarrassment.

Hindus regard all humans as fundamentally unequal. Hindu society is organized around groupings of people into ranked castes. On this there is general agreement, as Dumont's apt characterization, Homo hierarchies, affirms and attests. No similar agreement exists, however, as to the criterion of caste rank. On the one hand, attributional theorists such as H.N.C. Stevenson emphasize the physical nature of a caste and its placement on a continuum of purity and impurity, with the more pure castes held to rank above the less pure. On the other hand, interactional theorists like McKim Marriott emphasize the coded exchange between castes of culturally valued foods and services, with the givers of food held to rank above the receivers, and the receivers of service above the givers; here it is not the religious values of purity and impurity, but behavioral dominance that seems to be at issue.

The Indian Municipal Elections of 1959 raised in compelling form the question of the relationship between urban life and political radicalism; radical parties of both the left and the right gained ground in Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. In Calcutta, radicalism already had a long history. The Madras results, when put in the context of the state's political history, raise further questions: is urban life an experience or a location; are city and village two different and separate worlds whose politics are discontinuous; or do the politically salient experiences of urban and rural people in some measure overlap?

Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in these colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.

In August 2011, India was in the headlines due to an anti-corruption hunger strike that played upon Gandhi's legacy of civil disobedience and mass protest. The strike was initiated by a short, bespectacled, 74-year-old man called Anna Hazare to protest the government's new anticorruption legislation, which Hazare said was too weak. Hazare's call for a strong anticorruption Lokpal (ombudsman) had slowly gained momentum in the first half of 2011, when the self-styled Gandhian had collected a sizeable following. But it was Hazare's unexpected arrest on the eve of the August hunger strike that pushed him into the limelight, sparking candlelit marches across the country. A shaken government ordered his release in less than twelve hours, but in stunning turnaround, Hazare refused to leave and began his “fast unto death” in Delhi's notorious Tihar Jail, South Asia's largest high-security prison.

This article, based on newly opened archives, explores the rights of tenants in the neighborhood of Chongqing during the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Changes in tenancy arrangements are discussed within the context of Chongqing's role as the main transshipment center for rice and goods from Southwest China to the middle and lower Yangtze. By the 1820s there was a tendency toward the collection of fixed rents in kind. Rent deposits, a major source of liquid capital for landlords, became an almost universal feature of Baxian leases. High deposits encouraged subletting and multiple tenancy, but appear to have provided little security of tenure. The large collection of lawsuits in the Baxian Archives allows an examination of the treatment of tenants in the magistrates' court and of the rights of persons who had disposed of land by means of conditional sale (dianmai).

The British administrative frontier in India had widely differing effects on the political and social structures of the regions into which it moved from the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. It is impossible to generalize on the impact of the administration, because the regions into which it moved differed in their political and social structures, and because British administration and ideas about administration, both in India and in Great Britain, changed markedly throughout this hundred year period.

Early in the morning of August 26, 2008, a large group of stick-wielding, black-shirted masked men forced their way into the studios of Bangkok's NBT television station, briefly detaining a number of staff. Once inside, they flung open the main doors, allowing several hundred more yellow-shirted protestors from the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) inside. Other PAD supporters occupied the grounds of the station. NBT, the channel of the government's Public Relations Department (PRD) formerly known as Channel 11, was held by the PAD for around twelve hours. During this time, rogue engineers tried unsuccessfully to channel their illegal—but wildly popular—ASTV television signal through the NBT network. Defeated by the technical challenges, the protestors gave up their occupation of NBT, returning to Government House, the office of the Thai prime minister. That same afternoon, PAD supporters had climbed the fence of Government House and occupied the compound surrounding the Italianate Khu Fa building.

Asia, a region grappling with the impacts of climate change, increasing natural disasters, and transboundary water issues, faces major challenges to water security. Water resources there are closely tied to the dramatic Hindu-Kush Himalayan (HKH) mountain range, where over 46,000 glaciers hold some of the largest repositories of fresh water on earth (Qiu 2010). Often described as the water tower of Asia, the HKH harbors the snow and ice that form the headwaters of the continent's major rivers (Bandyopadhyay 2013). Downstream, this network of river systems sustains more than 1.3 billion people who depend on these freshwater sources for their consumption and agricultural production, and increasingly as a source of hydropower (Immerzeel, Van Beek, and Bierkens 2010; National Research Council 2012; Rasul 2014).

It was once popular for Western scholars to view the liberation of women as one of the most dramatic accomplishments of the Chinese revolution. This article reviews three recently published studies that present a more sanguine view of the impact of the policies adopted by the Chinese Communist party on women's lives. Throughout its history (with the possible exception of the 1920s) the CCP has failed to commit itself to the achievement of gender equality. To have done so, the new scholarship suggests, would have alienated male peasants, the most important constituency of the CCP Patriarchy, rather than being dismantled, has thus been perpetuated and reinforced in China. This argument is substantiated in the three volumes under review by an analysis of Party policy and political campaigns. The extent to which these policies and campaigns reflect social reality is a task that future scholars will have to confront.