This article discusses slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, under Dutch and British rule. It argues that by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting slaves, Dutch colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some enslaved people, however, bureaucratization provided grounds for negotiation and resistance, as well as the potential to take control over their individual lives. British rule that took over areas controlled by the Dutch East India Company or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—first in the guise of the East India Company (1796–1802), then under the Crown (1802–1948)—introduced a number of measures, acts, and incentives to dismantle slavery as it was practiced on the island. This article draws from Dutch and early British period petitions, court records, commission reports, and slave registers to interrogate the discourse of freedom that permeated the British abolition of slavery from 1806 to 1844 and suggests that in Jaffna after abolition there remained bondage in freedom.

In March 2020, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, the Tokyo Olympic Organising Committee, and the International Olympic Committee postponed the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for one year. The delay is the most prominent consequence of the COVID-19 crisis in Japan thus far. But the “Corona Calamity” (korona ka) is bigger than the Olympics. The totality of the disaster is impossible to capture. The very thing that makes it a calamity are the myriad rhythms of crisis that intersect at COVID-19. If there is a shared theme to be found in these rhythms, it is the question of recovery. When will it happen? What will it look like? And what, exactly, will we recover? In what follows, I share three rhythms of crisis and recovery: national history, the tourism industry, and the parcel delivery industry.

With the earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the expanding nuclear disaster that followed, our “affluent postwar” has finally reached a decisive end. Indeed, this closure had been clearly augured since the 1990s. The collapse of the bubble economy, the close of an era of single-party rule by the Liberal Democratic Party, and the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attacks that came in rapid succession in 1995—these events forced upon us the reality that the “affluent postwar” was over.

Periodic gatherings of Orientalists are fully meaningful only when they serve as forums for the discussion of important developments in the major fields of their professional concern: Oriental languages, literature and ideas, history and institutions. Having worked for decades in the latter fields with China as a starting point and the comparison of institutions as a central target, I would like to discuss here some of the problems connected with the power structure that Montesquieu, the men of the Enlightenment, and Marx and Engels called “Oriental despotism.”

For a variety of reasons, there has been a growing interest in the institutional conditions of the “Orient.” Hence any significant change in the interpretation of these conditions is bound to affect a growing number of Orientalists—and of social scientists who, although not Orientalists, deal with Oriental institutions.

In this article, I interrogate the exhaustive “inbetweenness” through which Bhutan is understood and located on a map (“inbetween India and China”). I argue that this understanding naturalizes a contemporary geopolitics with little depth about how this inbetweenness has shifted over the centuries, thereby constructing a timeless, obscure, and remote Bhutan that is “naturally” oriented southward. I trace how the construction of Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness is nested in the larger story of the formation and consolidation of imperial British India and its dissolution, and the emergence of post-colonial India as a successor state. I identify and analyze the key economic dynamics of three phases marked by commercial, production, and security interests, through which this asymmetrical inbetweenness was consolidated. Bringing together sources from different disciplines and archival work, this account also challenges some of the dominant historical scholarship on Bhutan in each phase. I conclude by emphasizing that critical work at the intersection of geographical/political/historical contingencies is important to the subalternizing of geopolitics, which recognizes the myriad ways in which dominant powers have shaped both the geopolitical environment as well as knowledge-making that has constrained small states.

The longevity of Chinese civilization is generally conceded to be a unique phenomenon in world history; as such it has evoked explanations ranging from the plausible to the esoteric. A search for the roots of its longevity is now feasible, thanks to the massive archaeological and scientific data pouring out of China since 1949. A preliminary integration of such multifarious new data with rich archaic Chinese literary records has enabled me to reach the conclusion that the trait-complex of each of the major Chinese cultural elements—field agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, metallurgy, script, language, religion including the system of divination, social and political thought—is marked at once by a regionally distinctive Sinitic character and by a pattern of centrifugal geographic spread from the southeastern portion of the loess highlands of North China. The detailed evidence and argument that the Chinese civilization, in spite of its later coalescence and articulation, was just as pristine as the Mesopotamian, have been presented in my recent book, The Cradle of the East: An Inquiry into the Indigenous Origins of Techniques and Ideas of Neolithic and Early Historic China, 5000–1000 B.C. In the course of my research I have uncovered three basic factors that may provide a fresh interpretation as to why the Chinese civilization is the only major civilization of ancient origin that is still distinctive and vital today.

Religious pluralism characterized Tibetan Buddhism by the eleventh or twelfth century, allowing for the development of many schools and sects with little differentiation in religious products. The early Ming dynasty (1368–1424) saw a significant shift in policy on Tibetan affairs compared to the Mongolian Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Relative disengagement from Tibet translated into a liberalization of local politics, resulting in a shift from secular politics and clan wealth to ecclesiastical monastic institutions. The Geluk sect formed during this period, introducing superior technology in its organizational characteristics—celibacy, ordained abbots, casuistical adherence, scholastic training, and doctrinal orthodoxy—that distinguished it from other schools and sects. With the loss of its major Tibetan patron, the Gelukpa faced a serious challenge from its fiercest competitor, the Karmapa, and raised the stakes by introducing the incarnate position of the Dalai Lama and his labrang (financial estate). This allowed the Gelukpa to directly compete with the Karmapa for wealthy patrons. By forming an alliance with the Mongols, the Gelukpa were willing to counter violence with violence to become the monopoly religion.

By the spring of 1966, it was abundantly clear in New Delhi that the Third Five Year Plan was a failure. Over the five year period (1961–66), the rate of increase in national income was less than half the projected level. Per capita income showed no increase at all. At the same time, prices for all commodities rose by over one half. The price index for foodgrains climbed by more than 56 per cent. By 1966, food shortages were so severe that some thirty million persons in major cities and towns were placed under statutory rationing. Another two hundred million—over one-third the population—were brought under partial rationing schemes. Even so, the general price index rose by another 38 per cent in 1967. Once again, foodgrains took the lead with a price increase of 44 per cent.

Since 1979, China has changed its rural policies from emphasis on the collective economy to the support of a variety of household and individual contract systems. The forms of economic organization introduced between 1954 and the late 1970s have been criticized in the Chinese media and blamed for slow rates of development. However, in retrospect, it is not completely clear that the form itself was to blame. Three of the four books under review are in part defenses of the past and critiques of present-day policies. Basing their work on interviews with peasants and rural cadres, these authors present both the achievements and the failures stemming from state policies during the collective years, and some of the peasant reactions to them. They also raise questions about the long-term implications of the new system. The fourth author is uniformly critical of the collective decades and the present readjustments. The extent to which rural socialism was a failure and the advantages or disadvantages of the household economy are matters that scholars of China and economic development will continue to argue in coming decades.

Takabatake Motoyuki was one of several prewar Japanese socialists who combined the Marxian ideal of proletarian socialism with nationalism. The first to produce a full Japanese translation of Karl Marx's Capital in 1919, Takabatake formulated a doctrine of national or state socialism that same year and dedicated the rest of his life to the promotion of that ideal. While Takabatake continued to call himself a Marxist, he criticized Marx's understanding of the state and drew on the work of Western political theorists such as Thomas Hobbes to construct his own functionalist interpretation of the state. Takabatake's work not only exposes some important lacunae in Marxist-Leninism, but his continued appeal to Marxism while embracing an ideology usually associated with the political Right defies analysis on the basis of conventional Left-Right distinctions. As his treatment of contemporary domestic and international problems demonstrates, both socialist and nationalist movements of this era constituted impassioned responses to social, economic, and political crises that were already apparent in the Taishō years.

This paper, a study of the career of Yii Chi (1272–1348), explores the nature of Chinese literati support of Mongol rulers during the Yiian period. Yii Chi served as the leading apologist for the usurper Tugh Temiir (Wen-tsung, r. 1328 and 1329–1332). The most prominent court scholar of his time, Yii Chi devoted himself to the enhancement of Tugh Temiir's prestige, authority, and legitimacy. The paper explores Yii's activities in detail and speculates on his motivations in serving his Mongol emperor. In particular, it suggests that Yii Chi's ultimate aim in bolstering the usurper's claims to the throne, as well as in encouraging imperial support of Chinese cultural symbols and values, was to make Mongol rule more predictable and stable and thus to benefit the Mongols' Chinese subjects.

The primary unit in the hierarchy of Philippine local government is the barrio. The term, barrio, is employed to describe any and all sub-units of the municipalities which lie outside the poblacion (municipal center) as well as sub-divisions of some of the smaller chartered cities. This double use of the term leads to confusion, for the rural barrio differs considerably from a barrio located within an urban or semi-urban area. The latter closely resembles a ward or precinct in a small American city, while the former is more akin to the prototype of an Asian village. In this paper, barrio will be used only in reference to the rural units and where mentioned is made of barrios which are city units, the distinction will be made.

Netherlands indies occupies a position somewhat unique in the sphere of colonial administration, or at least did so until its conquest by the Japanese. For one thing, it is not a dependency of the ‘mother country’ for it forms a component part, along with the Netherlands, Curacao and Surinam, of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. As such its nationals are Dutch subjects and stand on an equal footing, legally, with the citizens of other sovereign nations. In the event of legal controversy involving a resident of the Netherlands Indies and a citizen of another nation, the principles of private international law, better known in this country as conflict of laws, come into play to determine what body of legal rules, which of the two legal systems shall be applied in the particular case. The position of the Indies with respect to Holland—or Curacao or Surinam—introduces another, somewhat different, aspect of conflict of laws. For interregional law, as it has been termed, does not involve diverse sovereignties but concerns controversies that arise between subjects of the same state, controversies that flow from the fact that Indies private law is not identical to that of the Netherlands.

Contrary to accepted scholarly opinion, Ssu-Ma Kuang was not a leading spokesman for monarchical absolutism during the Sung dynasty. He conceived of “non-action” as a practical technique of government in which the various strata of the administration had their own unique areas of competence. The emperor, in his view, had only limited powers of decision-making. The outline of Ssu-Ma's theory of the proper relationship between bureaucracy and monarchy is that the bureaucracy is the official interpreter of the classical tradition, which was the criterion for the legitimacy of imperial decisions, and that the bureaucracy was to have wide-ranging discretionary power and delegated authority. The emperor was to rule through “non-action” by turning over authority to qualified subordinates.

During the half century before the Communist take-over of 1949, there occurred twice in China a large scale opposition to Christianity: the Boxer Uprising of 1900 and the anti-Christian movement of 1922–1927. Both these movements were crises of East-West contact, and Chinese reactions against foreign culture. They can be understood only in the context of the modern changes in Chinese culture and society. This study of the anti-Christian agitation of 1922–27 seeks to clarify the nature and constituent forces of this movement in the rapidly changing and complicated history of China in the 1920s.

In the Southeast Asian highlands, different types of hierarchy appear as forms of social organization as well as devices for intersocietal communication. In the present case, ranked titles from centralized Tai Meuang hierarchies such as the Lao or the Lue in southern China have been adopted by Rmeet (Lamet) uplanders in northern Laos, where the main type of hierarchy is the decentralized superiority of wife-givers over wife-takers. In the process of adoption, title-giving was subordinated to wife-giving, and today the wife-givers are the ritual source of ranks. In the course of history, title-giving has thus been integrated into Rmeet forms of sociocosmic reproduction while, at the same time, titles have lost their initial function of communication between upland societies and lowland state formations.

Sets of narrative pictures portraying the life of Confucius (Fig. 1; all figures appear at the end of the text) first appeared in considerable numbers in the late Ming period, typically under the title Sheng-chi t'u (Pictures of the Sage's Traces; hereafter SCT) or some close variant. Produced at varying levels of expense, these illustrated biographies or hagiographies were made in a variety of media, such as woodblock prints, paintings on silk, and incised stone tablets. The various examples also exhibit a wide range of artistic quality. These differences in quality and form suggest that pictorial biographies were made for multiple purposes and for diverse audiences. Furthermore, the pictorial biographies differ in total numbers of scenes and in specific episodes selected for inclusion. These differences in content imply disparate conceptions of Confucius and the significance of his life.

This article discusses how contemporary Chinese Muslims in the city of Xi'an remember a massive conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims that devastated northwest China in the Tongzhi period (1862–74) of the Qing dynasty. Every year on the seventeenth day of the fifth lunar month, local Hui hold a series of mourning rituals for the Muslims who died at that time. They recount stories about these events during the ritual and in other settings. The author uses Bakhtin's concept of “social heteroglossia” to explore the discursive features of three accounts of the violence, arguing that Xi'an Hui memories of this past show the influence of state-sponsored ethnic policies, a religious model of Hui identity, and a less formally articulated collective sentiment (what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling”) based on shared experience. The author discusses how these discourses are disseminated and which factors generate the “structure of feeling” that colors contemporary Muslim accounts of the Tongzhi period, and reflects on the consequences of Xi'an Hui internalization of the state's framework for ethnic identity.

The reform movement of 1898 sought to move the Qing empire toward comprehensive and unprecedented institutional change and thus was a critical event in modern Chinese history. Had it succeeded, China could have, like Meiji Japan, entered the modern era without revolutions. Yet, however determined and daring its leaders, the historic effort was suddenly and tragically cut short by a coup.

The standard view of the Reform Movement has been that, in reaction to China's repeated defeats and humiliation as well as the inadequacy of the Self-strengthening Movement, the reform-minded Kang Youwei (illustration 1) and Liang Qichao finally won support for change from a sympathetic Guangxu Emperor. The reformers then managed to put into effect a nationwide reform program through imperial decrees. But the movement, which lasted barely over one hundred days, came to an abrupt end when the Empress Dowager Cixi and her conservative supporters recaptured political power, executed or imprisoned many of the reformers, and placed the emperor under permanent house arrest.