In the 1920s and 1930s China was racked by civil strife. Although the Nationalist government was established in Nanking in 1928, it exerted its power only in a small part of China, mainly in the lower Yangtze valley. When the Nanking government endeavored to unify China by force, the local warlords, who strove to maintain their own armies and bases, directed against this central government. Political divisions and tensions persisted between Nanking and the local governments until 1936.

The Khilafat movement, which took place among Indian Muslims immediately following the First World War, was so called because it was a political agitation designed to pressure the British government to preserve the defeated Ottoman Empire and its ruler, the Caliph of Islam. The Khilafat movement was also, more fundamentally, a campaign to unite Indian Muslims politically by means of religious and cultural symbols meaningful to all strata of the community. The movement gained added significance because it took place simultaneously, and cooperated fully, with Gandhi's first non-violent non-cooperation movement against British rule. Muslim and Hindu were thus engaged in parallel political activity: the broadening of national political participation from the élite to the mass through new techniques of organization and communication.

Since the early twentieth century, reforms of the social institution of marriage in China have profoundly curtailed the power of the senior generation to influence the marriage decisions of their offspring. Yet the marriage considerations of graduates from economically deprived rural family backgrounds in China's northwestern Gansu Province reveal a definite impact of feelings of social obligation towards the family as well as of a local understanding of marriage market stratification which (also) reflects these obligations. In this rural region, higher education mainly aims at long-term upward mobility into the formal urban sector of the economy. After all, the basic ‘citizenship divide’ between rural and urban residence rights established by the socialist hukou (household registration) system continues to determine rural families’ structural exclusion from access to various urban resources. Feelings of indebtedness for financial and other support received from parents and family members during years of higher education entangle graduates from economically deprived rural family backgrounds in webs of social relations that oblige them to also consider the interests of others when deciding on whom to marry. When choosing a marriage partner they thus often face dilemmas of negotiating material versus emotional interests, as well as collective versus individual ones. While higher education empowers them to reject others’ interference in their marriage decisions, if they do so, they have to cope with feelings of having disappointed all the hopes their supporters invested in them.

It is an historical commonplace that the renewal of Western diplomatic contact with Japan, after the Tokugawa seclusion, seriously disturbed the Japanese political system, and contributed to the Meiji Restoration. Undoubtedly foreign demands for commercial and diplomatic privileges, combined with the presence of warships and military garrisons, cut sharply into the minds of all politically conscious Japanese, and added to the bitterness of internal conflict. But in the past numerous historians have gone much further than these general statements, and drawn far more specific conclusions about the policies and impact of Britain in these crucial years.

Even without this wonderful sixteenth-century hyperbole, forts remain an impressive feature of India's landscape. A thoughtful traveller, seeing the jagged walls high above the road, might well wonder who built them, and when, and what events took place within the gates. Scholarly writing on the subject will disappoint him. Toy, in his seminal book, noted that ‘this writer has been struck with the dearth of reliable litetature on the forts of India.’

From the end of the fifteenth century, the Ming state redirected the entire flow of the Yellow River into the course of the Huai River in order the facilitate the transport of tribute grain. This shifted the major problems of water control from the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River to the Huaibei region. Huaibei was viewed as ‘a local interest’, as opposed to the ‘general interests’ represented by the central government, and was sacrificed for those general interests. These policies, which were continued under the Qing dynasty, created widespread and frequent flooding in the region, causing short-term famine and destruction and leading to long-term economic decline.

Rapid population growth and widespread unemployment are twin dilemmas in all the South-east Asian nations. In other more developed countries, increases in population have coincided with the growth of industry and towns. Consequently serious rural unemployment has been avoided. However, the pace of industrialization in South-east Asia has not been able to cope with the natural growth of the cities, let alone to absorb immigrants from the countryside. Yet, even the very limited opportunities for employment in the towns has attracted people to them with concomitant spreading of slums, poverty and squalor. It can be argued that ‘urban growth in the underdeveloped areas is not a feature of the expansion of the industrial base but an expression of the severity of the agrarian crises’. Further, it seems unlikely that the current rate of urbanization and industrialization in South-east Asia will solve the unemployment problem in the region. A solution must be found within a rural context.

In this Afterword I argue that public authority in South Asia is produced in a dynamic interplay between ever-more segmented publics and the ubiquity of highly performative violence. Drawing on Indian examples, I suggest that the success of vernacular publics in producing a sense of cultural intimacy within language communities in turn has prompted a new segmentation of publics. This has occurred along lines of caste and community, defined by social experience and symbols, rather than language as such. The concomitant routinization of violence in public life—whether as physical destruction of public property, attacks on other communities, or as symbolic elevations of victims of violence to the status of martyrs—indicate that today valorization and experiences of violence, however incommensurable, have emerged as a universal medium, or general equivalent, in public and political life in India.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and India, this article explores the life-world and practices of small-scale Indian export agents based in Yiwu, China, the world centre for the export of small commodities. It shows that in a market overdetermined by fast-moving goods, short-term gains, and low margins, export agents have to steer their way between acting with extreme caution or taking risks with their clients and suppliers. These apparently contradictory dispositions or orientations are negotiated by the judicious exercise of mistrust and suspicion. The article suggests not only that mistrust is valued and cultivated as an indispensable practical resource for success in Yiwu's export trade, but that contingent relations of trust between market players emerge at the interstices of a generalized mutual mistrust, via the mobilization of practices of hospitality, commensality, and masculine conviviality. Indeed, feelings of amity and mutuality elicited by the performance of modalities of social intimacy become the affective terrain upon which divergent economic interests might be reconciled and taken forward. That is, mistrust might not lead to generalized distrust, instead a situational or contingent trust might actually emerge through the judicious exercise of mistrust.

Comparatively little of a scholarly nature has been written about Indonesian trade unions, particularly on the two decades from 1945 to 1965 when, like the political parties to which so many of them were affiliated, the unions had their heyday. This paper focuses on the development of trade unions in one specific industry: refined sugar production. The period to be examined—1945 to 1949—runs from the proclamation of Indonesian independence by Sukarno and Hatta, through the revolution fought against the returning Dutch, to December 1949 when the Netherlands finally acknowledged Indonesian independence. It was during this period that the major post-war sugar industry unions were established. The circumstances surrounding the establishment of these unions will be examined, along with their leaders and members, ideological leanings and political and industrial objectives.

The decade of the 1930s provided a near perfect backdrop for a leftist surge in Indian national politics whose trajectory so far had been mapped under the political leadership of Gandhi. It had its moments of excitement, glory and disappointments. Although ample opportunities presented themselves to the Left to decisively influence the nationalist struggle during this period, it failed in its endeavour to play a historical role, beaten by a smarter, tactful, opportunist ‘Old guard’, the ‘right-wing’ leadership of the Indian National Congress, who, as events indicated in the later years, left behind all scruples to cling to political power.

Generally speaking, there are two dominant schools of thought with regard to the British annexation of Sind in the Indian sub-continent in 1843. One takes the view that individuals on the spot make history. It was a harsh, bitter and frustrated soldier by the name of General Sir Charles Napier who was determined to seek glory and wealth for himself by annexing Sind. In this respect, the eminent historian and former Special Commissioner for Sind (1943–46), H. T. Lambrick, has put his case extremely well. The other school interprets the annexation in strategic terms, as part of a search for a defence system which would safeguard British India from the dangers of attack from the northwest. In about 600 pages, the distinguished historian M. E. Yapp has achieved his goal with remarkable success. Furthermore, Yapp has done so without discounting the first school of thought. Indeed, the two are not mutually exclusive. In this paper I wish to suggest that there is a third dimension, an economic one; and that the three are not mutually exclusive either. Indeed, all three appear to have different weights at different levels of the policy-making process.

The emergence of new groups in society willing and able to supply capital and enterprise to modern industry is one of the crucial aspects of economic development. The sources of entrepreneurship in China and the relations of those entrepreneurs with the rest of society have been insufficiently studied. Previous writers have tended to focus on outstanding individuals such as Sheng Hsuan-huai and Chang Chien, and to pay insufficient attention to their more run-of-the-mill followers. This paper surveys the changing sources of entrepreneurship in the Chinese coal industry between 1895 and 1937 and suggests reasons for the prominence or otherwise of the various groups involved. The concept of entrepreneurship used here is one much wider than the classic Schumpeterian definition, and includes the followers and adaptors who, as Redlich points out, also make a vital contribution to industrialization. Thus we take into our view all those who made a contribution to the development of modern coal mining enterprises as entrepreneurs, as managers or as stockholders—in many cases these functions overlapped. The companies covered are those owned either wholly or partly by Chinese nationals. Such companies accounted for 50–60 per cent of China's coal output of about 30 million tons in the 1930s.

IN 1912 Shaukat Ali drew from popular Hindu mythology to explain some recent disputes at Aligarh. Sayyid Ahmad Khan was represented by the god Indra, the Muslim community was his sabha, or assembly, and Aligarh College was the divine akhara, or wrestling pit. Shaukat Ali was the Red God, Muhammad Ali, the Little Red God, and Aftab Ahmad Khan, the White God.

In significant contrast with Indonesian writing there is in Malay literature a body of work concerned with rural life. That this is the case suggests the degree to which Malay writers even today have their roots in the agricultural cycle of peasant experience. Those who now work in clerical jobs, in publishing, in journalism, in teaching, those in fact who make up the writers of the novels, however divorced and remote their present life-styles and occupations are from their origins, still look back to the village as the world of their formative experience. It is a world with which they are intimate and familiar, a source of spiritual reassurance, of values which they may not endorse, but which they understand fully, in opposition to the alien environment of the modern city where the totality of life is fragmented into exclusive and contradictory domains of experience. And it is precisely because the writers are not so removed from rural life in space and time, that when they do cast a glance backwards they are never tempted to review that life through the distorting lens of nostalgia. On the contrary, there is the realistic acknowledgement that their own moving away from the village has also been an escape. There is, therefore, ambivalence: the village is perceived as the repository of Malay culture, the locus of traditional values, yet at the same time it is a locus of ignorance, frustration and poverty, somewhere to return for spiritual regeneration, but never again for permanent residence.

. . . There had always been some corner of the Empire where His Majesty's subjects were causing trouble . . .

J. G. Farrell, Troubles (London: Cape, 1990) p. 215.

J. G. Farrell has, in common with Paul Scott, an admiration for Joseph Conrad (obvious in their use of symbolism, topographical and otherwise), a fascination with the decline of Empire as a subject for fiction; a reputation that rests on a series of historical novels on this subject. Farrell died at the age of 44 whereas Paul Scott did so at 58; therefore it is not fair to compare their overall achievement. Yet it is necessary to observe that, whereas Scott portrayed one country during a single short period in his major work, Farrell's view was global and spanned virtually a century, lighting upon three important crises in three different countries during three different periods: Troubles (1970), set in the context of the Irish disturbances of 1919-21; The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), located during the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ in India; The Singapore Grip (1978), focusing on the period leading up to the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese during the Second World War, the first signal defeat of the might of the British Empire by an Asian power.

To many observers Japanese decision-making is an enigma that defies conventional analysis. Neither the traditional rational actor model of decision-making, nor alternative pluralist models proposed for the analysis of Western democracies fit the Japanese case. As a result Japanese security policy decision-making is described as ‘reactive’ or even non-existent. Likewise, the anomaly of Japanese decision-making is ultimately predicted to be resolved through a process of ‘normalization’ whereby Japanese policy formation evolves into a form that does fit these models. However, this paper contends that the fact that Japan's security decision-making does not fit commonly-used models is due rather to the limitations of those models. Japan's security policy, like that of all states, is gradually evolving, but this does not mean that it is about to become just like the West. This paper addresses how a conjuncture of external factors and internal factors has stimulated important changes in Japanese security policy-making which are frequently missed or misinterpreted by observers. In order to understand Japanese security policy-making, and to chart its future course, a refined cybernetic approach is introduced.

The role of the State in promoting Indian economic development in the nineteenth century is one of several aspects of modern Indian economic history which have been ‘re-interpreted’ in recent years. The conventional wisdom once portrayed the policy of the British government in India as one essentially geared to serving British economic interests. By means of ‘discriminatory interventionism’ in economic affairs, it was argued, the Government encouraged the development of a primary commodity export economy, with all its attendant defects, in India. However, over the last two decades the reputation of the Government of India has undergone a rather noticeable transformation. Economic imperialists became, first, benevolent nightwatchmen, and then ‘development-orientated’ officials formulating an embryonic unbalanced growth model for Indian development. Parallel with this improvement in the Government of India's reputation has been a deterioration in the economic reputations of certain other governments in nineteenth-century developing economies, governments whose performances used to be favourably compared with that of the British in India. In the cases of Japan and Tsarist Russia, for instance, both the extent and effectiveness of State intervention in the economy has been questioned, and there has been an increasing recognition of the primacy of non-governmental factors in the economic growth of those countries. Given the ideological and organizational parameters limiting the range of possible activity by any nineteenth century government in its economy, the performance of governments in other developing countries of the period, and the political constraints imposed by being a subordinate section of a world-wide Empire, it is no longer possible regard the actions of British officials in India as wicked, and many would now regard them as almost respectable.

This article re-examines the frustrated Westernizing efforts of Yung Wing and the recalled students of the Chinese Educational Mission to the United States (1872–1881). It does so in response to recent scholarship (in both the Chinese and the English languages) which affirms the ‘transformative role’ of the returnees in late Qing reform and modernization. On the basis of a variety of sources, this article suggests, instead, that for those patriotic students returning to the Middle Kingdom, eager to bring about a fundamental change in its political system and rejuvenation of its civilization, disillusionment was often inevitable, and the choice—short of revolution—became one of either marginalization or co-option by the autocratic state. Despite all their achievements, China's earliest students of the West ultimately failed to set the country upon a new modernizing course—a failure that pointed, beyond itself, to an emerging (and subsequently persistent) pattern in the troubled relationship between the new, Westernized elite and the state in modern China.