One must always bemoan the lack of adequate statistics when discussing population problems in Afghanistan.1 Few nations in Asia, however, have adequate data-collecting procedures: only 9 of the 41 Asian nations, encompassing about 8 per cent of Asia's total population, according to a recent UNO survey.

Despite the attention that has been given to the role of economic sanctions in Japan's decision to launch the Pacific war, Australia's decision to ban iron ore exports to Japan has been given little attention, even though this was one of the earliest economic sanctions imposed onimperial Japan in the 1930s. To a degree this neglect can be traced to a preoccupation with the actions and objectives of the great powers and a failure to consider the opportunities available to small nations to take significant initiatives. The following article traces the origins of the iron ore embargo back to 1934 when Essington Lewis, the Managing Director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Ltd (BHP), Australia's iron and steel monopoly, visited Japan and subsequently advocated the development of an Australian armaments industry to counter probable Japanese aggression in the Pacific. In Japan Lewis crossed paths with J. G. Latham, the Minister for External Affairs, who was leading the Australian government's Eastern Mission. Latham returned to Australia with conclusions that differed fundamentally from those of Lewis, who came up with a plan to take advantage of Japan's dependence on imports of iron ore and other iron products to finance investment in Australian armaments manufacturing. In explaining this outcome the article discusses interactions between a number of conflicts: between Latham and Lewis; between the British Treasury and the Foreign Office; and between the Japanese army and navy. In London the Treasury wanted to focus on the European theatre, while also holding down military spending in order to achieve balanced budgets. The Treasury believed that the way to best defend British commercial interests in Asia was to appease Japan. On the other hand, the Foreign Office was committed to the protection of British interests in the Far East by a more forceful diplomacy, although it was only willing to counten-ance behavior short of military action. Consistent with Latham's recommendations to his government, the emerging consensus in London was that while a settlement in China would help to safeguard British interests there, as long as the Japanese were bound up in their war in China they were less likely to attack British colonies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In 1936 this orientation was challenged by a shift in the balance of power in Tokyo away from the army and in favor of the navy. Although priority continued to be placed on winning the war in China and guarding against an attack from the Soviet Union, now the navy's plan for southward expansion was given more careful consideration and credibility.

Current discussions on the development of modern literary genres and aesthetic conventions in nineteenth-century colonial Bengal have tended, perhaps because of its relative neglect in the modern day, to ignore the seminal role of poetry in formulating the nationalist imagination. In academic discourse, the coming together of the birth of the novel, the concept of history and the idea of the nation-state under the sign of the modern has led to a collective blindness toward the forceful intervention of poetry and song in imagining the nation. Thus Dipesh Chakrabarty, in a chapter devoted to poetry in Provincializing Europe, ironically elides any mention of it at the crucial instance of the formulation of national modernity, when he takes his argument about the division between the prosaic and the poetic in Tagore further to say, without mentioning the seminal role of poetry, that: ‘The new prose of fiction—novels and short stories—was thus seen as intimately connected to questions of political modernity’. Partha Chatterjee discusses, in the introduction to The Nation and Its Fragments, the shaping of critical discourse in colonial Bengal in relation to drama, the novel, and even art, but ignores completely the fiercely contested and controversial processes by which modern Bengali poetry and literary criticism were formulated. ‘The desire to construct an aesthetic form that was modern and national’, to use his words, ‘was shown in its most exaggerated shape’ not, it is my contention, in the Bengal school of art in the 1920s as he says, but long before that in the poetry of Rangalal Banerjee, Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay, Madhusudan Dutt, and Nabinchandra Sen, and in the literary criticism and controversy surrounding their work.

The Cultural Revolution has reached its fortieth anniversary (1966–2006), but many questions about it remain unanswered or the answers themselves are controversial. Among the questions, why Mao and Maoist ideologists went such an extreme in seeking their political goals, and how they would justify the chaos and disasters the Chinese society suffered from 1966 to 1976, are perhaps the most fundamental one. To answer this question, Mao and China scholars have provided interpretations from political, economic, social, and cultural perspectives.

This article addresses the proactive agency of the Siamese kings in cementing commercial and diplomatic ties with the Dutch in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. The focus will be on two interrelated developments: one, the first diplomatic mission to the Dutch Republic in 1608–1610 and, two, a scheme hatched by Siamese officials to assist the Dutch in obtaining access to the Chinese market. This was deemed necessary after the Dutch, supported by some overseas Chinese businessmen from Southeast Asia, failed to gain trading access in 1604. On the Dutch side, two men stand in the limelight: Admiral Cornelis Matelief de Jonge, a director of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and supreme commander of its second fleet to Asia, and Hugo Grotius, who at the time was a rising star in the Dutch government and would later be celebrated as one of the pathfinders of modern international law. Both their published and unpublished manuscripts will be examined to ascertain how Matelief and the VOC directors reacted to these Siamese initiatives and how, in turn, the admiral sought to mobilize and co-opt the Siamese into his own commercial and military agenda, with the help of Grotius.

For perhaps a quarter of a century, from the mid-1930s to the year 1960, the Indochinese Communist Party—later the Workers' Party of Vietnam and now the Vietnamese Communist Party—celebrated the anniversary of its foundation on 6 January each year. The thirtieth anniversary (6 January 1960) was given special prominence in Hanoi and was marked by the publication of an official Party history in Vietnamese, French, English and other languages. Then, quite abruptly in September of the same year, the Party's Third National Congress approved a resolution to the effect that in future the anniversary would be commemorated on 3 February, which thereafter was held to be the ‘correct’ date.

British consuls were key agents for the British imperial presence in China from 1842 to 1943. Their role, which was to perform administrative duties that protected the rights of British subjects, is most prominently remembered in connection with the east coast. Here larger foreign communities and international maritime trade necessitated their presence. However, British consuls were also posted to the far southwest province of Yunnan and the Burma-China frontier region. This article sheds light on the role of consuls working in the little-known British consular station of Tengyue, situated close to the Burma-China frontier. Using the reports of locally stationed consuls and Burmese frontier officials, it argues that consuls were important mediators of legal power operating at the fringes of empire for British imperial and colonial interests in this region. They represented British and European subjects, and were mediators in legal disputes between British Burma and China, helping to smooth over Sino-British relations and promoting British Burmese sovereign interests. The article serves to shift our attention from the British presence in China on the east coast to the southwestern frontier, demonstrate the importance of consular legal duties, and emphasize the trans-imperial nature of British legal roles across this region.

This paper examines the changing reputation of one village in Himachal Pradesh, India, looking back over 30 years. This village has long had a singular identity and local notoriety for its association with jadu (‘witchcraft’). I argue that in this village today the idea of ‘witchcraft’ as a potent malignant force is losing its old persuasiveness, and with this change the village is also shedding its unwanted reputation. Against claims for ‘the modernity of witchcraft’ in various parts of the world, I argue that, in this case at least, witchcraft is construed as distinctly unmodern. The capacity of jadu to cause fear and, equally, its value as an explanatory idiom are, I suggest, being overwhelmed by social changes, the cumulative effect of which has been to reduce the previous insularity of this village and greatly widen the social networks of its members. I pose two main questions. Why should this village have held such a particular reputation? And why should it now be on the wane? Linked to the second question is the relationship between this decline and local understandings of ‘modernity’. In developing my argument around the specificity of an unusual village, I also consider the significance of ‘the village’ as both social entity and, formerly, one cornerstone of the anthropological project. Finally, I reflect on the methodological opportunities of long-term familiarity with a setting, exemplified in the iterative nature of learning ethnographically, as the children known initially in early fieldwork become the adult conversationalists of today, partners in interpreting their own village's past. In exploring their explanations for the decline in the salience of jadu, the pivotal impact of education and the pressures of ‘time’ created by the ‘speed’ of modernity are both salient.

In the last 15 years, India has witnessed the expression of a variety of new non-conformist religious practices performed by Muslim women. A range of vibrant campaigns has been pioneered by Muslim women's associations, asserting women's claims to hold and lead congregational prayers, enter and manage mosques, visit shrines, officiate Muslim marriages, and issue shari‘ah-based legal decisions. This article explores the twin questions of why these experimental remodellings of women's Islamic observance and leadership have been so pronounced in the Indian context compared with much of the Islamic world, and furthermore, why Muslim women's rights activists have put such confessional matters at the centre of their work. Exploring a series of specific female-led assertions of religious agency centring upon mosques, shari‘ah councils, and a Sufi shrine, the article argues that India's variant of ‘secularism’, which has normalized the state's non-intervention in religious institutions and laws, has given women the freedom to embark upon overhauls of Islamic conventions denied to their counterparts elsewhere. Simultaneously, this same framework for handling religious questions has historically given intra-community and clerical voices particular influence in regulating Muslim community affairs and family laws, compelling activists to seek women's empowerment in individual and local community contexts to further their objectives, including through the assertion of experimental forms of religious conduct.

This article examines pacification operations conducted by British colonial armies throughout the Maratha Deccan from 1803 to 1818. The East India Company assembled concentrations of coercive force by extending patronage to loyalist elites and mobile war bands. Military contingents from allied princely states were mobilized and combined with a policy of brokerage intended to demobilize hostile forces holed up in forts or engaged in brigandage. Pacification through a mixture of negotiations and force ensured loyalist groups a privileged place in the emerging colonial order.

This study of China's relations with Algeria and India shows that the Mao-era emphasis on the transnational function of class made it fundamentally sceptical of the privileged status of the nation-state and transformed Beijing's posture towards the Third World in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Beijing's sense of a growing matrix of transnational class forces damaged relations with India, a key Third World moderate, and spurred closer ties with non-state, revolutionary movements like the Algerian Front Libération Nationale (FLN). Thus Beijing retreated from the post-Korean War phase of moderate diplomacy during which it had eschewed support for revolution abroad under the rhetoric of the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’. This article relates Beijing's class analysis of the growing challenges in its relations with India to the arc of interactions between the communist Chinese, the FLN revolutionaries, and the newly post-colonial Algeria. It demonstrates that because of Beijing's understanding of how the domestic class category ‘comprador’ facilitated ‘neo-colonialism’ (an emerging Third World concept), China's anti-imperialism must be understood through its perception of the transnational function of class forces. This understanding of the post-colonial dilemma—how far to maintain or sever ties with the West, which grew partly from Chinese perceptions of Indian politics—explains the curious difficulty that Beijing faced in maintaining cooperative relations with many newly independent nations like Algeria. The emphasis on transnational class struggle also provides an interpretation of Beijing's foreign policy which is intimately linked to domestic politics and affirms the contribution of ideology to the Sino-Soviet split.

The rural history of modern India has been and is being written for the most part within the terms of that dictum of Louis Dumont, that ‘a certain hierarchy of ideas, things and people, is indispensable to social life’. Even the scholar who has most recently questioned the distributions of power between sections of the community in North India, arguing for inter-dependence of landlords, peasantry and traders, has still emphasized village controllers, and ‘momentum towards social differentiation’, ‘to produce groups of rich peasants, or rather to continue their existence’. The identity of such rich peasants remains obscure or at least specific to the region being studied; but obviously it would be very useful to have similar generalizations about social stratification in the study of modern Bihar. Hitherto the foundation at least of political histories there has been caste or caste groups, yet economic hierarchy, that related but more enigmatic pecking-order, is surely equally important. In this paper I seek a basis for making such generalizations. Grave difficulties stand in the way. My conclusion throws doubt on the applicability to Bihar of the idea of stable hierarchies, and suggests an alternative approach.

Faced with the progression of events outlined above, it is small wonder that observers of the Thai political scene at times are a bit baffled as to precisely what is transpiring in the kingdom's continued search for a stable political future. Yet beneath the headlines and seemingly blatant military power grabbing lies a web of internal happenings which is not only in a sense predictable, but to which there is an order and a fitful progress towards some form of popular representation. That this is so will become clear in the course of this analysis dealing with the military role in politics since the coup of October 1976 ended Thailand's chaotic three-year democratic experiment and reinstated ‘uniformed power’.

In this paper I examine British policy towards the Yuan Shikai government in China between 1912 and 1914 through a consideration of the role of Britain's ‘men on the spot’ in China (i.e. British diplomats and bankers resident there). In doing so, I synthesize two bodies of literature that rarely interact: British imperial history and work by China historians. Three main elements shaped British policy in China: first, British policy-makers were determined to support Yuan Shikai's consolidation of power in China; second, in the making of its China policy, the Foreign Office relied heavily on Britain's men on the spot; and, finally, these men were anxious about the vulnerability of the Yuan Shikai government and were therefore manipulated to a certain extent by Chinese politicians. I suggest that British policy-makers were reacting to, rather than controlling, Chinese politics and that in this period collaboration with British imperialism was a rational choice for the Yuan Shikai government.

At a very early stage in their respective careers, most of the major iron and steel plants of Europe and North America recognized the strategic importance of possessing colliery capacity in order to safeguard their requirements of coking-coal, a basic input to the blast furnace. In the Ruhr—where the tendency towards vertical integration probably reached its apotheosis—the Huttenzechen (tied mines), accounted for nearly twenty per cent of the total coal output at the turn of the century and no less than fifty per cent during the inter-war period. The precise legal standing of the integrated units naturally varied from country to country. In Britain and Germany, for example, the most favoured practice was for the iron and steel plant to establish outright ownership of the mines and to treat them merely as a department of the enterprise complex itself, whereas in the United States, the giant steel works such as Kaiser, Republic, and Bethlehem, preferred to create semi-autonomous subsidiary companies. In India, the two steel firms ofthe pre- Independence era, i.e. the Tata Iron and Steel Company (henceforth abbreviated to T.I.S.CO.) and the Indian Iron and Steel Company (I.I.S.CO.), inclined towards the former organizational model (with the single exception of T.I.S.CO.'s West Bokaro colliery which was purchased in 1947 and was wholly owned by the Company's shareholders).

The Indonesian revolution was a costly affair. Not only was it accompanied by the extensive destruction of life and property, but the actual logistics of fighting a protracted revolution placed enormous financial demands on the new Indonesian Republic, founded on 17 August 1945, three days after the Japanese surrendered, at a time when the revolutionary government was decidedly ill-equipped to meet them. The Republic was unable to take over immediately all the revenue sources of the colonial government and faced major difficulties in rapidly building up an alternative taxation structure. Needing a ‘soft’ form of taxation which was easily collected and which did not fall too obtrusively on the shoulders of its citizens, it turned to opium. The sale of opium to addicts had been used by colonial governments in Southeast Asia as a source of revenue, although its importance had greatly declined in the twentieth century. The Republic, however, not only maintained the colonial distribution and sales network but expanded its use of opium to make the drug an important source of government revenue and, for a time, a major source of foreign exchange.

Refugees have been largely overlooked in analyses of Myanmar's transition, apparently considered peripheral to more prominent topics such as negotiation with armed groups, economic reform, and political elections. By analysing approaches to return and repatriation in three distinct contexts—refugees in camps in Thailand, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and Chin refugees in Malaysia and India—this article shows that proposals for the return and repatriation of refugees are a form of ‘border governance' (that is, governance in, of, and through borders). This operates at three scales: (1) global border control by keeping refugees in their region of origin or returning them to their country of origin, (2) national border control by reinforcing boundaries between Myanmar and its surrounding states, and (3) the governance of political transition by reinforcing the Myanmar government’s narrative of peacebuilding by recasting continuing conflict as conditions suitable for refugee return. Premature promotion of repatriation has a number of harmful outcomes for refugee communities: encouraging the withdrawal of international aid, escalating fear and uncertainty, and political bolstering of a Bamar-dominated government and military vis-a-vis ethnic minority groups. This analysis supports a broader understanding of repatriation and its consequences, recognising that the promotion of refugee return can have significant political implications that are apparent even before mass returns have been carried out and which may reverberate far into the future.

This article will evaluate how the experience of participating in the Tabligh Jama‘at affects the formation of Chinese Muslims’ subjectivities in relation to their local, national, and global communities by using data gleaned from interviews with participants in the movement and participation in Tabligh activities in and around Xining, Qinghai Province. Intensively structured practices make the movement seem restrictive, but observing the variety permitted in individual performances and autonomy allowed by grassroots governance reveals that the movement imbues participants with a high degree of agency. A sense of belonging in a pious transnational community grants individuals the means and confidence to reshape their everyday behaviours and comportment in a way that transcends traditional sectarian structures of authority and conflicts with the predominant materialism of modern China. The movement's inward focus and apolitical stance make the movement a subtle and peaceful means of tacitly undermining both atheist state and Muslim hierarchies, reinventing oneself, and expressing membership in the global ummah.

This article explores the strategies of pandas (Hindu pilgrimage priests) in Vrindavan, relating changes in their trade (pandagiri) to tourism. These changes are the result of the pandas’ creative adjustments to shifting travel patterns that affect their market niche. Utilizing audio-recordings of the pandas’ guided tours, the article first portrays how pandas acquire ritual income from pilgrims by ‘inspiring’ donations of which they get a percentage. While commercial interests and economic conditions have always been crucial in shaping and perpetuating pilgrimage institutions and practices, global tourism has become an increasingly significant factor. Pandas all over India modify their services while the traditional exchange model (jajmani system) wanes. Changing travel patterns have made the guided tour a crucial component in the operation of Hindu pilgrimage. Vrindavan pandas have therefore turned into guides conducting religious sightseeing tours (darshan yatra). These tours are core to the new strategy for acquiring ritual income. To secure clients, pandas build connections with travel agencies and drivers and, in some cases, establish their own travel agencies that combine priestly and tourism services. The pandas’ own understandings of their methods and contemporary travel trends further reflect the dynamic interplay between pilgrimage and tourism in India.