The paper discusses the effective operation of money and credit among Europeans in Calcutta around 1800, arguing for the importance of informal processes and ties of friendship that facilitated, regulated, and enforced agreements, helping both to tide over individuals in times of economic stress and to underwrite the provision and transfer of capital. The argument is advanced by a detailed case-study of debts owed by one resident—Aaron Upjohn—to another, the diarist, Richard Blechynden, amid a web of acquaintance, officialdom, and law that variously ensured that the debts were honoured. It is defined as a support system among acquaintances, necessitated in part by shortage of money and abundance of risk.

This article argues that China's New Culture Movement was not a movement, but a buzzword. It was coined by little-known intellectuals in the summer of 1919 and then used by them to sell their own, long-standing agendas. Even though they declared famous intellectuals such as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu to be the movement's ‘centre’ and inspiration, some of them were as, if not more, important in shaping the discourses surrounding the expression ‘New Culture Movement’. Drawing upon newspapers, journals, and conference reports, this article shows this using the example of two case studies, both of which marketed their agendas as ‘New Culture Movement’: the Jiangsu Educational Association, which was a political-educational group in Jiangsu; and Chinese Christian intellectuals around the Apologetic Group in Beijing.

Regarding the New Culture Movement as a buzzword addresses some puzzles about it. It explains why it has proven difficult to agree on a starting and endpoint for the New Culture Movement. It also illustrates why such a huge variety of ideas, whose complexity has become ever more evident in recent scholarship, was subsumed under the one headline of ‘New Culture Movement’.

A maval is the generic name for one of the fertile river valleys which run east from the watershed of the Western Ghats in the Poona District of Maharashtra. They are called mavals only so long as they are fairly narrow and enclosed between the many spurs which run east from the summit crest of the Ghats and they end roughly at a line drawn north-south just short of Poona city itself, so that the whole belt of country west of Poona, about 25 miles wide and 70 miles from north to south is often called ‘the Maval’. The sub-district of Maval Taluka which lies north-west of Poona and through which run the main road and railway to Bombay, is only a small part of this area. It was in the Maval that Sivaji first established the power base which, after many vicissitudes, developed into the Maratha kingdom and the hardy mountain people who formed his guerrilla forces and raiding parties were known as māvaḷe. The word probably derives from the Marathi verb māvaḷaṇeṃ—‘to set, of the sun or any other heavenly body’, and so the Maval was originally just ‘the West’ if you happened to live in Poona. An alternative name for some of the higher and narrower valleys is khor.

A FORMIDABLE consensus of academic opinion exists on the question of the formation of Malaysia. In its most commonly stated form, this consensus is manifested in an explanation which specifies a date—27 May 1961—and sees Malaysia as the outcome of the attempt to solve the ‘Singapore Problem’. The movement towards Malaysia is, with dull regularity, dated from the Tunku's almost casual, certainly very vague, reference to the need for a ‘closer understanding’ between Singapore, British North Borneo (Sabah), Brunei, and Sarawak, and for ‘a plan whereby these territories can be brought closer together in a political and economic association’ which he made in the course of a speech to the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of South-east Asia on 27 May 1961.

A previous work on British Indian Army logistics from 1757 to 1857 called into question the accuracy of labeling Arthur Wellesley ‘The Logistical Architect of the British Indian Army’. As the ‘soldier brother’ of India's Governor-General Richard, Marquis Wellesley, Arthur was bound to have drawn some attention while in India; but secondary sources have tended to be too ethnocentric in their interpretation of his South Asian military experience. Arthur Wellesley's successful command-apprenticeship, during the Dhoondiah Waugh Campaign, led him to the promotional track which culminated in his appointment as the Commander of the Southern Theatre in the 1803 Anglo-Maratha War. However, one should not confuse his prominence with precedence and I have argued elsewhere that East India Company (EIC) logistical policy was essentially South Asian in origin.

Children from rural Odishan Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste communities have an historically marginalized relation to schools and a corresponding greater involvement with informal education regimes and participation in everyday economic and cultural routines. Although radical state restructuring in recent decades makes rural school buildings more visible, inside the classrooms, students were often present and teachers absent. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, in Western Mayurbhanj, Odisha, I examine students’ engagement with school and argue that rural schools cannot be fully understood without examining the motivations of and interactions between three sets of stakeholders: state, local providers, and students. Further, the motivations, evaluations, and experiences of students deserve to be brought much more to the fore in light of their active roles in Mayurbhanj village schools and the significant effects of this involvement on both the nature of rural schools and the changes in rural blocks.

This article examines the ways in which rural elite collaborators mobilized recruits for the British Army during the First World War. It thus not only increases knowledge of Punjab's military history, but adds to the understanding of collaboration as a process involving competitive groups in which elites manipulated the process for their own ends. The case study material drawn from the Shahpur district of the colonial Punjab argues that while there may have been a degree of indoctrination into the colonial state's values, it was mainly the desire to use its patronage to bolster family influence or to transform local hierarchies that was the key factor in securing willing collaborators. The competition for local power and influence provided a local dynamic to the collaborative process. The state could of course take advantage of this competition to serve its interests, just as the Punjabi tribal chiefs could utilize state patronage to beat off rivals to their power. Collaboration was thus a dynamic two-way process, rather than, as it is often portrayed, a top-down, one-way relationship.

Of the eleven states in West Malaysia, it may be said that Penang presents a somewhat different situation from the other ten in terms of demography, economics, geography and politics, to mention a few basic features. Situated in the northern part of the country, the state of Penang (which comprises the island and a narrow strip, Province Wellesley, on the mainland) does not exhibit the features of a typical Malay state—a Malay-majority population, a predominantly Malay agricultural economy and a Malay Mentri Besar (Chief Minister) leading a Malay-dominated State Assembly which governs the state for the sultan, the symbol of Malay political power. Instead it has a Chinese-majority population, an economic infrastructure based primarily on commerce and trade rather than agriculture and a Chinese Chief Minister leading a Chinese-dominated State Assembly.In contrast to the other Malay states, the central political role in Penang is played by the Chinese community. Whichever political party is aspiring to come to power in the state must have significant Chinese electoral support.Against the background of a Malay-dominated Federal Governmentstriving to ensure uniformity of political, cultural, linguistic and socio-economic goals, Penang poses a challenging situation.

In India in the 1860s, print was becoming the primary medium for the reproduction of religious texts. The accessibility of print, and its ready uptake within a highly stratified and competitive religious landscape, had a significant effect on the ways in which groups contended for textual, and thus spiritual, authority. In 1867, the popular Tamil Shaiva mystic Ramalinga Adigal and his followers published Tiruvarutpa, a book of Ramalinga's poems that would help establish his reputation as a great Shaiva saint. Ramalinga and his disciples chose to publish the work in a form that shared the content and the material features of contemporaneous publications of Tamil classics, thereby claiming a place for his poems alongside the revered Shaiva canon. They showed an acute awareness that it was not solely the content of religious texts, but also the materiality of the printed object in which texts appeared, that sustained assertions for authority. This article argues that leaders on the margins of established centres of religious power in South India sought authority by exploiting the material aspects of print as the new medium of religious canons.

The ability to handwrite Chinese characters in East Asia appears to be in sharp decline, most likely due to an increasing reliance upon digital technology and phonetic input systems. This so-called ‘character amnesia’ has provoked a heated debate, leading some to argue that Chinese characters—and even the Chinese and Japanese languages and cultures themselves—are facing a serious crisis. This article aims to examine the scope of this (predominantly alarmist) discourse and assess the coherence and validity of its arguments. In addition, it seeks to make sense of the possible forces and motives behind this upsurge in ‘verbal hygiene’ by answering such questions as: what led to the formation of such a discourse in the first place? What social functions might it serve, and what kinds of deep-rooted beliefs and anxieties does such a discourse reveal?

This article offers a critical reappraisal of the Maoist state's response to the 1954 Yangzi floods. It uses a variety of sources, including previously classified government reports and oral history testimony, to challenge the official narrative. It argues that, far from being a remarkable victory for the new government, the flood was a humanitarian catastrophe that caused almost 150,000 deaths. Government hydraulic policies were partly to blame, as the vast majority of disaster victims were located in rural areas that were flooded deliberately in order to protect cities. In addition to revealing the true scale of the flood, this article uses the disaster as a prism to examine the early Maoist state. The government's combative environmental policies turned disaster governance into a war on water. This approach had certain benefits, particularly in terms of organizing an effective urban relief campaign. Unfortunately, campaign politics fostered an atmosphere of distrust, which encouraged many citizens to resist disaster-prevention policies. The example of the 1954 flood reveals the profound impact that a political context can have upon the outcome of a supposedly natural disaster.

Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 changed the balance of power in the Far East, and there was a shift from opposition between Japan and Russia to one between Japan and the United States. One result of the new tension between the United States and Japan was the conclusion of a Russo-Japanese Agreement on 30 July 1907. Financial and political difficulties within Russia and Japan also helped to bring about this Agreement.

From the lens of two Macanese publics, this study rethinks cosmopolitanism as a diverse identity and pursuit that can vary from one individual to another. It complicates what we know about polyglot Asian publics often profiled as ‘cosmopolitan’ for their foreign education, middle-class status, social commitment, and internationalist visions. I argue that, while these subjects shared a common background, they diverged according to shifting global contexts, generational differences, and personal experience. On a par with imagining themselves as part of a global community, cosmopolitan publics navigated between personal worlds and communal networks, as well as between a narrower nationalist and/or urban context and a broader global framework. My first subject, Macao-born Lourenço Pereira Marques, saw Hong Kong as a liberal ground to disseminate Darwinism across southern China's Lusophone public sphere during the 1880s, whereas Hong Kong-born José Pedro Braga worked to preach an internationalist vision of racial equality through a wider Anglophone public sphere and an emerging transnational associational culture in the early twentieth century. This study also aims to further our understanding regarding Hong Kong as a vibrant port city and explore the diversity of cosmopolitan publics in the context of transitioning internal and external worlds.

This article explores how local civil servants produce the conditions of possibility for bureaucratic authority in Nepal's contested political environment of war and post-war ‘transition’. Specifically, it examines the everyday practices of local civil servants as they attempt to influence the distribution of such public resources as agricultural inputs and local government budgets. The article asks: how do local civil servants produce the authority necessary to get things done in the face of changing local government structures and rival authority claims from both wartime Maoist People's Governments and resurgent patronage politics in the post-war period? In a context characterized as ‘ordinary extraordinary’, the article suggests that local civil servants employ a form of practice that has been termed ‘tactical government’ and proposes three distinct forms of this practice. However, the article also argues that tactical practice tells only part of the story and that it can be insightful to enrich our understanding of tactical government with an analysis of more general life projects. Bureaucratic practices are also motivated by factors such as the significance of the contested resource and paternal ideas of ‘the common good’. Such a suggestion is in line with recent work on everyday lives in situations of protracted violent conflict and insecurity, and on the role of culture in producing civil servants/services. Looking at these two forms of practice together, in particular their interconnections, gives us a fuller account of how authority is produced. Furthermore, it allows more nuanced and detailed perspectives into the complex process of state-making.

This paper examines the history of ‘Hindi’1 as a modern Indian language in Bihar between 1850 and 1900. It looks beyond the North-Western Provinces, hitherto the focus of most studies of Hindi, and issues that were important here but not in Bihar like, for example, the ‘Hindi’-Urdu conflict. Instead, it looks at how the ways in which the history of ‘Hindi’ unfolded in Bihar and was distinct from that in other parts of North India. It demonstrates how the regional languages of Bihar were more crucial to the development of ‘Hindi’ in this region than standardized ‘Hindi’, at least until the early twentieth century. A prime focus in this paper is Sir George Abraham Grierson who postulated the theory of an independent ‘Bihari’ language and collected materials to support it. These materials reflect the continuing popularity of Bihari cultural traditions throughout the nineteenth century despite the avowed support for a standardized ‘Hindi’ by the colonial government and the intelligentsia of Bihar. They add a dimension to the historical development of ‘Hindi’ that was distinctive to Bihar. Focussing on this, this paper stresses the part played in the history of ‘Hindi’ by an agent whose voice was marginalized and later ignored or suppressed in canonical accounts of its development as a modern Indian language.

This article discusses the impact and implications of Sino-American reconciliation on South Korea's policy towards its conflict with North Korea as well as its effect on South Korean politics in the early 1970s. Specifically, this article will examine how the Park regime altered its policy toward the North in response to the demands of the Nixon administration, before discussing the limitations of the policy in terms of the hostile approach of the Park regime toward Pyongyang during its talks with North Korea in 1972.

Based on recent findings in the South Korean and American archives, and an interview with former KCIA official Gang Indeok, this article contends that this particular focus provides an interesting case study to explain the impact of global changes on the domestic politics of specific nation(s) during the Cold War era. Along with many other American client states, the Republic of Korea misunderstood the objective of the United States before Nixon announced his Doctrine in 1969 and intention to reduce American support for Park. To be sure, it was not Washington's intention to build a democratic country in the Korean Peninsula. Rather, as Westad has indicated, the superpower sought greater control over the world and the expansion and extension of its power. This short article will thus demonstrate the process by which the client states of the United States—in particular, South Korea—came to understand the real aims of Washington and learned how to utilize these American intentions for their own national interest.

This article engages with a long critical tradition, particularly amongst historians of India but also more generally within environmental and economic history, which describes the modern West's hubristic scientific domination of Asian environments. Confidence in the universal applicability of scientific knowledge, such critiques argue, justified one-size-fits-all technical schemes being exported across vastly different climates and societies, and landscape and communities reshaped to fit the rational visions of planners and engineers. The article examines the actual procedures of Indian canal engineering, whose protagonists ostensibly portrayed precisely this scientific hubris. It finds that even the most ‘scientific’ canal construction and management, borrowing ideas and procedures from steam engines and astronomy, involved precisely the sorts of local knowledge and social reliability evident in opposing forms of flexible, administrative irrigation management. While these two types of water management attempted literally to engineer two different political economies into India's agrarian landscape, in practice their management styles differed little. Both enlisted social and racial prejudice, rather than scientific knowledge, to defend the administrative superiority and actions of British officials. Instruments for economic governance and administrative control, it argues, thus derived as much from the colonial limits of ‘universal’ European science as from its global applicability.

In 1915 the south-western quadrant of Ceylon was convulsed by a week of rioting in which the Buddhist Sinhalese majority attacked a Muslim minority known as the Moors. The consensus amongst historians has long been that the pogrom (as it is best described) was the spontaneous result of religious tension and/or economic grievances at the popular level, with no leadership beyond the uncoordinated activities of local agitators. The consensus ignores significant evidence of wider orchestration, including the activities of itinerant gangs and other mobile agitators, the deliberate propagation of identical false rumours throughout the affected area, and the activities of individuals and societies associated with the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist movement. Although the picture is far from complete, the best interpretation of the evidence is that this movement orchestrated the pogrom, albeit with varying degrees of success in each locality. That it was able to do so shows that Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism (as opposed to non-communalist, Ceylon-wide nationalism) was more deeply entrenched than is usually thought, which helps to explain Sri Lanka's political direction later in the century.

This article focuses on how people who formerly worked as bonded labourers adapt to the new realities of an insecure capitalist labour market. It examines how the past shapes the uncertain labour situation of the present, including resistance. The article reflects on the current experiences of precarious labour at industrial sites in western Nepal. It describes how former bonded labourers and their descendants have begun working as contract workers in a modern industrial food-processing factory, with the help of contractors related to them by kin. The article further shows that one of the defining features of their new life as contract labourers is its chronic precariousness. Undisguised forms of confrontation, such as open disregard for management instructions, are also part of their new reality in the labour market. Contract labourers are often strongly assertive in the face of managerial authority, and this assertiveness has been shaped largely by either past experiences or memories of bonded labour. The article contributes to debates about bonded labour and its transformations in South Asia. It also offers a reflection on the limited impact of the Nepali Maoist Revolution on precarious labour and on the ethnic dimensions of this segment of Nepali society. Finally, it contributes to discussions about industrialization and Adivasi communities in South Asia and beyond.

At the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the world's press concentrated its gaze on Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China. Premier Zhou's every gesture, interaction and statement was scrutinized for evidence that his motivations at Bandung were antagonistic to Western interests. This preoccupation with the motivations of the Chinese was, however, no new phenomenon. By 1955, literary tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ had been firmly established in the Western imagination and, after 1949, almost seamlessly made their transition into fears of infiltrating communist Chinese ‘Reds’.

The first half of this paper explores the historical roots of the West's perceptions of the Chinese, through the literary works of Daniel Defoe to the pulp fiction of Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu series, which ran from 1917 to 1959. It then examines how this negative template was mobilised by the print media at the height of the Cold War to characterize Premier Zhou Enlai, not only as untrustworthy, but also as antagonistically anti-Western. This reading of representations of Premier Zhou at Bandung, as well as the literary tropes propagated in support of eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial expansion, exposes a history of Western (mis)interpretations of China, and sheds light upon the media network's role in constructing a Chinese enemy in the mid-1950s.