According to the view current among most Japanese today, the samurai lost their last hope of surviving as a distinct social or political group when Saigō Takamori died in the autumn of 1877. In fact, the fate of the samurai class had been sealed as early as 1866, when Satsuma and Chōshū joined forces to destroy the only institutional order in which the samurai had any functional meaning. Their disappearance from the Japanese stage was brought about by forces that Saigō helped to set in motion, but over which neither he nor any other individual could possibly have exerted much control. In the end he had no significant effect on the fate of the samurai.

Modern Japan has experienced two constitutional revolutions, one from the latter half of the nineteenth century until 1945, and the other since 1945. By ‘constitutional revolution’ is meant a long process in which a fundamental shift takes place in constitutional values diffused throughout society by means of law, administrative actions, judicial decisions, and education, both formal and informal.

An incidental aside in one of my books has become the focal point of a small controversy. Experiment with Freedom, India and Pakistan 1947 was a brief work which attempted to give a more precise and particular account of the events which led up to the transfer of power. Most attention has been paid to my interpretation of the celebrated episode at Simla in May 1947 when Nehru reacted violently to Mountbatten's plans for transferring power. I suggested that the crisis was not an external confrontation between British and Indian views over whether India should remain united, or be divided, or split into fractions, but was essentially an internal crisis in the mind of Jawaharlal Nehru. To try to explain why Nehru was so upset by a plan which he had, in all essentials, previously (however reluctantly) accepted, I made a comparison with his later reaction to Chinese activities on the Indian border. Nobody adopted the slogan Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai (‘Indians and Chinese are Brothers’) more ardently than Nehru and so the revelation that they were enemies came as a profound personal shock. Speaking on the morrow of the Chinese invasion, Nehru said that he now realized that they had been ‘out of touch with reality’, in an ‘artificial atmosphere of our own creation’. The Times printed this observation under the sardonic heading ‘The Dreamers’ (26 October 1962). I suggested that at Simla Nehru exhibited ‘much the same apparent amnesia’.

The Narmada valley and adjoining districts of Madhya Pradesh came under British administration following the defeat of Sagar and Nagpur in 1818. Known from 1820 as the Saugor and Nerbudda (Sagar and Narmada) Territories (map 1), the area was administered, variously, as an agency of the governor general or as a commissioner's division of the North Western Provinces. As officials made the area part of the British imperial and capitalist system, they met with increasing resitance from notables, smaller chiefs and malguzars. A first round of protests occurred between 1818 and 1826, though these proved no much for the new administration or the troops still in central India. A more determined agitation took place in 1842–43, to meet the same fate. In 1857–58 the traditional landowners launched a third and more coordinated revolt against British rele, but were again unable to dislodge it from the region. This essay explores the origins and nature of that revolt and it does so against the background of colonial beginnings in Madhaya Pradesh.

Since the war, some changes are discernible in Japanese attitudes towards the Emperor and the Imperial institution. When asked, those expressing support for the maintenance of the institution still comprise a stable and vast majority of the people (84 percent in 1973), but there has clearly been an increase in indifference, especially among the young. The other change is the recent emergence, after a long period of relative dormancy, of an emotional reaction on the part of a small minority against both the institution and the Emperor for their involvement in the per-1945 establishment. in the pre-1945 establishment. Bitter criticisms and attacks have dominated the intellectual journals and have spilled over into the mass media. There are strong emotional currents on both sides of the issue. One emotion, becoming more vocal, is iconoclastic; the other, not much represented in the mass media, is protective. In the immediate postwar period, the Emperor and the Imperial institution were associated in the minds of many Japanese, especially among those of left-wing persuasion, with repression, war and defeat. The problem of the ‘Emperor system,’ as the Communists called it, not yet decided by a new Constitution, became a political issue for a short period when Communists released from prison in 1945 mounted an attack on the Emperor as well as on the ‘Emperor system.’ But between 1946 and 1971, it was not of great importance as a political issue.

Although the Foreign Office was theoretically the department of state responsible for British relations with the Kingdom of Siam, it has for some time been recognized that the strategic interests of both the Indian Empire and the Straits Settlements and Protectorates in the Malay Peninsula necessitated the active participation of the India and Colonial Offices in policy making. The role of the Calcutta authorities and their superiors in Whitehall in the formulation of British official attitudes towards Siam in the latter part of the nineteenth century has yet to be made known. But much has been done, including several recent attempts, to evaluate the extent of Colonial Office interference in the Siamese Malay States before 1909. To some extent, the renewed interest in the broader metropolitan implications of the subject is characterized by a desire to investigate the character of British imperialism itself.

The decade preceding the Second World War was a crucial period in the history of the Indian nationalist movement. It was at this time that the leadership of Gandhi and the ‘Old Guard’—Congress veterans who, with few exceptions, were annually re-elected to the party's Working Committee—faced its most serious challenge for control of the Congress Party. The outcome of this internal party struggle determined the nature and scope of the independence movement throughout the war years and until the attainment of freedom in 1947. It also determined the political complexion of the party that was to guide the Republic of India through the early, and critical, formative years of its existence.

The Maithil Brahmans of Bihar and the Bengali Brahmans of Bengal, two of the five great North Indian Brahman castes, had, as of the early nineteenth century, closely similar systems of ranked grades and hypergamously marrying lineages. In addition, fundamental concepts—of purity and pollution, of coded substance, of sattva, rajas, and tamas (Dumont 1970; Inden 1976; Davis 1983)—form a shared construction of reality for both groups of Hindus. Yet despite a common ideation and similar patterns of organization up to that point, the ‘Kulin system’ of Bengal virtually disappeared in the middle of the last century, while among the Brahmans to the east in Bihar, the system faltered during the same period, then corrected itself, grew more complex with greater refinements of rank than at any time in the past, and has survived into the present.

On 28 November 1967, outnumbered Indonesian commandos, battling against more than five hundred guerrillas in the heavily jungled, mountainous area near Bengkajang, in the extreme western part of Indonesian Kalimantan (Borneo) close to the south-western frontier of Sarawak, were compelled to call for air support and reinforcements from the nearby crack Siliwangi army division, as the heavy automatic rifle and mortar fire of the insurgents was decimating commando ranks. The plight of the Indonesian regulars gave added significance to the concern voiced in the Indonesian Parliament a few weeks before that the Communist-led insurgents along the Sarawaken-Indonesian border should be prevented ‘from becoming a Viet Cong type terrorist band’, and to reports that Indonesian forces, engaged for some time in running battles with the guerrillas, had recently discovered in the forests near Sajung Kampong, Sebaloh and Punti various guerrilla caches of arms and supplies, including 'insignias with quotations of Mao Tse-tung’s teachings inscribed on them’.

Following the adoption of 8 August resolution at Gowalia tank in Bombay, Indian masses rose to revolt, which became famous as the Quit India movement. It was a call for freedom. ‘Nothing less than freedom’, to quote Gandhi. Unlike the 1920–21 Non-cooperation and 1930–32 Civil Disobedience movements which were basically peaceful campaigns against the British rule in India, the Quit India movement was the ultimatum to the British for final withdrawal, a Gandhi-led un-Gandhian way of struggle since the Mahatma exhorted the people to take up arms in self-defence, and resort to armed resistance against a stronger and well-equipped aggressor.

The image of the apex of the Japanese legal system, as portrayed by file video clips on NHK evening news, has remained amazingly consistent over the years: poker-faced judges sit motionless in high-backed chairs, as if waiting to be taken to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. With such a stodgy and foreboding appearance, it is hard for us to imagine that exciting events might transpire within those solemn chambers. And yet occasionally a specific case does demand our attention, especially when the controversy at hand is thought to embody, represent, or challenge some of the most fundamental principles ordering the way society goes about its business.

When he wrote his oft-cited work, Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (Freedman 1958), Maurice Freedman could say little about the nature of Chinese martial arts societies. ‘The boxing and music clubs were, as their names imply, groupings of recreation. The structural significance of these associations is not altogether clear’ (Freedman 1958:93). This paper aspires to make that situation somewhat less opaque. Chinese martial arts students under the same teacher are brothers. I don't mean this in a metaphorical sense, that they are ‘like’ brothers. They, at least in some Chinese martial arts groups, consider themselves to be kin.

Already between 40 and 50 percent of the military contribution is derived from the sale of opium. I say nothing about the Imperial Government thus drawing any revenue from what it is committed to regard as a tainted source.

Ceylon is one of the few non-European members of the Commonwealth which has been reasonably successful in adapting the Westminster-style government to suit its own requirements. There are difficulties in operating the system—a heterogeneous population comprising religious, cultural, linguistic and caste groups whose differences are not seldom accentuated by the island's slow rate of economic growth—but despite these, it could be said from the experience of nearly twenty years of Parliament's working, that the willingness of parties and groups to differ on a constitutional plane with all the necessary corollaries of elections, political meetings, a legally established government and a recognized opposition is the generally accepted norm of political behaviour in Ceylon today.

The individual works of Hariścandra in prose, poetry and drama have been little analysed or exploited by western scholars for the light they throw on social and political attitudes, and on language issues, in north India in their author's time. Yet many of these works are of interest from the above point of view. One such work is an essay based on an address given by Hariścandra in the town of Ballia, to the east of Banaras, in 1877. In the following pages the content of this interesting essay is outlined and analysed; an introductory account is first provided of Hariścandra, his activity, and its historical context.

It has been said that if completely known and understood, a historical phenomenon is therefore dead. Yet how perverse, so it might seem, that the scholarly revelation of the complex history of a powerful concept might therefore be taken as an argument that it should therefore be entirely abandoned. This is, of course, not Sanjay Subrahmanyam's conclusion about the notion of Asia. The choice he poses is not between one Asia or none, but between a singular and overarching universal and an unevenly connected plurality. However, further complementary questions might pose themselves. Under what conditions can this plurality and these connections become anything like objects of knowledge? And of whose knowledge? These are, perhaps, issues where historians of the sciences might contribute. It is a distressingly familiar theme among those historians that it has too often been supposed that a demonstration of the historical construction and variable functions of an object is to be understood somehow as a denial of that object's existence or value.

From the fourteenth century CE onwards, South Indian states ruled by Hindu kings were strongly influenced by politico-cultural conventions from Muslim-governed areas. This development was, for instance, manifest in the dress and titles of the rulers of the Vijayanagara empire. As has been argued, they bore the title of sultan and on public occasions they appeared in garments fashioned on Persian and Arab clothing. Both adaptations exemplified efforts to connect to the dominant Indo-Islamic world. From Vijayanagara's fragmentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new Hindu-ruled kingdoms arose. We may wonder to what extent those succeeding polities continued practices adopted from Islamic courts. With that question in mind, this article discusses royal dress at court audiences in four Vijayanagara successor states, chiefly on the basis of embassy reports of the Dutch East India Company and South Indian works of art. It appears that kings could wear a variety of clothing styles at audiences and that influences on these styles now came from multiple backgrounds, comprising diverse Islamic and other elements. Further, not all successor states followed the same dress codes, as their dynasties modified earlier conventions in different ways, depending on varying political developments.

The European Community is distinctive among the donors of international development assistance. Although it is categorized officially as a multilateral aid institution, the Community differs in structure, purpose and role compared to other, more familiar organizations of that genre. Like other multilaterals, the European Community derives its aid budget, as well as its other financial resources, from the fiscal contributions of its Member states (each of which provides its own bilateral assistance to developing countries). Yet, to be sure, the Community represents more than just a multilateral economic union, since it also constitutes a supra-European governmental authority in the making. Indeed, the European Community has begun to evolve a common foreign policy, which is reflected in its role in Official Development Assistance (ODA). Its aid effort, in giving expression to the Community's common international purpose, has taken on most of the attributes of government-to-government assistance. It is this combination of multilateral and quasi-bilateral characteristics that sets the European Economic Community (EEC, as the Community is styled in its ODA role) apart as a uniquely meta-national participant in international development cooperation.

The Indian state treated the partition of Punjab as a ‘national disaster’ and training for refugee women was deemed essential to restore the social landscape; yet the kind of help it offered to refugee women rested on its clear assumptions and biases about the kind of work that was appropriate for them: women were offered training in embroidery, stitching, tailoring, and weaving, as these are associated with feminine and household-based skills. This article will reveal that the state rehabilitation enterprise was primarily masculine in focus. The state treated women refugees as secondary earners and as guardians of hearth, kith, and kin; it did not see them playing a definitive role in nation-building in post-colonial India. In the absence of state supportive policies, refugee women were compelled to take up informal jobs like petty trading, domestic service, and labouring work. This article suggests that refugee women were handicapped in the labour market at their very point of entry. It traces the history of women's informalities in Delhi. In doing so, it investigates the feminization and commercialization of urban space in twentieth-century Delhi. It urges that women made space in more than one way: identifying fragmentary livelihoods, producing small-scale capitalism, and creating informal markets.