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.

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.

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.

Although it is under the rule and administration of the British, Hong Kong is geographically, socially, economically and politically linked with China. The part played by Hong Kong in the 1911 Revolution has been noted in a number of works, published or unpublished. This paper, however, proposes to examine the role of the Hong Kong educated Chinese in the modernization of China, limiting the study to those who had attended schools in Hong Kong before 1911 and their activities in China during the late Ch'ing and early republican years. During these decades, the English education afforded in the Anglo-Chinese schools in Hong Kong succeeded not only in turning out people who later became leading citizens of the local community but also in producing Western-educated young men who went to China to be engaged in the imperial service, participating directly or indirectly in the various reform programmes in China; while still a greater number, having received some English education in Hong Kong, were recruited into the various modern schools in China to receive training for new careers—modern diplomacy, warfare, engineering, medicine, as well as modern communication and transportation. A number, however, played leading roles in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and in the establishment of the Republic of China—among them Dr Sun Yat-sen , father of the Republic and its first President, and Wang Ch'ung-hui , its first Foreign Minister.

In the late 1970s, a modest scholarly clash took place between James C. Scott and Michael Adas over the extent to which, if at all, the British administration in Burma had granted tax remissions to the rural population of the province during the economic crisis of the early 1930s. This formed an important part of their wider debate on the causes of the major rebellion—the Hsaya San rebellion—which erupted in Lower Burma in the closing days of 1930. First into the arena was Scott, in The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, published in 1976. On this issue, Scott's starting point was the observation that the colonial world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a very marked increase in the capacity of the state to extract tax revenues from rural populations. The decisive strength of colonial administrations in this respect lay in paperwork, in ‘the inexorable progress of cadastral surveys, settlement reports for land revenue, censuses, the issuance of land titles and licences, identity cards, tax rolls and receipts . . .’, in other words, in the creation of ‘nets of finer and finer official weave’ that trapped rural taxpayers with increasing thoroughness.

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.

This article is about one of the most depressing fieldwork situations I have ever encountered in China. Tiaoxi, basically, is dead. Some of the old artists are still alive, but the plays themselves were performed for the last time in 1987. There is video footage, taken by a professional team from the Ministry of Culture in Beijing, but the quality can only be described as execrable. There are abundant surviving libretti in manuscript, collected by field workers during the 1950s and again during the surveys of the 1980s, but they are almost all held in the Provincial Arts Research Institute in Xi'an, and no one is allowed to see them, not even the ‘old artists’ who donated them in the first place; not even photocopies are held by the county Cultural Bureau or by the artists themselves.

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.

‘The Pontiff has engulfed the Emperor, has joined in his pontifical staff the imperial sword. And the result: both Empire and Church go ill because united in one hand they cease to fear each other’ (Kantorowicz, ‘Dante's Two Suns’, 218).

Architecture can be viewed as a reflection of value placed on life. In colonial Hong Kong, a distinctive Gothic-style castle, Euston, was built by tycoon Eu Tong Sen (1877–1941) as his family's grand residence. Eu was a prominent figure in South China and Southeast Asia and remains a local legend decades after his death. Eu's castle, being built in 1928 and demolished in the 1980s, was and still is one of the most recognizable monuments in the region. Although Eu did not leave behind any autobiography or memoirs, the monumental castle can be regarded as a symbolic manifestation of his life story. The design of the castle is of mixed ancestry—it is a reconciliation of traditional Chinese design based on feng shui (Chinese geomancy) with European architectural elements. The fusion of East-West architectural building elements, as symbolized by the Eu castle, was a significant achievement symbolizing general social and cultural changes spanning more than a century.

This article builds on work by social and cultural historians of the Cold War such as Heonik Kwon and Masuda Hajimu by showing how three groups of Chinese actors helped create the locally specific reality of Chinese anticommunism in the Philippines during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It argues that, in a climate thick with Sinophobia and fears of communism, but largely devoid of actual Chinese Reds, anticommunism for the Chinese was only secondarily about rooting out subversives, ideological authenticity, and supporting Chiang Kai-shek's counterattack against mainland China. As a social phenomenon, it was primarily a diverse and flexible repertoire of practices, from crime to civic associationism, that Chinese elites and their challengers employed to bolster their reputations as anticommunists, enrich themselves, and pursue vendettas against their ‘communist’ enemies. By focusing on these practices of what I call ideological accommodation, the article intervenes in scholarship on the Chinese diaspora after the Second World War by showing that anticommunism was essential to how the overseas Chinese adapted to being resident ‘aliens’ in post-colonial Philippine society.

In the late nineteenth century British expatriate enterprise enjoyed extraordinary success. A few large firms effectively dominated the external trading sector and the modern industrial economy of Eastern India. Based in Calcutta, these firms have been credited with the introduction into India not only of modern industry, but also of modern corporate organization. However, having reached a peak of dominance in the early 1900s, British enterprise seemed to lose its dynamism and became increasingly associated with the old and declining sectors of the Indian industrial and trading economy.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Vietnamese were confronted with the harsh realities of French colonialism, while simultaneously engaging with a flood of new concepts and the language that came with them. Among these concepts was that of ‘society’, whose import was enhanced by its linkages with the discourse of social Darwinism. This article explores the Vietnamese neologistic project of the early twentieth century through a close examination of the ways in which the concept and labels for ‘society’ were brought in and understood. I argue that the arrival of ‘society’ in conjunction with social Darwinism profoundly shaped the Vietnamese understanding of the term, implicating it in a notion of struggle and contestation. By illustrating the introduction of ‘society’ through early modernist school textbooks I suggest the ways in which Vietnamese conceptualized it as they embarked on their own struggle with the threats posed by colonialism.

This paper examines the case of a Shiite practitioner of Tibetan medicine in Ladakh, North-western India. It recounts the story of a Buddhist family converted to Islam, for which the abandonment of religion has not led to the discontinuation of a lineal medical practice known to have Buddhist overtones. This situation provides an invitation to explore the social consequences of maintaining the practice in a region characterized by religious conflict, as well as the criteria of sameness and difference, technique and genealogy that make a marked ‘other’ a practitioner of Tibetan medicine. These religious overlaps are, however, not only apparent at the social level; they are also present in the preparation of medicines, in etiological narratives or in the physical regimes of bodily care. The composite nature of medical practice helps us to observe from a new angle the role of religion in the practice of Tibetan medicine. The way medicine is enacted and performed in this context provides empirical materials to study the paradigms that both structure and confer motion to Tibetan learned medicine. The ethnography of a remote region in the Himalayas opens up research paths for the anthropology of Asian medicine amongst new categories of healers and renewed contexts of practice.

This article focuses on the workings of the Punjab Partition Committee in the crucial months of July and August 1947. In bringing new material to the historiography of partition, this article challenges the widely held assumption that the Punjab Partition Committee did not deliver. It argues that one must assess and value the large degree of cooperation and agreement between Punjab political leaders on the Committee, despite the charged political and communal atmosphere of the summer of 1947. Furthermore, it argues that the Committee created a limited sense of order during the disarray that prevailed in the run-up to the Transfer of Power. This order was brought about by the cooperation and work of the ‘middle tier’—the bureaucrats and other officials who are often missing from partition literature. The article shows the hard, bureaucratic—yet human—side of partition during these deliberations: at the same time as these people were carrying out partition, they were also suffering its effects. Finally, the Committee's negotiations show how the soon-to-be-established provinces and dominions were setting up their respective states through the procurement of assets and resources.

This essay explores the distribution of the ownership of land in a coastal village in the New Territories of Hong Kong at the beginning of the last century. The study examines land and houses as indices of relative wealth in a poor community. Above all, it points to the discursive social use of land as a genealogical tract in an area where written genealogies would have been scarce or nonexisting. Belonging in terms of agnatic continuity and its ramifications over time were mapped out in the agricultural landscape to form a complete depicting graph.

Masjid Manzilgah forms a chapter in a biography of Mohammed Ayub Khuhro on which the author is currently working. Khuhro (1901-80) was an important politician of Sind whose political career spanned over fifty years from 1921 to the end of the ‘seventies. He was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council from 1923 till the severance of the connection between Bombay and Sind in 1935 when the latter province attained autonomy under the Government of India Act of 1935. He was in the forefront of the political struggle for the ‘separation’ of Sind and after 1936 became a front-ranking Muslim League leader who helped organize the party in Sind and put it behind the Pakistan movement. Khuhro was the first Premier of Sind after independence and held that office altogether three times. He came into confrontation with Jinnah over the issue of severing Karachi from Sind and became identified as the protagonist of states' rights (or provincial autonomy) and as a champion of politicians' supremacy in the fight against the domination of the bureaucracy which bedevilled Pakistani politics for nearly half a century of its existence. This fight resulted in his repeated enforced exile from the political field depriving Pakistan of one of its most experienced public men during its formative years.

On April 1st 1768, a Parsi servant of Mancherji Khurshedji, a merchant and -broker of the Dutch Company, came to Surat to whom another Parsi servant of Dhanjishah, a merchant under the English protection, asked wherefrom he came and without any further argument he inflicted a blow with his fist to the first mentioned who then fell down and meanwhile he gave him a slap, then the defender inflicted two pricks with his knife to the offender, many people witnessed this fight, and the Parsi who still had the knife in his hand, was attacked with bamboos with such force that the knife fell from his hand, he was further beaten up till he fell down.

Japan's departure from the League of Nations in 1933 over the Manchurian issue has often been portrayed as an act of national self assertiveness signifying a willingness to defy international opinion and pursue an independent course in world affairs. The physical act by Matsuoka Yosuke and his delegation of walking out of the League Assembly on 24 February promotes an image of a firm and uncompromising attitude on the part of Japan; and as time passed, the interpretation recorded in 1944 by Joseph Grew, US Ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1942, became a standard one: ‘Nobody could miss the political significance of Japan's decision to quit the League of Nations. It marked a clear break with the Western powers and prepared the way for Japan's later adherence to the Axis’.