Between 1800 and 1950, the Bengali gentry experienced—over five or six generations—dramatic changes in fortune. The broad outline of the story of landed society in Bengal is well known. There emerged, in the first generation, families from widely varying background who owed their fortunes to the Permanent Settlement. In the next two generations they successfully integrated themselves into the rural world as an influential class of gentry with a well-marked-out life style. The fixity of revenue demand, the extension of cultivation and the perfected machinery of legal coercion contributed towards the development of high landlordism by the mid-nineteenth century. The end of the century, however, brought with it a gradual crumbling of the basis of landed society which gathered momentum with the Great Depression and the second world war, forcing an increasing number among the last two generations to seek supplementary or alternative means of livelihood.

Why should we care about giving in modern South Asia, and why now? These are among the questions at the forefront of this special issue whose contributors explore charitable practices and philanthropic transformations in diverse historical and cultural contexts across the colonial/post-colonial divide at a time when trade liberalization, the transformation of state welfare-ism, and the consolidation of a global economy has led to a deepening of neo-liberal regimes across the region as well as political and religious fundamentalisms. We also write at a time when non-governmental organizations have proliferated across the region, as has the discourse regarding humanitarian aid for a diverse range of development projects. This special issue, then, seeks to throw light on what is new and different, and what persists in the context of the region's long and well-established traditions of giving. Who gives and toward what purposes and with what stated intentions? How have acts of giving changed over time and across cultural, religious, and regional complexes? What are the institutional frameworks within which specifically local, national and regional mechanisms and instruments of giving intersect with global practices? How do the economic and financial incentives interact with ethical and affective imperatives to give?

Being the concluding part of the study on the Chinese in the nineteenth-century Straits Settlements, the inquiry has a twofold aim: to construct a social alignment pattern of the Chinese in Penang, and to compare the pattern with those in Singapore and Malacca. Altogether 14,500 names of donors from epigraphic sources were processed.

The Penang Chinese exhibited a rather unique social alignment pattern in that the Hokkiens had been very active in a number of community oriented associations. Cases of cross-dialect-group participation were few, as compared to the other two settlements, for the various dialect groups in Penang, particularly the Hokkiens, were largely attracted to the inter-provincial associations. This was a unique social alignment pattern.

The findings from Penang, together with those in Singapore and Malacca were used to reconstruct an unidimensional scale for measuring the system rigidity of Chinese voluntary associations.

Pakistan is today moving toward a population crisis with two dimensions. The source of this crisis is both internal and external. Internally the country is experiencing one of the greatest population growths in the world, externally the conflict in Afghanistan has resulted in the world's greatest refugee migration. Together these two dimensions of population pressure have generated a potentially explosive condition.

The newspaper has been a key element in China's modernization. A large body of literature on the history of China's modern press, works of varying degrees of accuracy and analytical depth, has been produced, and yet, there are still many gaps in our knowledge of its development. Here, I will discuss one newspaper, the Zhongwai xinwen qiribao (hereafter, the Qiribao), published between March 1871 and April 1872, to show how, at a very crucial stage of the press's development, Chinese journalists emerged from under the apprenticeship of Westerners and shaped this new medium to their own social, political and cultural needs.

The opening up of Japan to the west and the consequent influences of the west and of Japan upon each other are remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is the interchange of styles and techniques of the arts and crafts one to the other. The export of Japanese works of art, and the influence upon European artistic production during the Meiji period (though often of works produced during the Edo period) have all but obscured the remarkable effects Japanese export art had upon the west during the period of self-imposed semi-isolation. Of course Japan was also greatly influenced by western art; that is not the subject of this paper, but it is a subject of great interest, worthy of considerable attention.

The aim of this paper is to interpret the life experience of a south Indian landholder at the end of the nineteenth century. The basis for interpretation comes from the author's analysis of the values of political economy among, chiefly, warrior castes as they adjusted to constraints of imperial rule from 1800 in Madras Presidency. The method of exposition is, for the most part, descriptive and narrative, with the intention of highlighting and contextualizing major concepts governing the man's thoughts and actions. Because the subject, a wealthy Tamil zamindar, kept English-language diaries, problems of cultural anachronism in the prose below are mitigated. Having the English vocabulary—or a small part of it—of our subject subverts the bugbear of ethnosociology, the cultural distortions inherent in using an alien language as one discusses the values of a social group. Contemporary newspaper commentary in English also lends cultural accuracy to the narrative. Memories of the subject linger still in Madurai Town, scene of many of his activities. I wrote the major part of the piece in Madurai and was honoured with a request to read it to the membership of the local Historical Society. That membership gave me paradoxical relief in saying of this cultural account, ‘She has told us nothing new about Baskara Setupati.’

In the 1850s photography was a nascent technology. Linnaeus Tripe's photographs and the Burmese Konbaung polity were perceived to be new and/or novel. They were defined and interpreted in relation to things that were established and better-known, as Tripe sought to understand photography and culturally locate ‘Burma’. Tripe was not simply a ‘colonial’ functionary, but an exploratory photographer attempting to classify the subjects of visual representation—mainly Buddhist architecture—and explore photography itself. He strove to be systematic and methodical in his ‘mapping’ of locales: he photogenically captured specimens of architecture, which could then be compared with specimens from elsewhere and located in a ‘Linnaean system’. The lack of clearly defined expectations gave him room for experimentation in his delineations of unphotographed locales, which meant that he could ultimately decide for himself what was worthy of being represented. It takes a concerted effort today to see his photographs as they might have been seen in the 1850s. They can be interpreted in myriad ways and a limitless number of meanings can be ascribed to them, reflecting the ambiguous nature of the medium. Interpretations are shaped by archival contexts and microhistories of circulation and presentation; when viewing the prints today it is important not to posthumously infer Tripe's intentions and motivations without adequately considering the circumstances in which he operated.

This article examines the role of the private merchant firm Jardine Matheson in procuring Chinese tea cultivators for the East India Company's experimental tea plantations in Assam in the 1830s. Where existing literature has detailed the establishment of a Tea Committee by the East India Company to oversee these tea plantations, the focus of this article is on the way that the illicit opium-distribution network of Jardine Matheson was used to extract labour, tea specimens, and knowledge from China. The colonial state's experimental tea plantations were directly connected to the devastation of the opium trade. The multiple uses of Jardine Matheson's drug-distribution networks and skilled employees becomes evident upon examination of their role in facilitating Chinese migration. The recruitment of tea cultivators from China in the 1830s also impacted on colonial concepts of racial hierarchy and the perceived contrast between savagery and civilization. Ultimately, Jardine Matheson's extraction of skilled labour from the China coast informs our understanding of the evolving private networks that became crucial to British imperialism in Asia, and through which labour, capital, people, information, and ideas could be exchanged.

In this article, by studying the candidate-nomination process of the two major political parties, I show how power is distributed within the political party in Bangladesh. I show that the general acceptance by scholars that political power lies in the hands of the innermost circle of the political-party leadership in Bangladesh is too simplistic. A more nuanced observation of power and influence within the party structure shows that, in the context of Bangladesh's clientelistic political system, which is based on reciprocity between patrons and clients and relies on the ability of middlemen to organize and mobilize (in order to disrupt through hartals and strikes), power is often in the hands of those mid-level leaders who are in charge of mobilizing because their demands cannot be ignored by the topmost leadership. Through studying the candidate-nomination process of the major political parties and using the Narayanganj mayoral election of 2011 as a case study, I answer questions such as whose interests political parties are representing, what channels of influence are being used, and why these channels exist.

This article uses the case of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in China to argue that disruptive cultural technologies—namely organizational forms and tools—were just as significant within Christian mission encounters as religious doctrines or material technologies. LMS missionaries did not convert as many Chinese to Christianity as they hoped, but their auxiliary efforts were more successful. The LMS mission project facilitated the transfer of certain cultural technologies such as church councils to administer local congregations or phonetic scripts to facilitate literacy. Once in the hands of native Christians and non-Christians alike, these cultural technologies could be freely adapted for a variety of purposes and ends that often diverged from the missionaries’ original intent and expectation. This article draws on the letters and reports of missionaries of the London Missionary Society in North China from roughly 1900 to 1930—the period during which self-governing Protestant congregations took root in China and many places around the world. The spread of church government structures and a culture of Bible-reading enabled Chinese within the mission sphere to create new forms of collective life. These new forms of community not only tied into local networks, but also connected to transnational flows of information, finances, and personnel. Native Christian communities embraced new, alternative sources of community authority—the power of God working through a group of ordinary people or through the biblical text—that proved both attractive and disruptive.

This article analyses how, at the time of the Japanese military expansion across Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the category of ‘Burma Chinese’ and notions of ‘Chineseness’ acquired meaning through the movement across Chinese and Indian borders of residents of Burma identified as Chinese. Focusing on the terminology utilized by various reporting organizations to refer to evacuees, refugees or returnees, this article asks what we can learn from bureaucratic exchanges and practices of documentation about the wartime migration of Burma Chinese. I argue that a shared racial logic of territorialization operates across divergent sets of correspondence concerned with the repatriation of Burma Chinese to Burma. Multiple acts of iteration and practical implementation of categories naturalized this racial logic with respect to Burma Chinese in the latter half of the 1940s. Understanding how the work of repatriating Burma Chinese rested upon a shared racial logic is important because the regulation of Asian wartime migration was foundational to the emerging international refugee regime and post-Second World War world order.

What is ‘early modern’ about religion in South India? In theorizing early modernity in South Asia, the category of religion has been viewed with scepticism, perhaps to avoid painting India as the exotic ‘Other’ that failed to modernize in the eyes of Western social theory. And yet, Western narratives, drawn from secularization theory, fail to do justice to our historical archive. As a vehicle for approaching the experience of religion in early modern South India, this article invokes the category of space as a medium for the publicization and contestation of meaning across diverse language, caste, and religious publics. In the process, it excavates the codification of the ‘Sacred Games of Śiva’ as public religious canon of the city of Madurai, exemplifying the distinctive role played by religion in public space in early modern South India.

This paper analyzes the political project of secular Islam as outlined by the Indian political and religious leader, Muhammad Shah—also known as Aga Khan III (1877–1957). As first president of the All India Muslim League, Muhammad Shah facilitated the installation of separate electorates for Muslims as well as the call for Partition. The reformist notion of Islam he invoked for this separatist programme was informed by the secular and modernizing projects of the colonial public sphere. Simultaneously, however, Muhammad Shah claimed a divine role as Imam of the Ismaili Muslim community—a position validated by Ismaili beliefs and teachings of messianic Islam. The paper engages Muhammad Shah's writings and the devotional texts of the Ismailis to illustrate how the heterogeneous forms of practices peculiar to the vernacular history of Islam in early modern South Asia were displaced by the discourse of religious identity in the colonial period.