China's foreign relations during the Second World War underwent a radical metamorphosis. The Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) earned new international respect by mounting a tenacious resistance against the Japanese enemy. By allying itself with powerful countries in the West for the first time in modern history, China emerged from its involuntary diplomatic isolation. The new Grand Alliance facilitated China's diplomatic initiatives seeking to eradicate the legal stigma of its semi-colonial status through the abrogation of the unequal treaties. In the process China also leaped to the rank of the ‘Big Four’. At a time when the Western colonialism was receding, the Japanese Empire was collapsing and national independence movements were on the rise in many Asian countries, China seemed positioned to achieve a new prominent leadership role in Asian and world affairs.

In the process of opening up China, the French representatives, like their other Western counterparts, came into contact with the Chinese mandarins who represented a culture and world view that were almost totally foreign to them. Part of the daunting task of preservin their country's glory and pursuing its interests, was to try and comprehend the world they were attempting to engage. They arrived in China with an intellectual luggage replete with stereotypes and misconceptions about the Chinese, on the one hand, and on the other hand they were committed to their mission civilisatrice in China which was to help the Chinese save themselves from themselves.

Comparative historians have illuminated the weaknesses in the Europe-derived and Europe-centred historical paradigms of the preceding century-and-a-half, while questioning the factual foundations and depth of Europe's development towards capitalism, imperialism, and industrialism. But a continental perspective on China's early modern development suggests the possibilities of a vicinage—or integrated environment—approach to China's development and its relevance to more widespread changes of the early modern period.

What was it like to be a French Consul in newly opened up China of the 1850s? What sort of people served in that risky yet challenging job in an exotic, yet remote and isolated place like mid-nineteenth-century China? How did they discharge their duties both vis-à-vis the puzzled Chinese who did not quite know how to handle the ‘Western Devils’ who thrust themselves into the Middle Kingdom, and their Western colleagues who, like them, were scrambling for Chinese concessions and for commercial and diplomatic rights for their countries, in pursuance of ever-elusive gains in prestige and diplomacy? What kind of matters did they deal with, what were they concerned with, and how well did they perform their consular duties? Under what bureaucratic and hierarchical constraints, both French and Chinese, did they operate? What was their personal contribution to advancing the cause they were delegated to promote?

Unlike the State Department Officials of the United States who were subjected by the Senate to postwar Congressional investigation in the Pearl-Harbor hearing, British Far Eastern policy-makers were saved such parliamentary ordeals. The loss of the whole British position in the Far-East at the hands of the Japanese between December 1941 and May 1942 was humiliating enough. It was, as Winston Churchill later claimed, ‘the worst disaster and the largest capitulation of British history’.

Historians of modern India have recently been paying increased attention to the founders of nationalist politics in the provinces, in growing recognition that the heredity of the Indian National Congress was influenced by complex institutional patterns going back some decades before its birth in 1885. These patterns were rooted in widely varying local and regional conditions. To the extent that the local political associations were designed by a Western-educated professional class with the common purpose of influencing policy decisions of the British Raj, they can all be understood within the context of British imperial politics. But the associations' leaders, the spokesmen of Indian nationalism in its early forms, had to confront a second audience as well as the British: the largely traditional society of their birth. Their relationship to that society was probably the most controversial and misunderstood dimension of their lives, yet it was crucial to the growth of regionally distinctive variations of later mass nationalism.

From 1939 to 1941, Mei Niang (b. 1920) penned three of her most famous novellas, Bang (Clam)(1939), Yu (Fish)(1941), and Xie (Crabs)(1941). Each of these works sheds light on the struggle of Chinese feminists in Japanese-occupied north China to realize ideals that stood in stark contrast to the conservative constructs of ‘good wives, wise mothers’ (xianqi liangmu) favoured by colonial officials. The contemporary appeal of Mei Niang's work is attested to by a catch-phrase, coined in 1942, that linked her with one of the most celebrated Chinese women writers of the twentieth century, Zhang Ailing (1920–1995): ‘the south has Zhang Ailing, the north has Mei Niang’ (Nan Ling, Bei Mei). Both women attained great fame in Japanese-occupied territories, only to have their achievements tempered by condemnation of the environments in which they forged their early careers. The Chinese civil war that followed the collapse of the Japanese empire propelled the two writers along divergent trajectories: Zhang Ailing moved to Hong Kong and the United States, where she achieved iconic status, while Mei Niang remained in the People's Republic of China, to be vilified. As one of the pre-eminent ‘writers of the enemy occupation’ (lunxian zuojia), Mei Niang was persecuted by a Maoist regime (1949–1976) dedicated to the refutation of the Japanese colonial order in its entirety.

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.

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?

Exploring the intersection of state, religion, and ethnicity, this article considers the opportunities for individual and collective advancement available to Muslim Gujjars in Chamba district of Himachal Pradesh. Following the lives of three prominent members of the community—a teacher, a political activist, and a maulvi—it considers their respective orientations to the state and their relationships with their fellow Gujjars, to illustrate the different ways in which Gujjars have sought to transcend their marginal and subordinated position as an ethnic and religious minority. With state-promoted schemes of affirmative action and reservation offering only limited opportunities for social and economic advancement, we see how Gujjars have responded to their continued marginalization, first through political mobilization as an ethnic group and, more recently, through the establishment of Islamic educational institutions and association with Tablighi Jama'at. This leads to an evaluation of the emancipatory potentials and contradictions of insurgent citizenship when mobilized around specific aspects of ethnic and religious identity. Against a backdrop of economic liberalization and accompanying shifts in civil society, I show how the distribution of rewards that derive from strategies of assimilation, engagement, and withdrawal are structured in particular ways, including by class and gender.

This article identifies a moment of conceptual innovation—the 1830s to the 1850s—in which everyday artists and writers in Siam were tasked with creating comparative representations of the peoples of the world. Although their compositions took a variety of formats, they departed from earlier representations of alterity by devoting equal attention to each ‘type’, including the Thai themselves. This approach is best exemplified in three mid-nineteenth-century works: (1) a set of archetypal portraits of about 20 peoples painted on the shutters of a major Buddhist monastery, (2) sculptures of 32 peoples at the same monastery with a short poem describing each one, and (3) entries defining terms for peoples in an early Thai–Thai dictionary. The systematic formatting of these works drew on similar compositions circulating across the nineteenth-century globe. Yet, despite the presence in Bangkok of foreign interlocutors and imported books and prints, the mid-nineteenth-century compositions preserve ethnic tropes and practices of expression specific to Siam. In addition, the agents of intellectual innovation were not restricted to the usual princely or missionary protagonists. It was a motley cast of anonymous artists, local scholars, and middling officials who tapped traditional genres of composition and local markers of differentiation to render the peoples of the world as comparable, generic, and fixed.

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.

In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues.

This article considers the relationship between poverty in Rangoon and the ways in which both an imperial and a post-imperial urbanism helped ‘improve’, develop, and reclaim Rangoon's urban environment. Examining the actions of the Rangoon Development Trust before and after the Second World War in the context of actions taken by the Bombay Improvement Trust, Bombay Development Directorate, Singapore Improvement Trust, and Hong Kong Housing Authority, it both analyses measures taken in Rangoon and constructs a connective history of urban development in relation to other Asian port cities. Incorporating documents released only in 2014 by the National Archives of Myanmar, this analysis for the first time considers interventions made in Rangoon's post-war built environment of poverty, connecting these actions to policies constructed over the preceding decades.

During an evening's conversation in September of 1989 in Hyderabad, two educated men: onea retired professor of economics, the other a civil servant whose avocation was lexicography, entered into a spirited and lengthy debate over the proper way of translating ‘fundamentalist’ into Urdu. The lexicographer argued that ‘bunyād-parast (lit: one who loves the basics)’ was the most accurate as it conveyed not only the English meaning, but also the reality of what a fundamentalist Muslim believed. In opposition, the economist held that ‘mullah-yī (lit: like a mullah)’ was culturally more correct. The ‘foundation’ implied by bunyad was not specifically religious. It could apply to the fundamentals of anything: grammar, for example. In addition, he argued that what fundamentalists really did was to dress, act and talk like mullahs. In a sense, both were correct, because each was struggling over the transfer of a notion alien to traditional Islam into the vocabulary of a living language through which Muslims interact.

Survey data on Indian labour points to a rapid expansion of the care-domestic economy, currently the main employment avenue for urban women. Hitherto, studies on domestic service portray the unequal class structures of master–servant relationships and the escalating phenomenon of live-out and part-time hired help. This article shifts the focus to under-researched, yet increasingly visible, placement agencies, which regulate care-domestic markets and provide diverse services, from specialized ‘patient care’ to the training of subaltern communities. The article discusses how these service providers denote prominent shifts in skill sets, intra-household care arrangements, forms of medical assistance, and new (and old) mechanisms of authority. The ethnography expands our knowledge of everyday mediations around hiring and training between agencies, employers, and care-domestic workers in New Delhi. The article puts forward innovative conceptualizations of service provider approaches through juxtaposing the informal practices of local (or Indian) agencies with formalized and ‘civilizing’ agendas developed by Euro-American intermediaries. The formal–informal dichotomized framework of service provider relationships adds to critical scholarship that contrived dualisms which need historical scaffolding and nuanced engagement. I argue that, while informal and formal approaches appear markedly different for the care-domestic economy, they also overlap. Significantly, both approaches are unjustly weighted against the workers who lack the potential to democratize labour relations. Local agencies reinforce exploitative care-domestic relationships, while Euro-American intermediaries, who espouse modern values, formalization, and civilizing experiments, promulgate punitive regimes and stigmatized futures for their Indian subjects.

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.