The article focuses on how low and lower-middle class youth employed in new private sector jobs in the booming service economy in Indian cities engage with the material environment of their workplace, and how, through their ‘aesthetic scrutiny’ of its materiality, come to ‘consume’ work. The setting is the store floor of a fast-expanding organized retail company, called Spexy, that sells budget eyewear products. Through ethnographic elaboration, the article follows how the Spexy staff deride the ‘un-branded’ products, ‘un-technical’ equipment, and ‘un-professional’ uniforms at their workplace. The company, as constituted of these ‘poor’ materials, is mocked for failing in its ‘company-ness’ and branded ‘fake’. The material environment of the workplace provides a platform for the articulation of larger configurations of ‘feelings’ the youth seek to give and get through formal employment in a private company. These articulations, in turn, reveal larger sociocultural valuations regarding ideas of social mobility and visibility in contemporary India where there is a strong interest in brand regimes and brand value hierarchies, fixation with technological education and expertise, and attraction towards a corporate work culture in the private sector, and, concomitantly, a strong desire amongst the store staff to craft branded, technical, and professional work identities. By putting the scholarship on work and consumption in dialogue, the article demonstrates how bottom-rung urban workers look expectantly to the material environment of company work to fulfil these desires.

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.

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.

One of the epic national narratives of modernization and development in China is the story of Beidahuang (‘Great Northern Wilderness’) in the country’s northeast. The term ‘Beidahuang’ refers originally to state-sponsored campaigns, starting in the 1950s, that involved the enlistment of tens of thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers, educated youth, and Communist Party cadres. Their task was to transform the vast northeast ‘wasteland’ into productive farmland that would feed the nation while securing the nation’s borders with Russia. This article examines the significance of Beidahuang as a feature of the environmental discourse in China’s northeast borderlands, focusing on the first decade of the twenty-first century when the Chinese state was establishing more systematic measures for addressing environmental concerns. In the context of the northeast borderland, the massive deforestation that resulted from the socialist campaigns to transform ‘wasteland’ into productive farmland has left a controversial legacy for regional elites grappling with the Party leadership’s turn towards environmental conservation as an emerging political priority. This article suggests that the ongoing importance of the ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ in the Chinese cultural imagination has shaped the ways in which regional elites frame environmental issues in relation to economic development, nationalism, and border relations with Russia.

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.

Focusing on Rajeev Bhargava's claim that Aśoka was a secularist avant-la-lettre, I dispute the common understanding of secularism as the separation of religion and politics, and argue instead that such separation, to the extent that it existed, was characteristic of traditional religious societies. I then offer an alternative history of secularism as the demise of the traditional balance of power between church and state, and the rise of a unitary state which incorporated a civil religion that excluded competing forms of religiosity within its domain. This model of secularism, exemplified by the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, fits Aśoka's Dhamma better than the separationist model does.

Of all the Western diplomatic personalities who served in Peking during the nineteenth century, Anson Burlingame was perhaps the most celebrated figure. He acted as the first American resident minister in Peking from 1861 to 1867. He also acted as the first ‘Chinese’ envoy to the Western courts from 1867 to 1870, when his untimely death at St Petersburg cut short his colourful diplomatic career. Viewed against this unusual background, it is not surprising that his diplomacy in and out of China became something of a cause célèbre among his contemporaries. With the passing of the events and men associated with his name, however, a new and deatched appraisal of the man and his diplomacy is in order. It is outside the scope of the present paper to treat his spectacular diplomatic mission on behalf of China in the Western capitals, better known as the burlingame Mission. This paper focuses instead on his role in the inauguration of the Co-operative Policy. In doing this, the apper attempts to shed some light on the origins of one of the most significant Western policies toward China.

Modern Malaysian constitutional history can largely be analysed in terms of the fortunes of three federations: the Federated Malay States (1896), the Federation of Malaya (1948) and the Federation of Malaysia (1963). The last two are recent enough to fall within the domain of contemporary history. Still, it is possible to suggest that they share at least two characteristics with the first. To begin with, each assumed a highly centralized form of administration at the same federal capital of Kuala Lumpur. Protests over such centralizing tendencies led in the original case to the ‘decentralization movement’ from c. 1920 to c. 1940, and in the third instance to Singapore's separation from the Federation of Malaysia in August 1965. Secondly, all three federations witnessed controversies before their final inauguration, and political conflicts thereafter. The F.M.S. was born only after two Colonial Governors had reported in favour of the proposal, and discontent among the Malay rulers was partly responsible for the decentralization movement just mentioned. The Federation of 1948 was partly a British attempt to arrive at a modus vivendi with the Malay nationalists after the post-war Malayan Union scheme proved abortive, and it was attended by a Communist revolt and growing nationalist demands for self-government. The Malaysian Federation was the product of a ‘Battle for Merger’ (to use Mr Lee Kuan Yew's phrase), and created or exacerbated internal social and political tensions in addition to arousing Indonesian hostility.

In April of 1980 I was received by the Henan Province History Research Institute of the Henan Province Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to begin the first systematic oral political history project on peasant revolution in modern China. The focus of this project is on the problems of livelihood faced by the peasants of Lin county and several other counties in the pre-Liberation period, roughly 1911–49. In May I began an investigation of the history of rural Lin county and the village of Yao Cun, Lin county, Henan. In this essay I will sketch the general social and political history of Yao village in Republican years, and then draw from my preliminary field research to explain the relationship between land rent, the impoverishment of peasant smallholders, and political power in pre-Liberation China in one North China village. This relationship has received minimal emphasis in the literature on peasantry and change in pre-1949 China. One of the many reasons for this has been the tendency of past scholarship to stress the critically important role of the ‘middle peasant village’ in the Chinese revolution. The evidence from Yao cun offers a slight qualification of this middle peasant thesis.

At the beginning, a warning is due: this is a study of a false trail to real events. Between the years 1883–86, a mixed community sprang up on a side stream of the river Albazikha, a right tributary of the upper Amur. The discovery of gold, in a Chinese territory previously unfamiliar to any but the local Evenki tribes, had brought about a stampede of fortune seekers. Since Russia's annexation of the Amur District by the Aigun treaty of 1858, and its acquisition of the Maritime District by the treaty of Peking in 1860, the Amur and the Ussuri had marked the eastern borderline between the two empires, and the left banks of both rivers were by now dotted with Cossack settlements. Russians thus made up the bulk of the arrivals to the newly discovered deposits of placer gold, opposite the Cossack station Ignashino. However, estimates at different points in time spoke of up to ten percent of Chinese gold-seekers, while persistent reports mentioned the presence among the miners of the representatives of many other nationalities, from Siberian and Chinese native peoples to European and American adventurers. It must have been the Russians who gave the name Zheltuga to the stream along which gold was extracted. The name derived from a tributary of the Shilka river in the Nerchinsk mining area in Eastern Siberia, where gold had been discovered as early as 1860 (and where, in the territory of modern Chita District, the small river Zheltuga still flows today). Soon after its foundation, the rapidly growing gold camp became widely known in the Russian Far East as ‘the Amur California’. It was the need to describe the phenomenon in terms more familiar to readers in European Russia, but also the temptation to project on the miners' assembly such political aspirations that it did not possess, which led later writers to create the fanciful label of a ‘Zheltuga republic’.

Most historians agree that the Mongolian revolution of 1921 was initiated by Soviet Russia and was imposed on the Mongols, who were nothing more than their passive tools. This must be at least partly due to the fact that so far, works on this subject have almost exclusively been based on materials of Russian and Chinese origin. Materials published in the Mongolian People's Republic, however, provide ample evidence that the Mongolian revolution originated in a purely Mongolian situation, though the Mongols could never have succeeded in their revolution without Soviet support.

The madrasa, the Islamic institution of learning, has for centuries occupied a central role in the transmission of religious knowledge and the shaping of the identity of the global Muslim community (umma). This paper explores the sharp rise in the number of madrasas in contemporary Hong Kong. It examines, in particular, how South Asian Muslim youth, after receiving a modern education in a conventional day school, remain faithful to their religious tradition by spending their evenings at a madrasa studying and memorizing the Qur'an. Engaging with the stereotypical bias of Islamophobia and national security concerns regarding the ties of madrasas to Islamic terrorist movements over the last decade, this paper argues that the burgeoning South Asian madrasa networks have to be understood in the context of Hong Kong's tripartite Islamic traditions—South Asian Muslim, Chinese Hui Muslims, and Indonesian Muslims—and within each Muslim community's unique expression of Islamic piety. Furthermore, the paper also identifies factors contributing to the increase in madrasas in Hong Kong after the transition from British colonial rule to China's resumption of sovereign power in 1997.

On July 16, 1905, an overseas Chinese, Feng Xiawei, committed suicide in front of the American consulate in Shanghai. The impetus for Feng's sacrifice was a labor treaty being negotiated with the United States, which had placed obstacles to the Chinese who would like to go to the United States to make a living. Two months before Feng's suicide, merchants in Shanghai had asked Americans to revise their immigration policy or face a boycott in two months. The Americans showed no sign of yielding. Four days before the deadline, Feng killed himself. This previously unknown individual became a hero in the 1905 boycott movement. For an overview of the boycott movement see Zhang Cunwu, Guangxu sayinian Zhong Mei gongyue fengchao [The Chinese Boycott of American Goods, 1905-1906] (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1966); Margaret Field, “The Chinese Boycott of 1905”, Papers on China 11 (1957): 63-98; Edward J. M. Rhoads, ‘Nationalism and Xenophobia in Kwangtung (1905-1906): The Canton Anti-American Boycott and the Lienchow Anti-Missionary Uprising’, Papers on China 16 (1962): 154-97; Delber L. McKee, Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door Policy, 1900-1906: Clashes over China Policy in the Roosevelt Era (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), especially chapter 7; Sin-Kiong Wong, ‘The Genesis of Popular Movements in Modern China: A Study of the Anti-American Boycott of 1905-06’. Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1995.

In the hundred years before 1857, the last vestiges of the crumbling Mughal power in India slowly vanished. When forceful resistance to the British was no longer expedient or possible, the Muslims, who had been the rulers, withdrew into a purposive cultural isolation. Under the leadership of the—‘ulama’ (religious teachers), contacts with the British and Hindus were discouraged and the introduction of new cultural elements into Muslim life was severely eschewed. The result was that while the British were introducing a new administrative system, a new language and a new technology into India, and the Hindus, finally released from Muslim rule, were rapidly adopting the British offerings, the Muslims chose not to participate in the professional, governmental or educational life of the country.

Since the end of World War II, the ever-increasing role of government in advanced democratic nations has resulted in a massive organizational growth in the public sector. The impact of the welfare state provides an explanation for changes in traditional patterns of central–local government relations. The era of the welfare state has witnessed the rapid emergence of an intermeshed system of making and implementing policies, which necessitates integration between central and local government.

Compared to missionaries like Timothy Richard (1845–1919) and Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), Dr Alexander Maclean Mackay is a name almost unknown in the annals of Christian evangelism in China. The personnel roster of the London Missionary Society, to which he initially belonged, did boast of such luminaries as Robert Morrison (1782–1834), a pioneering Protestant preacher in early nineteenth-century China and James Legge (1815–1897), a missionary turned Sinologist and Oxford don. But Mackay, as one of the Mission's numerous field workers, is not likely to be found in such distinguished company. In fact, his sojourn in China, in comparison, was relatively brief. It lasted not quite six years, from January 1891 to September 1896, when he died of cholera and was buried in China. In many ways, he was merely another missionary, one of the many men and women, Catholic and Protestant, who had toiled in China, then faded into oblivion, and have since eluded the eye of the historical researcher.

‘Toleration’ is a notoriously slippery concept, and yet, as recent scholarship on the historical roots of Indian secularism has implied, it was a guiderail for East India Company decision-making in Bengal in the late eighteenth century. What, then, was the outcome when Europeans encountered what they were quick to regard as South Asian patterns of ‘toleration’? This article argues, first, that a medley of competing policy visions emerged from this interaction and, second, that where these visions overlapped was in perceiving political gain to ensue from facilitating existing South Asian devotional practices. A corollary consequence of this still-emergent policy framework was that most East India Company personnel were loath to intervene in any way but a reactive one when conflicts between devotees of Durga on parade and observers of the Shia Muslim holy day ashura escalated into reprisals and street violence in Calcutta in September 1789.

This article examines how the divine epithet ‘Rahman’ was invoked in public inscriptions and oaths in pre-Islamic Yemen. Between the first and the sixth centuries ce, with the spread of Christianity across the Roman empire and Abyssinia, and the subsequent rise of Jewish and Christian kingdoms in southern Arabia, the use of ‘Rahman’ was gradually biblicized. By tracing this history, this article opens a window into the use of this theonym in the Quran and the controversy surrounding its use in the first formal treaty in Islam, the Peace Treaty (Sulh) of Hudaybiyya.