Some write because they travel, and some travel because they write. A large number of progessional writers, not just travel-writers, have derived inspiration from travel: equally, a large number of travellers, who are not professional writers, have nevertheless often felt compelled to encapsulate their experience in literary form. It is the aim of this paper to survey such British travel literature relating to Southeast Asia during the period of massive transformation dating approximately from the ‘20S to the ’ 50S of this century. It is not intended to be comprehensive, but representative of the major landmarks of that literature along with some lesser-known works of particular interest.

This essay discusses women's gender roles as they were imagined and debated in a Bengali text written towards the end of the sixteenth century. Efforts to reexamine precolonial gender roles and debates about them are important for three reasons. First, that large body of research on gender which begins with the colonial period often has obscured elements of continuity between colonial and precolonial discourse on gender in South Asia, and often exaggerates or misstates both the degree of consensus about gender in the precolonial period, and the nature of change in the colonial period.

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.

Patterns of opium production and distribution shifted immensely over the course of the twentieth century, with output falling by three-quarters, almost nine-tenths of which now takes place in Afghanistan. Supporters of drug prohibition trumpet the success of this long-term decline and hail the withdrawal of the four largest opium producers—India, China, Iran, and the Ottoman empire—from the non-medical market, but this seemingly linear trend conceals numerous deviations of historic significance. Among the most notable and little known is Turkey's prolonged resistance to international restrictions on the narcotics trade and the efforts of state and non-state networks to substitute Turkish opium for the diminishing supply of once-dominant Indian exports to a still opium-hungry China in the first half of the twentieth century. This article uses neglected League of Nations and Turkish government sources alongside international newspapers and diplomatic reports to demonstrate the extent of connections forged by state and non-state actors between Turkey and East Asia, expanding on recent research on trans-Asian connections in commerce and political thought.

The slave trade in nineteenth-century Central Asia involved hundreds of thousands of slaves, predominantly Persian Shīʿites, and stopping the trade was alleged to be a major motivating factor in the Russian conquest of the region. Nevertheless, Central Asian slavery remains little-studied and little-understood. In this article I will argue, first, that the region's slave trade was characterized by decentralized trade networks and by abundant inter-nomadic trade; and, second, that Russian efforts to end the slave trade by decree and through military force in the 1860s and 70s were not as successful as has often been assumed.

Communist sources record that between 20 August and 5 December 1940, the Eighth Route Army (8RA) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fought 1,824 large and small engagements with Japanese and puppet troops from the plains of Hebei to the mountains of Shanxi. These engagements are known collectively as ‘the Battle of the Hundred Regiments’ and they are the subject of this essay.

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.

The release of Peter Clarke's biography of Sir Stafford Cripps in 2002, with much of its focus on the protagonist's time in India, meant that a thorough reappraisal of Lord Wavell's time as Viceroy to India was clearly needed. By giving an impartial account of Wavell's relationship with Whitehall during his time as Viceroy this article will also focus on such significant events as the 1945 Simla Conference, the 1946 Cabinet Mission and Wavell's dismissal in late 1946/early 1947. It is hoped that by the end of this article readers will be able to judge Wavell's overall performance as Viceroy and decide for themselves whether he deserved to be replaced by Mountbatten or not.

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.

Recent work in religious studies has emphasized how European colonial empires used the defining and constructing of religions and secularism as tools of rule. This article explores parallel processes in the Mongol empire (1206–1368) where ‘religion-making’ occurred in three areas: 1) a precise and legal definition of professional service estates among the conquered peoples that included the clergies of designated religions; 2) a broad and imprecise classification of nom or ‘way of life’ that partially overlapped with the clergies defined in the first category; and 3) a realm above all such sectarian distinctions destined for the Mongol ruling elite who alone were capable of living in free obedience to Heaven. The parallels and differences with classifications of the religious and the secular in European colonial empires shed light on how power interacts with cultural classification and practices.

This article investigates Japanese imperialism in northeast China through its road construction infrastructure projects within its railway auxiliary zone (1906–1932) and Manchuria at large (1932–1945). The materiality of roads unveils a history of how Japanese engineers adapted to local practices and absorbed local knowledge in building physical infrastructure and developing their technical expertise. These engineers engaged with local practices rooted in pre-existing social and natural environments to facilitate road construction. At the same time, in Manchuria their technical expertise in construction was built on the absorption and subsequent erasure of local workers’ vernacular craft. Rather than the physical realization of an imperialist, top-down vision of modernization, imperial infrastructure projects were in fact hybrid productions of technical expertise, and local vernacular knowledge and skills. By constructing roads, engineers helped to expand Japan’s political and economic influence in northeast China, assert domination over Chinese residential areas and business interests, and coerce Chinese subjects into complying with policies and rules issued by Japanese administrations. The materials of roads—gravel, granite flagstone, and concrete—illustrate a complex relationship between Japanese imperial agents and local environments.

The story of the ‘opening’ of Korea presents us with a peculiar problem of its own. For, when Westerners arrived on the shores of Korea in the nineteenth century, they found a country that was shielded in the shadow of China. Korea, so it seemed to Westerners, would not open the country without Chinese approval, but China would not interfere in Korea on Western countries' behalf or, at times, even on her own behalf. And both Korea and China professed that they were acting according to the dictates of the traditional relationship which had bound the two countries for many centuries in peace and harmony. To Western observers this traditional Sino-Korean relationship seemed to offer nothing but a diplomatic cul-de-sac. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Western diplomats concluded that this relationship was merely ceremonial and largely dismissed it as having little political consequence.

Despite the enormous size and economic and scientific significance of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River, questions of where and what it was generated successive waves of dispute from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Geographical discovery in the eastern Himalayan borderlands neither entailed the application of fixed theories and techniques, nor resulted from consistent flows of information along established channels. Europeans instead understood the region’s rivers in many different ways, influenced by sporadic deluges of data, competing forms of expertise, shifting imperatives of colonial political economy, unsettling encounters with various bodies of water, and heterogeneous Asian knowledge structures. Informants, infrastructures, and cosmologies of often-overlooked communities at imperial margins fundamentally reshaped European knowledge. Under these conditions, practitioners of spatial sciences came to thrive on the proliferation of models and objects of discovery rather than seeking definitive closure.

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.

This article tells the intertwined tales of two historical routes that testify to the extensive geographical distance and profound political connections between Tibet and China throughout the modern era. In much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Sichuan Route operated as the transportation artery upon which the Qing empire depended to maintain authority in Kham and Tibet. It was also the site of a rite of passage for frontier functionaries and a meeting ground between imperial agents and the indigenous population. Despite its destruction after the implosion of the Qing in 1911, the histories and memories of the Sichuan Route continued to influence decision-makers in both China and Tibet in the following decades. The Maritime Route, which emerged in the late nineteenth century with the proliferation of steam transportation in Asia, revolutionized the way in which Tibet connected to China and the rest of the world. It also competed with the Sichuan Route and encouraged the Qing to reconfigure its presence in its non-Chinese territories in the southwest. After the empire fell, political tensions continued to evolve around the Maritime Route, which functioned simultaneously as the reluctant choice of Chinese emissaries and a strategic tool that the Lhasa government wielded to curtail China's influence. Through an exploration of the Sichuan Route and the Maritime Route on the levels of experience and representation, this article sketches the two routes’ troubled interconnections with each other and with every twist and turn in Sino-Tibetan relations from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

In 1896, Sir Halliday Macartney, counsellor of the Qing London legation, detained the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen on legation grounds in an attempt to deport him back to China. Since then, the image of the legation as an ossified extension of a despotic government has dominated public imagination. This article proposes a new way of understanding the legation's action: it exemplifies the legal activism of Qing diplomats in recovering judicial sovereignty that had been compromised by the presence of extraterritoriality and colonialism. Legations represented a broad range of interests of China through diplomatic negotiations and legal mediations, and brought unresolved disputes between foreign ministers and the Zongli Yamen in Beijing to the attention of their home governments. This article analyses the mediation and collaboration performed by the London legation between the various levels of the Qing government and the British Foreign Office. It argues that Qing legations and their diplomatic representation abroad were essential to the construction and imagination of China as a sovereign state.