The Kailuan Mining Administration (Kailuan or the KMA) ran one of the two largest colliery combines in pre-Communist China. Because it was a Sino-British company, most previous studies have concentrated on the important role it played in China's political history before 1949, but its equally important role in China's economy has been little studied. This paper contributesto remedying that deficiency.

Rapid growth among a few large firms distinguished the early years of cotton manufacture in South Korea. A review of expansion and concentration in the industry, and case studies of the T'aech'ang and Kyungbang firms, provide evidence of extensive structural support managed by the state, and also of favoured access to such support for the larger cotton mills. In contrast to earlier studies critical of the state role, I argue that the agencies and protectionist legislation of the state under Syngman Rhee played a productive, indeed decisive, role in promoting concentration and productivity among the early mills.

As viceroy of India (1899–1905), George Curzon believed that unprovoked British assaults on Indians undermined the colonial state's authority to rule. These collisions1 challenged Curzon's conception of moral empire and called into question one of the most important representations of British moral character—that of ‘officer and gentleman’. Aware of the strength of indigenous feeling in India and of liberal discontent at home, the viceroy engaged in what appears to have been a laudable defence of the rights of Indians. By doing so, he certainly risked the hostility of official and unofficial opinion in both Britain and India. The fundamental issue was: should the Raj be based on a ruling moral authority administered by men of character, in which collisions were reprehensible, or did it ultimately rest on force?

Examining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice of press regulation and governmentality was initially articulated in colonial India, embodied in everyday transactions between the newly invented East India Company state and an emerging newspaper press. While Company officials recognized that scrutiny by a free press was central to establishing their fairly new claims to just governance and public legitimacy, they feared that public critique would destabilize the very sovereign authority that they sought to establish. Concerned with appearing arbitrary, officials developed strategies through which they could demand obedience without necessarily predicating it on censorship. Journalists derived much of their negotiating power from the early colonial state's vulnerability to public scrutiny, but they also knew that the state possessed extensive control over their livelihood. Cognizant of the power and constraints of colonial governmentality at this juncture, they produced their own mechanisms of permissible intransigence. This uneasy equilibrium generated the questions explored in this article: What rights of comment and critique practically accrued to newspapers? What was the legal authority of executive regulations censoring newspapers and how far were these enforceable? Why, in practice, did punishments remain strikingly similar across periods with and without formal censorship? The cases between 1780 and 1823 not only reveal the historical negotiations that structured this foundational—though somewhat marginalized—period of India's press history, but also explain the strategic shifts that followed as, in 1823, the fulcrum of crime and punishment turned away from press censorship and towards press licensing.

The observer who travelled in India in early 1965 found no one lower in public estimation than the late Pundit Jawarharlal Nehru. Not yet dead a year, it seemed that there was nothing that he had done which was right. Population?—he should have taken steps to control it. Language?—he had failed to control the Hindi faction and had weakly compromised. Corruption?—he had denounced but failed to act, had even shielded guilty parties. Non-involvement?—it had led India into isolation, and as for China, the less said about that painful subject the better. If Mahatma Gandhi was the forgotten man of early 1965, Nehru was the rejected man.

A puzzling feature of interwar Anglo-Indian economic relations is the contrast between Whitehall's relatively hands-off attitude to Indian tariff policies, and its insistent hands-on approach to monetary policy issues in the colony. Both sets of issues were, at various times, equally contentious. But while Britain's strategic objectives in India paved the way for the Fiscal Autonomy Convention, the road towards a similar monetary ‘convention’ was never taken. Rather, thanks to Britain's external financial problems, the interwar decades saw initially a tightening, and later a refinement, of London's control over Indian monetary policies. This paper hopes to set out the processes at work more clearly than has been attempted before, and to account for them. The interpretation offered here is consistent with the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ explanation of British imperialism during the interwar years, and of the postwar de-colonization process.

Mao Zedong's historic swim in the Yangtze River on 16 July 1966, which heralded a new phase of the Cultural Revolution, was a carefully staged political performance and a notable example of body politics in Communist China. Beginning in the late 1950s, Mao began to broadcast the idea that he was a keen swimmer and to convince the masses to take up swimming. The swim was the climax of those efforts and an integral part of the Mao cult. Swimming in Mao's China offers a useful lens for understanding the close relationship between sports, the body, and politics. Swimming was a means for Mao to mobilize mass support for his political authority and a venue for the masses to practise and perform Maoism. This article examines the constructive process and meanings of Mao's swimming body, and the extent to which the bodies of the populace were regulated through the mass-swimming craze. Drawing on untapped archival materials related to mass swimming in Mao's China, this article argues that swimming both solidified and destabilized the Mao cult and became a venue through which political values were shaped, indoctrinated, contested, and repudiated.

With the current and continuing collapse of marxist-stalinist structures occurring in the eastern part of our European world and the ensuing debate now circulating about personal cultship and the mythologies surrounding it, I feel I must congratulate the convenor of this 1990 Oxford Trinity College lecture programme for the title he chose to bestow upon the small part I am responsible for discussing.

American trade with China was ushered in by the voyage of the Empress of China to Canton in 1784. Within a few years commerce had become so profitable that the United States appointed Major Samuel Shaw to act as the American Consul in China. Very quickly the United States became the number two trader with China and the most serious rival to England. However, American ships were neither as large nor as numerous as those of the British East Indies Company and American merchants possessed neither the financial backing nor the prestige of their British counterpart. The United States was still a weak naval power and traders could not depend on any significant protection from the fleet. Furthermore, the Washington government was unable to exert any appreciable influence on Chinese authorities and they settled into a well-patterned position of following the British lead in the Far East.

Few documents in recent history have provoked such controversy as the so-called ‘Tanaka Memorial’. ‘Document’ is perhaps a misnomer, for the original (assuming that there was one) has never been seen by anyone willing to admit its existence. The memorial is said to be a 13,000-word secret petition presented by Prime Minister Baron Tanaka Giichi to Emperor Hirohito on 25 July 1927 outlining a program of economic penetration into Manchuria, China, and Mongolia that would prepare for Japan's subjection of Asia and Europe. Exposed by the Chinese in 1929, the document gained global notoriety during the 1930s. Over vehement Japanese objections and disclaimers, it was translated and circulated in Europe and the United States. Grandiose designs expressed in a language that might have aroused incredulity or mirth in calmer times sounded uncomfortably authentic in the context of Japanese behavior in East Asia and the Pacific between 1931 and 1945.

As a turning-point in the international politics of the Far East, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 has been studied from many different viewpoints. In particular, the renowned tripartite Intervention by Russia, France and Germany into the terms of the Shimonoseki Peace Treaty has interested many students of diplomacy. However, the questions of Formosa and the Pescadore Islands and of the British attitude in regard to the Intervention remain historically unanswered, mainly because of the lack of publicized British official documents.

Mass disease and starvation in the princely state of Travancore during the Second World War claimed some 90,000 lives. However, this episode has never received much prominence, especially when compared to the simultaneous crisis in Bengal. It is, in many ways, forgotten. Instead, Travancore’s wartime food management apparatus appears in some accounts as a success story. How did this happen? Integration into the world economy, the reordering of a rigid social structure, and popular political pressures on an autocratic princely regime created a unique set of conditions that left Travancore vulnerable to food scarcity and conflict during the Second World War. A particularly draconian princely regime that suppressed civil liberties prevented the gravity of the situation from being understood. This culminated in vastly unequal suffering and disease-related deaths. But the story is not merely one of despair. The Indian communists took advantage of war conditions to bring together agricultural and factory labourers and contribute to improving the food situation in this ‘People’s War’, while mainstream nationalists sought to obstruct the war effort and have the British ‘quit’ India. Wartime activities would shape the unique post-colonial politics of what became the state of Kerala in 1956. Intervening at the intersection of the historiographies of food and the princely states, this article adds a regional perspective to the nation-centric social history of the Second World War in South Asia. Hunger was a constitutive experience of this period across various parts of India, but the post-colonial political legacies of war could be regionally distinct.