bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Role of Hong Kong Educated Chinese in the Shaping of Modern China
Authors: Ngai-Ha Ng Lun
Published: November 2008

Although it is under the rule and administration of the British, Hong Kong is geographically, socially, economically and politically linked with China. The part played by Hong Kong in the 1911 Revolution has been noted in a number of works, published or unpublished. This paper, however, proposes to examine the role of the Hong Kong educated Chinese in the modernization of China, limiting the study to those who had attended schools in Hong Kong before 1911 and their activities in China during the late Ch'ing and early republican years. During these decades, the English education afforded in the Anglo-Chinese schools in Hong Kong succeeded not only in turning out people who later became leading citizens of the local community but also in producing Western-educated young men who went to China to be engaged in the imperial service, participating directly or indirectly in the various reform programmes in China; while still a greater number, having received some English education in Hong Kong, were recruited into the various modern schools in China to receive training for new careers—modern diplomacy, warfare, engineering, medicine, as well as modern communication and transportation. A number, however, played leading roles in the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and in the establishment of the Republic of China—among them Dr Sun Yat-sen, father of the Republic and its first President, and Wang Ch'ung-hui, its first Foreign Minister.
Chinese Entrepreneurs, the Government, and the Foreign Sector: The Canton and Shanghai Silk-Reeling Enterprises, 1861–1932
Authors: Eng Robert Y.
Published: November 2008

In the aftermath of the Opium War of 1839–42, China was continuously subjected to increasing Western political and economic penetration. The Treaty of Nanjing was only the first of a series of unequal treaties which led to the opening of over 100 treaty ports along the coast and in the interior of China. In many of these ports Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, Japan and other imperialist powers set up concessions under their administration and outside Chinese jurisdiction. There their nationals could freely trade, invest in banking, industry and construction, and engage in missionary and other cultural activities. Thus, although China never completely fell under the direct control of any imperialist power, the treaty ports were functionally similar to the port cities of Western colonies as linkages to the metropolitan countries.Did these treaty ports serve as beachheads of imperialism which facilitated foreign extraction of raw materials, exploitation of a cheap labor market, and displacement by cheap imports of native handicrafts left unprotected by the loss of tariff autonomy, as neo-Marxist historians charge? Or, as the revisionist scholars contend, were they centers of political and economic modernization where Western ideas and institutions were communicated to the Chinese, and where Western entrepreneurship and capital not only pioneered in modern industry, but also prompted imitative responsesfrom Chinese entrepreneurs? And yet, did the ports fail to have any major impact at all on Chinese political organization and socio-economic development, as Chinese mercantile interests thwarted Western attempts to penetrate the economy?
Underdevelopment and Dependency: Maritime India during the Raj
Authors: Broeze Frank
Published: November 2008

An extensive body of literature has grown up in recent years devoted to the analysis of the causes of what is certainly the most pressing economic issue of our time: the unequal distribution of the world's wealth and income, and in particular what in shorthand may be called ‘the underdevelopment of the Third World’. Tremendous progress has been made by radical as well as more conventional social scientists, and our understanding of the processes of interaction, economic as well as otherwise, between the metropolitan core of western colonial powers and indigenous societies in the periphery has benefited commensurately. Naturally, the debate has tended to focus on the major sectorsinvolved in the processes of economic growth and modernization, agriculture and industry, with infrastructure a poor third. Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising to observe that what to many students ofEuropean expansion has appeared to constitute the essential element intheir ability to explore, gain access to, and exploit the periphery, hasbeen completely neglected: ocean transport, or to put it differently, themain body of the infrastructure of the world economy. In some ways, no dependence is felt to be so absolute as that of the country that sees itscoastal traffic dominated and its exports carried by foreign-owned ships.
Class Structure and Social Mobility in the Chinese Community in Singapore and Malaya 1800–1911
Authors: Ching-Hwang Yen
Published: November 2008

The social history of the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be fully understood if aspects of class structure and social mobility are not examined. Of course, the social relations of the Chinese were principally determined by kinship and dialect ties, but they were also affected by class affiliations. Class status, like kinship and dialect relations distanted Chinese immigrants from one another. This paper seeks to examine the nature and structure of Chinese classes, class relations and the channels of social mobility in the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya during the period between 1800 and 1911. The findings of this paper may be applicable to other overseas Chinese communities in the same period outside this region.
The Urban Economy in Premodern Muslim India: Shahjahanabad, 1639-1739
Authors: Blake Stephen P.
Published: November 2008

Economists and economic historians have not devoted much time or effort to the analysis of premodern economies. Most scholars have tended to concentrate on the United States and Western Europe during the twentieth century. While a few persons have examined the economic development of premodern Europe (1000–1700a.d.), almost no one has chosen to write about economic organization in the countries of Asia and Africa before 1800.
Banias and the British: the Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Subramanian Lakshmi
Published: November 2008

The pressing preoccupation of the British administration in the early decades of the nineteenth century to clip the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings was in sharp and in a sense valid contrast to their earlierperceptions of the Indian shroffs and their Hundi empire. By 1807, Mr Rickards, senior member of the Bombay establishment, was urging the Governor-General in Council to establisha General Bank whose operations would extend throughout India, facilitate remittances andcredit transfers from one part of the country to another, and above all ‘free the mercantile body from losses and inconveniences suffered in the exchange and from the artifices of shroffs’. Their ‘undue and pernicious influence over the course of trade and exchange’ could no longer be treated with forbearance, and the urgency of remedy was stressed. It was both strange and ironical that such advice should stem from a quarter where in the crucial years of political change and transition in the second half of the eighteenth century, the cooperation and intervention of the indigenous banking fraternity and their credit support had proved vital to the success of the Imperial strategy. The experience was admittedly not unique to Bombay and the English East India Company (hence-forth E.E.I.C) and in a sense the guarantee of local credit and the support of service groups for a variety of reasons, was clearly envisagedas a basic ingredient to state building in the eighteenth century.
Economic Change and the Railways in North India, 1860–1914
Authors: Derbyshire I. D.
Published: November 2008

M. D. Morris re-opened the debate on late nineteenth-century Indian economic history with a brace of powerful, though conjectural, revisionist articles in 1963 and 1966. He questioned the then prevailing orthodoxy which viewed the late nineteenth century as a period of increasing population pressure on the land (exacerbated by the atrophy of handicraft production), of holding fragmentation, declining per capita food availability, and inimical commercialization of agriculture. This interpretation had seen the position of a narrow mercantile and creditor elite improving, but the position of the mass of the rural population deteriorating, as evidenced by the terrible famines of 1876–80 and 1896–1900. Morris, influenced by D. Kumar's findings, contended that pressure on the soil did not increase excessively; that the influx of imported cloths merely skimmed off the broader increase in textile demand; and that agricultural output per capita increased as a result of extensions to the cropped area, political peace, growing regional specialization, and the increased sowing of valuable, high yielding cash crops.
Foreign Trade of Russia and Britain with Asia in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
Authors: Petrov A. M.
Published: November 2008

Before expounding the fundamental provisions of my report, I deem it necessary to make some preliminary remarks. In my opinion, they will help bring to light some reasons for the situation that took shape in the foreign trade of Russia and Britain with Asia in the seventeenth–nineteenth centuries.
British Perceptions of the Russian Threat to India
Authors: Yapp M. A.
Published: November 2008

Soviet writers have often claimed that there was no Russian threat to India. They have pointed, correctly, to the circumstance that no invasion attempt was ever launched and have stated that those projects which were canvassed were no more than the ideas of hotheaded generals and the like, were never adopted by the Russian Government and cannot be taken seriously. Further, they have pointed to the rejection of approaches made to Russian authorities by discontented Indians who sought Russian assistance in overthrowing British rule in India. Talk of the defence of British India, with its implication that there was a genuine Russian threat to be warded off, they argue, is more than misleading; it was a deception practised by nineteenth-century British rulers of India to disguise expansionist British aims in India and, beyond the Indian frontier, in the Persian Gulf, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkestan, and it is now a device employed by modern British historians to conceal the true nature of British imperialism in India and to blacken the reputation of Russia. They do not accept that British statesmen and military officers could genuinely have believed in the possibility of a Russian invasion of India; and they suppose that British historians are not so incompetent as to think that nineteenth-century Britons did believe that the threat was real.
Surat During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: What Kind of Social Order?
Authors: Torri Michelguglielmo
Published: November 2008

In a recent and thought-provoking article, Dr Lakshmi Subramanian has forcefully made the case that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the history of the West Coast of India in general and the history of the city of Surat in particular are explained by the rise of what she terms the ‘Anglo-Bania order’, namely ‘a mercantile and political order distinguished by the mutually beneficial cooperation of the English East India Company and the Bania bankers and merchants of Surat and Bombay’.More specifically, Dr Subramanian claims that the rise of the Anglo-Bania order is at the roots of the first Hindu—Muslim communal clash about which a reasonably good documentation has survived, namely the ‘great tumult’ of August 1795, when ‘the lower orders of the Muslim population fell upon the shops and houses of the Bania residents of the city, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books’.
The Kahar Chronicle
Authors: Ray Rajat Kanta
Published: November 2008

Untouchable agricultural servants in the Indian countryside are among the lowliest people on earth. Such illiterate folk leave no written record to enable historians to comprehend their world from their own angle of vision. To write their history from below, historians have to search for contemporaneous observations which—even though made by an outsider—show some degree of empathy with their consciousness. The gifted novelist is able to enter recesses of the mind which elude the most acute scientific investigator. Among the several Bengali novels which have taken for their theme the wretched of the earth, perhaps the most empathetic is the Kahar Chronicle of Tarashankar Banerjee which thankfully avoids painting their life in unrelieved black. InHansuli Banker Upakatha, the novelist, a small landlord in Birbhum district, descends to the bottom of rural society to give us—as far as possible for a gifted novelist of gentry origin—a view from within.
A Review of South Asian Studies
Authors: Harriss John
Published: November 2008

In 1986 the International Activities Committee of the Economic and Social Research Council decided to undertake reviews of progress in ‘area studies’, and to do this by means of small, inter-disciplinary conferences. A review conference on South Asian studies was held in Cambridge, and attended by forty-one scholars from different disciplines and from India, France, Holland and the USA as well as from Britain. The purpose of the review was understood to be a ‘stock-taking’ in different fields of research, intended to identify conceptual, theoretical and substantive issues at the frontiers of enquiry; and to examine the implications and contributions of research on South Asia for historical research and for the social sciences in general. In the pursuit of these objectives the conference had three components. First came sessions in which two economists (Toye and Chaudhuri), two historians (Tomlinson and Washbrook), an anthropologist (Fuller) and a sociologist (Hawthorn) presented views of ‘progress and problems’ in their fields. Then came two pairs of concurrent working groups on broad themes, drawing partly on the earlier papers and discussions; and finally three panelists (Bharadwaj, Breman and Lipton) offered commentary on the proceedings. The review papers by Toye, Tomlinson and Washbrook appear in this issue of Modern Asian Studies. What follows here is a commentary on some of the themes that emerged in the papers and discussions.
Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c.1720–1860
Authors: Washbrook D. A.
Published: November 2008

Over the last fifteen to twenty years, interest in the history of early modern and modern South Asia has grown enormously and has engaged the attention of an increasingly international audience. Whereas, at the end of the 1960s, research in the subject was largely confined to universities in South Asia itself and the rest of the British Commonwealth, today a variety of projects, conferences and regular workshops link together scholars from South Asia and the Commonwealth with those in Japan, Indonesia, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and the United States. Equally, whereas twenty years ago the publication of South Asia-related research was restricted to a few specialist journals, today this research provides the staple of at least four quarterlies with major international circulations and appears regularly in most of the leading historical periodicals. In the last five years, monographys on South Asia related historical subjects have been published by presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, the Soviet Union and Japan as well as, of course, India and Pakistan, the rest of the Commonwealth and the United States.
Political Economy and the Analysis of Indian Development
Authors: Toye John
Published: November 2008

The purpose of this paper is to review recent analyses of the process of development in India which have used the concept of ‘political economy’ as their principle of intellectual organization. The focus will be primarily on studies which have been published in the 1980s. Some of these make explicit their reliance on political economy as their analytical framework (e.g. Jha, 1980; Rubin, 1982; Bardhan, 1984). For others it remains more implicit but the underlying concern to fuse economic with political analysis is much the same.
The Historical Roots of Indian Poverty: Issues in the Economic and Social History of Modern South Asia: 1880–1960
Authors: Tomlinson B. R.
Published: November 2008

Study of the economic and social history of modern mainland South Asia—covering present-day India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh over roughly the last hundred years—has been a major academic growth industry since the 1960s. The result has been a bulky and disparate corpus of work, spinning off in many directions and adopting increasingly inter-disciplinary approaches, with historians borrowing from, informing, and interacting with anthropologists, sociologists, and economists among others. The sheer volume of recent research is impressive. One survey of empirical work on the nineteenth century (N. C. Charlesworth, The Indian Economy under British Rule, 1800–1914, London, 1983) lists over 150 titles, more than half of them published in the 1970s; another discussion of conceptual material available for the study of Indian economic growth and development in an historical context has over 100 footnote references, and an appendix listing 109 further relevant works published between 1979 and 1984.
Conquest and Concession: The Case of the Burma Ruby Mines
Authors: Turrell Robert Vicat
Published: November 2008

A compelling vignette of the use of political influence for private gain in the expansion of the British empire is provided by the way King Thebaw' s legendary ruby mines in Upper Burma were acquired by British speculators in the late 1880s. The details of how the ruby-mine concession was awarded to a syndicate soon after Upper Burma was annexed to Britain in 1886 are not well known, although the concesion-mongering created a furore in the India Office and the House of Commons. There was even, at the time, a suggestion that the rubymine affair infleunced Lord Dufferin's decision to resign as Viceroy in 1888.
The Emergence of the Asian System of Powers
Authors: Stargardt A. W.
Published: November 2008

The ‘downward sweep’ of Japan after Pearl Harbor has been widely noted for its long-term effects in Southeast Asia. The rule of the established colonial masters was shattered, and those failing to escape disappeared into the camps of the Kempeitai. In Burma and Java, in particular, Japanese rule promoted local organizations, local administratiors, the indigenous language and, in Burma, a ‘national’ government and a ‘national’ army, under Japanese supervision: the one thing Japan did not bring was freedom and independence. Yet the greatly-increased social mobility and political, military and administrative experience had long-term consequences: none of the post-war attempts at colonial restoration proved viable.
Silk in Northeastern and Eastern India: The Indigenous Tradition
Authors: Varadarajan Lotika
Published: November 2008

India has had a remarkable tradition in cotton textiles, but that in silk is not of an equivalent order. The purpose of this article is to define the different categories of silk worms and determine their regional diffusion in India within some chronological framework. The question also needs to be raised whether silk was brought to India from China or whether it was indigenous to this country.
‘Niachile Pokaraga’ A Sad Story of a Moluccan Queen
Authors: Abdurachman Paramita R.
Published: November 2008

A new chapter was opened in the history of the Portuguese overseas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the publication of Professor Boxer'sMary and Misogyny(1981). It dealt with the relations between the Portuguese men, freshly arrived from their homeland and the local women, their relationships, adventures and the formation of Mestizo communities. As Dr Geneviève Bouchon in her review article of the book says, it ‘served as a source of inspiration and of indispensable sources’:
Brief Encounter at Macao
Authors: Blussé Leonard
Published: November 2008

The real issue at stake is the following: Since 1595 merchants from Holland and Zeeland have sent ships for trading purposes to several islands of the Indies that are not dependent upon Portugal. Now when the crews of these ships as well as the natives that were friendly to them had suffered great losses of lives and possessions due to the mischief of the Portuguese and their henchmen—unreliable and violent people who did not shrink from openly attacking the Dutch with force of arms—only then did the Dutch at long last fit themselves out to take revenge. After several hostilities from both sides Jakob van Heemskerck received command over an Amsterdam fleet of eight sails and with it he forced into submission on February 25th 1603 in the Strait of Singapore (that is, one of the two straits that separate Sumatra and Malacca) a Portuguese vessel, a so-called caracca, named Catarina and loaded with merchandise. merchandise. He released the crew and carried off the ship as a prize. Others have performe such exploits before and afterwards, yet because this feat of arms has caused the greatest stir, have decided to emphasize it in my enquiry so that one can easily judge the other events on basis of it.
Migration Linkage of a New Town and its Significance in Town Planning
Authors: Chaudhuri Jayasri Ray
Published: November 2008

This paper provides empirical evidence from Durgapur (a post-Independence, industrial new town of eastern India) which tends to support the Harris–Todaro model of migration and introduces the concept of how the age of a town and growth of its indigenous population may affect a potential migrant's expected probability of finding a job. Thus a new town like Durgapur can be expected to experience distinct phases of labour force migration with different proportions of different types of employment certainties which in turn will guide the growth of squatter colonies in the town.
Trade and Darbar Politics in the Bengal Subah, 1733–1757
Authors: Chatterjee Kumkum
Published: November 2008

The history of India's trade has attracted the attention of researchers for several decades now. But in the seventies and eighties our knowledge of the history of India's trading world has been especially enriched by a spate of literature on the subject. Among the issues that have received special attention from historians, the relationship between merchants and politics must be singled out as a theme that has recurred in the investigations and analyses of scholars. This issue of the connection between merchants and politics has yielded different conclusions depending on the regional and chronological dimensions of each study, as well as on the specific circumstances that molded the history of the regions that have figured in studies of Indian trade history.
From Landgrabbing to Landhunger: High Land Appropriation in the Plantation Areas of Sri Lanka during the British Period
Authors: Meyer Eric
Published: November 2008

In this contribution I propose to examine an aspect of Sri Lankan agrarian history which is often alluded to but rarely studied in depth: the process of high land appropriation for the development of coffee, tea, rubber and coconut plantations. The development of a land market in the Indian subcontinent is becoming a promising field of research for the study of imperial impact as a process at work in specific contexts.The Sri Lankan case differs from the Indian one in that land appropriation was originally meant for and followed by large scale land alienation to outsiders–the planters. This process has attracted the interest of most historians writing on the history of the Raj in Ceylon, but usually the only aspect stressed has been the appropriation by the Colonial State of forest and chena(land devoted to slash-and-burn cultivation) for sale to British planters.
Diplomacy of Contempt: The French Consuls and the Mandarins in Nineteenth-Century China
Authors: Israeli Raphael
Published: November 2008

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.
Azad Dastas and Dacoit Gangs: The Congress and Underground Activity in Bihar, 1942–44
Authors: Damodaran Vinita
Published: November 2008

This paper attempts to examine the nature of underground activity in Bihar in the 1940s. It outlines, for the first time, the dynamics of the Congress underground movement as it emerged after the imprisonment of Gandhi and the established Congress leadership in 1942. No historian has, to my knowledge, attempted to study the nature of the underground activity and its implications for the Congress organization in Bihar, or elsewhere, in this period. Most of the studies of the Quit India movement examine only the few days in August when the mass movement erupted with full force and then neglect the more significant following period. This includes the studies of Stephen Henningham and Max Harcourt who have examined the nature of popular protest in Bihar in some detail. This neglect is surprising, for the underground movement was very active and proved to be a major ‘law and order’ problem to the British well into 1944. As an underground activist, Havildar Tripathi, told me in an interview in Patna in March 1986, ‘The mass movement lasted for only 2 weeks in August, we carried it much beyond that’.
Australian Defence Contacts with Burma, 1945–1987
Authors: Selth Andrew
Published: November 2008

To most Australians, Burma is still associated with the Second World War, and in particular the infamous ‘death railway’ from Thailand. In May 1942 some 3,000 Australian prisoners of war (POWs) were sent from Singapore, to provide labour for the construction of an airfield at Tavoy. They were subsequently joined by another 1,800 or so Australians from Java, making a total in southern Burma of 4,851 men. Together with other Allied prisoners and Burmese levies they were later put to work building a railway line over Three Pagodas Pass, to link Burma with the Siam-Malaya railway system. Before the project was completed in November 1943, 771 Australian POWs (nearly 16 per cent of those on the Burma side of the border) had died from disease, malnutrition and the brutality of their Japanese captors. Casualties among the POWs working on the railway in Thailand were even higher.
The Manchurian Crisis and Moderate Japanese Intellectuals: The Japan Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations
Authors: Wilson Sandra
Published: November 2008

Ever since its occurrence, the ‘Manchurian Incident’ of September 1931 has been interpreted, by both Japanese and non-Japanese writers, as a crucial event in modern Japanese and, indeed, world history. Not least, it has been identified as the beginning of Japan's ‘fifteen-year war’. Whether or not such judgements are accepted, it must be recognized that the Manchurian Incident and subsequent events significantly affected the workings of Japanese politics in the 1930s, the relationship between civil and military authorities and Japan's international image in the years leading up to the Pacific War.
Consul de France in Mid-Nineteenth-Century China
Authors: Israeli Raphael
Published: November 2008

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?
Wang Jiaxiang, Mao Zedong and the ‘Triumph of Mao Zedong-Thought’ (1935–1945)
Authors: Kampen Thomas
Published: November 2008

While Mao Zedong might still be China's most famous communist, only scholars of the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have heard of Wang Jiaxiang and even they have never studied his career in detail. But recent Chinese publications show that there were very few CCP leaders who had such a tremendous impact on the Chinese communist movement in general and Mao Zedong's career in particular. This article will show that Wang not only supported Mao during the power struggles of the 1930s and helped convince Stalin that Mao should be acknowledged as the CCP's leader, but that Wang also played a decisive role in establishing Mao Zedong-Thought as the Party's guiding ideology. The release of numerous Party documents in the last five years also throws some light upon the relations and conflicts between Mao Zedong and other CCP leaders such as Wang Ming, Zhou Enlai, Zhang Guotao and Liu Shaoqi in the decade between the Long March and the Seventh Party Congress of 1945.
From Gandhi to Violence: Ahmedabad's 1985 Riots in Historical Perspective
Authors: Spodek Howard
Published: November 2008

In 1985 riots racked the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, continuing for a period of almost half a year, form February through July, leaving some 275 people dead, thousands injured, tens of thousands homeless, and a loss of property and trade estimated at Rs 2,200 crores (US$1.75 thousand million) (India Today, 13 August 1985, pp. 60 and 119), in ‘the most alarmingly sustained bout of rioting (as opposed to the sort of terrorism Punjab suffered…) since India's independence’ (Manor 1986: 102).
The Men who Would be King? The Politics of Expansion in Early Seventeenth-Century Northern Tamilnadu
Authors: Subrahmanyam Sanjay , Shulman David
Published: November 2008

These people, called badagàs, though of the same colour and quality as the other peoples of India, are more valiant and powerful in war; because, as I have said, they are a wealthy people, and of great chivalry, and behave with greater dignity than the others, and they have all their cities and towns sheltered and encircled all around with walls of mud or of stone, with their bulwarks, rather like our fortresses, in which too they differ from the other peoples of India, who in general do not live together and encircled in this manner.
Public Interventions in Agricultural Markets in Malaysia: Rice and Palm Oil
Authors: Pletcher James
Published: November 2008

This paper explores the goals, nature and results of government interventions into the rice and palm oil markets of Malyasia since independence. Its purpose is to compare the relatively successful way in which the government has promoted the palm oil industry with the failure of interventions in the rice market. The historical comparison of public efforts in these two industries points up the importance of setting consistent goals, of encouraging crops which match the natural resource endowment of the country, of having a private sector which is capable of responding to production incentives, and of letting supply and demand determine prices when designing a strategy of market intervention. Above all, it is important to distinguish programs of intervention based primarily on efficiency criteria from those which seek to perform social welfare (e.g. income support) and political (e.g. food security) functions as well.
Economic Liberalization versus Political Pluralism in Sri Lanka?
Authors: Moore Mick
Published: November 2008

Is there a positive symbiosis between the liberal economy and the liberal polity? From the time the question became meaningful, mainstream Western social theory and doctrine has tended to give a positive answer. It has generally been possible convincingly to argue an intrinsic causal connection between the dispersal of economic (and thus political) power inherent in the competitive market economy and the pluralism which is central to all definitions of the liberal polity. At a ‘broad-brush’ level the historical evidence is supportive. There is a strong empirical association between liberal democracy and (successful) capitalist market systems. While there are a number of quite plausible arguments indicating some potential deep and long-term causal connections between capitalism/the market economy and political unfreedom, the balance of long term historical evidence appears to support orthodoxy.
Rajput Ceremonial Interactions as a Mirror of a Dying Indian State System, 1820–1947
Authors: Haynes Edward S.
Published: November 2008

As the British Empire extended its power across the Indian subcontinent, the military and political pressures which it could bring to bear had proved to be its most significant assets. However, both to establish and to maintain an English political paramountcy which could guarantee economic dominance came over time to be revealed as two separate tasks, demanding very distinct skills. To maintain and secure this newfound power in India, the British were forced to come to know more about India. They had to grasp the ‘rules’ of India's preexisting political ‘game’ and, more frequently, to confront their need to rewrite these rules into a form which they could comprehend, in which they could compete, and where their dominance could be virtually assured.This process suggests the ‘gathering in of the threads of legitimacy’ towhich D. A. Low has to eloquently drawn our attention.
The Durbar Incident
Authors: Nuckolls Charles W.
Published: November 2008

Here I apply a theory of ‘political displacement’ to the study of an incident that took place at King George V's investiture as ‘King-Emperor’ of India at the ‘Delhi Durbar’ on December 12, 1911. By ‘political displacement’ I mean the shifting of political attention from one domain to another, or from one idiom to another, where problems emergent but unresolvable in the first are dealt with by conversion into the second. My purposes are these: First, to describe the problem created by the incident when the Maharaja Gaekwar of Baroda, second in rank among the Indian Princes, ‘insulted’ the King-Emperor; second, to trace reactions, both British and Indian, to the series of events that followed; and third, to examine how the incident's conversion from one political idiom to another rendered it interpretable, thereby reducing confusion and permitting action.
Some Structural and Sequential Aspects of the British Imperial Assemblages at Delhi:1877–1911
Authors: Trevithick Alan
Published: November 2008

Three great Durbars, royal assemblages, were staged in Delhi by the Government of British India, in 1877, 1903, and 1911. These are particularly interesting as examples of explicitly political rituals, their purpose being to legitimate and popularize British rule in India. The rituals would therefore exemplify, for many social theorists, a form of political manipulation which employs symbolic action as an adjunct to raw force. Yet, while many anthropologists, at least, would reject, in favor of an analysis which addresses the political aspirations of ritual manipulators, any unreconstructed Durkheimian paradigm that would equate ritual acts with social consensus (Moore and Myerhoff, 1975:9), many would also reject, as Tambiah has, the notion that ritual, by nature, constitutes a ‘diabolical smokescreen.’ The more useful approach, in Tambiah's view, is that ritual is ‘an ideological and aesthetic social construction that is directly and recursively implicated in the expression, realization, and exercise of power.’ (Tambiah, 1979: 153)1 shall be working with a similar theoretical point of view and not, largely, with the opposed view that the ritual form is merely a strategy employed by manipulative agents to perpetuate, in Bloch's words, an ‘institutionalized hierarchy’ or ‘legitimate order of inequality.’ (Bloch, 1977:289)
Shintoists in Restoration Japan (1868–1872): Towards a Reassessment
Authors: Breen J. L.
Published: November 2008

In April of 1868, the Restoration government issued an anti-Christian proscription—‘a fixed law for all ages’ it was styled. Christianity was declared a pernicious sect; rewards were offered for information leading to the discovery of Christians. In the name of the proscription, the government carried out a persecution which, in the first four years of the new era, resulted in the deaths of as many as 500 native Christians. These men, women and children died from torture, starvation or from sickness induced by the conditions in which they were kept. The native Christians were, of course, from the recently discovered hidden Christian communities around Nagasaki. The Nagasaki Christian affair is a fascinating one to which I shall return, but I mention it at the outset since it serves usefully to stress the climate of the times as far as Christianity was concerned. Given this climate, it is remarkable that there emerged by 1871, or thereabouts, a small number of enlightened intellectuals who criticized government policy on Christianity and went so far as to advocate religious freedom. The most famous of the few were Mori Arinori, Nakamura Keiu, Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nishi Amane—names known to anyone familiar with early Meiji intellectual history. There is, however, one other name that needs to be added to this short list. That is Fukuba Bisei. The little known Fukuba Bisei was, perhaps, the most remarkable of these men since he was an early Meiji Shintoist.
The Seventeenth-Century Crisis in South Asia
Authors: Richards John F.
Published: November 2008

In several of the world's regions a ‘general crisis’ seems to have occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century. At that time in each region, political instability and war, population decline and urban stagnation, economic crises marked by falling prices and depleted stocks of precious metals, and dramatic climatic shifts converged. These symptoms have been detected in western Europe, in the Ottoman lands, and even in China and Japan. Their causes have been attributed in part to the effects of the price revolution, partly to climate change, and in part to rising populations which begin to outstrip agricultural production. The latter tendency in particular seems to have caused a fiscal crisis for the absolutist agrarian states characteristic of Eurasia in this period. Other analyses stress the effects of a tightening linkage in the emerging capitalist world economy in which precious metal flows served to mark newly imposed interdependencies.
A Seventeenth-Century ‘General Crisis’ in East Asia?
Authors: Atwell Williams S.
Published: November 2008

Approximately ten years ago now, several colleagues and I were discussing Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith's then recently-published volume on the ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis’ when a specialist in Byzantine history told us that in his opinion at least, Parker, Smith, and the others who had contributed to their jointly-edited work had gotten it all wrong. The reallyimportant‘general crisis’ in pre-modern times, he believed, had occurred not in the seventeenth century but rather in the fourteenth. As he went on to discuss the impact of climatic change, food shortages, epidemic disease, monetary fluctuations, and military operations on fourteenth-century Europe and the Middle East, I began to think about some of the great and terrible events that had occurred in East Asian history during that same century: the fall of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1330S) and the political turmoil of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (Nambokuchō) period (1336–92) in Japan; the economic and military disasters surrounding the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) in China; and the food shortages, ‘Japanese pirate’ (wakō) raids, and civil wars that paved the way for the founding of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) in Korea. In subsequent readings I added economic and political strife in fourteenth-century Southeast Asia, the decline of the Delhi Sultanate in India, the collapse of the Ilkhanate (1256–1335) in Persia, and the destructive rise of Timur (1336–1405) in Transoxania. Surely a case could be made, I came to think, for a 'General Crisis of the Fourteenth Century,' one much broader in scope than even our Byzantine specialist had been considering.
The Seventeenth-Century Crisis and the Unity of Eurasian History
Authors: Steensgaard Niels
Published: November 2008

The seventeenth-century crisis concept served the research in European history well, it deepened and broadedned and broadened our understanding of well-studied issues, even though we were far from agreeing on a definition of what the seventeenth-century crisis was or is. This is the kind of conceptual embarrassment which baffles our colleagues in the social sciences, but which the historian takes in his stride.
Salt and Warlordism in Szechwan 1914–1922
Authors: Adshead S. A. M.
Published: November 2008

In recent studies of warlordism, one source has not, to my knowledge, been used. This is the collection of reports of the Sino-foreign salt inspectorate held in the Toyo Bunko. Of all the institutions of the China coast, the salt inspectorate, its offices deep in the interior, its revenues a magnet for predatory armies, was perhaps in closest touch with warlordism. This paper studies the relationship of salt and warlordism in Szechwan between 1914 and 1922. Szechwan in this period has been selected for 3 reasons. First, the reports from the inspectorates of Ch'uan-nan and Ch'uan-pei, which together covered not only Szechwan but also Yunnan, Kweichow and Hupei as supplied by its salt, are unusually informative on politics. Second, between 1914 and 1922, Szechwan, a border province both northern and southern or neither, ran a full gamut of warlordism: regional, provincial, subprovincial and stabilized. It also attracted the attention of ‘guest armies’ from outside. Third, 1914–1922 has coherence; 1914 saw Yüan Shih-k'ai ascendant and the inspectorate established in Szechwan; 1922 saw Yüan's legatee Hsü Shih-ch'ang descendant, and Liu Hsiang, the embodiment of stabilized warlordism in Szechwan, ascendant.
Increased Disunity: The Politics and Finance of Guangdong Separatism, 1926–1936
Authors: Fitzgerald John
Published: November 2008

There are two lemons in the larder of Modern China's history. Stalin's, dating from April 1927, is certainly the better known:

Chiang Kaishek is submitting to discipline. The Kuomintang is a bloc, a sort of revolutionary parliament, with the Right, the Left and the Communists. Why make a coup d'etat? Why drive away the Right when we have the majority and the Right listens to us?… Also, they have connections with the rich merchants and can raise money from them. So they have to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then flung away.
Origins and Development of the Malayan Communist Movement, 1919–1930
Authors: Yong C. F.
Published: November 2008

Communism as an ideology was first introduced to Malaya by Chinese anarchists, and not by Kuomintang Left, Indonesian communists or Chinese communists as claimed in existing scholarship.1A handful of Chinese anarchists arrived in British Malaya during the First World War to take up positions as Chinese vernacular school teachers or journalists. These Chinese intellectuals harboured not only anarchism but also communism, commonly known then as anarcho-communism.
Maintaining Cultural Boundaries in Retailing: How Japanese Department Stores Domesticate ‘Things Foreign’
Authors: Creighton Millie R.
Published: November 2008

This essay explores the division between ‘things Japanese’ and ‘things foreign’ in contemporary Japanese life through an analysis of modern retailing. Japanese department stores domesticate ‘foreign things’, including customs, holidays, goods, and people, by creating for these meaning consistent with the existing fabric of Japanese culture. Their role in gift-exchanges, in the adoption of foreign holidays and in establishing special advocacy centers for foreigners reinforces the distinction between ‘Japanese’ and ‘other’ that shapes and affirms Japanese identity (economy, national identity, symbolism, popular culture, gift-exchange, Japan).
The May Fourth Movement Redefined
Authors: Chen Joseph T.
Published: November 2008

The May Fourth Movement of 1919 was an epochal event in modern Chinese history. It marked the beginning of China's modern revolutionary era, and a new stage after the Republican Revolution of 1911. It was both anti-imperialist and anti-warlord, and represented the reaction of the Chinese people to the turbulent new forces unleashed by the First World War. In specific protest against the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty as they affected China, and against the terms of Japan's infamous ‘Twenty-one Demands’, huge student demonstrations were held in Peking on 4 May 1919 to denounce the pro-Japanese Peking government. This revolutionary tide soon spread rapidly throughout China, spearheading a rapid growth of mass consciousness and cultural change, and culminating in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, in the reorganization of the Kuomintang in 1924, and the establishment of a united front between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. It is the very importance of the May Fourth Movement (MFM) as well as its manifold repercussions and ramifications, which have complicated the problems of defining, interpreting, and evaluating the movement per se. The definition of its true nature and character, the clear identification of its actual leadership, and the realistic appraisal of its scope and achievements have all become matters of dispute. Ideological commitment, political ties, or professional interest have too often clouded the objectivity of individuals who have studied the movement—and hence their interpretations of it.
Jinnah and the Pakistan Demand
Authors: Moore R. J.
Published: November 2008

In an age sceptical of the historic role of great men there is universal agreement that Mahomed Ali Jinnah was central to the Muslim League's emergence after 1937 as the voice of a Muslim nation; to its articulation in March 1940 of the Pakistan demand for separate statehood for the Muslim majority provinces of north-western and eastern India; and to its achievement in August 1947 of the separate but truncated state of Pakistan by the Partition of India. Subcontinental judgements of Jinnah are bound to be parti pris and to exaggerate his individual importance. While Pakistanis generally see him as the Quaid-i-Azam, Great Leader, or father of their nation, Indians often regard him as the Lucifer who tempted his people into the unforgivable sin against their nationalist faith. Among distinguished foreign scholars, unbiassed by national commitment, his stature is similarly elevated. Sir Penderel Moon has written:

There is, I believe, no historical parallel for a single individual effecting such a political revolution; and his achievement is a striking refutation of the theory that in the making of history the individual is of little or no significance. It was Mr Jinnah who created Pakistan and undoubtedly made history.