bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Maratha Revenue Farming
Authors: Wink André
Published: November 2008

In absolutist Europe the administrative device called ‘farming’ covered at most the collection of customs and a number of other indirect taxes. In contrast we find in India and in many Muslim states that, in addition to customs, indirect taxes, and a wide range of less important miscellaneous items, the land-revenue itself could be farmed as well. It is chiefly with that of the latter, as implemented by the Maratha government, that this article is concerned. We will attempt to show that a variety of forms of land-revenue farming prevailed not only under the much-discredited Baji Rao II, the last of the Peshwas, but was also of regular occurrence under comparatively paternalistic rulers like Madhav Rao I and Nana Fadnis, and in fact throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Secondly, it will be argued that revenue farming was either a characteristic response to crisis, or otherwise occurred only under frontier conditions.
The Dubashes of Madras
Authors: Neild-Basu Susan
Published: November 2008

If Calcutta of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a city of ‘banians,’ can Madras of the same period be called a city of ‘dubashes’? The parallels in the early history of these two port cities, and particularly in the emergence of similar groups of Indian collaborators, are not hard to find. Nor are they especially surprising in view of the common goals and needs of the English traders who founded them. The need for intermediaries and collaborators was built into the very economic and political structures of these towns. In turn, these groups inevitably had a tremendous influence on the development and environments of these colonial urban centers.
Chang Yu-nan and the Chaochow Railway (1904–1908): A Case Study of Overseas Chinese Involvement in China's Modern Enterprise
Authors: Ching-Hwang Yen
Published: November 2008

With the climax of imperialism in China at the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese nationalism in its modern form grew rapidly and became ever more assertive. As the imperialists concentrated on economic gains, the frustrated nationalists gave increasing attention to economic defences. The prime target of the imperialists was the control of mining and railway construction in different areas; so ‘to resist the imperialists’ became the catchword of the day, and the movement for recovering mining and railway construction rights highlighted the development of Chinese economic nationalism. While revolutionaries and the fugitive reformers abroad worked out their political programmes for the salvation of China, the conservative Manchu government and scholar-gentry tried to resist imperialism by promoting economic nationalism. To recover the mining and railway rights, to find the alternative capital for economic modernization and to play one power against another, became the strategic aims of economic nationalism.
Kurahashi Yumiko: A Dream of the Present? A Bridge to the Past?
Authors: Yamamoto Fumiko
Published: November 2008

Widely recognized as a leading writer of prose fiction, Kurahashi Yumiko (b. 1935) produced several early works permeated by stark modernist imagery, then combined this approach with an imaginative drawing upon the ancient prose narrative tradition. She thus developed a unique style which has been characterized as a fantasy that ‘relies for its powerful effects upon a kind of imagination that does not so much engage in romanticizing … as lay things bare with shocking candor and with a cynicism comparable to [that of] an anatomist at [an] autopsy.This attribution of cynicism to her works undoubtedly derives from the author's dispassionate treatment of various kinds of heightened sexuality, including trading sexual partners and the practice of incest. Kurahashi's unusual ‘kind of imagination’ also encompasses the portrayal of contemporary situations suffused with many attitudes and values expressed in the early prose narratives which mirror the court tradition of ancient Japan. One of the earliest works, The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari c. 1015? by Lady Murasaki Shikibu), seems to have exerted a strong influence on Kurahashi's recent novel, A Floating Bridge of Dreams (Yume no ukihashi, 1970). Kurahashi is likely to have been attracted to The Tale of Genji not only because it is the first important long narrative written by a woman, but also because this complex and beautiful work has long been held in esteem as the greatest narrative in Japanese literature, and has been accorded the same stature as The Divine Comedy or Don Quixote. The following essay considers the ways that Kurahashi's novel adapts the Japanese classical literary legacy, and explores the potential of this inheritance to act as a framework for describing contemporary experience.
The Experience of Rural Poverty in Malay Novels
Authors: Watson C. W.
Published: November 2008

In significant contrast with Indonesian writing there is in Malay literature a body of work concerned with rural life. That this is the case suggests the degree to which Malay writers even today have their roots in the agricultural cycle of peasant experience. Those who now work in clerical jobs, in publishing, in journalism, in teaching, those in fact who make up the writers of the novels, however divorced and remote their present life-styles and occupations are from their origins, still look back to the village as the world of their formative experience. It is a world with which they are intimate and familiar, a source of spiritual reassurance, of values which they may not endorse, but which they understand fully, in opposition to the alien environment of the modern city where the totality of life is fragmented into exclusive and contradictory domains of experience. And it is precisely because the writers are not so removed from rural life in space and time, that when they do cast a glance backwards they are never tempted to review that life through the distorting lens of nostalgia. On the contrary, there is the realistic acknowledgement that their own moving away from the village has also been an escape. There is, therefore, ambivalence: the village is perceived as the repository of Malay culture, the locus of traditional values, yet at the same time it is a locus of ignorance, frustration and poverty, somewhere to return for spiritual regeneration, but never again for permanent residence.
Health and Health Services in British Malaya in the 1920s
Authors: Parmer J. Norman
Published: November 2008

British Malaya was a very unhealthy place in the early years of this century. Malaria, ankylostomiasis or hookworm, venereal disease, tuberculosis, dysentery, pneumonia, beri-beri, cholera and still other diseases accounted for thousands of deaths annually in the 1920s. Typically, persons suffered from two or more maladies at the same time. In the Federated Malay States (F. M. S.) probably more than half of those listed as dying from malaria also suffered from hookworm. Many pneumonia deaths were due to tuberculosis. Chronic malnutrition combined with malaria, hookworm and diarrhea in many, perhaps most, pregnant women to produce high infant and maternal mortality. The majority of the living were more or less continuously afflicted with disease. Most of the diseases were debilitating and slow to kill. Most were preventable although that was imperfectly understood.
French Far Eastern Policy in the 1930s
Authors: Laffey John F.
Published: November 2008

The completion in 1986 of the Documents diplomatiques français, 1932–1939 permits a review of French Far Eastern policy during that troubled time characterized by J.-B. Duroselle as ‘la décadence.’ This massive documentary collection, however, still dose not provide a full picture of the forces which shaped French East Asian policy in the years before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Understandably focused upon European developments, it begins and ends, from the Far Eastern perspective, in medias res; that is, after the outbreak of the Manchurian crisis and before the Japanese occupation of Indochina. Moreover, like other compilations of what statesmen and diplomats said to each other, this one slights economic factors and, though to a lesser extent, the role of public opinion. Even taken in their own terms, the documents perhaps reveal more about what others said and did to the French than about what they themselves accomplished. That points to a more fundamental problem, for one can question whether anything so gelatinous as the French responses or lack thereof to developments largely beyond their control can even be described as ‘policy.’ Still, although much more work in archives and private papers will be necessary before the entire story can be pieced together, these documents do shed light on what passed for French policy in East Asia during the years before the outbreak of World War II.
The T'i—Yung Dichotomy and the Search for Talent in Late-Ch'ing China
Authors: Kwong Luke S. K.
Published: November 2008

It is a commonplace in modern Chinese history that the twin-concept oft'i–yungespoused a doctrine of cultural conservatism in late-Ch'ing China. Briefly, the dichotomy is seen as a call to preserve the ‘substance’ (t'i) of the Chinese cultural tradition by adopting the ‘function’ (yung) of Western technology, or simply, to strengthen Confucian China by implementing Western-inspired reforms; hence, the famous slogan, ‘Chinese learning for fundamental principles and Western learning for practical application’ (Chung-hsueh wei-t'i Hsi-hsueh weiyung). Both the slogan and the position it reflects have long come under criticism. An early, influential critic was Yen Fu, the well-known interpreter of Social Darwinism in late-Ch'ing China. In 1902, in a published open letter to the editor ofWai-chiao pao(Foreign affairs magazine), Yen expanded on an earlier view of a contemporary schlar, Ch'iu T'ing-liang, that the notion oft'i-yung, when properly applied, refers to the two complementary aspects of a single entity and not to attributes from two different juxtaposed objects. To drive home his point, Yen cites an analogy. An ox ast'ihas itsyung, which is to carry heavy loads, whereas a horse ast'ihas itsyung, which is to go long distances. Now the attempt to combine at'iwith an extraneousyungis like ascribing a horse's function to an ox's body, or vice versa, and the result could only be a bizarre mismatch, an affront to nature's purposes.
National Humiliation and National Assertion: The Chines Response to the Twenty-one Demands
Authors: Luo Zhitian
Published: November 2008

The Japanese Twenty-one Demands toward the Chinese government headed by Yuan Shih-k'ai in 1915 marked a milestone in Sino-Japanese relations as well as in the Chinese response to imperialism. Yet studies on the event, particularly on its consequence and influence in China, are still insufficient. Studies by Chinese scholars have not gone far beyond Wang Yun-sheng's publication of collected materials more than fifty years ago. The only book-length study on the event is the first volume of Li Yu-shu's study, published in Taiwan. This last does not even cover the whole period of Sino-Japanese negotiations. His second volume has not yet appeared. Li's contribution is that he has made use of more Japanese documents than Wang. In mainland China, the most current study on the event is a chapter on the Demands in the first volume of the work by Li Hsin and Li Tsung-i. This chapter is based primarily on the works of Wang and Li Yu-shu. Compared with Japanese studies on other landmarks of Sino-Japanese relations, the coverage of this episode is rather thin. There is only one book-length study, published in 1958. As for works in English, Madeleine Chi's book has a chapter dealing with the Sino-Japanese negotiations. Two general works examine the event from a broader perspective.
Colonial Politics and Women's Rights: Woman Suffrage Campaigns in Bengal, British India in the 1920s
Authors: Southard Barbara
Published: November 2008

The historian Geraldine Forbes, writing on the origins of the woman suffrage movement in India, stated: ‘the firm insistence of organized women—that they be treated as equals of men on the franchise issue—emerged not from the perceptions of the needs of the women in India, but as the result of the influence of certain British women, in the case of the first demand for the franchise, 1917, and as a response to the nationalist movement, in the case of the second demand for franchise, 1927–33.’
The Politics of Trade Union Formation in the Java Sugar Industry, 1945–1949
Authors: Brown Colin
Published: November 2008

Comparatively little of a scholarly nature has been written about Indonesian trade unions, particularly on the two decades from 1945 to 1965 when, like the political parties to which so many of them were affiliated, the unions had their heyday. This paper focuses on the development of trade unions in one specific industry: refined sugar production. The period to be examined—1945 to 1949—runs from the proclamation of Indonesian independence by Sukarno and Hatta, through the revolution fought against the returning Dutch, to December 1949 when the Netherlands finally acknowledged Indonesian independence. It was during this period that the major post-war sugar industry unions were established. The circumstances surrounding the establishment of these unions will be examined, along with their leaders and members, ideological leanings and political and industrial objectives.
Capital Formation and Operating Profits of the Kailuan Mining Administration (1903–1937)
Authors: Yuru Wang
Published: November 2008

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.
Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code: A Victory of Symbol over Substance?
Authors: Som Reba
Published: November 2008

If to Gandhi goes the credit of having drawn out Indian women from their cloistered protected environment to join the national movement for freedom, to Jawaharlal Nehru surely goes the credit for having recognized the need formally to grant equality between the sexes and to enshrine it in the Fundamental Rights drawn up at the Karachi Congress of 1931.
Saigō Takamori in the Emergence of Meiji Japan
Authors: Yates Charles L.
Published: November 2008

According to the view current among most Japanese today, the samurai lost their last hope of surviving as a distinct social or political group when Saigō Takamori died in the autumn of 1877. In fact, the fate of the samurai class had been sealed as early as 1866, when Satsuma and Chōshū joined forces to destroy the only institutional order in which the samurai had any functional meaning. Their disappearance from the Japanese stage was brought about by forces that Saigō helped to set in motion, but over which neither he nor any other individual could possibly have exerted much control. In the end he had no significant effect on the fate of the samurai.
Chinese Vernacular Education in Sarawak during Brooke Rule, 1841–1946
Authors: Gin Ooi Keat
Published: November 2008

The Chinese in Sarawak, like their counterparts in other parts of Southeast Asia (Nanyang), were staunch advocates of education where every Chinese community had its own school which was built, managed and financed by local resources, and largely independent of government control.
‘Ethnic’ Conflict as Stat–Society Struggle: The Poetics and Politics of Assamese Micro-Nationalism
Authors: Baruah Sanjib
Published: November 2008

This paper is an attempt to understand one case of ‘ethnic’ conflict in India—Assam. By looking closely at this one case I hope we will understand better the phenomenon of India's persistent dilemma of micro-nationalist politics that from time to time seems to be fundamentally at odds with India's macro-nationalist project. To be sure, despite the seriousness of some of these conflicts—say Punjab and Kashmir at present, or Assam until recently—the incidence of micro-nationalist dissent should be kept in perspective. The Indian state can claim quite a bit of success in its project of ‘nation building’-it has been able to incorporate micro-nationalist dissent of a number of peoples by using persuasive and coercive means at its disposal. Moreover, cven conflicts that appear stubborn at one time turn out to be surprisingly amenable to negotiated settlement. Irrespective of the Indian state's ability to manage micro-nationalist dissent, the assumption that nationalisms have a telos that inevitably leads to a demand for separation relies on a rather sloppy and lazy naturalist theory of the nature and origins of nations and nation states. What the Indian experience forces us to confront is the fate of nationalism and the nation state as they spread worldwide as a modal form. In the Indian subcontinent these new forms that privilege 'formal boundedness over substantive interelationships," come face to face with a civilisation that represents a particularly complex way of ordering diversity.2 In a subcontinent where the historical legacy of state formation is marked by an intermittent tension between the imperial state and regional kingdoms, nationalisms and the nation state may have proved to be rather unfortunate modern transplants.3
Punjabi in Lahore
Authors: Shackle C.
Published: November 2008

Under the terms of a Fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, the author was given study-leave for the academic year 1967–68 to go to Pakistan and India in order to improve his knowledge of Urdu and Punjabi. Having chosen Lahore as the most suitable place to pursue the concurrent study of these two languages, he lived there from September 1967 until April 1968, during which time he became increasingly conscious of, and interested in, the rather peculiar socio-linguistic position of Punjabi in the city's life. This article is a sunnary of the observations he was able to make about this, and of the thoughts to which he was led.
Reconstructing late Ch'ing Fengt'ien
Authors: Leeming Frank
Published: November 2008

It is generally recognized that modern knowledge of the functioning of Chinese society is radically imperfect, and that this is increasingly the case as the topic of discussion is the more limited in locality and the more confined to the domestic details of native Chinese civilization. As the study of the complexities and subtleties of local social and economic organization in our own cities and countrysides has grown and developed, together with that of many other parts of the world with infinitely shorter histories and weaker societies than those of China, students of China have become increasingly aware of the great gulf which resides between what it would be satisfying to know about the China of the past (and the present), and the little which is known in detail, and with any degree of certainty, about these topics.
Jawaharlal Nehru at Simla, May 1947
Authors: Tinker Hugh
Published: November 2008

An incidental aside in one of my books has become the focal point of a small controversy. Experiment with Freedom, India and Pakistan 1947 was a brief work which attempted to give a more precise and particular account of the events which led up to the transfer of power. Most attention has been paid to my interpretation of the celebrated episode at Simla in May 1947 when Nehru reacted violently to Mountbatten's plans for transferring power. I suggested that the crisis was not an external confrontation between British and Indian views over whether India should remain united, or be divided, or split into fractions, but was essentially an internal crisis in the mind of Jawaharlal Nehru. To try to explain why Nehru was so upset by a plan which he had, in all essentials, previously (however reluctantly) accepted, I made a comparison with his later reaction to Chinese activities on the Indian border. Nobody adopted the slogan Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai (‘Indians and Chinese are Brothers’) more ardently than Nehru and so the revelation that they were enemies came as a profound personal shock. Speaking on the morrow of the Chinese invasion, Nehru said that he now realized that they had been ‘out of touch with reality’, in an ‘artificial atmosphere of our own creation’. The Times printed this observation under the sardonic heading ‘The Dreamers’ (26 October 1962). I suggested that at Simla Nehru exhibited ‘much the same apparent amnesia’.
The Japanese Occupation of Hainan
Authors: Phillips R. T.
Published: November 2008

Japanese interest in Hainan stemmed from the desire to emulate the success which they had achieved in Taiwan in an area further south which could offer a full range of tropical products for theuse of the Japanese economy. The naval importance of Hainan was also recognized, because it could dominate the South China Sea from the excellent harbour of San-ya (Samah) Bay, and there were indications that the island was rich in minerals. The development of official Japanese interest in the island was largely the work of the governor-general's office in Taiwan. Thus in 1918 and 1919 an official from Taiwan called Kaku () was sent to Hainan to observe conditions under the title of special sales office head. In the 1920's the Taiwan government sponsored conferences o the South China Japanese consuls to discuss plans for the area, and in 1935 a conference was held production in the tropics, to coordinate research on the economy, production possibilities and culture of the tropical part of China.Meanwhile Chinese government interest in Hainan began to be aroused in the 1930's, culminating in the visit of T.V. Soong, one of the highest ministers of e Kuintang government, in 1936. Thereafter a rail route a west of the island was surveyed but no furthe progress was made. Private businessmen in the 1930's began to develop rubber plantations to join those set up with overseas Chinese capital in the 1910's,and there was a sharp rise in the area planted to sugar in 1936 as the price of sugar rose. Hence when war broke out between China and Japa,the possibilities for the development were just beginning to be explored.1
Wooden documents from China and Japan: Recent Finds and Their Value
Authors: Loewe Michael
Published: November 2008

Until the evolution of paper, which is dated traditionally in A.D. 105, the majority of Chinese documents were probably written on boards or narrow strips of wood or bamboo; the use of silk was reserved for the preparation of de luxe copies of certain works, either for sacred or for profane purposes. However, it was only quite recently that actual examples of wooden documents from China were first brought to the attention of the scholastic world, as a result of two series of expedit ions to central Asia and northwestern China. First, Sir Aurel Stein's expeditions, at the be ginning of the century, brought back fragments of inscribed wood from the sites of Tun-huang; thi s was subsequently examined and the results published, by Chinese scholars such as Wang Kuo-wei, an European scholars such as Chavannes and Maspero. Secondly, the expeditions led by Sven Hedin s ome thirty years later found similar material in larger quantities, from the more easterly sites of Chü-yen (Edsen-gol). These texts were published by a number of scholars, beginning with L ao Kan,who was working in China in the extremely difficult conditions of the 1940s.1940s.Shortly afterwards, Japanese scholars were able to turn their attention to this material whose content, l ike thatof the strips from Tun-huang, was almost exclusively concerned with the civil and militar y administration of Han imperial officials, between about 100 B.C.and A.D. 100. In the early 1960 s Professor Mori Shikazo led a series of seminar meetings to study the material from Chii-yen, wh ich the present writer was fortunate and privileged to attend. The results of such meetings were published atthe time in a number of Japanese periodicals, and constituted a valuable contribution to the studyof the wooden material from China known to exist at that time.
Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port City: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795
Authors: Subramanian Lakshmi
Published: November 2008

Surat, the waning port city of the departed Great Mughals, was rocked by riots on 6 August 1795. 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. This was the response of a collapsing social order to the thrust of a highly adaptive banking and trading group which had adroitly allied itself to the rising English power on the West Coast of India. A combination of circumstances in the half century following 1750 had resulted in the formation of 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. The violent protest by the Muslims against the new order served only to reaffirm the significance of the Anglo-Bania alliance as the central fact in the unfolding political and commercial situation on the West Coast. The once powerful Mughal ruling élite and the once wealthy Muslim shipping magnates1 were no longer in a position to offer much resistance to the English East India Company and its Bania allies. Likewise the popular Muslim disaffection failed to shake by violence the foundations of the emerging Anglo-Bania order. An analysis of the August riots in Surat would afford the historian a unique opportunity to assess the nature and impact of the new order on the West Coast and to understand the crumbling social structure of a traditional port city—the composition of its lower orders and its burgher groups and their responses to the major changes that were taking place in the political and trading structure of Surat in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Peasant-worker Households and Community-based Organizations in Rural Japan
Authors: Prindle Peter H.
Published: November 2008

Despite a growing interest by anthropologists in the process whereby peasants have been incorporated into a modern industrialized economy as ‘post-peasants’, ‘peasant-workers’, or ‘part-time farmers’, comparatively little research has focused upon the community level of social integration as an important facet of this process (see Barlett 1980: 553, 560–1). For the most part, this lack of concern can probably be attributed to the fact that much of the research devoted to post-peasants has been conducted in European societies where community-wide types of cooperation do not seem to have been particularly important with regard to the production strategies peasants followed in their adaptation to conditions of rapid sociocultural change since the second world war (see Holmes 1983; Symes 1972; Redclift 1973; Minge-Kalman 1978; Franklin 1969: 10–15, 225–33; Tamanoi 1983).
Filipino Identity in Fiction, 1945–1972
Authors: Roces Mina
Published: November 2008

The Philippines in the immediate post-war years may be described as a nation in search of an identity. This preoccupation with what one journalist has dubbed ‘the question of identity’ spurred a sudden interest in the research and discussion of things Filipino: Filipino dance, theater, literature, language, music, art and cultural traditions. After four hundred and fifty years of colonial rule the Filipino intelligentsia began to wonder if indeed the western legacy of colonial rule was the annihilation of the very essence of Filipino culture. Under the aegis of American rule Filipinos were adamant about proving to their colonizers that they had been good pupils in western democratic ideals and were fit to govern themselves. From the 1920s to the early 1940s, the Filipino had become a sajonista (pro-American). The Japanese colonizers who replaced the Americans in the second world war were appalled not only at the pro-Americanism of the Filipino but at the magnitude of American influence absorbed by Filipino culture. In fact it was the Japanese who promoted the use of Tagalog and the ‘revival’ and appreciation of Filipino cultural traditions as part of the policy of ‘Asia for the Asians’. Once independence was achieved at last in 1946, the focus shifted. The nagging question was no longer ‘Are we western enough to govern ourselves?’ but its opposite—‘Have we become too westernized to the point of losing ourselves?’.
From Empire Defence to Imperial Retreat: Britain's Postwar China Policy and the Decolonization of Hong Kong
Authors: Tang James T. H.
Published: November 2008

Attempts to examine Hong Kong as an issue in British postwar colonial policy often emphasize the unique nature of the colony, and therefore a special case in British decolonization. Hong Kong has been regarded as an unconventional colonial entity, an anachronism in the modern world. But others argue that the word colony is not an appropriate term to describe it, except in the most severely technical legal sense, because of its spectacular industrial and economic development since the end of the Second World War. Nonetheless, Hong Kong has existed as a British crown colony since 1842, and its colonial political structures have remained more or less the same until the early 1980s. Hong Kong's special relations with China is an important factor making it an oddity in post-war British decolonization. Instead of becoming independent like most other British colonialterritories, Hong Kong's political future is linked to China. This situation of ‘decolonization without independence’ has been an important theme of academic analysis on the colony's political development.
British Literary Travellers in Southeast Asia in an Era of Colonial Retreat
Authors: Christie Clive J.
Published: November 2008

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.
Utilitarianism and the Criminal Law in Colonial India: A Study of the Practical Limits of Utilitarian Jurisprudence
Authors: Raman Kartik Kalyan
Published: November 2008

The role of legal tradition in the reformist rhetoric of Benthamite Utilitarianism presents us with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is the common observation that Utilitarian jurisprudence was necessarily ahistorical and rejected the past as a source of concepts for reworking the criminal justice system existing in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For philosophic reformers such as Bentham, contemporary British criminal justice was to be replaced by a scientific jurisprudence, abstract, universal, and secular in outlook, and antipathetic to the more conservative insistence that the foundations of the penal law continue to be tradition-based. ‘If society was to see any improvement, its law must be reformed; if its law was to be reformed it must be burned to the ground and rebuilt according to a new and rational pattern.’ On the other hand, we find that the very same Utilitarian thinkers, in works describing the state of the law in British India, were concerned with local rather than universal conceptions of criminality. In his 1782Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, Bentham, for instance, urged the philosophic reformer to temper change in India by fitting Utilitarian judgments about the law to the frames of local society.
The Colonial State, Capital and the Peasantry in Bombay Presidency
Authors: Kaiwar Vasant
Published: November 2008

Despite the commodification of land and labor in colonial Bombay Presidency, capitalism and its associated dynamic (modern economic growth via innovation, specialization, and so on resulting in the improved productiveness of labor) did not, by and large, develop.The colonial state reformed the property structure, bringing the notion of a single owner for each property, ending the overlapping property rights of the pre-colonial regimes. Capital was freely deployed to make profits of alienation, if not profits of enterprise. Yet, small-scale family-labor farms continued as the backbone of Bombay agriculture. The peasantry could not sustain capitalist-style growth but did maintain a tenacious hold on the land with the help of the state, and its own capacity to endure horrendous levels of exploitation and poverty; the former symptomized by high land prices and low crop prices paid to the producer; the latter by mass peasant insolvency. The power of capital was in direct proportion to the peasants' desperate need for land and loans. The colonial state was fully aware that this kind of relationship was inimical to development, but did little to bring capital into a productive relationship with landed property. The colonial state came to resemble a classic agrarian bureaucracy rather than a capitalist state. Despite some commitments to modernization, it ruled over an impoverished agrarian society. This paper attempts to locate this result in the specific interests and interactions of the major social agents of rural Bombay: the state, capital and the peasantry.
Planning for Pakistan: The Planning Committee of the All-India Muslism League 1943–46
Authors: Talbot Ian
Published: November 2008

Most studies have concentrated on the Muslim League's political activities and objectives. It is generally believed that it lacked a distinctive economic programme and unequivocally favoured private enterprise. The radical economic ideas produced by its Punjab and Bengal branches are attributed to a handful of activists who received short shrift from the High Command. The League's stance is thus contrasted with the Congress which addressed economic issues from a largely Socialist perpective.
Work and Life of the Rural Proletariat in Java's Coastal Plain
Authors: Breman Jan
Published: November 2008

The village S lies in the plain that is known as the rice store of West Java. Surrounded by fields on which paddy is cultivated for a large part of the year, the visitor sees S as the prototype of the agrarian settlements that fill the landscape: a small-scale concentration of houses hidden amongst trees and farmyard crops, whose inhabitants have for centuries lived in the shelter of their community and depend for their living largely or even entirely on cultivating the land in the locality. This is the classical image of peasant society as laid down in the literature, but one that is in need of revision also in this particular case.
Disaster or Release? J. S. Furnivall and the Bankruptcy of Burma
Authors: Taylor R. H.
Published: November 2008

At the heart of modern social science lies the belief that if societies understand the causes of their current condition, their people will foresee what future ills may befall them unless particular public policies are implemented to avoid the undesirable consequences of previous actions. Analysis and prediction thus provides the power to alter the future, which is only inevitable if people and governments do nothing to understand the causes of their present complaints. J. S. Furnivall, arguably the most prescient foreign analyst of Burmese political and economic life this century, was a true disciple of this idea.
The Babbling Brookes: Economic Change in Sarawak 1841–1941
Authors: Kaur Amarjit
Published: November 2008

The present day economy of Sarawak is characterized by a small but rapidly growing, largely rural population engaged in low productivity, semi-subsistence agriculture; a dependence on the export of a few primary commodities; the relative absence of modern transportation linkages, and a small industrial sector. In many respects, therefore, Sarawak represents a microcosm of the underdeveloped world. Yet for about a hundred years Sarawak was ruled by the white Brooke dynasty and was touted as a true frontier for western expansion and an ideal setting for the exploitation of its natural resources. There was very little development during this period because Brooke rule was inimical to economic progress—the Brookes gave little or no financial assistance to the natives, undertook few developmental initiatives, and expected foreign entrepreneurs and missionaries to provide the rudiments of physical and social infrastructures. The Brookes believed that change, particularly far-reaching or rapid change, would be harmful to the natives. Consequently, when Brooke rule ended, the problems of economic development seemed more intractable while the supposed benefits of ‘white’ rule appeared less tangible.
The French in Laos, 1887–1945
Authors: Stuart-Fox Martin
Published: November 2008

Laos constituted one of the five territorial entities making up French Indochina—comprising in addition the colony of Cochinchina and the protectorates of Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia. It was never, however, one among equals. Even before the annexation of Lao territories east of the Mekong river in 1893, Laos was perceived as little more than an extension of Vietnam west towards Siam (Thailand), a much more significant potential prize. The addition of minor extensions west of the Mekong demarcated by treaty in 1904 and 1907 still gave France no more than half the former Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang. Any possibility of reconstituting a greater Lao state was thereafter lost.
The Cross Battles the Crescent One Century of Missionary Work Among Chinese Muslims (1850–1950)
Authors: Israeli Raphael
Published: November 2008

Much has been written and published about Christianity in China, less has been known about the particular interest that the Mission had evinced toward the Muslims of China, much less has been recorded about the Muslim reactions to this activity, and almost nothing has been concluded in terms of the dialectical interaction between Christianity and Islam in that part of the world.
Town Building in North India, 1790–1830
Authors: Bayly C. A.
Published: November 2008

The fate of urban centres in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India has attracted attention far in excess of their supposed importance as population centres. It is assumed that flourishing towns are an indicator of economic development and change in their hinterlands. Muslim historians traditionally laid stress on the opulence of towns as a gauge of the wealth of divisions of the Moghul Empire. Recently, Indian historians of the Medieval period have returned to the theme, claiming for the Moghul cities large populations, developed ‘industries’ and sophisticated credit systems. Throughout these works there is an implicit paralled drawn with the point it is suggested that far from being mere administrative centers and entrepots for ‘aristocratic’ long-distance trade, these cities were exchange marts for wealthy hinterlands where agreculturalists exchanged thier products of ‘urban industries’. It is but a short step to argue that these cities weakened by the anarchy of the eighteenth century, were finally ruined by the negligent commercial amorality of the East India Company. The claim by early British writers that the security of British rule encouraged the growth of urban communities in which merchants secured relief from the vexations of local potentates and innumerable minor transit duties is rejected This argument for town decline first revived by Professor Irfan Habib almost as a throwaway, has recently been followed by other younger Indian Marxist historians.
Agrarian Society and the Pax Britannica in Northern India in the Early Nineteenth Century
Authors: Stokes Eric
Published: November 2008

It has been customary to view the effects of the British annexation of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces (1801–3) in terms of an abrupt caesura. Upon the whirling anarchy of the North Indian scene there suddenly fell the Pax Britannica. A political revolution was worked almost overnight. The tide of Sikh expansion was checked and turned back, Jat power penned in Bharatpur, Sindhia driven across the Chambal to his matchless rock citadel at Gwalior, and the Oudh nawabi stripped of its Doab, Rohilkhand and eastern districts. The second line of the political elite could not long survive this dismantling of the superior political structure. Although, at first, expediency impelled the use of large-scale intermediaries, the assertiveness of British rule and its hunger for revenue could tolerate no more than could the Mughals the existence of tall poppies along the principal strategic highway of its power between Benares and Delhi; and on their part the number of magnates capable of keeping their footing and making the rapid adjustment from warlordism to estate management were few indeed. Within two decades of 1801 a large proportion of the established magnates had been swept from the scene, and the remainder were finding that the sun of official favour had gone down while it was yet day.
Hindu Traditionalism and Nationalist Ideologies in Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra
Authors: Tucker Richard
Published: November 2008

Historians of modern India have recently been paying increased attention to the founders of nationalist politics in the provinces, in growing recognition that the heredity of the Indian National Congress was influenced by complex institutional patterns going back some decades before its birth in 1885. These patterns were rooted in widely varying local and regional conditions. To the extent that the local political associations were designed by a Western-educated professional class with the common purpose of influencing policy decisions of the British Raj, they can all be understood within the context of British imperial politics. But the associations' leaders, the spokesmen of Indian nationalism in its early forms, had to confront a second audience as well as the British: the largely traditional society of their birth. Their relationship to that society was probably the most controversial and misunderstood dimension of their lives, yet it was crucial to the growth of regionally distinctive variations of later mass nationalism.
The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720–1760
Authors: Gordon Stewart N.
Published: November 2008

The eighteenth century in India has generally been described as a period of great turbulence, characterized by march and counter-march, rising and falling fortunes, and bewildering political intrigue. Many historians, focusing on this aspect, have dismissed the century as merely an unsavory hiatus between the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of British domination. Yet there was more to the century than the march and counter-march of armies. The other aspect of the period was the emergence of strong successor states in Gujerat, Bengal, Oudhe, Malwa, Hyderabad, Mysore, and the Punjab. Recently, historians have begun exploring these successor states, looking both back towards the Mughal administrative and ideological heritage and forward towards their role as princely states in British India. There are also important issues within the century itself, such as the role of successor states in developing regional language and consciousness, and successor states as channels of economic and social mobility.
The Islamic Frontier in Southwest India: The Shahīd as a Cultural Ideal among the Mappillas of Malabar
Authors: Dale Stephen F.
Published: November 2008

The only really unique feature of the Mappilla outbreaks which occurred in Malabar District during the period of British rule was that each attack was conducted as a kind of suicidal jihād, in which the Mappillas involved intentionally sought to become shahīds or martyrs for the faith. No other South Asian Muslims who took part in protest movements to achieve goals similar to those which underlay the Mappilla attacks resorted to suicidal jihāds as a means of coercion. Yet no satisfactory explanation has ever been given to account for the Mappillas' peculiar militancy. Modern scholars have generally ignored the question, while the few British officials who tried to answer it usually argued, or implicitly suggested, that the attacks represented the inherent fanaticism of Islam. This explanation is, of course, vitiated by the very uniqueness of the Mappillas' suicidal ritual.
The Manchuria Bridgehead: Anglo-Russian Rivalry and the Imperial Railways of North China, 1897—1902
Authors: Rosenbaum Arthur Lewis
Published: November 2008

The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 committed Great Britain to the defense of Manchuria, an area of the Chinese Empire which the Foreign Office and Cabinet never had considered to be vital to Britain's strategic or commercial interests. In the years preceding the alliance, British policy in Manchuria was weak and indecisive. The government consistently refused to run the risk of war and was genuinely concerned about the unacceptable level of tension generated by half-hearted attempts to maintain some semblance of the open door. Successive attempts to negotiate a diplomatic settlement that would provide a degree of protection for British trade while acknowledging Russia's special political and economic rights were wrecked by the uncompromising views of Sergie Witte. Under these circumstances, it was only natural that Britain should give serious thought to abandoning Manchuria.
The Canton Rising of 1902—1903: Reformers, Revolutionaries, and the Second Taiping
Authors: Armentrout L. Eve
Published: November 2008

It has frequently been asserted that the Chinese revolutionaries and the 1898 reformers, after making several unsuccessful attempts at cooperation, divided into enemy camps after the failure of their respective risings in 1900. This would suggest that by 1901, the lines between reform and revolution were clearly drawn. It has further been assumed that the decision not to cooperate was a result of the reformers' permanent rejection of the principle of seizing power in China through means of an armed uprising, and that all vestiges of sympathy for republicanism had by 1900 or soon afterwards been replaced by a decisive commitment to constitutional monarchy on the part of even the most radical reformers. Furthermore, although some evidence to the contrary has been pointed out, it has often been said that the reformers, both before and after 1900, looked down on Sun Yat-sen's well-known contacts with Christians, and his close association with secret societies. This implies that the reformers, themselves, were not interested in actively soliciting the support of Chinese Christians, and that apart from T'ang Ts'ai-ch'ang's 1900 involvement with the Ko-lao Hui, of which K'ang and Liang presumably either disapproved at the time, or came to oppose immediately after T'ang's failure, the reformers kept themselves free of secret society entanglements and operated on a higher plane. Finally, it has frequently been assumed that the secret societies themselves were practically devoid of any true, revolutionary spirit, and while at times anti-Manchu, were still ‘primitive rebels.’