This article revisits the same author's Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (1988–93) through the lens of a pattern of alternating globalization and localization in Southeast Asian History. It highlights the effects of the intense globalization of the “age of commerce” (centuries) on Southeast Asian performance traditions, notably the state theatre of the great entrepôts. Reid considers the critiques of his emphasis on a seventeenth-century crisis in the region in the decade since publication, and defends most of his original position against Victor Lieberman and Andre Gunder Frank in particular. He pursues the theme forward in time, to note another period of significant trade expansion and globalization in roughly 1780–1840; the following high-colonial period which paradoxically had more of a localizing effect on most Southeast Asian populations, and the nationalist reaction which (again paradoxically) marked extreme globalization in some respects between the 1930s and the 1960s.

This paper explores the ocean produce trade that connected maritime East and Southeast Asia between 1780 and 1860. The essay explicitly concentrates on two “arenas” of action where politics, commerce, and the trade in sea produce combined in powerful ways: the Straits of Melaka, and the waters of Northern Borneo. In both of these regions, the collection of marine goods became big business. More importantly, however, the organized funneling of these objects helped keep disparate political projects alive and running. This was the case in the Straits of Melaka, where the collection of such bounty supplied one rationale for British expansion in Penang (1786) and Singapore (1819), in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century. In Northern Borneo, the collection of these commodities from shallow local seas was also tied to empire-building, in this case via the Sultanate of Sulu. Sulu used North Borneo's waters as a vast collecting-ground for sea-produce to be shipped to China. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, North Borneo's coasts became a major source for these products geared toward international trade, linking East and Southeast Asia in increasingly vigorous ways.

This paper discusses the role of Indian merchants, especially Muslims, in the match trade between Japan and India, and situates the cooperative ventures set up in the middle of the 1920s between Indian merchants and Japanese manufacturers in the context of the economy of the Bengal Bay region. Their inter-regional networks and partnerships were important not just for trade, but also for manufacturing based on the flow of technology, ideas, information, and natural resources. The paper also shows that such ventures unexpectedly caused conflicts with movements in India to promote domestic industry and with the logic of territorial nationalism that lay behind them.

In ancient and medieval south India, from about the fifth century, the term nādu denoted a micro-region which was important as the basic unit of agricultural production. The agricultural community formed in the nādu was called nāttār or nāttavar, literally meaning the people of the nādu. Initially it was exclusively composed of the Vellāla peasantry, but from the eleventh century there began to appear in Tamil inscriptions the term periyanādu meaning “big nādu” to denote a supra-nādu assembly. In this paper we examine the meaning of the emergence of this and other similar supra-local and/or multi-community organizations.

The Chola dynasty, which had ruled south India for about four hundred years, disappeared in the latter half of the thirteenth century. The succeeding Pandyan dynasty was put down in its turn by the invasion of the Delhi Sultan's army at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Therefore, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in south India were a period of political turmoil, during when, nevertheless, foreign trade was carried out vigorously in the Indian Ocean. Merchants and artisans joined peasants in the activities of the periyanādu, generating a new state and social formation that became explicitly visible in the fifteenth century under Vijayanagar rule.

A study of the site of Kharakhorum suggests it was a large city with an extensive population. The rulers however did not live here permanently but in seasonal palaces in the environs of the city. I have identified the Spring and Winter Palaces and been able to narrow down the possible sites of the Summer and Autumn Palaces. The Spring Palace (the Qarshi-“Sūrī” of Juvainī, the Gegenchaghan of Rashīd al-Dīn and the Jiajianchahan-dian of Saolin-cheng of the Yuan shi) is located at the site known as Doityn Balgas, and the Winter Palace (the Ong-khin of the Rashīd al-Dīn) I consider to be at the Shaazan-khot site. The sites of the Summer and Autumn Palaces are uncertain at this point. Judging from the location of the Spring and Winter Palaces, it is clear that the emperors moved over a distance of 450 km each year and a reconstruction of the migration route shows that the emperor had a domain of 14,000 square km. This area can be called the peri-urban area of Kharakhorum, the political, economic, and cultural centre of the Mongol empire.

This paper explores the link between globalization, as the source of contemporary crises in representation, and the academic crisis in Asian Studies. The situation of Japanese Studies in Australia is used as a case study to illustrate these links. I argue that traditional area studies, as a colonial structure rooted in the (Cold) War, has become anachronistic. It is suggested that one strategy through which conventional area studies may be reconfigured and revitalized is by more fully and warmly embracing those movements or networks such as cultural studies that can be seen as responses to global changes.

The following article is the first part of a translation of Dentō Chūgoku hō – hinagatasetsu ni taisuru ichishiron by Nakamura Shigeo, which was published in 1979 in the Hōsei riron 12:1 (Niigata University). The second part will appear in the next issue of the International Journal of Asian Studies.

While Chinese law is on the one hand widely understood to have contained minute administrative and penal provisions and to be related to the examination system, it has always been shadowed, on the other, by a different image. First, the law was seen to have been determined as no more than a reflection of political ideas and so to have been divorced from reality.

A frequently discussed theory about the nature and function of traditional Chinese law claims that, in traditional China, law was no more than a model, with little practical applicability. This theory seems to be still dominant.

On a different occasion in the past, I presented some doubts about this theory of law as a “model”, based on impressions I received from reading through a body of judgments from Qing dynasty lawsuits.