Present disturbed relations between France and the republic of Vietnam add a special significance to the story of how near France came, in 1863 and 1864, to abandoning her colony in Cochinchina. It was by using as a base the three southern provinces of Cochinchina (Basse Cochinchine) which she had conquered from Annam that France subsequently established her protectorate over Cambodia, annexed the remaining three provinces of Cochinchina, and eventually extended her suzerainty over Annam, Tonkin, and Laos. Had she not decided to remain in Cochinchina, therefore, it is doubtful if she would have attained the rank, of an important imperial power in the Far East.

During the winter of 1867–1868 the Chinese Foreign Office dispatched its first diplomatic mission to the United States and Europe. The stipulated time for treaty revision was drawing near and the Chinese government had reason to expect that the Treaty Powers, under pressure from their merchants doing business in China, would demand a considerable expansion of the privileges which they had forced the Chinese to grant them on previous occasions. Fearful of the internal effects of a great extension of foreign influence and activity, the Foreign Office decided to send a special embassy directly to the governments of the various Treaty Powers to plead for patience and forbearance.

The outbreak of hostilities between Chinese and Japanese troops at Liutiaohu in the vicinity of Mukden on the night of September 18, 1931, unleashed a chain of events leading to a disasterous war for Japan and the collapse of the Kuomintang government in China. The causes and course of the Manchurian incident which began on that date are well known and have been abundantly published in recent years. Although the significance of the Nakamura incident as a prelude to the Manchurian affair has also been generally recognized, the details of the Nakamura case and the manner in which the conflicting organs of Japanese policy-making handled it have remained obscure. The attempt here is to supply these details and analyze the affair with particular reference to the role of the Japanese Foreign Office and the growing civil-military conflict over the control of foreign policy.

One of the most encouraging trends in contemporary scholarship is the considerable raprochment between fields of study conventionally classed as the “humanities” and those called the “social sciences,” or now fashionably, “behavioral sciences.” A strong contributing factor here has been the growth, especially during and since World War II, of so-called “area” studies which focus various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches upon a region. Furthermore, the region which has constituted perhaps the most active front for such experiments in coordination is the Far East.

In the area under consideration in this paper, eight countries with a population of 600 million people or about 30% of the world's total population have acquired their independence since the end of World War II. National governments in this area are faced with serious economic, social and other problems, many of them long-standing but of more compelling current importance because of the raised expectations of the Asian peoples. The technical and financial resources of these governments for meeting their problems are limited and, in some cases, ineffectively and inefficiently used. Their ability to develop, in the short-term future, solutions to these problems judged effective by their people will determine the survival of these or similarly-oriented governments, or their replacement by chaos or extremism.

The logic of Indonesian subjectless and tenseless expressions appears to have cultural implications, just as the use of tenses in English scientific writing entails much more than grammatical minutiae. A. L. Becker has pointed out that tense in English functions in a “coherence system” that pervades and transcends grammar. A parallel coherence system is suggested for Indonesian, based not on tense but on topic. Paul Ricoeur's distinction between LANGUAGE and DISCOURSE is the basis of the claim that Indonesian sentences cohere on the bond between grammatical subject and discourse topic. Examples are drawn from a number of contexts that call forth passive sentences in Indonesian. The article concludes on another suggestion by Becker. The Indonesian topic may be part of a larger deictic category of person, which may be related in discourse to orientation in space—both physical and social—of participants in the speech event. If this suggestion is correct, then the contrast between English and Indonesian coherence systems may be found in the opposition tense/time vs. person/space.

The opening paragraph in Mr. Campbell's excellent article on “American business interests and the Open Door in China, “published in the preceding number of the Quarterly, might leave the casual reader with the impression that the principle of the Open Door in China was no older than the year 1899. Actually, as has been pointed out by numerous authors, the principle of equality of opportunity for all nations in China, which constitutes the meaning of the Open Door in its broadest sense, goes back at least to the most-favored-nation clauses in the supplementary British treaty of 1843 and the American treaty of 1844.

The number of persons who perished in the so-called Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756 has long been a matter of controversy, especially intense since the Indian viceroyalty of Lord Curzon of Kedleston. Two scholars, C. R. Wilson and S. C. Hill, and their patron, Lord Curzon, have maintained that HolwelPs narrative declaring that 123 persons perished in the Black Hole is substantially true. On the other hand, J. H. Little has argued that the Black Hole tragedy is a “gigantic hoax,” exaggerated beyond all proportions, since only a few men, in his opinion, were confined in the Black Hole, and of them only those who had received severe wounds during the actual fighting died. While English scholars have generally followed the Curzon- Wilson-Hill school, Indian scholars have recently come to accept Jadunath Sarkar's opinion that probably not more than sixty were confined in the Black Hole.

Ancient Sinhalese rulers had a right to a share of agricultural income, a right which embraced the produce of the land as well as irrigation rates and was generally paid in kind. In effect, there was a land tax; but the term used (bojika-, bojiya-, or bojaka-pati) was more than mere land tax and connotes a tax on income corresponding to bhaga in Indian law books. By the fourteenth century, if not earlier, there had been a fundamental change. Rather than a tithe from each class of land in the village, the king received the whole of the produce of certain fields, the muttettu, which were cultivated gratis by the villagers who possessed other fields either in return for this service or in recognition of the king's suzreignty. This meant that there were no intermediaries farming (renting) the right to collect the tithe. It also meant that the villager held his paddy fields on an individual and hereditary (paraveny) basis. There was, however, no concept of freehold ownership. Authority was political. One could not distinguish private rights from political allegiance. Landholders combined rights in land with duties to the king. Service was attached to the land and was obligatory to any transferee. In some cases, this service was rendered to the king's chiefs and nominees or to the temples, for the kings distributed largesse in the form of lands and the services attached to them; these were known as nindagam, viharegam or devalegam as distinct from the king's villages, the gabadagam; such recipients were more like feudal overlords than farmers of the revenue. In other cases, villagers of certain castes performed certain specified services for the king, for other castes (usually higher castes) in their village, or for neighboring villages, and in return enjoyed certain fields. It was a system of service tenure that was girded and threaded by the caste system.

Nationalism is an explosive topic at any time, but it is peculiarly explosive at this moment when the restraints of war have been lifted, when peace settlements are in prospect, and when national movements everywhere are again in full flower. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of nationalism in as uncontroversial and non-political a manner as the subject itself allows, and to compare its development in Southeast Asia with similar movements in other parts of the world. What is involved is an objective sociological investigation, and not an effort to arrive at value judgments which would answer such questions as whether this or that nationalist movement is good or evil or whether particular nationalist demands should be granted or opposed.