The early debate over the economic impact of European imperialism on the Afro-Asian world centered largely upon the roles played by the European rulers. Both pro- and anti-imperialist writers focused on the introduction and effects of European economic policies and institutions, on the alleged benefits or exploitation that resulted from official and private European economic enterprise, and on the implications of European colonial control for the future economic development of subject areas. In recent years historians and other social scientists, drawing on hitherto neglected sources and applying new techniques of analysis, have undertaken a thoroughgoing reappraisal of the economic effects of European imperialism. One product of this effort has been the increased attention given by scholars to the important roles played by non-Europeans in the economic transformation of colonized areas.

On june 30, 1989, at around one-thirty in the afternoon, a young woman made an emotional descent from the uneven steps of a Soviet passenger airliner towards a crowd of well-wishers who had gathered together to welcome her to Pyŏngyang, North Korea. Rising just above them, in bold neon letters, an anachronistic sign, which served as a reception banner of sorts, read:

Let the world's youth and students unite firmly under the banner of anti-imperialist solidarity, peace and friendship.

The role of patrilineal ideology in Chinese village social organization varies more widely than the orthodox paradigm would predict. In minor multilineage communities closely interspersed among dominant elite lineages, interlineage rivalry and competition may indeed prevail. But in the many similar villages somewhat removed from the pressures of dominant lineage expansionism, lineage solidarity may coexist harmoniously with community solidarity, legitimized through a liberal extension of the kinship idiom. This article reviews several village studies and describes in detail a multilineage alliance that complements rather than supplants lineage unity, suggesting that principles of segmentary opposition and solidarity can provide positive means of integration among separate lineages in a shared territory as effectively as among branches of a single lineage.

Since its appearance in 1983, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has taken on almost talismanic status, ritually invoked for its quasi-magical efficacy in thousands of scholarly discussions of nationalism and ethnicity. Anderson's book has given focus to a line of argument in which not only nationalism but also ethnicity are seen as reflexes of the Euroamerican colonial enterprise. Anderson proposes what we might call an “appendency theory” of ethnicity, holding that ethnicity is a phenomenon that is secondary to, contingent upon, and necessarily later than the modern nation, and that therefore it could not possibly have existed prior to the colonial conquest and the creation of nation-states. In this view, ethnicity itself is a recent product of modern history—of the colonial or postcolonial era, the age of the modern nation state and the capitalist world system.

The rigors of the transition from Ming to Qing imposed harrowing moral choices upon Chinese elites during the 1600s. Some chose to collaborate uneasily with their Manchu conquerors. Others remained loyal to the Ming, even after all hope was lost for a restoration in the South. Yet a third group transferred its support from the fallen dynasty to the rising one, becoming so fiercely attached to the new rulers that its members were willing to endure martyrdom rather than turn against the Manchus during the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories. Although such choices were often situational and not always mutually exclusive, they were associated in contemporaries' eyes with distinct aesthetic tastes, specific philosophical positions, and particular political commitments. This essay attempts to identify those distinctions in the biographical trajectories of several eminent seventeenth-century literati, scholar-officials, and military statesmen.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868, unquestionably the most important event in modern Japanese history, brought in its wake social and economic changes of a revolutionary nature. With the overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu, the subsequent abolition of the han system, the equalization of classes, and the establishment of a conscript army, the need for a hereditary military class ceased to exist. Certainly, the presence of a samurai class, numbering approximately 1,800,000, or 400,000 families, stranded in a society in process of divesting itself of all feudal fetters, constituted an acute problem. The continued existence of this vast army of unemployed retainers could have easily hamstrung all efforts to modernize. And it is hardly surprising that the new Meiji leaders realized at the inception of the new regime that if the work of the Restoration was to be completed successfully, it was necessary to work out a satisfactory settlement for the samurai class.

A generation of research on red guard politics has traced the origins of its debilitating factionalism to social and political divisions that were well established among students on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. These social interpretations impute political motives to student activists according to their positions in the pre-Cultural Revolution status quo. However, a closer examination of events in Beijing during the summer and early autumn of 1966—where the Red Guards and their factional divisions first emerged—suggests a different interpretation. Factions emerged when student activists from similar social backgrounds responded differently to ambiguous and rapidly changing political signals. These initial acts left students on opposite sides of an emerging political divide and exposed them to unforeseen risks as the movement took unpredictable turns. In this interpretation, student divisions are rooted in political interactions in the early phases of the conflict itself. Red Guard factions did not emerge in Beijing as expressions of opposed group interests based on preexisting social divisions, but as struggles to vindicate earlier actions and to avoid the harsh fate of political victims.

Post-Restoration Japan faced a number of serious problems in its relations with East Asia and the West, all of which came to a head in seikan ronsō, the clash in the Council of State, October 1873, over sending a punitive expedition to Korea. Essentially this was a struggle to define the nature of the Meiji Restoration—how radical would it be—and to decide who would control the politics of Japan's renovation, but intermixed with these domestic issues were several questions of foreign policy. To Japan's leaders, the Ryukyus, Taiwan, and Sakhalin were as important as Korea; security of the frontier in East Asia as significant as equal treaties with China and the West. And for historians with the advantage of a century of hindsight, the debate is important evidence in assessing the strength and sophistication of expansionist sentiment in early Meiji Japan. Does modern Japanese imperialism date from this period as consistent and persistent government policy or simply as a set of commonly held aspirations and desires, stronger in some than others or more evident outside of government than within it? To assist in answering these questions there is a wealth of Western and Japanese language diplomatic correspondence and numerous memoirs, letters, and diaries. The clash pitted die returning members of the Iwakura embassy and their allies at home against prominent officials in the caretaker government. The envoys, who had gained from their journey to die West a better understanding of international politics and the instability of the world order as well as a clearer perception of the gigantic transformation Japan must undergo, won with the argument of restraint abroad and rapid reform at home. But were the differences primarily in methods and timing and not ultimate intentions? Were Japan's leaders only biding their time until domestic strength made foreign adventurism possible, as is often charged? There is little evidence that Iwakura's group had such ulterior motives. In the grosser sense of the existence of an elaborate plan of conquest, there was no imperialist conspiracy. In the more complex sense of consistency of dreams, aims, or ambitions, there was more continentalism among public critics than officials. The victors in the debate wished to create a strong and enlightened state capable of taking whatever measures seemed necessary, whether at home or abroad. Expansion into frontier regions therefore was always a possibility but even then for security and prestige rather than overseas dominion. Such thinking guided the government for the next twenty years. However more research is needed on the basic character of Meiji Japan's political and economic institutions, the expansionist sentiments of the government's critics, changing concepts of security, and Japan's response to Western imperialism.

Rabindranath Tagore's visit to China in 1924 was a milestone in the May Fourth Movement's envisioning of modern literature as a vehicle for social transformation. Moving beyond interpretations of the visit as a political failure, this article locates the reception of Tagore's ideal of Eastern spirituality within the larger climate of literary production, specifically in new poetry. Through close reading of poems by Xu Zhimo and Bing Xin, this article argues that Tagore's ideas were fundamental for the development of poetry as an interpersonal medium that both portrays and effects social bonds. This understanding developed as Chinese poets and literary critics engaged with Tagore's critique of Western materialism and his positioning of Asian religious sensibilities in contrast to Western materialism. Tagore's view promoted literature as a medium connecting religion, the individual, and the universe. In this sense, though Tagore's pan-Asianism failed as a viable political project, it carried powerful resonance in the arena of modern Chinese literature.

In 1999, the East Kalimantan Dayak Association convened a watershed conference in Samarinda, Indonesia, that was attended by indigenous people from across the province. The conference, which was intended to nurture an emerging indigenous solidarity that aimed to transcend narrower loyalties, included sessions on organizational reform. This article examines the ongoing process of organizational rationalization within the association and investigates how that process comports with the evolving vision of indigenous solidarity that its leaders promote. It addresses challenges to that vision offered by constituents and others. The article also explores the role of symbols drawn from the social and natural worlds in fostering the development of an ethnic identity. The article reveals a paradox in the way that ethnicity is framed within the organization—one that invites comparison with the methods and goals of other indigenous and pan-indigenous movements.

In recent years a number of historians, political scientists, and sociologists have been searching for a better way of approaching the study of the religious ideas, sentiments, and symbols associated with the life of modern national communities. It has become increasingly evident that the older procedure of making a clear distinction between specifically religious communities and religion on the one hand, and the state and politics on the other, then analyzing the interaction between the two, is no longer sufficient. However, no widely accepted alternative way of viewing the problem has emerged.

Many historians of China, particularly those based in North America, insist that the Qing dynasty's territorial expansion was imperial and comparable to the imperial expansions of other global empires. Other historians, particularly but not only those based in the People's Republic of China, continue to resist this interpretation. They argue that dynastic expansion in the Ming and Qing periods was simply a form of nation-state building, akin to similar processes in Europe. Rather than rejecting their claims as a product of Chinese nationalism, we argue that the term “empire” should be (re)understood as a global co-production, emerging from multiple intersecting histories and scholarly debates about those histories. Doing so challenges influential definitions of empire that rely on a distinction between empires and nation-states, highlighting their dual presence in both Euro-American and Chinese pasts (and presents). This move demands a rejection of periodizations that suggest that empires ceased to exist following the period of decolonization from 1945 to the 1970s. This opens up new avenues of historical and normative inquiry to acknowledge the modern continuity between empires and nation-states.

Like the European written genre history, court literature from the traditional kingdoms of Southeast Asia often relates historical events and possible or probable genealogies. Yet, like the myths of tribal peoples, these accounts are characterized by mythical elements and a somewhat repetitious style, and were recited aloud rather than read in private silence. But if we regard them as mixtures of historical and mythical elements, our understanding of their inner structure and meaning is inevitably compromised, for the notion of a mixture already imposes assumptions about the shape of the past and criteria of reality which are implicit in a historical consciousness. The form in which thought is couched, after all, is the thought, not a representation of something behind or outside it. This paper therefore attempts a rhetorical analysis of a Classical Malay text of the type called hikayat, one which dates from about the seventeenth century. It begins with an analysis of grammar and sentence structure, then moves to certain stylistic features of hikayat, contrasting them with some stylistic features of historical writing. I then comment on the context of texts—the meaning of audience, of performance, of language, of author—and end with some speculation about the notion of the past as revealed in Classical Malay hikayat.

Amid the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations, the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry finds its authority over the forested areas (kawasan hutan) under pressure and continues to pursue strategies to legally maintain the areas within its jurisdiction. Combining insights from legal studies with political economy, this article applies the concept of “political forests” to contemporary contestations and the development of “rule of law” in relation to Indonesia's forested areas. Establishing legal certainty and “rule of law” are widely asserted to be important but never fully achieved. Two cases demonstrate this: the first focuses on the negotiated resolution of overlapping permits in the kawasan hutan between the center and the region in Central Kalimantan Province. The second examines the maneuvers of the Ministry of Forestry to (re)assert its authority over kawasan hutan by classifying palm oil as a tree crop. The article concludes that the widespread quest for certainty and rule of law is quixotic because it ignores the realities of political economy, including social conflict, beneath the veneer of law.

Through investigating the construction of one of Japan's largest infrastructure projects during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), this article examines the formation of a technocratic regime of colonial development expertise that was an important pillar of Japanese imperial rule and continued to have powerful effects throughout postwar Asia. It analyzes how a particular form of technical expertise and the wider discourse of “Scientific Japan” as the modernizer of Asia were legitimated and naturalized, as well as how they operated as a system of colonial power. Japan and other East Asian regimes after the war continued to invoke forms of technocratic expertise with origins in the colonial era as part of their state-led development programs, often with adverse effects on their populations. Thus this article concludes that there is a continuing need to critique, historicize, and denaturalize such regimes of expertise invoked by networks of bureaucrats, businessmen, engineers, and experts.

As early as the han dynasty, exegetes of the texts in the Confucian canon were preparing written commentary on them, and by the dynasty's end they were interspersing their glosses in the body of these texts as interlinear, running commentary. From this time on, few Chinese would have read any classic from the canon without commentarial companion. And, as Confucianism came to be identified over the course of the imperial period with the Chinese cultural tradition par excellence, the writing of interlinear commentary on the canon of texts became a standard, even dominant, mode of scholarly and philosophical discourse for Chinese literati. It was in commentary that these men would offer their reflections on the meaning of Confucian doctrine as it had evolved through the centuries and attempt to construct a philosophical or moral vision meaningful in a world far removed from that of the classical age.

The Pervasive Presence in Asia of ascetic practitioners—whether sedate, shorn, and robed monks or fierce, ash-smeared, naked yogis—has long fascinated Western observers and certainly nourished stereotypes of a mysterious, otherworldly, and impenetrable East. In India especially, the ascetic's figure has fueled the speculations of scholars, artists, tourists, and religious seekers for centuries (Oman 1905; Narayan 1988). Most depictions of Indian culture, whether indigenous or foreign, evocative or analytic, include portraits or analyses of world-renouncers.1 And yet with the notable exception of numerous fictional explorations (e.g., Bhattacharya 1978; Markandaya 1963; R K. Narayan 1980), the renouncer remains a figure whose existence comments on the human predicament but whose human thoughts and feelings remain opaque.