With the earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the expanding nuclear disaster that followed, our “affluent postwar” has finally reached a decisive end. Indeed, this closure had been clearly augured since the 1990s. The collapse of the bubble economy, the close of an era of single-party rule by the Liberal Democratic Party, and the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and Aum Shinrikyō sarin gas attacks that came in rapid succession in 1995—these events forced upon us the reality that the “affluent postwar” was over.

In 1984 two publications appeared that were designed to make available little known source material—archaeological and paleographic in one case, textual in the other—important for the historiography of the eastern Islamic world over the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. These publications are based on relics from port cities on the northern and southern shores of this world—Quanzhou (Zaitun) on the China coast, Semarang and Cirebon on the north coast of Java. Along with many other emporia old and new, these cities were incorporated into an extensive and thriving network of maritime exchange in the fields of commerce, religion, and civilization. The continued development of this network was threatened and ultimately forestalled by the antagonism of the conservative inland states of both Java and China on the one hand and the hostility of European maritime power on the other. But its legacy is not a trivial one.

In Chinese history, few reformers have been merchants and, prior to Cheng Kuan-ying, none of them was a merchant working for foreigners. In the late Ch'ing, the rise of the merchant class was remarkable and the reformers came from varying social backgrounds. Yet Cheng Kuan-ying (1842–ca. 1923) was the only noted merchant-reformer in this period. Due to his association with the foreign merchants, he was probably the first reformer in modern China who mastered a Western language. This fact made his reform proposals unique in many ways, although his understanding of the West as a whole was limited. The significance of Cheng Kuan-ying as a reformer lies in the fact that he implicitly challenged the programs of the self-strengthening movement by pointing out the necessity of institutional change.

In the thirty years since the appearance of K. S. Latourette's A History of Christian Missions in China the published materials in this vast field have been accumulating at a good pace, and an increasing number of mission-society archives have been opened to research. However, very little such research has been done. While Professor Latourette's work provides a matchless foundation for further contributions, few aspects of the subject have received thorough monographic treatment.

One of the most recurrent themes in the descriptions and analyses of political development in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912) is the emergence of the genrō as the primary decision and policy-making group. Surprisingly, however, while a great deal has been written by both Japanese and Western scholars concerning the individual members of the genrō, very few attempts have been made to explain the origins of the group and especially the form which it took. A major obstacle to the analysis of this problem appears to be the failure to distinguish clearly between the genrō as an informal collegial decision and policy-making body and membership or participation in the organization. Failure to view membership and organizational structure as two separate aspects of the development of the genrō has had serious consequences for those attempting to explain the place of the genrō in Japanese political development. The emphasis placed on the nine men who are usually designated as the genrō has diverted attention from the more important problem, from the viewpoint of political development, of why the genrō as a decision-making structure emerged at a particular time and took a particular form. Absence of serious concern over the origins of the genrō structure on the part of historians has led them to ignore the question completely or to assign the informal collegial character of the genrō to the general tendency in Japanese society to make decisions through group consensus. The latter is too general an explanation since it does not tell us why consensus in this case should be arrived at through an informal collegial body rather than through some other structural form.

The problem of ethnic identification is an important but neglected theme in Southeast Asian history. Historians of the region are indebted to Leach, Lehman, and Moerman for their pioneering work on the nature and history of upland societies in Southeast Asia. In Political Systems of Highland Burma, Leach demonstrates that culture and ethnic identity are not necessarily synonymous. He points out that the process of identification among tribal people like the Kachin is never simple; it entails migration, intermarriage, barter trade relations, warfare, interpenetrating political systems, and values and beliefs shared with non-Kachin. Manifest in the work of all these anthropologists is a conscious effort to define the nature of social categories applied to ethnic groups in Southeast Asia across time. Their work has led to a more complete understanding of the nature of ethnic groups and the processes responsible for “accomplishing ethnicity” among upland peoples in Southeast Asia.

Dream of the red chamber has been analyzed and reanalyzed by thousands of Chinese commentators in the more than two centuries since it was written (e.g., Yu 1923; Hu 1940; Zhou 1953; He 1956; Liu 1956; Jiang 1959; Wu 1961; Wang 1983). Indeed, entire journals are devoted exclusively to the novel's analysis, and strictly original contributions to this vast literature are rare. However, Meng Zhang's comparison of the genealogical relations of the principal characters of the novel with Eugene Cooper's ethnographic data on twentieth-century Zhejiang, and the joint analysis of the results are informed by an anthropological consciousness uncommon to previous commentators. The analysis not only takes note of patterns of cousin marriage recognized by earlier commentators (e.g., Yu 1923; Zhou 1953; Wu 1961), but also discovers instances of several of the more obscure patterns noted by Cooper in his Zhejiang materials (Cooper, in press).

Periodic gatherings of Orientalists are fully meaningful only when they serve as forums for the discussion of important developments in the major fields of their professional concern: Oriental languages, literature and ideas, history and institutions. Having worked for decades in the latter fields with China as a starting point and the comparison of institutions as a central target, I would like to discuss here some of the problems connected with the power structure that Montesquieu, the men of the Enlightenment, and Marx and Engels called “Oriental despotism.”

For a variety of reasons, there has been a growing interest in the institutional conditions of the “Orient.” Hence any significant change in the interpretation of these conditions is bound to affect a growing number of Orientalists—and of social scientists who, although not Orientalists, deal with Oriental institutions.

How can crisis, breakdown, violence, and collapse be explained in the social sciences? This paper engages with this broad question by studying an extraordinary episode of mass tension and anxiety in postwar Sri Lanka caused by a mystery male predator known as the “grease devil.” Reports of widespread attacks on women in mid-2011 by this shadowy, ubiquitous, and powerful being led to heightened levels of vigilance and fear across large parts of rural and peri-urban Sri Lanka. It had a particularly strong impact on the formerly war-torn northeastern part of the island, where it led to violent confrontations between affected communities and the police and military. Drawing on primary research and by engaging with a range of literatures across the historical and social science literature, this paper attempts to reconstruct and understand the grease devil crisis. In doing so, it identifies and evaluates the different ways in which the crisis could be explained and the extent to which these approaches produce analytically relevant insights.

In this article, I interrogate the exhaustive “inbetweenness” through which Bhutan is understood and located on a map (“inbetween India and China”). I argue that this understanding naturalizes a contemporary geopolitics with little depth about how this inbetweenness has shifted over the centuries, thereby constructing a timeless, obscure, and remote Bhutan that is “naturally” oriented southward. I trace how the construction of Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness is nested in the larger story of the formation and consolidation of imperial British India and its dissolution, and the emergence of post-colonial India as a successor state. I identify and analyze the key economic dynamics of three phases marked by commercial, production, and security interests, through which this asymmetrical inbetweenness was consolidated. Bringing together sources from different disciplines and archival work, this account also challenges some of the dominant historical scholarship on Bhutan in each phase. I conclude by emphasizing that critical work at the intersection of geographical/political/historical contingencies is important to the subalternizing of geopolitics, which recognizes the myriad ways in which dominant powers have shaped both the geopolitical environment as well as knowledge-making that has constrained small states.

In addition to other forms of precarity, food insecurity—citizens not having access to nutritious food—is an issue of growing concern in contemporary Japan. This article explores societal responses and documents a strong growth of volunteerism in the form of food banks and kodomo shokudō (children's cafeterias) that offer cheap or free meals to children in need. Both types of programs have become more common since the mid-2000s and are filling a void left by the government. This article explores the tensions in these private programs by drawing on the concept of ethical citizenship, which suggests that volunteerism is entrenched in neoliberalization. The programs are constructed in terms of moral matters, such as creating ibasho (space) for citizens’ mutual help and reducing food loss by “bringing back mottainai” (wasting nothing). This championing of community power risks masking the fact that food insecurity is in part a result of the failure of public safety nets.

This paper examines the values that informed the actions of two polities in seventeenth-century Bengal, the Nadia Raj and the Malla dynasty, through a close analysis of their temple inscriptions—a form of royal laudation or praśasti. Focusing on this inscriptional record of each polity, the paper is divided into three sections. The first section analyzes the language of the inscriptions in order to examine the ways in which each polity crafts a political language. The second section addresses how each set of inscriptional records speaks to each polity's political culture. Finally, the third section discusses questions of patronage and reception in order to draw connections in each polity between its public language and its public settings. The paper concludes with some thoughts on what it meant for a polity to speak publicly in seventeenth-century Bengal.

This article discusses slavery and the lives of enslaved people in Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka, under Dutch and British rule. It argues that by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting slaves, Dutch colonial rulers further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalar over their subordinates. This was done through processes of registration, legal codification, and litigation. For some enslaved people, however, bureaucratization provided grounds for negotiation and resistance, as well as the potential to take control over their individual lives. British rule that took over areas controlled by the Dutch East India Company or Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie—first in the guise of the East India Company (1796–1802), then under the Crown (1802–1948)—introduced a number of measures, acts, and incentives to dismantle slavery as it was practiced on the island. This article draws from Dutch and early British period petitions, court records, commission reports, and slave registers to interrogate the discourse of freedom that permeated the British abolition of slavery from 1806 to 1844 and suggests that in Jaffna after abolition there remained bondage in freedom.

In the Southeast Asian highlands, different types of hierarchy appear as forms of social organization as well as devices for intersocietal communication. In the present case, ranked titles from centralized Tai Meuang hierarchies such as the Lao or the Lue in southern China have been adopted by Rmeet (Lamet) uplanders in northern Laos, where the main type of hierarchy is the decentralized superiority of wife-givers over wife-takers. In the process of adoption, title-giving was subordinated to wife-giving, and today the wife-givers are the ritual source of ranks. In the course of history, title-giving has thus been integrated into Rmeet forms of sociocosmic reproduction while, at the same time, titles have lost their initial function of communication between upland societies and lowland state formations.

This article discusses how contemporary Chinese Muslims in the city of Xi'an remember a massive conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims that devastated northwest China in the Tongzhi period (1862–74) of the Qing dynasty. Every year on the seventeenth day of the fifth lunar month, local Hui hold a series of mourning rituals for the Muslims who died at that time. They recount stories about these events during the ritual and in other settings. The author uses Bakhtin's concept of “social heteroglossia” to explore the discursive features of three accounts of the violence, arguing that Xi'an Hui memories of this past show the influence of state-sponsored ethnic policies, a religious model of Hui identity, and a less formally articulated collective sentiment (what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling”) based on shared experience. The author discusses how these discourses are disseminated and which factors generate the “structure of feeling” that colors contemporary Muslim accounts of the Tongzhi period, and reflects on the consequences of Xi'an Hui internalization of the state's framework for ethnic identity.

The reform movement of 1898 sought to move the Qing empire toward comprehensive and unprecedented institutional change and thus was a critical event in modern Chinese history. Had it succeeded, China could have, like Meiji Japan, entered the modern era without revolutions. Yet, however determined and daring its leaders, the historic effort was suddenly and tragically cut short by a coup.

The standard view of the Reform Movement has been that, in reaction to China's repeated defeats and humiliation as well as the inadequacy of the Self-strengthening Movement, the reform-minded Kang Youwei (illustration 1) and Liang Qichao finally won support for change from a sympathetic Guangxu Emperor. The reformers then managed to put into effect a nationwide reform program through imperial decrees. But the movement, which lasted barely over one hundred days, came to an abrupt end when the Empress Dowager Cixi and her conservative supporters recaptured political power, executed or imprisoned many of the reformers, and placed the emperor under permanent house arrest.

Netherlands indies occupies a position somewhat unique in the sphere of colonial administration, or at least did so until its conquest by the Japanese. For one thing, it is not a dependency of the ‘mother country’ for it forms a component part, along with the Netherlands, Curacao and Surinam, of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. As such its nationals are Dutch subjects and stand on an equal footing, legally, with the citizens of other sovereign nations. In the event of legal controversy involving a resident of the Netherlands Indies and a citizen of another nation, the principles of private international law, better known in this country as conflict of laws, come into play to determine what body of legal rules, which of the two legal systems shall be applied in the particular case. The position of the Indies with respect to Holland—or Curacao or Surinam—introduces another, somewhat different, aspect of conflict of laws. For interregional law, as it has been termed, does not involve diverse sovereignties but concerns controversies that arise between subjects of the same state, controversies that flow from the fact that Indies private law is not identical to that of the Netherlands.