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² Marx, Karl, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, New York Tribune, 08 8, 1853.Google Scholar

³ Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, London, 1930. Vol. I, p. 406.Google Scholar

⁴ A prime example of this attitude is contained in the inaugural lecture of Professor Basham, A. L., The Indian Sub-Continent in Historical Perspective, London, 1958.Google Scholar

⁵ Harris, Richard, ‘A New Thirty Years' War’, The Times, 14 February 1968.Google Scholar

⁶ The Origin of Species was first published in 1859. The text was revised up to the 6th edition of 1872. There have been so many reprints subsequently that there is little advantage in giving a page reference to any particular edition. For the quotations which follow, only chapter references are therefore cited.

⁷ Darwin even suggests that ‘In some few cases there has been what we must call retrogression of organisation’.

⁸ Rivers, W.H.R., Psychology and Politics; and other essays, London, 1923, p. 118.Google Scholar

⁹ Ibid., p. 114.

¹⁰ Jaspers, Karl, The Origin and Goal of History, London, 1953, p. 2.Google Scholar A translation of Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Zurich, 1949.Google Scholar

¹¹ Dawson, Christopher, The Dynamics of World History, London, 1957, p. 179.Google Scholar

¹² Hogben, Lancelot in Man, Race and Darwin, ed. Philip, Mason, London, 1960, p. 22.Google Scholar

¹³ ‘The Sources of Culture Change’ (1928),Google ScholarDawson, C., The Dynamics of World History, London, 1957, pp. 7–9.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Leach, E. R., Political Systems of Highland Burma, London, 1954.Google Scholar

¹⁵ E.g. Skinner, G. W., Chinese Society in Thailand, Ithaca, 1957.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Dawson, , op. cit., p. 58.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The Glass Curtain Between Asia and Europe; a symposium on the historical encounters and the changing attitudes of the peoples of the East and West, Raghavan, Iyer (Ed.), London, 1965, p. 42.Google Scholar

¹⁸ See, for example, Hagen, E. E., On the Theory of Social Change, Homewood, Illinois, 1962.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Wertheim, W. F., East-West Parallels; sociological approaches to modern Asia, The Hague, 1964, p. 276.Google Scholar

²⁰ For an interesting revision of American ideas of progress through democracy, see Samuel P. Huntington, ‘Political Development and Political Decay’, World Politics, April 1965. Huntington questions accepted American ideas about ‘modernization’ and ‘mobilization’: he insists that ‘people can be demobilized out of politics’: political development is a reversible process. However, he argues that there is an alternative strategy: Institutionalization. Turning back to the United States, he argues that a good president is a strong president (or vice versa), ‘Institutional interest coincides with public interest’, and ‘The existence of political institutions (such as the presidency or the praesidium) capable of giving substance to public interests distinguishes politically developed societies from underdeveloped ones’. It will be seen that the Huntington view (which has attracted great éclat among American political scientists) merely substitutes a conservative view of progress for previously dominant liberal views. My own approach is to suggest that for much of Asia, instead of the categories ‘development’ and ‘decay’ one ought to substitute a category of ‘suspense’: see my essay ‘Broken-backed states’, discussed later in this paper.Google Scholar

²¹ According to Dawson, Raymond, who in The Chinese Chameleon; an analysis of European conceptions of Chinese civilization, London, 1967, has a chapter entitled ‘A people of eternal standstill: China and the historians’. Throughout the book there is a vigorous refutation of the theme of ‘the Unchanging East’.Google Scholar

²² Quoted in Sarvodaya (the Welfare of All), ed. Bharatan, Kumarappa, Ahmedabad, 1954, p. 161.Google Scholar

²³ Mao Tse-tung, July 1919, cited by Schram, Stuart R., Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, New York and London, 1963, p. 106; U Nu, ‘Pyidawtha, the New Burma’, cited by H. Tinker, The Union of Burma, 4th ed. 1967, p. 379.Google Scholar

²⁴ Pe, Hla, Burmese Proverbs, London, 1962, p. 54.Google Scholar

²⁵ Jaspers, K., The Origin and Goal of History, pp. 243–4.Google Scholar

²⁶ Ibid., pp. 54 and 64.

²⁷ Similarly, in Java, the mid-sixteenth century is remembered as the ‘time without order’, the ‘time between times’.Google Scholar

²⁸ Coedès, G., The Making of South East Asia, London, 1966, pp. 133–4 tr.Google Scholar of Les Peuples de la Péninsule Indochinoise, Paris, 1962.Google Scholar

²⁹ Rivers, W.H.R., Psychology and politics, and other essays, pp. 71–2 (italics added). In 1922, Rivers was persuaded to stand as Labour candidate for the old London University constituency. His electoral campaign followed the unusual course of delivering three academic lectures in which he illustrated his political ideas from his professional diagnoses.Google Scholar

³⁰ Raymond Dawson observes (The Chinese Chameleon, p. 165) that ‘Views of Communist China afford a very good illustration of the thesis that attitudes towards foreign countries derive largely from the needs and personalities of the observers rather than from the objective facts’.Google Scholar

³¹ Wertheim, W.F., East-West Parallels, pp. 216–17.Google Scholar

³² Tinker, H., Reorientations; studies on Asia in transition, London, 1965, pp. 118—19.Google Scholar

³³ Nehru, J., An Autobiography, 1953 edn., pp. 431–2.Google Scholar

³⁴ Cited by Yu, F. T. C. ‘Campaigns, Communications, Development in Communist China’, Communications and Change in the Developing Countries, 1967, Ed. Lerner, D. and Schramm, W., p. 214.Google Scholar