On 15 August 1950, just as India was celebrating its third independence anniversary, an earthquake of 8.6 magnitude struck the remote northeastern state of Assam and its surrounding borderlands. Rivers burst their banks and landslides blocked Himalayan valleys, destroying towns, villages, roads, fields, and tea gardens in their wake. Beyond the disaster's shattering impact on the physical geography of the region, this article explores how it participated in another reconfiguration—that of Assam's place within India's political geography and national imaginary. The Indian public had hitherto known very little about India's remote ‘northeast frontier’; the cataclysm and subsequent relief measures served to carve out a space for it on Indian mental maps. Simultaneously, by forcing a large-scale encounter between Indian authorities and the people of the scarcely controlled eastern Himalayas, post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation led to unprecedented state expansion in this newly strategic borderland. Yet in the same breath, the aftermath of the disaster fuelled stereotypes about Assam and its hinterland that would eventually further their marginality within India and undermine their continued unity. The crystallization of Assam's image as a place irreducibly subject to the whims of nature and, more importantly, incapable of taking care of itself (and hence, of its highland dependencies), would poison centre–state relations for decades to come. Imperfect and contradictory, the reordering of this border space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India's national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it.

Beginning in the early eighteenth century, a bifurcated structure of authority in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet frustrated attempts by both the Lhasa and Beijing governments to assert their unquestioned control over a myriad polities in the borderlands between Sichuan and Tibet. A tenuous accommodation of this structure persisted from the early eighteenth century until the first two decades of the twentieth century when powerful globalizing norms—territoriality and sovereignty—transformed both the understanding and expectations of territorial rule held by Qing and, later, Republican Chinese officials. Absolutist conceptions of these norms prompted an ambitious endeavour to shatter the bifurcated structure and undermine the Dalai Lama's spiritual influence on Kham society. Infrontier imperialism is used to analyse the incomplete implementation of resulting acculturative and incorporative policies, inflected by these two norms, which challenged the monasteries’ indirect influence on the lay rulers of Kham, initiating a struggle for authority that persists to this day.

While the territory of Afghanistan is widely connected in the popular and historical imagination to long-distance trade, Afghan society continues to be popularly represented as being made-up of ‘tribes’, who subscribe to static ‘honour codes’, and tenaciously cling to archaic tribal values. This article examines the significance of traders of Afghan background to commodity flows across a wide range of contexts in the former Soviet Union, especially in Russia and Ukraine and the Muslim-majority Central Asian Republics. It charts the social and political backgrounds of the merchants who make up this trading network, the nature of their connections to one another and the forms of mobility that make these connections possible, their complex relations with the communities amongst whom they live, and the types of moral value they attach to their work as traders.

In the second half of the nineteenth century an increasing number of Indians entered the world of volunteerism and public activism. One such individual was the prolific Urdu writer Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926), who served as the secretary for a short-lived voluntary association, the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam, during the late 1880s in Lucknow, India. Using readers’ letters as printed in Sharar's widely circulating monthly periodical, Dil Gudāz, this article seeks to understand the reasons behind the increasing role of volunteerism as part and parcel of a modern sharīf Muslim identity in the post-1857 period. Having adopted the role of a community activist, Sharar began using his periodical, soon after its inception, to mobilize and recruit his readers to participate in what he described as a passionate movement sweeping through the ‘Islami pablik’. Both rhetorical and descriptive, such an idea provided hope for a divided and struggling community to overcome the divisions that were central to their many challenges in a post-1857 world. Through the study of the vicissitudes and challenges faced by Sharar and his fellow activists, this article underscores the ways in which public activism and volunteerism simultaneously represented the possibility for Muslims to use their own resources to bring about real social and political change, and also reminded them of their shortcomings and the limits of an informal activism. This article seeks to show that ultimately, even such ‘failed’ and ephemeral attempts were foundational for more effective mass mobilization efforts in the following decades and into the twentieth century.

This article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The article argues that elections bring together different political storylines, rather than one master antagonism. It is the interaction between different narratives that paradoxically provides elections both with a sense of gravity and dignity, and with the lingering threat of rupture and disturbance.

On the morning of 24 June 1932 the ‘People's Party’, a small group of civil and military bureaucrats, toppled the Thai absolute monarchy and introduced constitutional democracy. This article discusses the establishment of democracy as an endeavour in ‘democratic paternalism,’ by which is meant the Party's attempt to establish a new moral and intellectual leadership that had as its main goal the creation of a depoliticized democratic citizenry. To implement their programme for democracy, the Party embarked on an ambitious plan to modernize education and explain popular sovereignty through countrywide lectures and radio programmes. The democratic paternalist effort had mixed results. State weakness limited the reach of the educational and propaganda campaigns, and further the ‘people’ in whose name the revolution was staged, constituted two different groups: a largely illiterate peasantry and a small, incipient new intelligentsia. Because of its limited capacity, the People's Party tasked the second group with assisting in democratic mentorship of the masses, but many in this second category of people had a broader conception of democracy than the Party's ‘top-down’ model and criticized the Party for its paternalist constraints on popular sovereignty. Democratic paternalism and frustration with the limits imposed on popular democracy are two central aspects of this period of history that have endured in Thai society.

Using new archival materials, internal publications, and gazetteers as its sources, this article studies the conduct of disaster governance in Tianjin city during the Great Leap Forward famine from 1958–1962. The city was organizationally well able to implement disaster relief efforts, and early on it took a number of measures to control and mitigate the food crisis that began in the city in early 1959. However, Maoist campaign-based disaster management could not work well when other campaigns were prioritized in its stead. Lacking central sanction for a major disaster relief effort, city leaders resorted to strategies that prioritized its residents over suburban peasants and outsiders. The city actively sought resources from outside while trying to prevent their outward flows. The city's own production of vegetables must not be overlooked as one of the reasons for better survival rates among urban residents, but even this policy was hampered by other Great Leap Forward initiatives. In the case of Tianjin, urban disaster governance of the famine was inward-looking and, at the same time, constrained and reliant on the central government.

This article examines the ‘greening’ of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's ‘barren’ mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to ‘sanitize’ Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the history of green space and the cultivation of ‘nature’. While the state sought to transform the ‘barren rock’ into a visible correlate of the colony's aspiring status as an imperial hub in Asia, the promotion of hygiene and health provided a further rationale for tree-planting. The article argues that colonial Hong Kong provides insights into the ‘tropicalization of modernity’ and the constitutive processes by which colonial power was naturalized and legitimated through planning practices that extended from the urban to the natural. A study of Hong Kong's afforestation underscores the importance of the natural environment as a ‘contact zone’ between colonial and ‘native’ cultures; it also reveals the extent to which the equation of a ‘green’ landscape with economic (re)production and colonial order, functioned as a critical trope for framing race and labour.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian princes correlated the preservation and use of well-maintained hunting grounds rich in desirable flora and fauna with the enjoyment of higher status, stronger defences against foreign interference, and more compliant subjects. As a result, they carefully managed wilderness and wildlife in their territories. Major past impacts on environments and biodiversity, with ongoing relevance to the ways in which wildlife and wilderness are perceived in the subcontinent today, emerged from the widespread conviction of these rulers that their attempts to govern ecosystems and wildlife demographics were natural and necessary functions of the state. Evidence drawn from hunting memoirs, shooting diaries, photographs, paintings, archival records, and administration reports from a selection of North Indian states calls into question exactly how, and even if, wildlife or wilderness existed in separation from people and the realm of civilization. The intimate relationship between Indian sovereigns, wilderness, and wildlife, therefore, informs new understandings of princely identity, South Asian environmental history, and elite Indian receptions of European and colonial science and managerial practice relating to forests and wild animals in the era of British paramountcy.

This article considers the formation of moral and ethical worlds in India, drawing largely on cases reporting on modern times, as people interact with or imagine the landscapes in which they live. Questions of ethics, and how they are animated in practical existence through the experience of emotional ties and affective attachments to nature, near and far, have not always informed the writing of environmental history in India. In contrast, scholars in disciplines other than history have often paid attention to ethical and religious ideas about landscape and nature. This review argues that ethics of nature are developed in historical processes of community formation and identity-expression or self-making that occur in and through the imagination and experience of the natural world in religious and political action. Historical perspectives on these topics are useful and necessary, even as careful examination of how affect and worship shape attitudes to being in particular landscapes can enrich the understanding of meaningful relations to landscape and nature in environmental history. The argument is developed by a close examination of a handful of recent studies that have provided an empirical basis for this synthesis, review, and conceptual elaboration of the ethics of nature in India. The article considers the formation of ethical ideas and practical values of nature in realms of worship, natural resources management, rural development, conservation science, natural resources policy, and legal disputes relating to nature protection in India.