The launching of this journal of Modern Asian Studies, on the initiative of the Hayter Asian Centres in co-operation with the School of Oriental and African Studies, provides a good opportunity to review the progress being made in these studies in the universities of the United Kingdom. We have nearly reached the half-way stage of a ten-year programme of development which was put forward in the Hayter Committee Report of 1961, and are approaching the new quinquennium in which what has already been started should be consolidated and the new pattern for the future established.

The observer who travelled in India in early 1965 found no one lower in public estimation than the late Pundit Jawarharlal Nehru. Not yet dead a year, it seemed that there was nothing that he had done which was right. Population?—he should have taken steps to control it. Language?—he had failed to control the Hindi faction and had weakly compromised. Corruption?—he had denounced but failed to act, had even shielded guilty parties. Non-involvement?—it had led India into isolation, and as for China, the less said about that painful subject the better. If Mahatma Gandhi was the forgotten man of early 1965, Nehru was the rejected man.

Malaya has a plural society in which Malays form 49·8 per cent of the total population, Chinese 37·2 per cent and Indians 11·2 per cent. Apart from this racial diversity, there is the added fact that the Malays tend to live in the rural areas whereas the immigrant groups tend to live in the urban areas or on the plantations, and only to a much lesser extent in the rural areas. For example, of the rural population of Malaya, Malays form 70 per cent, Chinese 17 per cent and Indians 11 per cent. In the urban areas of Malaya, Malays make up 23 per cent of the population, Chinese 65 per cent and Indians 10 per cent. In 1957 the average annual income of the adult male in the Malay community was $1,463, as against $3,223 in the Chinese community and $2,031 in the Indian. From these figures it is clear that the Malays have lagged behind the immigrant communities in respect of economic development.

All historians would agree that one decisive factor in the overthrow of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the alignment against it in 1867 of several of the great domains (han), and the failure of the Shōgun to rally any comparable support among the rest. In the wider sense the reasons for this are complex, as well as being a matter of some controversy. Nevertheless, the proximate causes are obvious enough. In the anti-Bakufu domains, notably Satsuma and Chōshū, power had fallen into the hands of samurai groups which sought the destruction of the régime. In a number of others, similar groups wielded sufficient influence to prevent the daimyō or his senior officials from giving whole-hearted backing to the Tokugawa. Clearly, therefore, the study of how this came about, that is, of the nature and processes of domain politics, is important to an understanding of the Meiji Restoration.

Discussion of the minority problem in India has been largely concerned with the relations between the two major communities of Hindu and Muslim, an emphasis justified by the less important part played by non-Muslim minorities in the communal conflict that preceded independence. The Indian Christians repay close study, however, for a number of reasons.