In the early decades of this century, Naitō Konan (1866–1934) became Japan's leading authority on Chinese history and contemporary Chinese affairs. His early education in Kangaku (Chinese studies) had emphasized the Neo-Confucian tradition of jitsugaku or the practical application of learning, a broad trend in Japan then and one subscribed to by Naitō's family. Thus, before his arrival in Tokyo in late 1887, Naitō was already deeply concerned with China. He also possessed a kind of Kangaku assumption that China and Japan were linked culturally, and by extension their contemporary fates before the West were linked. The jitsugaku underpinning to Naitō's thought spurred him to seek out solutions for China's ills (and Japan's) on the basis of his knowledge of the past.

Overseas Chinese political links with China have been a subject of interest for many years. Travellers, journalists, officials and scholars have constantly made speculation, assessments and predictions about the political loyalties of overseas Chinese, and their future in their host countries. Although the overseas Chinese share a common historical and cultural background, they live in different economic environments and political climates, and in different stages of transition. Their political loyalty is especially difficult to assess. It is not just moulded by cultural, economic and political environments; it is also affected by other, less predictable factors. The rise of nationalism in the overseas Chinese communities at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries was a major factor in shaping the political life of the overseas Chinese. Using Singapore and Malaya as case studies, this paper seeks to explain how and why overseas Chinese nationalism arose during this period.

The present paper is divided into three parts. Part I describes and analyses the emergence of an indigenous business class in Maharashtra, in western India, during the Peshwa times, and its position under early British rule. Part II discusses the dominance of Brahman savakars in the newly emerged business class. Part III presents an overview and states general observations relating to the subject.

After revisiting Sind in 1876, Sir Richard Burton wrote, ‘The Hindu's reed-pen is a rod of iron and abjectly the unhappy Sindi trembles before it.’ By ‘Hindu,’ Burton meant the Hindu bania, the trader and moneylender, and by ‘Sindi’ he meant the Sindhi Muslim zamindar (landholder), the perennial debtor. The creditor tyrannized over the debtor, imposing ever harsher and more inequitable terms on him. What is interesting is that Burton scarcely appeared to recognize the Hindu banias as Sindhis at all; he wrote as if they were interlopers on the Sindhi scene. It was a colourful summary of the average British official's attitude towards debt. Twenty years later, Evan James, the Commissioner in Sind, quoted Burton's remark to lend support to his own argument that debt was an intolerable burden on Sindhi Muslims in general and the great zamindars in particular.

In 1947 the fabric of Bengali rural society woven together by a common language and a syncretist popular culture was torn asunder on lines of religion. During the final two decades of colonial rule in India the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Jamuna deltaic tracts of east Bengal increasingly became the scene of tension and violent conflict between a Muslim peasantry and a predominantly Hindu landed gentry. The conflict between rival élites in a plural society over government jobs and positions of vantage in the legislative arena has been a subject of scholarly studies in twentieth-century Bengal. Successive ‘legislative attacks’ of one status and interest group upon another have been carefully identified and documented, and their significance assessed. The inner dynamics of the struggle in the countryside and the periodic outbursts of ‘communal’ fury that rent rural Bengal during this period have not come under the same systematic investigation. Yet, without the agrarian dimension to the Hindu–Muslim problem in Bengal, the politics of separatism would in all likelihood have proved ineffectual and been washed away by the strong tide of a composite nationalism.

The paradox of the authoritarian rule of the Indian Raj at the heart of Britain's liberal empire was one that ran continuously through the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism. Both as the unpaid arsenal of Eastern expansion and defence, and as the essential stop-gap to Britain's multilateral pattern of trade, India was the necessary if incongruous adjunct of Liberal England, supporting the doctrines of progress at home on the basis of the autocratic control of its British-born hierophants over the numberless ‘contented masses’ of the Indian countryside. The resulting contrast between the increasingly self-governing white dominions, and the Indian maverick upholding in chains the very fabric of the empire, was also reflected in the political thinking of the motherland itself, by way of the stresses and contradictions which the conditions of the Raj's existence served to create within the liberal framework of the Victorian intellectual world. At the core of the Victorian liberal empire stood the strictly paternalistic government of the Raj in India; at the centre of the ‘benevolent despotism’ that British rule in the subcontinent adopted stood the steel frame of the Indian Civil Service, ‘much more of a government corporation than of a purely civil service’ and the creator as much as the executor of British policy there.