The role of the State in promoting Indian economic development in the nineteenth century is one of several aspects of modern Indian economic history which have been ‘re-interpreted’ in recent years. The conventional wisdom once portrayed the policy of the British government in India as one essentially geared to serving British economic interests. By means of ‘discriminatory interventionism’ in economic affairs, it was argued, the Government encouraged the development of a primary commodity export economy, with all its attendant defects, in India. However, over the last two decades the reputation of the Government of India has undergone a rather noticeable transformation. Economic imperialists became, first, benevolent nightwatchmen, and then ‘development-orientated’ officials formulating an embryonic unbalanced growth model for Indian development. Parallel with this improvement in the Government of India's reputation has been a deterioration in the economic reputations of certain other governments in nineteenth-century developing economies, governments whose performances used to be favourably compared with that of the British in India. In the cases of Japan and Tsarist Russia, for instance, both the extent and effectiveness of State intervention in the economy has been questioned, and there has been an increasing recognition of the primacy of non-governmental factors in the economic growth of those countries. Given the ideological and organizational parameters limiting the range of possible activity by any nineteenth century government in its economy, the performance of governments in other developing countries of the period, and the political constraints imposed by being a subordinate section of a world-wide Empire, it is no longer possible regard the actions of British officials in India as wicked, and many would now regard them as almost respectable.

The legacy of the Portuguese Jesuits and Spanish mendicant orders in Japan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was strongly felt both in Japan and in the Catholic Church. In Japan the alien religion had been suppressed in the early Edo period and throughout the decades of sakoku measures continued to be taken to ensure that Christianity would not re-emerge. In Europe, however, the determination of Christian missionaries to return to Japan persisted. Already in the seventeenth century, after the expulsion of the Iberian missionaries and at a time when the French Société des Missions Etrangères (established in 1658) had been granted by the papacy the exclusive right of missionary work in the Far East, on two occasions bishops of the Société were appointed Apostolic Vicars to Japan—even though, needless to say, they never set foot in the country. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Japan remained little more than a distant memory of the past and a distant hope for the future. Following the French Revolution, the end of the Napoleonic wars, the onset of the Bourbon Restoration and with increasing French naval activity in the Far East, however, the Société's interest in Japan revived.

The Purpose of this essay is to portray the missionary activity which the Japan Congregational Church (Nihon Kumiai Kirisuto Kyōkai) undertook in Korea between the years 1911 and 1921, and the various criticisms raised against it from both inside and outside the Church (owing to limited space we shall treat only the period up to the 1st March Movement).In doing so we shall try to illustrate at least partially the general views which Japanese Protestants held about Korea at the time.

William L. Langer, the eminent scholar of imperialism, has succinctly defined the nature of the Russo-Japanese War:

The Russo-Japanese War still remains the classic example of a conflict waged for purely imperialistic motives. There was no sentiment, no tradition involved. The Japanese and the Russians were equally disliked by the population of the territories which they desired to control. At bottom it was merely a question of which nation should victimize the moribund Korean and Chinese Empires.

The capitulation of China to the Western powers' military, commercial, and diplomatic offensive by 1860 removed the immediate formal façade of resistance to improved Sino-western relations which the West had sought. Not so easily removed were the endemic institutional and cultural obstacles to China's understanding and effective handling of foreign affairs which accompanied these expanded relations. Increased involvement with the West, both at the capital and in the provinces, generated more complex problems and renewed suspicion which made a practical knowledge of the Western powers and their behavior all the more urgent. Yet in a society which had consistently underestimated and depreciated the importance of the West, the requisite knowledge of the Western world did not lie readily at hand, and specialists in foreign affairs were few. This article examines the career of one foreign affairs expert in this critical period. Its purpose is twofold: First, to illuminate the origins and quality of ‘foreign affairs’ expertise in China, broadly defined here as the understanding and dealing with the West (including the knowledge of foreign activities and policies in China, of characteristics of, and distinctions among, foreigners and foreign nations, and policies with respect to foreigners); and second (and closely related to the first), to examine the role and significance of the specialist in Chinese society.

In this paper an attempt has been made to delineate the background of the religious support for the Pakistan movement in the Punjab by looking in particular at the connections between the structure of religious leadership and the structure of Muslim politics in 20th century Punjab. Only the rough outlines of these connections have been provided, but nevertheless some important patterns have emerged. From the time of the conversion to Islam of much of the western Punjab at the hands of sufi saints, religious leadership in the rural areas was focused on the hereditary sajjada nashins of the shrines of these saints. The position of these hereditary religious leaders was tied closely into the political organization of the rural areas, and this produced a considerable unity of political and economic interests between the religious and the secular leaders of rural society. Such common interests were strengthened by the British, who, in molding a system of rural administration in the Punjab, recognized the sajjada nashins of these shrines as part of a single ruling class of hereditary rural leaders. When the Unionist Party emerged in the 1920s as a party of rural interests led by this class of rural leaders, the sajjada nashins as a group were strongly disposed, therefore, to support it and to oppose the religious attacks on the Unionists which emanated from primarily urban reformist leaders.

As a result of a widespread revival of sufi. influence in western Punjab in the post-Mughal era, however, many of the sajjada nashins in twentieth- century Punjab had also developed very strong religious commitments to spreading a deeper awareness of Islam. This revival had spread initially through the Chishti order but was later widened by the development of the Ahl-e-Sunnat-o-Jamaat group of ulama who gave religious legitimacy to the continuing emphasis on the forms of religious influence centered on the shrines. The sajjada nashins who drew on this revival tradition were not satisfied with the secular basis of the political system developed by the Unionists, but due to their structural grounding as sajjada nashins in the rural political milieu, they did not generally give the Unionists active opposition. The Unionist Party was thus able, with tacit religious support in the rural areas, to build a strong system of political authority based on rural control, and this propelled the Party to its sweeping victory in the 1937 elections.

With the emergence of the Muslim League, however, which transcended the political question of rural interests versus urban, the revivalist sajjada nashins saw the opportunity to put rural politics on a more solid religious foundation. The concept of Pakistan was seen by them in traditional terms as the establishment of a religious state, ruled by the traditional leaders of rural society but firmly based on the Shariat. In the elections of 1946 the revivalist sajjada nashins provided the vanguard of religious support for Pakistan and played an important role in carrying the Muslim League to triumph over the Unionist Party. The victory was a sweeping religious mandate for Pakistan and marked the most important step on the road to Pakistan's formation.

The important role of the sajjada nashins in the Muslim League's election victory was also an important pointer to the nature of the Pakistan state which was to emerge. Structurally, the revivalist sajjada nashins were themselves deeply rooted in rural society and their support for the Muslim League in no way represented a repudiation of the class of landed leaders who had long wielded power in western Punjab under the Unionist banner. The victory for Pakistan represented only, a call for a new religious definition of the old rural order, not for a new alignment of political power such as the reformist ulama had called for. The further definition of this system, however, remained to be developed in the new Muslim state.