The decade preceding the First World War, with the Younghusband expedition, the Chinese forward movement in Tibet of 1909–11, and the Simla Conference of 1913–14, is naturally the period of Anglo-Tibetan relations that has been most thoroughly covered by historians. It could indeed be argued that, on the surface at least, the relationship forged between British India and Tibet by the conclusion of the Simla Conference remained unchanged and largely unchallenged until the transfer of power to an independent Indian Government. This seeming stability, however, masks a debate over Tibetan policy within the British and Indian Governments that was particularly intense during the years 1919–21, and which reflected Britain's nervousness over the political instability of north Asia as a whole during and after the First World War. Before the First World War, the ‘problem’ of Tibet was largely a parochial issue for the British Indian Government, but at the conclusion of the First World War this ‘problem’ had become an important ingredient of a much wider debate on the overall direction of post-war British policy in Asia.

Scant attention has been paid to the study of ownership of agricultural land in Peninsular Malaysia, and the dearth of research on this important topic is largely due to the lack of source materials and the difficulty of collecting such materials. A major source of information on land ownership is the land titles which are filed in the Registration of Titles Office (for lots of land exceeding 4 ha.) in the State capitals, and in the Land Office (for lots below 4 ha.) in the district capitals, and the potentiality of these records for geographic investigation has barely been tapped. The registration of land ownership in Peninsular Malaysia is based on the Torrens System which represents ‘a system of registration of transactions with interests in land whose declared object is, under Government authority, to establish and certify to the ownership of an absolute and indefeasible title to land and to simplify its transfer’. Under this system, land alienation involves cadastral surveys to delineate the boundaries of individual parcels of land, to each of which a non-recurring identification number is assigned. All details relating to the size, date of registration, land-use conditions, and transactions for each parcel of land are entered in the land registers.

Five years after the Meiji Restoration, on the seventh of the second month of 1873, the Japanese Government issued the following decree:

The taking of human life is strictly prohibited by the law of the land, and the right to punish a murderer lies with the Government. However, since ancient times it has been customarily regarded as the duty of a son or younger brother to avenge the murder of his father or elder brother. While this is a natural expression of the deepest human feelings, it is ultimately a serious breach of the law on account of private enmity, a usurpation for private purposes of public authority, and cannot be treated as other than the crime of wilful slaughter. Furthermore, in extreme cases the undesirable situation often arises that one person wantonly and deliberately kills anothe in the name of revenge without regard for the rights and wrongs of the case or the justification for his act. This is to be deplored, and it is therefore decreed that vengeance shall be strictly prohibited. In future, should some close relative unfortunately be killed, the facts should be set out clearly an a complaint be laid before the authorities. Let it be plainly understood that anyone who ignores this injunction and adheres to the old customs, taking the law into his own hands to kill for revenge, will be subject to a penalty appropriate to his offence.

The rebellion of the Muslim community of Malabar, the Moplahs, in 1921–22 is well known to scholars of Indian history. The violent but small-scale Moplah disturbances which were a recurring feature of the south Malabar interior between 1836 and 1919 have also received attention. The present writer has argued elsewhere that these ‘out breaks’ were attempts by rural Moplahs in the south Malabar taluks of Ernad and Walluvanad to curb the British-fortified power of the high-caste (mainly Brahmin and Nair) Hindu jenmis or ‘landlords’ by means of what were, in effect, ritual challenges to British rule. What is little realized is that defiance of British power by the Moplah agricultural population of interior south Malabar dates from the earliest period of the rule of the East India Company, the decade after the Muslim ruler of Mysore, Tippu Sultan, ceded the province in 1792.

In February 1937, the Congress party in the Madras Presidency won 159 of 215 seats in the provincial Legislative Assembly at the first elections under provincial autonomy. It was the most convincing victory for the Congress in any province of British India, and neither the Madras Government nor the Congress leaders had expected it. In the two and a half years Congress rule that followed, their ministers made adept use of their powers. They cut land revenue and dismantled the procedure for revising the land revenue demand, thus appealing to the pocket of every landholder. They re-instated all the village officers who had been dismissed for aiding the Congress during Civil Disobedience, thus instructing the leaders of rural society where the source of power and influence now lay. They passed two measures to alleviate the burden of agricultural debt, and threatened to legislate in favour of the tenants inside the major landed estates. Meanwhile, for the first time, the Cogress established a network of committees throughout the province, and by 1939 this new machine had placed virtually every local government board under a Congress régime. The number of Congerss members in the Tamil and Andhra areas rose from 115,971 on the eve of the 1937 elections to 594,397 in 1938.

A Great deal has been written about the Chinese state, but we still know very little about the common people, particularly peasants. How did they live? How did they found their communities? How did their socioeconomic status and property rights change over time. During the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s, China's rural society and economy became the object of intense investigation by Chinese and foreign researchers. From this period dates our present, conventional wisdom of how rural communities were structured and had evolved since the nineteenth century.