The purpose of this paper is to supplement existing knowledge of British and Asian ‘country’ trade to selected parts of Southeast Asia by drawing upon British private papers and the records of Fort St George, Madras. The 1680s marked the peak of international trade in Siamunder king Narai before the wars and revolution there of 1687–88. The decade also saw the elimination of the last great independent entrepot, Banten, on the Java Sea in 1682, as well as the final, ultimately-futile, Dutch efforts to control the Malayan tin-trade north of Perak. The Dutch also began in 1685 and 1689 their intermittent attempts to monopolize key commodities in the Johor–Riau–Lingga sultánate at the southern end of Malacca Strait. In one sense, given Dutch success or at least pretensions, the region from Pegu and Tenasserim–Mergui through certain Malay ports and Aceh to Ayudhya and Tongking constituted what might loosely be called the free-trade zone of maritime Southeast Asia. It was also one in which, with the exception of Perak after 1745, the indigenous monarchies retained complete or extensive independence from European supervision. Into this zone, with occasional ventures to the smaller Indonesian ports, British country traders sailed for over a century, from Bowrey and Dampier in the 1680s to Light and Scott in the 1770s. What were the principal features of the markets they frequented?

This paper attempts to establish broad orders of magnitude for the colonial period as a whole, and the results are necessarily rough and tentative. Nevertheless, this kind of quantitative macroestimation is useful in illuminating the plausible size of the magnitudes which are usually implicit in qualitative assessment.

What was it like to be a French Consul in newly opened up China of the 1850s? What sort of people served in that risky yet challenging job in an exotic, yet remote and isolated place like mid-nineteenth-century China? How did they discharge their duties both vis-à-vis the puzzled Chinese who did not quite know how to handle the ‘Western Devils’ who thrust themselves into the Middle Kingdom, and their Western colleagues who, like them, were scrambling for Chinese concessions and for commercial and diplomatic rights for their countries, in pursuance of ever-elusive gains in prestige and diplomacy? What kind of matters did they deal with, what were they concerned with, and how well did they perform their consular duties? Under what bureaucratic and hierarchical constraints, both French and Chinese, did they operate? What was their personal contribution to advancing the cause they were delegated to promote?

While Mao Zedong might still be China's most famous communist, only scholars of the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have heard of Wang Jiaxiang and even they have never studied his career in detail. But recent Chinese publications show that there were very few CCP leaders who had such a tremendous impact on the Chinese communist movement in general and Mao Zedong's career in particular. This article will show that Wang not only supported Mao during the power struggles of the 1930s and helped convince Stalin that Mao should be acknowledged as the CCP's leader, but that Wang also played a decisive role in establishing Mao Zedong-Thought as the Party's guiding ideology. The release of numerous Party documents in the last five years also throws some light upon the relations and conflicts between Mao Zedong and other CCP leaders such as Wang Ming, Zhou Enlai, Zhang Guotao and Liu Shaoqi in the decade between the Long March and the Seventh Party Congress of 1945.

In 1874 Itagaki Taisuke and other critics of the newly established Meiji government submitted a petition demanding a popularly elected national assembly. This is said to be the origin of the Liberty and People's Rights Movement (jiyū minken undō). Around the same time a number of local political leaders intensified their campaign for the creation of village assemblies. Although the demand for local autonomy in the early Meiji period was both deep-felt and widespread, only a few scholars, notably Neil Waters, have diverted their attention from Itagaki and other political activists and thinkers at the center. An examination of Meiji local politics is nonetheless essential to understand Japan's modern political development.

Recently social scientists have demonstrated an increasing interest in famines and their sociocultural effects. However, as William Torry notes, empirical research on famines at the local community level particularly in terms of quantitative household surveys, longitudinal studies, or the junctures of relationships linking the local community with regional or national levels of organization are extremely scarce (1984: 229, 243, 245–7; 1986:13).

In 1985 riots racked the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, continuing for a period of almost half a year, form February through July, leaving some 275 people dead, thousands injured, tens of thousands homeless, and a loss of property and trade estimated at Rs 2,200 crores (US$1.75 thousand million) (India Today, 13 August 1985, pp. 60 and 119), in ‘the most alarmingly sustained bout of rioting (as opposed to the sort of terrorism Punjab suffered…) since India's independence’ (Manor 1986: 102).

The subject of this paper is the fate of progressive taxation in South Asia. This is a subject about which Kingsley Martin himself would have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he strongly advocated a redistributive fiscal strategy. On the other hand, he was never at all comfortable examining the kind of economic analysis with which it is usually justified. Somewhat unfairly, he distrusted all orthodox economists on moral grounds (Martin, 1966: 34). Moreover, his prolonged encounter with the unorthodox economics of Maynard Keynes was equally unsatisfactory as an educational experience. Lord Boothby summed up Martin's efforts to learn the technicalities of economics from Keynes as follows: ‘Kingsley simply never understood economics and yet he was always trying to understand. “Explain it to me, then” he would say, but his attention soon wandered’ (Rolph, 1973: 195).