European enclaves were a characteristic feature of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century European presence in Asia, serving as centers of trade and European society far beyond the frontiers of metropolitan Europe. Yet to consider them as phenomena belonging only to the history of European Asia would be a mistake. Despite the protection of fortifications and control of the sea, the enclaves could never be completely isolated from their hinterlands, for not only did they receive their trade goods from the interior, but the changing local political stituation frequently threatened their survival. Moreover, the enclaves themselves had their definite non-European character, a population of local merchants, artisans and laborers which outnumbered the Europeans. These resident Asians provided goods, services and often capital for European trade; they were, as Holden Furber has observed, partners in European enterprise.

In the opening chapter of his study of Agricultural Trends in India, 1891–1947, George Blyn explains the double significance of determining crop production trends in a society where agriculture is the largest single sector of the economy. Firstly, crop trends reveal the nature of changes in production and provide the basis for estimating changes in consumption. Secondly, since availability of crops for consumption depends not only on output but also on foreign trade, changes in cropping patterns provide a basis for estimating the pace and direction of commercialization of the economy. Blyn's study covers the fifty-six years before Indian independence and provides detailed analysis of such topics as aggregate crop trends for the eighteen crops that constituted most of India's agriculture. More recently, there have been a number of studies concerned with the agricultural history of nineteenth-century India. My own work is concerned with the social and economic history of the Central Provinces for the period 1861–1921. Within this broad subject an important specific topic is that of cropping patterns. This paper provides data on crop trends in this part of India for a period of fifty-four years from 1867 to 1921 and evaluates and analyzes this data. Its object is to establish the broad trends in cropping patterns and to shed some light on methods of agriculture in the Central Provinces in the later nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. (Provincial data are given in Tables 1.1 and 1.2 at the end of the paper.)

It may be asserted with some assurance that the very name ‘Siraiki’ will be quite unfamiliar to most readers of this article. The well-known predilection of most South Asianists for working from English sources and their concentration upon the larger Indian scene, where such sources are so much more abundant than for Pakistan, may contribute to this unfamiliarity; but it is doubtless due principally to the quite recent introduction of the term on a general scale in its homeland. In simple terms, ‘Sirāikī’ is the language of the middle Indus valley, while the ‘Sirāikī movement’ that seeks to improve its standing is based in the central part of this region, the South-West Panjab, principally in its most important cities, Multan and Bahawalpur. This article sets out to inform a wider audience about the movement which is attempting to assert the language's separate identity and to secure for it increased official recognition.

Chinese secret societies have usually proved to be enigmatic topics for scholarly study. Although a considerable amount of writing and research in several languages has been published about Chinese secret societies during the past hundred years, the topic remains beset by a variety of contradictory information.

Bureaucratic capital—that is, capital accumulated through public office, or state revenue diverted by individual officials for capital investment— has had a long history in China since early Han times. This paper is concerned with the development of bureaucratic capital for ‘modern’ industry during the last forty years of the Ch'ing dynasty.

Much can be learned about the character of a political movement by examining the personal relations between its principal members as well as their political writings, speeches, and ‘formal’ activities in the movement. This is all the more the case if the movement is politically radical, for radical politics often generate a radical subculture which has as its chief function the moulding of an ideal revolutionary personality which will serve the movement in all of its vicissitudes and be a model for the type of citizen the movement wishes to create in society.