In this roundtable discussion, five scholars of modern India with diverse methodological training examine aspects of Rupa Viswanath's 2014 book, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India, and assess its arguments and contributions. This book has made strong challenges to the scholarly consensus on the nature of caste in India, arguing that, in the Madras presidency under the British, caste functioned as a form of labour control of the lowest orders and, in this roundtable, she calls colonial Madras a ‘slave society’. The scholars included here examine that contention and the major subsidiary arguments on which it is based. Uday Chandra identifies The Pariah Problem with a new social history of caste and Dalitness. Brian K. Pennington links the ‘religionization’ of caste that Viswanath identifies to the contemporary Hindu right's concerns for religious sentiment and authenticity. Lucinda Ramberg takes up Viswanath's account of the constitution of a public that excluded the Dalit to inquire further about the gendered nature of that public and the private realm it simultaneously generated. Zoe Sherinian calls attention to Viswanath's characterization of missionary opposition to social equality for Dalits and examines missionary and Dalit discourses that stand apart from those that Viswanath studied. Joel Lee extends some of Viswanath's claims about the Madras presidency by showing strong parallels to social practices in colonial North India. Finally, Viswanath's own response addresses the assessments of her colleagues.

This article examines the entanglement of administration, education, and law in North India under early British rule. While there exists extensive discussion on each of these three themes, historians have not paid enough attention to the processes in which, by the mid-nineteenth century, the official minds of the East India Company gradually came to imagine its revenue administration in North India at the institutional intersection of state bureaucracy, village schools, and the law courts. I will argue in this article that through this intersection of knowledge/law-making, the Company wished to foster an ‘enlightened’ but simultaneously obedient subjecthood among the Indian rural population. The contested relationship between the state, the local Indian officials, and the villagers in general, however, thwarted this patronizing ambition.

This article argues that gendered ideas about political representation were pivotal to the All-India Muslim League's new self-imagination as the exclusive representative of Indian Muslims after the Pakistan Resolution of March 1940. I offer a gendered reading of League politics during the crucial decade of the 1940s by examining the historical implications of Begum Jahanara Shah Nawaz's expulsion from the party in 1941 for accepting a post on the National Defense Council. When she claimed that she was appointed to the Council as a representative of all Indian women and Punjab, the League leadership condemned her for disobeying the party's resolution to remain aloof from British India's wartime administration. With an unusual intensity, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the League's president, censured her for endangering Indian Muslims’ fragile unity and asserted that League members could either represent Muslims—or no one. Her arguments functioned as an effective foil against which the League solidified its homogenizing narrative of an Indian Muslim identity and its universalizing project of Pakistan. As the demand for Pakistan increasingly dominated the League's rhetoric, alternative models of representation that drew upon cross-religious, gender-based, or regional solidarities became progressively untenable for female Muslim League politicians. Shah Nawaz's expulsion, and the discourse on representation it generated, demonstrated that gender issues were central to League politics at both the provincial and the all-India level.

In recent debates in the field of urban studies, issues of informality, marginal settlements, and extreme poverty have often been analysed in relation to the dynamics that transformed spatial and social balances with respect to neo-liberal economic policies. The restructuring of spaces, infrastructure, and economies that marked the success of changing paradigms of urban planning since the 1990s has been widely seen to be responsible for the extensive marginalization of the most vulnerable strata of society. In order to understand the emergence of areas considered informal—or illegitimate—this article aims to question the very validity of categories such as ‘informality’ when applied to analysing the transition from medium-sized urban centres to ‘mega-cities’ (a label that, in itself, blindly recalls the allure of modernization, technology, and development).1 It does so by adopting a longer term perspective in analysing the evolution of a municipal housing project for the resettlement of slumdwellers in Ahmedabad, India, in 1978, which, in the span of four decades, turned into a substandard informal settlement and then into a ‘Muslim city’ called Juhapura. Widely known in India as the ‘biggest ghetto in South Asia’, this area is an observatory for reconsidering the significance of concepts such as informality, illegality, temporariness, and people's legitimacy as citizens.

Studies on Salafism tend to put the spotlight on the Middle East, rendering all other movements as secondary offshoots. In the British context, research typically focuses on British Salafi groups and their close relationship with Arab Salafis; it usually locates the origins of the British Salafi movement in the 1980s with the rise of cohorts among second-generation Muslims and converts to Islam, with fleeting remarks on the South Asian Ahl-e-Hadith who migrated to Britain from the 1960s onwards. This article recentres the South Asian Ahl-e-Hadith movement within the narrative of British Salafism. Tracing its trajectory from its origins in British India to Britain, this article argues that in the 1970s the Ahl-e-Hadith played a significant role in laying the foundations for British Salafism. Furthermore, far from being eclipsed by newer cohorts, it highlights the hitherto continuous presence of the Ahl-e-Hadith in the British Muslim landscape and emphasizes its overlapping, yet distinct, position in relation to the spectrum of Arab-inspired British Salafism.

Patterns of opium production and distribution shifted immensely over the course of the twentieth century, with output falling by three-quarters, almost nine-tenths of which now takes place in Afghanistan. Supporters of drug prohibition trumpet the success of this long-term decline and hail the withdrawal of the four largest opium producers—India, China, Iran, and the Ottoman empire—from the non-medical market, but this seemingly linear trend conceals numerous deviations of historic significance. Among the most notable and little known is Turkey's prolonged resistance to international restrictions on the narcotics trade and the efforts of state and non-state networks to substitute Turkish opium for the diminishing supply of once-dominant Indian exports to a still opium-hungry China in the first half of the twentieth century. This article uses neglected League of Nations and Turkish government sources alongside international newspapers and diplomatic reports to demonstrate the extent of connections forged by state and non-state actors between Turkey and East Asia, expanding on recent research on trans-Asian connections in commerce and political thought.

This article centres on the evacuation of the Lahore Elementary Flying Training School, which was built in 1943 to train Chinese pilots and mechanics. It details the British and Chinese authorities’ concerns over the school and how the chaotic situation in India during the final days of the British Raj influenced its evacuation back to China. This article locates the story within the broad context of the British withdrawal from India and the Chinese Civil War, and it uses this case to uncover the links between the two most significant events in the history of modern India and China. In so doing, it puts forward an integrated framework for studying modern Indian and Chinese history.

This article tells the intertwined tales of two historical routes that testify to the extensive geographical distance and profound political connections between Tibet and China throughout the modern era. In much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Sichuan Route operated as the transportation artery upon which the Qing empire depended to maintain authority in Kham and Tibet. It was also the site of a rite of passage for frontier functionaries and a meeting ground between imperial agents and the indigenous population. Despite its destruction after the implosion of the Qing in 1911, the histories and memories of the Sichuan Route continued to influence decision-makers in both China and Tibet in the following decades. The Maritime Route, which emerged in the late nineteenth century with the proliferation of steam transportation in Asia, revolutionized the way in which Tibet connected to China and the rest of the world. It also competed with the Sichuan Route and encouraged the Qing to reconfigure its presence in its non-Chinese territories in the southwest. After the empire fell, political tensions continued to evolve around the Maritime Route, which functioned simultaneously as the reluctant choice of Chinese emissaries and a strategic tool that the Lhasa government wielded to curtail China's influence. Through an exploration of the Sichuan Route and the Maritime Route on the levels of experience and representation, this article sketches the two routes’ troubled interconnections with each other and with every twist and turn in Sino-Tibetan relations from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

In the aftermath of the Nanjing Massacre, one way in which Wang Jingwei's Reorganized National Government sought to impose social order was to implement a corporatist labour strategy. Inspired by European fascist theory and building on the pre-war Nationalist-Government labour legislation, corporatism sought to prevent union autonomy, stifle class-based sentiment, and undermine the pursuit of class interests whether on the part of capitalists or of workers. It aimed to ensure government control and loyalty to the state, and promote production. An analysis of approximately 50 records of labour–capital disputes mediated by the Shehui yundong zhidao weiyuanhui (Social Movement Guidance Committee) during the early 1940s suggests that the Wang regime carved out a sphere autonomous from Japanese oversight and exerted state control over commercial associations and artisans employed in the handicraft sector. Even so, worker actions show that workers did not trust corporatism to provide social unity. Contrary to much of the Chinese historiography on occupied Nanjing that emphasizes either social repression or resistance, one finds that state authorities in most cases granted trade unions’ economic demands for higher wages. The state provided workers with a modicum of agency while pressuring commercial associations to accept worker demands. In response to inflation and to preserve their breadwinner status, male artisans actively participated in the arbitration process. Workers’ agency did not reflect an endorsement of Wang Jingwei's regime or of corporatism. It was a tacit form of consent as a means of survival.

From the lens of two Macanese publics, this study rethinks cosmopolitanism as a diverse identity and pursuit that can vary from one individual to another. It complicates what we know about polyglot Asian publics often profiled as ‘cosmopolitan’ for their foreign education, middle-class status, social commitment, and internationalist visions. I argue that, while these subjects shared a common background, they diverged according to shifting global contexts, generational differences, and personal experience. On a par with imagining themselves as part of a global community, cosmopolitan publics navigated between personal worlds and communal networks, as well as between a narrower nationalist and/or urban context and a broader global framework. My first subject, Macao-born Lourenço Pereira Marques, saw Hong Kong as a liberal ground to disseminate Darwinism across southern China's Lusophone public sphere during the 1880s, whereas Hong Kong-born José Pedro Braga worked to preach an internationalist vision of racial equality through a wider Anglophone public sphere and an emerging transnational associational culture in the early twentieth century. This study also aims to further our understanding regarding Hong Kong as a vibrant port city and explore the diversity of cosmopolitan publics in the context of transitioning internal and external worlds.

This article examines the afforestation movement in the West Lake area in Mao's China (1949–1976). I argue that this campaign was, by its nature, propagandistic, for it created a narrative of a deforested China before 1949 and a greener land after 1949 to serve the purpose of justifying China's new political system and popularizing socialist ideologies. Hence, such projects helped to define what socialism was in China and thereby solicited the participation of the general population. This afforestation project, engineered to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rule in China both domestically and internationally, was, however, marred by both human and non-human actors. Local inhabitants who were intent upon protecting their own private properties vis-à-vis the collectivizing state, poachers who illegally felled trees for firewood and timber, and tea growers who were keen on expanding their tea plantations at the cost of mountain forests sabotaged the CCP's afforestation efforts. Meanwhile, various pests contributed to the massive death of newly planted trees and prompted local cadres and citizens to adjust afforestation policies throughout Mao's times. I argue that human and non-human actors possessed non-purposive agency—that is, agency not driven by their intentions and purposes but defined by their actions—to affect, deflect, and undercut the CCP's political agendas.

Drawing on materials from the National Archives of Malaysia, newspapers, literature on historical metrology, and the colonial history of Malaya, this article weaves a social history of Malaya's colonial metrological reform by taking into account the roles of both European and Asian historical actors. Prior to the 1894 reform, people in Malaya used customary scales and weight units, which varied across districts, for commercial transactions. Initiated by colonial administrators, the reform was both welcomed and resisted. In 1897, a riot against the Sanitary Board broke out in Kuala Lumpur for its attempt to mandate that previously exempted traders use only government-verified and -stamped scales. The colonial government managed to maintain order and restore its authority at the end of the riot, but four types of merchants—goldsmiths, silversmiths, opium dealers, and drug sellers—managed to remain exempted. Metrological reform continued to be contested in the following century, but the central concerns of the regulation moved from easing taxation, facilitating cross-district trade, and taming Chinese traders to protecting consumers. More emphasis was placed on educating the public to be able to read scales, in addition to using police force to raid businesses. The enforcement was, however, compromised due to inadequate funds. The reality on the ground contradicts the image of an omnipresent colonial authority and reveals the fragility of colonial administration.

This article examines the history of the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important exporters of Indian raw cotton and one of the biggest trading firms in South Asia during the colonial period. The study allows for a fresh look at Indian economic history by putting forth two main arguments. First, it charts the history of a continental European firm that was active in South Asia to offer a better understanding of the economic entanglements of the subcontinent with the wider world, which often had a reach beyond the empire. This ties in with recent research initiatives that aim to examine the history of imperialism from a transnational perspective. Second, the history of a private company helps in developing a micro-perspective on the often ambiguous relation between the business goals of individual enterprises and colonial rule. The article argues that this may be evidence of the fact that capitalism and imperialism were two different, although sometimes converging, spatial structures, each with a distinct logic of its own. What is more, the positive interactions between European and Indian businessmen, fostered by a cosmopolitan attitude among business elites, point to the fact that even in the age of empire, the class background of actors could be more important for the establishing of cooperative ventures than the colour of their skin or their geographical origin. It is argued that this offers the possibility of examining the history of world trade in terms of global social history.