The developments in East Asia in the late nineteenth century became a matter of great interest to Britain. The rise of Japan and the wrangles among the great powers over China and Korea were some of the issues that put East Asia in the spotlight. In China, Western powers had been contending fiercely for economic and political hegemony since the Opium War. Japan, after abandoning its national policy of seclusion in 1854, carried out the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and was driving towards rapid Westernization. Here modernization took place in a relatively smooth manner and there was no need to fear external threats, but domestic tensions were inevitable. Finally Korea, after being forced to open its doors in 1876, suffered from acute dissensions between conservatives and progressives, and fierce competition between China, Japan and Russia over hegemony in Korea complicated the situation further.

As early as 1613, the leadership of the Dutch East India Company [VOC] recognized the importance of direct trade with China. Attempts to gain a foothold on the Chinese coast by use of force in the early decades of the century were unsuccessful. Beginning in 1624, the Dutch used a fortified settlement on the island of Taiwan as the next best thing to a mainland base. When their position on Taiwan was threatened in the middle of the century, the VOC directors decided to try to get their mainland trading privileges through diplomacy. Although later embassies have received more extensive scholarly attention, relatively little research has been done into the expectations and strategies of the various parties involved in the first VOC embassy of 1655–1657.

Prologue: Business Environment and Economic Behavior

For more than two decades, sociologists, historians and economic geographers have produced many case studies on Chinese family businesses. A major consensus of these works suggests that ‘networking’, especially ethnic and familial, is extremely important to Chinese businesses. Various models and theories have been employed to explain this phenomenon. Notable among these explanations is the idea of Chinese entrepreneurship. According to this idea, such ethnicity-based groups as the Cantonese and the Fujianese (of the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian), are regarded to be culturally oriented towards business entrepreneurship and the cultivation of business networks. Before the outbreak of the Asian economic crisis in October 1997, many researchers believed that ‘Chinese entrepreneurship’ and the ‘business culture of networking’ contributed to the success of Chinese businesses in Asia (especially in the ‘Four Little Dragons’ of coastal Asia). For example, Confucian ethics and its emphasis on familial and ethnic networks is regarded as an asset for business expansion by Chinese international enterprises based in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. After the outbreak of the crisis, more research on the nature of Chinese entrepreneurship and the culture of networking was carried out. This research started from a different angle. The reliance on politically secured economic privileges (i.e.; nepotism), was identified as a defect of networking and thus, one of the major underlying causes of the crisis. The claim that the culture of networking contributes to business success actually offers a readily available explanation for its failure as well (see for examples Redding, 1990; Yeung, 1997; Yeung, 1998).

A recent trend in the historiography of north India has involved analyses of ‘Hindu nationalist’ motifs and ideologies within both mainstream nationalist discourses and subaltern politics. A dense corpus of work has attempted to provide historical explanations for the rise of Hindutva in the subcontinent, and a great deal of debate has surrounded the implications of this development for the fate of secularism in India. Some of this research has examined the wider implications of Hindutva for the Indian state, democracy and civil society and in the process has highlighted, to some degree, the relationship between Hindu nationalism and ‘mainstream’ Indian nationalism. Necessarily, this has involved discussion of the ways in which the Congress, as the predominant vehicle of ‘secular nationalism’ in India, has attempted to contest or accommodate the forces of Hindu nationalist revival and Hindutva. By far the most interesting and illuminating aspect of this research has been the suggestion that Hindu nationalism, operating as an ideology, has manifested itself not only in the institutions of the right-wing Sangh Parivar but has been accommodated, often paradoxically, within political parties and civil institutions hitherto associated with the forces of secularism. An investigation of this phenomenon opens up new possibilities for research into the nature of Hindu nationalism itself, and presents new questions about the ambivalent place of religious politics in institutions such as the Indian National Congress.

Event

During the spring, summer and autumn of 1947 India's richest province, the Punjab, played host to a massive human catastrophe. The trigger for the catastrophe was Britain's parting gift to its Indian subjects of partition. Confronted by a seemingly intractable demand by the All-India Muslim League for a separate Muslim homeland—Pakistan—a campaign which since 1946 had turned increasingly violent, the British government early in 1947 accepted viceroy Lord Mountbatten's advice that partition was necessary to arrest the country's descent into civil war. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi notably excepted, the leadership of the Congress party came gradually and reluctantly to the same conclusion. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru's deputy, likened it to the cutting off of a diseased limb. But in accepting the ‘logic’ of the League's ‘two-nation’ theory, the British applied it remorselessly. They insisted that partition would have to follow the lines of religious affiliation, not the boundaries of provinces. In 1947 League president Muhammad Ali Jinnah was forced to accept what he had contemptuously dismissed in 1944 as a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, a Pakistan bereft of something like half of Bengal and the Punjab and most of Assam.

Introduction

The Jama‘at-i-Islami is, by far, one of the most influential Islamic movements in the world today, particularly strong in the countries of South Asia. Its influence extends far beyond the confines of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and the writings of its chief ideologues have exercised a powerful impact on contemporary Muslim thinking all over the world. Much has been written about the movement, both by its leaders and followers as well as by its critics. Most of these writings have focused either on the Jama‘at's ideology or on its historical development in India and Pakistan. Hardly any literature is available on the evolution and history of the Jama‘at in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. This is unfortunate, because here the Jama'at has had a long history of its own, which has followed a path quite distinct from the branches of the movement in both India and Pakistan. Furthermore, the Jama‘at has played a crucial role in the politics of Kashmir right since its inception in the late 1940s, a role that has gained particular salience in the course of the armed struggle in the region that began in the late 1980s and still shows no sign of abating.