Some write because they travel, and some travel because they write. A large number of progessional writers, not just travel-writers, have derived inspiration from travel: equally, a large number of travellers, who are not professional writers, have nevertheless often felt compelled to encapsulate their experience in literary form. It is the aim of this paper to survey such British travel literature relating to Southeast Asia during the period of massive transformation dating approximately from the ‘20S to the ’ 50S of this century. It is not intended to be comprehensive, but representative of the major landmarks of that literature along with some lesser-known works of particular interest.

The role of legal tradition in the reformist rhetoric of Benthamite Utilitarianism presents us with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is the common observation that Utilitarian jurisprudence was necessarily ahistorical and rejected the past as a source of concepts for reworking the criminal justice system existing in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For philosophic reformers such as Bentham, contemporary British criminal justice was to be replaced by a scientific jurisprudence, abstract, universal, and secular in outlook, and antipathetic to the more conservative insistence that the foundations of the penal law continue to be tradition-based. ‘If society was to see any improvement, its law must be reformed; if its law was to be reformed it must be burned to the ground and rebuilt according to a new and rational pattern.’ On the other hand, we find that the very same Utilitarian thinkers, in works describing the state of the law in British India, were concerned with local rather than universal conceptions of criminality. In his 1782 Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, Bentham, for instance, urged the philosophic reformer to temper change in India by fitting Utilitarian judgments about the law to the frames of local society.

Despite the commodification of land and labor in colonial Bombay Presidency, capitalism and its associated dynamic (modern economic growth via innovation, specialization, and so on resulting in the improved productiveness of labor) did not, by and large, develop.The colonial state reformed the property structure, bringing the notion of a single owner for each property, ending the overlapping property rights of the pre-colonial regimes. Capital was freely deployed to make profits of alienation, if not profits of enterprise. Yet, small-scale family-labor farms continued as the backbone of Bombay agriculture. The peasantry could not sustain capitalist-style growth but did maintain a tenacious hold on the land with the help of the state, and its own capacity to endure horrendous levels of exploitation and poverty; the former symptomized by high land prices and low crop prices paid to the producer; the latter by mass peasant insolvency. The power of capital was in direct proportion to the peasants' desperate need for land and loans. The colonial state was fully aware that this kind of relationship was inimical to development, but did little to bring capital into a productive relationship with landed property. The colonial state came to resemble a classic agrarian bureaucracy rather than a capitalist state. Despite some commitments to modernization, it ruled over an impoverished agrarian society. This paper attempts to locate this result in the specific interests and interactions of the major social agents of rural Bombay: the state, capital and the peasantry.

The vital importance of the Indian Army as the guardian of the imperial order in India was never more evident than during the interwar years. The period from 1919 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 was a testing time for the Raj; state authority was being challenged by a mounting nationalist movement, and public order was frequently disrupted by civil disobedience campaigns, as well as recurrent outbreaks of communal violence. In maintaining public order the colonial state had always been prepared to rely on that ultimate guarantee of its authority and power–the Indian Army. However, in frequent discussions of the deployment of the military in 'aid of civil power', the continued loyalty of the bulk of the army the Indian soldiers and officers, was never questioned, and seemed to be taken for granted.2 Yet, both the Government of India and the to be taken for granted.2 Yet, both the Government of India and the Army Headquarters were well awar that the 'loyalty' of the Army could never be guaranteed, and that it was conditional upon a stable and pacified recruiting base; if that base were to be 'subverted', then the Indian Army, or portions of it, would not only cease to be of use as an instrument of state power, but could ultimately pose a threat to the Raj itself

Most studies have concentrated on the Muslim League's political activities and objectives. It is generally believed that it lacked a distinctive economic programme and unequivocally favoured private enterprise. The radical economic ideas produced by its Punjab and Bengal branches are attributed to a handful of activists who received short shrift from the High Command. The League's stance is thus contrasted with the Congress which addressed economic issues from a largely Socialist perpective.