It is the events of the late 1890s in China which represent the most notorious example of a ‘scramble’ or ‘battle’ for concessions in the era of Western imperialism. The five years following her defeat in her war with Japan of 1894–95 seemed to reduce China to chaos and the brink of dismemberment, when the so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ was crushed by an international army comprised mainly of Russian and Japanese troops. But the powers could not agree on how to extend the concessions they had previously secured, and the ‘open door’, championed by Britain, the United States and initially Japan, prevailed. The ultimate blow to Western imperial expansion on a world scale was then delivered by Japan against Russia in the war of 1904–05, and a mere six years later, the Chinese launched out on their own revolutionary path which was to culminate in the Communist victory of 1949.

Although the Thai electronic media remain subject to considerable state control, newspapers in Thailand have gained some latitude to report and comment on political developments. The Thai press is one of the freest and most outspoken in Pacific Asia. In particular, the Thai language press frequently engages in antagonistic exchanges with political office-holders, and has often been credited with contributing to major upheavals. Most recently, the press was involved in the downfall of the Democrat-led government coalition over a land reform scandal in May 1995. Traditionally, however, Thai newspapers have been regarded as platforms for articulating the political views of their owners. Politicians have typically cultivated close personal ties to newspaper editors and columnists in order to further their own objectives. In recent years, the character of some Thai newspapers has changed. Whereas old-style newspapers such as Thai Rath and Daily News remain private family companies, newspapers such as Matichon, Phujatkarn, and Siam Post are part of larger corporate entities.

More than most of humanity, scholars are prone to sinking their feet into the quagmire of definition. Words are unpacked, nuances of meaning are debated, and discourses are interrogated. Post-developmentalists have been at the forefront of a re-examination of the languages of development and developmentalism. Arturo Escobar, for example, states that his desire is to analyze ‘regimes of discourse and representation’ (1995: 10). Jonathan Crush is similarly concerned with the so-styled discourse of development, and expresses the desire to make the ‘self-evident problematical’ (1995: 3). He highlights work in the humanities and social sciences which concerns itself with textual issues of writing and representation through which this discourse has been framed. Crush suggests that such textual analysis offers ‘new ways of understanding what development is and does, and why it seems so difficult to think beyond it’. He goes on to argue that ‘we need to not only understand why the language of development can be so evasive, even misleading, but also why so many people in so many parts of the world seem to need to believe it and have done so for so long’ (1995: 4).

In seeking to explain the social, political and economic development of South Korea since liberation in 1945, many scholars have begun paying increasing attention to the significance of Korea’s colonial past. Most of these scholars have, for very good reasons, focused on fundamental—even revolutionary—changes in Korea's institutional structure, which for centuries had been dominated by a landed aristocracy ‘intent upon the preservation of its social, economic, and political privileges.’ Colonialism, to be more specific, replaced the factionalized and conflict-ridden institutions of aristocracy (and dynastic rule) with a modern, highly centralized, and extremely capable state apparatus, one which was used to reshape Korean society in any number of ways during Japan's 35 years of domination. The ‘strong state’ is, in fact, an enduring and undeniably powerful legacy of colonialism.

The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya represented to the British, in the nineteenth century, a conveniently ruined Indian past which could be protected, recovered and restored as both a duty and a validation of legitimacy. However, for the temple's Hindu proprietors, the shrine—aside from being a valuable estate in purely financial terms—functioned as a symbol of the triumph of ‘orthodox’ Hinduism over ‘heterodox’ Buddhism. Finally, for the Burmese Buddhists who undertook their own ‘restoration’ mission in 1874, the Mahabodhi Temple marked the site where, according to Buddhist tradition, Gautama Buddha first achieved enlightenment and thereby began the career of the religion that bears his name.

It is not always remembered that under British rule some 150,000 Punjabis were notified under the Criminal Tribes Act as belonging to tribes and castes whose hereditary occupation was deemed to be crime. More than any other class these criminal tribes felt the harsh impact of the colonial state, which sought to control, punish and reform them. This paper traces the evolution of a Punjab criminal tribes policy and argues that the British—assisted by the indigenous elite—achieved only partial success in assimilating these people into the wider community by 1947.

The Subaltern studies project has been a major contribution towards rethinking the role of groups such as peasants, lower castes, labourers or women in forming the course of Indian history. The project has also brought the issues of culture, ideology and consciousness to the forefront of Indian history writing. Although the importance of non-elite action on the historical developments of the Indian independence movement has already been noted by more mainstream historians, the concertedness of the project has created a whole new situation in which the subalternist perspective has become a new paradigm for Indian history writing, indeed, the subalternist perspective has increasingly come to dominate the formation of perspectives and concepts. As Masselos points out, the Subaltern studies has become the establishment.

How could relative underdevelopment pose a constraint to the harnessing of technological change and increased output productivity due to technological developments? In this paper one possible chain of causation in the understanding of this question is suggested. It is argued that fragmentation of markets and the absence of industrial deepening, both factors characteristic of developing country markets, could constitute important barriers to the adoption of firm strategies that promote technological efficiency in producer goods sectors. The fragmentation of markets (due to poor infrastructure) prevents specialization and thus impedes technological learning through this route. The lack of industrial deepening implies that a large proportion of demand for intermediate producer goods emerges from households in the economy rather than firms.