The notion of ‘banker's trust’ has a paradoxical quality, like ‘burning cold’ or ‘military intelligence.’ Common sense (another paradoxical notion) tells us that bankers have no trust. Perhaps this explains the appeal of Marxist and Weberian assumptions that capitalist economies tend to destroy pre-capitalist social formations based on trust. From the classic perspective, ‘primordial’ social ties mandate relations of trust (or something like them) in kin groups and castes only so long as the members of these groups do not operate directly—as bankers do—within a capitalist economic system.

Recently, we have come to see that the perceptions which we had of the decay and destruction of India in the eighteenth century were more than anything else a product of British writing which sought consciously or unconsciously to magnify and color the changes which took place in the eighteenth century to enhance the magnitude of their own ‘achievements’ from then onwards. ‘achievements’ from then onwards. Secondly, we have come to see the interaction of British desires for political security on the one hand and a steady income from land and other taxes as producing a situation first of depression in the first half of the nineteenth century and later of gradual underdevelopment at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth. It is therefore possible now to understand the unwillingness of the British administration in India to engage in any large-scale developmental activity which would upset the political balance which the British had established early in their relationship with landed and mercantile groups in the area. In this essay, I should like to address the connection between British support for landed groups in the agrarian area outside of Madras on the one hand and the colonial ‘discovery’ and reinforcement of traditions on the other, to understand both the nature of colonial control strategies and the genesis of Indian revivalism.

The debate over the separate and joint electorates as rival modes of election to the various representative institutions by the British began with the Simla deputation of 1906 and remained controversial until 1947. Not only was the issue controversial in pre-Independent India, but it also raises debates among contemporary historians and political scientists. For John Gallagher, the Communal Award was nothing but ‘a sign of [the] determination [of the British Government] to warp the Indian question towards electoral politics’. While looking into the operational aspect of the Award, Anil Seal, too, has affirmed that ‘by extending the electorate, the imperial croupier had summoned more players to his table’. Looking at the Award from the British point of view, both of them thus arrived at the same conclusions: (a) the Award introduced the native politicians to the sophisticated world of parliamentary politics; and (b) as a result of the new arrangement, as stipulated in the 1935 Act, politics now percolated down to the localities. The available evidence, however, does reveal that the Award and the constitutional rights guaranteed to Indians under the Act were the price the British paid for the continuity of the Indian Empire. What thus appears to be a calculated generous gesture was very much a political expedient. The surrender of power into Indian hands, though at the regional levels, was not welcomed by some senior officers who saw an eclipse of British authority in this endeavour.

The rise and significance of the opium trade from India to China are well understood by historians, but the trade's decline and disappearance have received very little attention. This article explores the motives which led Britain to agree to phase out its opium exports to China and the part which the government of India played in determining this policy.

The ‘downward sweep’ of Japan after Pearl Harbor has been widely noted for its long-term effects in Southeast Asia. The rule of the established colonial masters was shattered, and those failing to escape disappeared into the camps of the Kempeitai. In Burma and Java, in particular, Japanese rule promoted local organizations, local administratiors, the indigenous language and, in Burma, a ‘national’ government and a ‘national’ army, under Japanese supervision: the one thing Japan did not bring was freedom and independence. Yet the greatly-increased social mobility and political, military and administrative experience had long-term consequences: none of the post-war attempts at colonial restoration proved viable.