Some time ago the Commonwealth and Overseas History Society of Cambridge University asked me to provide an overview of recent scholarship on modern Chinese history. What follows is a written version of this ‘public service’ lecture aimed at non-specialist historians. It discusses Western scholarship on China from the eighteenth until the twentieth century.

On June 4th 1931 the North China Daily News—the principal British owned English-language newspaper in Shanghai published a small report on page 12 headed ‘Alleged crime by foreigner: Shooting affair on the Nanking railway: Held by military authorities’ This went on to state a Russian had been arrested for the murder of two Chinese gendarmes on the 1st of June at 10pm. He had been challenged as a prelude to a search but had fired on them and escaped having fatally wounded two men. The following morning a ‘suspicious looking foreigner’ had been arrested in the vicinity and was still being held in custody. The source of this story was the previous day's Shenbao, the leading Shanghai Chinese newspaper which had picked up the story from the Suzhou press. The Russian's name was given as Xi si ke tuo qu luo—which might be transliterated as ‘Sea Scout’, for reasons which will become clear.

The soil and productions of this country are of the richest description, and it is not too much to say, that within the same given space, there are not to be found the same mineral and vegetable riches in any land in the world (James Brooke, 1838).

This paper examines the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ as an ideal-typical pair and shows how they are typically misused as descriptive terms. It discusses the transformation of these terms' use from one of description to one of prescription as they are adopted by ‘developing’ nations. Focussing on Thailand, the paper shows how the term ‘tradition’, which formely stood alone, shifts in meaning as it is put into opposition to ‘modernity’, and how the pair serve as legitimating terms in a political context, tied to ‘nation-building’ and the interests of different political groups. This process and its ambiguities are explored through an examination of ritual, public monuments, and semantic changes.

Studies on Indian artisans in the recent times have tended to be guided by the notion of a world market which, it is believed, drove them towards obsolescence through changing tastes or productivity. This framework, however, is not without problems. First, the presence of older industries in modern India, or their long continuance, tends to be seen in terms of ‘survivals’ or ‘revivals’, which terms deny them any inherent dynamics. On the other hand, the impression that many of them ‘survive’ today in strikingly modernized forms, utilizing production and marketing institutions vastly different from those that prevailed a hundred years ago, would demand of historians an account of how old industries evolve, and become integrated into the rest of the economy. Secondly, the crux of the world market story is the economy's opening up to trade. That foreign trade had a critical impact on crafts such as textiles, partially decimated by imports, or leather, where trade commercialized an erstwhile custom-bound exchange, is indisputable. But there are other notable examples where the effect of trade was benign, minor, or indirect, where artisans remained producers of a mass consumable; and where neither did they face significant competition from imported goods, nor were reduced to fodder for metropolitan industrialization. Yet they changed profoundly. In a way, their history reflects not the play of a dominant exogenous process, but the totality of the economy's structural change. Crafts history does not yet provide us with prototypes of this endogenous transformation.

As the capital of the Estado da India, the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia and East Africa, Goa was subjected to a blizzard of policies designed at once to transform and fossilize life there. Desiring to preserve much of the precolonial village economic structure, yet determined to force their Goan subjects to total conversion to Catholicism, the Portuguese created policies that had a dramatic impact on Goan culture and identity. The focus of this article will be on the Hindu resistance to the policies that were appiled by the colonial regime and its role in the shaping of the regional culture: in the face of over-whelming physical force, direct defiance revealed itself primarily in the religious life of Hindu Goa as archival records of the Portuguese rule and temple histories demonstrate. Even formsof religious syncretism that are pervasive in Catholic Goa and might initially be perceived as indications of the success of Portuguese repressive and discriminatory policies represent a subtle pattern of ‘everday resistnce’ and are not simply the blending of Portuguese Catholic and Hindu cultures.

Religion in India has always been profoundly politicized, which is why it has remained of enduring importance, instead of ‘withering away’ as in the West. Though its presence is somewhat hidden in parties that profess a secular view, it is of vital importance, at the local village level, as a focus for the organization of political factions. More precisely, even if local political parties in Tamilnadu do not organize around religion, they use religion and ritual events for their political purposes, in their struggles to dominate local politics. The fact that this politicization of religious ritual is implicit, not explicit, only testifies to the fact that power-relationships—and struggles—exist in all aspects of life (as Foucault often noted), including apparently ‘innocent’ rites such as religious possession.

The book Angāre, a collection of ten short stories by Sajjād Ẓahīr, Rashīd Jahān, Aḥmed 'Alī and Maḥmūduzẓafar published in Lucknow in December 1932, marks a major turning point in the history of Urdu literature. Acting as a powerful catalyst, it initiated a major change in the form and content of Urdu literature and helped to lay the basis for the establishment of the Progressive Writers Association, the most significant Urdu literary movement of the twentieth century.

‘Communist, Revolutionary, most capable and most implacable of the enemies of the British connection with India,’ this is how Winston Churchill described Jawaharlal Nehru in 1937. Most British politicians, and the ‘guardians’ of the Empire would have agreed with the verdict.