The historiography of precolonial Southeast Asia remains remarkably fragmented and inaccessible, even by the standards of that variegated region. We have a limited number of country monographs. But no systematic overview of Southeast Asian political or economic history has been attempted for all, or even part, of the period between the waning of the classical states in the fourteenth century and the onset of high colonialism in the early nineteenth. Scholarly surveys, like the magisterial and still standard magnum opus of D. G. E. Hall, make discretion the better part of valor by providing separate country chapters without integrative theme or comment.

This essay places Mughal–Sufi relationship within a larger sixteenth century context, focusing on the strategies the early Mughals adopted to build their power in India. It reviews the positions of the two important sufi groups, the Indian Chishtis and the Central Asian Naqshbandis, juxtaposing the political benefits or the loss that the Mughals saw in their associations with them. While the Naqshbandi worldview and the legacy of the legendary Ubaid Allah Ahrar clashed with their vision of power, in the Chishti ideology, on the other hand, they found a strong support for themselves. The Chishtis then had an edge at the time of Akbar. But the Naqshbandis under Khwaja Baqi Billah (d. 1603) continued in their endeavour to reinstate their place in Mughal India. The paper thus provides a backdrop and makes a plea for re-evaluating the debate on the ideology and politics of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624).

In India, investigations into patterns of industrialisation and the formation of industrial labour began during the colonial period, soon after the inception of modern industry in the mid-nineteenth century. After Independence in 1947, the development of a ‘working class’ became the primary focus of enquiry into conditions of industrial labour.

‘Earthquake and fire destroyed the greater part of Tokyo. Thoroughgoing reconstruction needed. Please come immediately if possible, even if for a short stay.’ So cabled Viscount Gotô Shinpei, former mayor of Tokyo (1920–1923) and current Home Minister to his long-time friend and Director of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, Charles A. Beard. Six days earlier, on 1 September 1923, an earthquake with an estimated magnitude between 7.9 and 8.2 devastated much of Tokyo and the surrounding Kantô region. The quake and the resulting fires, conflagrations that burned for over two days, destroyed nearly 70% of all structures in Tokyo, inflicted damage with a monetary cost upwards of 5.5 billion yen, killed more than 120,000 citizens, and rendered just over 1.5 million people homeless: it was an urban catastrophe surpassed in scope only by the devastation wrought by aerial bombing during the Second World War. The Kantô Daishinsai was Japan's most deadly, economically costly, and physically destructive natural catastrophe in history. Within a world history context moreover, the 1923 earthquake was one of the most devastating and disruptive natural disasters of the 20th century, yet it is also one of the least studied.

Two major factors determined the growth of Indian nationalism: developments within Indian society and indigenous political organizations and the British response to agitation and the demands of Indian politicians and interest groups. Current studies of Indian nationalism generally focus upon the former, while the relation of British rule to political development is either ignored or misunderstood. Frequently the British are portrayed as inept bureaucrats, or the government as a monolithic structure run on inflexible bureaucratic principles and bent upon a policy of repression. While the shoe often fits, this caricature ignores the basic fact that, despite mounting pressure from 1904 onwards, the British rulers managed to keep order and to choose their hour of departure. They were able to continue governing primarily because they were adroit in handling agitation, minimizing serious grievances, and retreating from policies or measures which threatened to inflame the subcontinent. Professor Anthony Low of the University of Sussex has shown graphically how the Government of India manipulated Gandhi's first and second civil disobedience campaigns to its own political advantage. This paper explores the background and the British response to an earlier but equally volatile situation, the 1907 rural disturbances in the Punjab.

Surat, the waning port city of the departed Great Mughals, was rocked by riots on 6 August 1795. The lower orders of the Muslim population fell upon the shops and houses of the Bania residents of the city, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books. This was the response of a collapsing social order to the thrust of a highly adaptive banking and trading group which had adroitly allied itself to the rising English power on the West Coast of India. A combination of circumstances in the half century following 1750 had resulted in the formation of a mercantile and political order distinguished by the mutually beneficial cooperation of the English East India Company and the Bania bankers and merchants of Surat and Bombay. The violent protest by the Muslims against the new order served only to reaffirm the significance of the Anglo-Bania alliance as the central fact in the unfolding political and commercial situation on the West Coast. The once powerful Mughal ruling élite and the once wealthy Muslim shipping magnates1 were no longer in a position to offer much resistance to the English East India Company and its Bania allies. Likewise the popular Muslim disaffection failed to shake by violence the foundations of the emerging Anglo-Bania order. An analysis of the August riots in Surat would afford the historian a unique opportunity to assess the nature and impact of the new order on the West Coast and to understand the crumbling social structure of a traditional port city—the composition of its lower orders and its burgher groups and their responses to the major changes that were taking place in the political and trading structure of Surat in the second half of the eighteenth century.

This paper explores India's role in the development and design of the United Nations (UN), refracted through the Commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Through an analysis of sovereignty, citizenship, nationality and human rights from the 1940s to 1956, the paper discusses what India hoped the UN to be, and more generally what they intended for the new world order and for themselves. The paper challenges existing interpretations of international affairs in this period. It seeks to reform our understanding of Jawaharlal Nehru's intellectual vision, and in the process attempts to recast the very concept of post-coloniality.

The Kheda (or Kaira) district has lately attracted great interest among Indian historians, not only because it was the area in which Gandhi chose to launch the very first peasant ‘satyagraha’ in resistance to government revenue demands, but also because it harboured a highly progressive class of peasant farmers, known as the Patidars, who to this day rank among the wealthiest cultivators in Western India.

Readers in the historiography of colonial south India have every reason to feel puzzled by the answers available to even the most straightforward of questions. Was the colonial conquest achieved through the imposition of ‘superior’ European arms, technology and ideology or was it more in the nature of an internal subversion of the pre-existing Indian state system? Did British rule fundamentally alter the structures of South Indian society or did it rest lightly on top of pre-existing structures and serve to sustain established elites? Did it undermine the hold of ‘indigenous’ cultures on society or did it merely scratch their surface or even did it promote their revival?

The British Empire established itself and expanded largely through its incorporation of existing indigenous political structures. A single British Resident or Political Agent, controlling a regional state through ‘advice’ given to the local prince or chief, became the norm for much of the Empire. India's princely states, where from the mid-eighteenth century the British first employed and developed this system of indirect rule, stood as the conscious model for later imperial administrators and politicians who wished to extend the Empire without the economic and political costs of direct annexation. In dealing with Malaya, East and West Africa from the mid-nineteenth century onward, officials in the field and notables in London sought to justify imperial expansion and to establish indirect rule efficiently by drawing upon the Indian example.Thus, during a century of empirical learning from relations with India'sprincely states, the British established a body of theory and policies about indirect rule which then spread throughout the rest of the Empire.

This paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.

Between the wars, the development of a labour movement in Bombay reflected a growing polarization in social and political relations in the city. This period, which saw an intensification of social conflict, also witnessed changes in the character of industrial action. Until 1914, strikes in the cotton textile industry were largely confined to particular departments and mills; increasingly after the war, they were coordinated across the industry as a whole. Rising prices and unprecedented profits which accompanied the post-war boom led to the demand for higher wages supported by two general strikes. In the mid 1920s, as the industry's markets slumped, attempts to cut wages were once again strongly resisted. With a slight improvement in their fortunes in the later 1920s, the millowners introduced ‘rationalization’ schemes; for the workforce this meant more work, less wages and higher chances of unemployment. Between April 1928 and September 1929, two general strikes crippled the industry for about eleven months, and the extension of these schemes and a further round of wage cuts led to another strike wave in 1933-34. Apart from several one-day closures, eight general strikes occurred in the industry between 1919 and 1940. The impact of this militancy was felt not only in other occupations in Bombay but also in other industrial centres, such as Sholapur and Ahmedabad. As Bombay became the scene of militant working-class action in India, its labour movement, under communist leadership since 1928, acquired an explicitly political direction.

Both Moluccan cloves and Bandanese nutmeg and mace played an important, even crucial, part in the elaborate network of exchanges of commodities which for many centuries before the intervention of the Europeans had been the characteristic feature of inter-island trade in the Indonesian archipelago. From the early sixteenth century the Portuguese, and to a lesser extent the Spanish, added a new strand to this network, but even in the spice islands, the commercial domination of which was their chief goal, they did not seriously disrupt its traditional pattern. This was particularly so in the Banda Islands, which they soon discovered were markedly different from the Moluccas, not only by virtue of the different spices which they produced and in which they traded, but in the economic and political organization of their societies, in the manner in which they reacted to the European intervention and in the effect which that intervention had upon their commercial activities. Both acted as magnets to the Portuguese and Spanish, and later on the Dutch and English, drawn by the lure of great profits, as they had to Asian traders for many centuries before the arrival of the Europeans. But both presented rather different problems to those traders, Asian and European alike, once commercial relations had been established

‘In England every piece of land is owned by someone—an individual, a public body, a company or perhaps by the crown. In India this is not so.’ Thus writes, in his unpublished reminiscences, a British ICS Officer who acquired experience of revenue work in the United Provinces and Bengal in the course of his career in India from 1915 to 1946.

Historians of early British administration in India have traditionally focused their attention upon the two major ‘systems’ of that administration—the ryotwari and zamindari land revenue settlements, or variations thereof. This is understandable: these systems provide a convenient framework within which to measure variations in administrative policy and consequent social and economic results. This preoccupation seems further justified by the attention that was given to the merits of these systems by officials high in the Company's administration in India and London in the early nineteenth century.

Students of Javanese society have long recognized that the Java War (1825–30), the bitter five-year struggle against European colonial rule in Java, constituted a watershed in the history of modern Indonesia. In his recent textbook, Professor Ricklefs has characterized the year 1830 as ‘the beginning of the truly colonial period in Java’, arguing that the Java War marked the transition point between the ‘trading’ era of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the years of ‘colonial’ exploitation ushered in by Johannes van den Bosch's well known ‘cultivation systems’. In military and political terms, the costly Dutch victory over the javanese made them, for the first time in their three and a half centuries of involvement in the archipelago, the undisputed masters of Java. At the same time, scholars of Javanese Islam have suggested that the defeat of the Javanese leader, Dipanagara (1785–1855), and the religious ideals for which he fought (most notably his goal of strengthening the institutional position of Islam in Javanese society), temporarily undermined the morale and self-confidence of the Islamic communities in Java. Specialists in the history of the central Javanese principalities (vorstenlanden), especially those interested in cultural developments, have also seen the Javanese failure in 1825–30 as a setback to the vitality and independence of the Javanese cultural tradition, a time when Javanese society began to turn in on itself and lose something of its strength and flexibility.

Tropical deforestation and the associated economic, ecological, and equity issues have become a matter of general interest and concern for scholars, international conservation and environmental organizations, and local pressure groups. ‘Remote’ outposts like Sarawak (‘Land of the White Rajahs’) have suddenly been thrust into the limelight as conflicts arose between different interest and ethnic groups for allocation of land and rights to utilize forest resources. A review of existing knowledge and data is therefore necessary to set rainforest clearance in Sarawak in a local, national, and international political economy context. This paper looks at the following themes: the historical legacy of ‘commercial’ extraction of forest products; the growth of the timber sector and the development of state forest regulation; and the conflicts of interest for allocation of land and rights to utilize forest resources.

Burma has never been a popular subject for academic research but, since a massive pro-democracy uprising drew worldwide attention to the country in 1988, the number of scholars and students engaged in the field has grown considerably. However, they still face a number of major challenges. Along with other kinds of area studies, Burma studies have been accused by academics from the more ‘scientific’ disciplines of being too narrowly focused and lacking theoretical rigour. Also, it has been difficult to conduct research in Burma's closed society. While the latest military government has relaxed some controls, field work is still constrained and reliable sources are hard to find. Often, the knowledge gap has been filled by myths and misconceptions. Adding to these problems, since 1988 the Burma studies community has become highly polarised, with political and moral factors often featuring more prominently in the public debate than considered arguments based on objective analysis. All these factors have adversely affected modern Burma studies and restricted understanding of this deeply troubled country by both scholars and the wider community.

Land is a metaphor for power, wealth and status. Independent Gujarat's initial mass-development strategy centered on agriculture but the emphasis was on productivity and efficiency rather than land redistribution or social justice. A state apparatus and socio-political set-up dominated by elite landed upper and middle castes and classes ensured this. Primary fieldwork-based research shows that by the mid-1980s, with a growing acceptance of ideas of liberalisation at the national and international level, the elite consensus on land began to shift. This shift must also be placed within local socio-economic developments that had propelled dominant landed groups into agro-industry and small scale industry in the last third of the twentieth century. Gujarat's elite still wanted to control land, but they did not want the state to regulate land use or continue emphasising the diluted but powerful rhetoric of land to the tiller. The rightward shift of all political formations in Gujarat after 1985 and the growing importance of the upper caste-middle class merchant-trader-builder-small businessman dominated Bharatiya Janata Party further facilitated the moves towards a shift in land policy. Continuing changes in Gujarat's land policy are determinedly moving towards the complete liberalisation of land.

The campaign to establish a Muslim University at Aligarh is a good example of the confluence of education and politics in modern India. The political motives involved were similar to those that lay behind the founding of the Mahomedan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875: a sense that English education was a prerequisite to enfranchisement. By the turn of the century, the stakes were higher and the interests involved had expanded in number and complexity. The Muslim University movement represented nothing less than an effort to create an all-India Muslim constituency and to carve out for it a decisive piece of political power. It was political both in its attempt to consolidate support to influence specific government policies, and also as a direct challange to British control of the educational access too power.