In the latter part of the 1990s, several of the major economies in South East Asia underwent one of the worst economic crises in living memory. It is thus not surprising that economic historians with an interest in the region are re-examining the experience of the 1930s. One crucial difference between the crisis of the late 1990s and that of the early 1930s is that the latter was preceded, and in large measure caused, by problems in the world economy. When the industrial world fell into a severe economic depression in the early 1930s, most parts of Asia were affected, mainly through falling export receipts which in turn affected colonial budgets. A second difference was that most parts of South East Asia in the 1930s were still under colonial rule, and had little autonomy in framing or implementing economic policy. Only Thailand remained nominally independent, but even there the influence of foreign, especially British, economic advisers was considerable. Given the very different economic interests which the colonial powers (Dutch, French, American and British) had in their South East Asian colonies, and given the widely differing nature of the economic links between colony and metropole, it was to be expected that the impact of the 1930s slump, and the policy responses which it provoked, would vary. This indeed turned out to be the case.

Through ethnographic material gathered in the Muslim woodworking mohallas (neighbourhoods) of a North Indian city, this article attends to ‘performed’ elements of everyday convivial interactions. It builds on work that situates conviviality as a normative project aimed at understanding and fostering interaction within urban space which bridges forms of difference. Through descriptive accounts, the article illustrates how convivial exchanges can embody degrees of instrumentality and conceal relations of power and marginalization that act to silence outrage or contestation. This ‘performed conviviality’ is dealt with in a broader context of ‘scale’ to consider how marginalization and connectedness—the marginal hub—intersect in even the most mundane moments of convivial exchange. By tracing processes of marginalization, boundary making, and bordering within the local, city-wide, state, and international contexts, the article follows the production of a marginalized or ‘border’ subjectivity through to the individual level. The subjectivities produced in this context act to enforce degrees of self-imposed silence among those subjected to processes of marginalization. In addition—and again attending to scale through an acknowledgement of the connected nature of the mohallas—the article also considers the role of conviviality in global chains of supply through the creation and maintenance of bonds and obligations that facilitate production in the city's wood industry.

This article offers a comprehensive set of explanations for why people vote. Based on evidence from Indian elections, where voter turnouts remain consistently high—and rising—despite voting not being compulsory, the article shows that two broad sets of reasons exist. First, a set of transactional factors, labelled ‘money’ here, encompass within it the instrumental and coercive reasons that propel people to vote. Secondly, evidence shows that people also attribute ‘meaning’ to the act of voting itself so they vote for the sake of performing the act itself. Drawing from the wider literature and the author's own ethnographic work, including comparative ethnographic research conducted by a team across India, this article brings together these diverse set of reasons to propose a holistic explanation for why people vote.

In 1905, Viceroy Nathaniel Curzon applied well-worn principles of imperial order to reorganize northeastern regions of British India, bringing the entire Meghna-Brahmaputra river basin into one new administrative territory: the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. He thereby launched modern territorial politics in South Asia by provoking an expansive and ultimately victorious nationalist agitation to unify Bengal and protect India's territorial integrity. This movement and its economic programme (swadeshi) expressed Indian nationalist opposition to imperial inequity. It established a permanent spatial frame for Indian national thought. It also expressed and naturalized spatial inequity inside India, which was increasing at the time under economic globalization. Spatial inequities in the political economy of uneven development have animated territorial politics in South Asia ever since. A century later, another acceleration of globalization is again increasing spatial inequity, again destabilizing territorial order, as nationalists naturalize spatial inequity in national territory and conflicts erupt from the experience of living in disadvantaged places. Remapping 1905 in the long twentieth century which connects these two periods of globalization, spanning eras of empire and nation, reveals spatial dynamics of modernity concealed by national maps and brings to light a transnational history of spatial inequity shared by Bangladesh and Northeast India.

In several of the world's regions a ‘general crisis’ seems to have occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century. At that time in each region, political instability and war, population decline and urban stagnation, economic crises marked by falling prices and depleted stocks of precious metals, and dramatic climatic shifts converged. These symptoms have been detected in western Europe, in the Ottoman lands, and even in China and Japan. Their causes have been attributed in part to the effects of the price revolution, partly to climate change, and in part to rising populations which begin to outstrip agricultural production. The latter tendency in particular seems to have caused a fiscal crisis for the absolutist agrarian states characteristic of Eurasia in this period. Other analyses stress the effects of a tightening linkage in the emerging capitalist world economy in which precious metal flows served to mark newly imposed interdependencies.

The role of Sufi networks in facilitating trans-imperial travel and the concomitant social and political connections associated with the pilgrimage to Mecca is often mentioned in the literature on Ottoman-Central Asian relations, yet very little is known about how these networks operated or the people who patronized them. This paper focuses on the Sultantepe Özbekler Tekkesi, a Naqshbandi lodge in Istanbul that was a primary locus of Ottoman state interactions with Central Asians and a major hub of Central Asian diasporic networks. It departs from an exclusive focus on the experiences of elites, to which much of the conventional historiography on Ottoman-Central Asian relations has confined itself, and examines the butchers and bakers, craftsmen and students who set out on the hajj to Mecca in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on sources from the private archive of this lodge, the paper reconstructs the experiences of a diverse range of remarkably mobile actors and explores the myriad ways in which this Ottoman-administered institution facilitated their travel to and from Mecca. Through its focus on the conduits and mediators, the structures and buildings—the actual sites—where connections were forged, the paper sheds light on the role that such state-administered Sufi lodges played in delivering on the paternalistic rhetoric and system of sultanic charity that was an integral part of late Ottoman politics and society.

The late-nineteenth century in India, usually scrutinized for the emergence of anti-colonial nationalist thought and politics, witnessed broader, and potentially more radical changes in the making and re-making of political subjectivities as articulated within burgeoning vernacular public spheres. Vernacular publics coalesced around the emergence of new communicative forms, the formation of voluntary and political associations, and the restructuring of literary communities. It is within this context I place the writings of Gidugu Venkata Ramamurti (1863–1940). He proclaimed at the turn of the twentieth century that Telugu as a language had to be reformed in order for it to become an appropriate medium for the newly emergent Telugu public spheres. Through his study of linguistics, his commitment to educational reform, and his study of Telugu language and literature, Ramamurti became the spokesperson for a new Telugu that would be able to traverse the boundaries of modern genres of writing that flourished in the colonial era. Fully immersed in linguistic theories of the day, Ramamurti's concerns were primarily with language reform and its centrality in the remaking of political subjectivities.

The influenza epidemic swept through our midst in September and October, unhappily with fatal consequences to a number of friends in the Tamil community. We are glad to say that though terribly severe while it lasted, its duration was mercifully short. On the other hand, the great news that the armistice has been signed filled us with unaccustomed joy.

J. S. Furnivall, in his influential account of the impact of British rule in Burma 1824–1948, argues that British officials laid down a Liberal administration that exposed the colony to market forces, monetized the economy and devastated communities. However, there is little evidence that British administrators actually thought in Liberal terms: they relied heavily on institutions inherited from the Burmese monarchy, and when they introduced new administrative methods these were drawn from other parts of British India and only indirectly influenced by Liberalism. Furnivall's view of the ideological origins of British administration, in turn, distorts his reading of the impact of British rule, as illustrated by recent work on the pre-colonial economy showing that it was in fact more monetized and commercialized than he claims. If his account of the pre-modern economy is not viable, Furnivall's claims about the impact of British colonialism in Burma demand re-evaluation.

In this article I examine the similarities between colonialism and postcolonialism in Sabah, Malaysia. I argue that the strategies of rule employed by the colonial and postcolonial states can be viewed as a sustained interaction in which the power of colonial discourses, institutions, and forms of rule still operate in postcolonial Sabah, particularly in terms of control over and access to natural resources. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data I present case studies from the colonial and postcolonial period that demonstrate that whether the focus of state rule is native land management systems and property rights or the conservation of biodiversity the result is the same: both states construct images of what types of agricultural practices and uses of forest resources are appropriate, what types of property regimes can persist, and how rural people should look and act in order to appear modern.

I conclude that the colonial and postcolonial states share the following characteristics: 1) they control access to resources through legal institutions that privilege private property law over customary practices; 2) they invent discourses that justify centralized rule while obfuscating the realities of those who live on the margins and whose lives depend directly on natural resources; 3) they utilize certain ideals of protection and/or commercialization of resources that privileges elite concerns over local concerns and subsistence uses; 4) they blame rural people for resource degradation while overlooking legal, political and economic structures that influence how rural people use resources; and 5) both the colonial and postcolonial states make it difficult for marginal people to define their own interests in their own terms.

For centuries Europeans were fascinated by rumours and legends of the wealth and wonders of the Orient and by stories of the supposed existence there of realms free from all those tiresome taboos and restrictions that prevailed in the West. Long before the arrival of Vasco da Gama, renegades were serving the Mongols in Iran and Marco Polo had been in the entourage of the Grand Khan himself. The Portuguese pioneers were disconcerted to encounter in 1501 a certain Benvenuto de Abano who had spent the previous twenty-five years sailing the seas of Asia, and his contemporary, the Muslim Khoja Safar Salmâni, an erstwhile Genoese or Albanian. But this was nothing compared with the flow that followed western penetration of the maritime economy of the East, scattering European adventurers and outlaws throughout the Orient anywhere from the shores of the Persian Gulf to those of the Pacific Ocean. And very soon these hopefuls were joined by European pirates, some working from ports in their mother countries, some from the Caribbean and North America, and some from bases in the Indian Ocean, of which Madagascar was, according to taste, the most celebrated or the most notorious. Such men, frequently of remarkable skills and fearsome abilities, exercised a considerable influence on the maritime history of the East in the early modern centuries, and it is with the origins, aspirations and activities of these elusive—indeed often anonymous—but nevertheless highly significant figures that this paper is concerned.

In this paper my main empirical data are taken from the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, but much of what I say applies equally to the other East Malaysian state of Sabah. What is more, my argument is relevant in large part to the southern two-thirds of the island of Borneo—that is, to the four provinces of Indonesian Borneo or Kalimantan. For the purposes of this discussion I have to treat the small, newly independent oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam on the north-west coast of Borneo as an exception. My general concern is with the peripheral position of the Borneo territories, economically and politically, in relation to the developed core areas of the nation-states of Malaysia and Indonesia. As a result of its environmental and demographic characteristics, its historical experiences under British protection and then colonialism in the north, and Dutch colonialism in the south, and its subsequent post-independence experience, Borneo is admirably suited to perform the role of a natural resources area for the national development programmes of Malaysia and Indonesia (Avé and King, 1986). For Indonesian Borneo there is an additional issue; it is also an area for the resettlement of some of the excess population from the densely populated islands of Indonesia's heartlands, especially from Java and Madura. Fortunately, Malaysian Borneo has no need to fulfil such a role in relation to West Malaysia.

The Indian court system is by all accounts unusual. The proceedings are extraordinarily dilatory and comparatively expensive; a single issue is often fragmented into a multitude of court actions; execution of judgements is haphazard; the lawyers frequently seem both incompetent and unethical; false witness is commonplace; and the probity of judges is habitually suspect. Above all, the courts are often unable to bring about a settlement of the disputes that give rise to litigation. So great are these failings that the Indian judicial process can reasonably be seen as a ‘pathology’of a legal system.

Under the terms of a Fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, the author was given study-leave for the academic year 1967–68 to go to Pakistan and India in order to improve his knowledge of Urdu and Punjabi. Having chosen Lahore as the most suitable place to pursue the concurrent study of these two languages, he lived there from September 1967 until April 1968, during which time he became increasingly conscious of, and interested in, the rather peculiar socio-linguistic position of Punjabi in the city's life. This article is a sunnary of the observations he was able to make about this, and of the thoughts to which he was led.

In June 1930, units of the 10th Red Army, which had been formed in northeastern Jiangxi by Fang Zhimin and Shao Shiping, entered the ancient porcelain town of Jingdezhen. The capture of the town brought the modern revolutionary politics of the Chines Communits Party (CCP) into contact with the local government and trades union organizations of a conservative, traditionally-minded town. Jingdezhen remained under the influence of the Red Army from 1930 until the strategic withdrawal from the Northeast Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 which was the forerunner of the complete withdrawal from the Jiangxi base areas and the Long March. There is ample information on the organization of the N.E. Jiangxi Soviet base and its best-known leader, Fang Zhimin, but most studies concentrate on the political structure of the Soviet government, the career and personality of Fang and the peasant milieu in which the Soviet emerged.1 Jingdezhen was not a peasant society or a major city: it was an intermediate small town world with part of the population permanently resident and many seasonal workers from the rural areas who provided a link with peasant communities.

Introduction

The Jama‘at-i-Islami is, by far, one of the most influential Islamic movements in the world today, particularly strong in the countries of South Asia. Its influence extends far beyond the confines of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and the writings of its chief ideologues have exercised a powerful impact on contemporary Muslim thinking all over the world. Much has been written about the movement, both by its leaders and followers as well as by its critics. Most of these writings have focused either on the Jama‘at's ideology or on its historical development in India and Pakistan. Hardly any literature is available on the evolution and history of the Jama‘at in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. This is unfortunate, because here the Jama'at has had a long history of its own, which has followed a path quite distinct from the branches of the movement in both India and Pakistan. Furthermore, the Jama‘at has played a crucial role in the politics of Kashmir right since its inception in the late 1940s, a role that has gained particular salience in the course of the armed struggle in the region that began in the late 1980s and still shows no sign of abating.

From 1919 through 1921, a combination of poor rice harvests and speculative buying caused unprecedented rice shortages in Southeast Asia and led to imposition of government controls over the rice industry. Because there were large workforces in South and Southeast Asia entirely dependent upon imported rice, the shortages were potentially very serious. Malaya and the East Coast Residency of Sumatra, for example, exported non-edible primary products such as tobacco, rubber and tin, and imported rice from Burma and Siam. Two-thirds of the rice consumed each year in Malaya, and one-half of that used in Sumatra's East Coast Residency, was imported, and local food production fell far short of the minimum needed if imported grain could not be obtained. Tea cultivation in Ceylon, tobacco and rubber planting in British North Borneo, and sugar planting in the Philippines were conducted along much the same lines.

The Japanese Twenty-one Demands toward the Chinese government headed by Yuan Shih-k'ai in 1915 marked a milestone in Sino-Japanese relations as well as in the Chinese response to imperialism. Yet studies on the event, particularly on its consequence and influence in China, are still insufficient. Studies by Chinese scholars have not gone far beyond Wang Yun-sheng's publication of collected materials more than fifty years ago. The only book-length study on the event is the first volume of Li Yu-shu's study, published in Taiwan. This last does not even cover the whole period of Sino-Japanese negotiations. His second volume has not yet appeared. Li's contribution is that he has made use of more Japanese documents than Wang. In mainland China, the most current study on the event is a chapter on the Demands in the first volume of the work by Li Hsin and Li Tsung-i. This chapter is based primarily on the works of Wang and Li Yu-shu. Compared with Japanese studies on other landmarks of Sino-Japanese relations, the coverage of this episode is rather thin. There is only one book-length study, published in 1958. As for works in English, Madeleine Chi's book has a chapter dealing with the Sino-Japanese negotiations. Two general works examine the event from a broader perspective.

The eighteenth century in India has generally been described as a period of great turbulence, characterized by march and counter-march, rising and falling fortunes, and bewildering political intrigue. Many historians, focusing on this aspect, have dismissed the century as merely an unsavory hiatus between the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of British domination. Yet there was more to the century than the march and counter-march of armies. The other aspect of the period was the emergence of strong successor states in Gujerat, Bengal, Oudhe, Malwa, Hyderabad, Mysore, and the Punjab. Recently, historians have begun exploring these successor states, looking both back towards the Mughal administrative and ideological heritage and forward towards their role as princely states in British India. There are also important issues within the century itself, such as the role of successor states in developing regional language and consciousness, and successor states as channels of economic and social mobility.

Though local and international trade is a main point on the agenda of any government and though economists build elaborate models around trade statistics, the social consequences of trade have hardly ever been explored in full by social scientists. This is particularly the case in Thailand where only a few studies of limited scope exist on traders, businessmen and markets. There is a reason for this lack of attention to trade. The series of post-war village studies, carried out mainly by anthropologists in isolated villages, stressed intra-village relations and neglected as a consequence larger networks of trade. The most important study on trade during that time was probably the work of Skinner (1962, 1967) on the Bangkok Chinese in which, however, ethnic relations rather than trade and business constituted the main theme of the study.