This article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The article argues that elections bring together different political storylines, rather than one master antagonism. It is the interaction between different narratives that paradoxically provides elections both with a sense of gravity and dignity, and with the lingering threat of rupture and disturbance.

Anxiety about the intemperance and misbehaviour of the European soldiery in nineteenth century India prompted a raft of regulations which not only imposed a punitive regime on those living and working in and around the cantonments, but prompted an extension of military space. This paper specifically examines the methods and levels of control—both of which existed and were attempted in and around the cantonment. These ranged from regulations enacted to order the physical space of the cantonment, to calls for a more direct control over the bodies of the soldiers themselves as well as the numerous others who occupied the land. Crucially for this argument, moral and medical concerns were of critical importance in moulding this ordering. However, as this paper argues, social and class perceptions of the men—and the fear of provoking their wrath—dictated what officers and officials felt was legally possible. The various ways in which the military and government imposed order on the cantonment (or attempted to do so) had serious implications for the shaping of the empire itself and European understanding of its inhabitants.

Since the nineteenth century scholars have depicted Indian castes as timeless, fixed communities whose customs, rituals, and occupational specialities evolved at an unidentifiable point in the distant past. It has now been shown, however, that many jatis are of relatively recent origin, and historians have been able to trace the economic, political, and religious changes which acted to form individual caste groups during the colonial period. Several recent works on south India have argued that the agglomerations of artisans and cultivators described as castes in British ethnographies and Census reports had no real cohesion and were often no more than unstable political alliances or ‘administrative fictions’. In this view it was the misconceived European notion of castes as rigid, competing corporations which stimulated the formation of many south Indian castes after 1880.

The sirdar (also termed sardar and jobber in Indian historiography)—foreman, recruiter, at once a labour leader and an important intermediary figure for the employers of labour both in India and in the sugar colonies—is reassessed in this article. Tithankar Roy's thoughtful 2007 article looked at how the sirdars’ multiple roles represent an incorporation of traditional authority in a modern setting, giving rise to certain contradictions. In 2010 Samita Sen, conversely, developed Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's argument about the use of labour intermediaries in colonial India to reveal how, in the case of the Assam tea plantations, the nexus between contractors and sirdars belies the ‘benign’ role often accorded to the intermediary within narratives from the tea industry. This article provides examples from the overseas labour destinations in the Indian Ocean region, particularly Mauritius, to further develop and nuance the debate, through an assessment of the complexity of sirdari roles in the colonial Indian labour diaspora.

The north-east frontier of India has today become a controversial issue between India and China. It is well known that this frontier is inhabited by many tribes. They are different from the plainsmen of Assam and, like the Tibetans, Mongoloid in origin. This has led some people to argue that they are far closer to Tibetans than to Indians, or that they are not Indian in any sense of the word. Such arguments are based on the assumption that the people of India do not include people of Mongoloid origin. But there are many Indians who are Mongoloid, especially those who live in the hills of Assam south of the Brahmaputra. And in such important respects as religion, dress and methods of building, the people of the north-east frontier of India are far closer to the hilimen living south of the Brahmaputra than to Tibetans. On ethnic grounds therefore it cannot be said that this frontier area is a part of Tibet rather than of India.

This paper is a study of certain aspects of land tenure in late imperial China. An extensive literature has evolved in recent years on the relationship between traditional forms of landholding and rural social structure in the irrigated rice-growing areas of southeastern and central China. In particular, the pronounced separation of‘rights to the surface’ (tianmianquan) and ‘rights to the subsoil’ (tiandiquan), which was common in many regions until its elimination as a result of the land reform campaigns of the People's Republic during the early 1950s, has attracted the interest of a growing number of sinological historians and anthropologists. I analyze here some of the principal characteristics of this traditional Chinese method of dividing property rights in land as they were found in the pre-British New Territories of Hong Kong. I also give consideration to those areas of the existing literature which seem especially relevant to my interpretation of the local manifestations of this extremely important feature of Chinese social life.

In the last two decades there has been much scholarly and journalistic attention given to the issue of how Chinese overseas relate themselves to China. This happened against a backdrop of two major developments in Asia. The first has to do with the fact that many ethnic Chinese outside mainland China have been faring well economically and accumulating considerable wealth in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the second half of the twentieth century. The second is the rise of China as an economic superpower attracting foreign capital after it reopened itself and launched economic reform in 1978.

Trusteeship is Gandhi's conceptualization of the contribution of business houses towards social well-being. Trusteeship is a theoretical construct seeking to redefine the relationship between indigenous business houses and the nationalist movement. That Gandhi succeeded in persuading the business men to participate in the freedom struggle, despite adverse consequences, suggests the extent to which Trusteeship was an effective mechanism in political mobilization. Besides elaborating the concept, this paper also argues that Gandhi was indebted to Andrew Carnegie and John D. Ruskin, amongst others, in his effort to articulate Trusteeship as a bridge between business houses and the freedom struggle; and that this Gandhian idea is a forerunner of the contemporary conceptualization of Corporate Social Responsibility.

In the mid 1920s Prince Damrong Rajanubhab and George Coedès jointly formulated the stylistic classification of Thailand's antiquities that was employed to reorganize the collection of the Bangkok Museum and has since acquired canonical status. The reorganization of the Bangkok Museum as a ‘national’ institution in the final years of royal absolutism responded to increasing international interest in the history and ancient art of Southeast Asia, but represented also the culmination of several decades of local antiquarian pursuits. This paper traces the origins of the art history of Thailand to the intellectual and ideological context of the turn of the twentieth century and examines its parallelism to colonial projects of knowledge that postulated a close linkage between race, ancestral territory and nationhood.

This paper is about a special category of guiqiao or ‘returned overseas Chinese’, in southern Fujian. Arriving in China from Bali, Indonesia in 1961, the people were settled in an overseas Chinese farm. The paper illustrates how the re-migrants coped with life in China and how they see themselves today. The returned overseas Chinese reterritorize their Indonesian and Balinese cultural life in China, and they, including the local-born children, speak Balinese and eat Indonesian food. Their experiences provide much food for thought on acculturation, migration and identity as well as on the idea of ‘homeland’.

Mundane knowledge of how information flows is essential for a proper understanding of large organisations and complex activities. It gives us valuable insights into the prevailing constraints of the era and the creative responses that enabled the demands of its cosmopolitan residents to be met. Though the sinews of communication have been a major topic of historical inquiry in recent decades, the focus has been decidedly uneven; much of the attention has been directed towards modern times and, for earlier periods, has been confined almost entirely to Europe, the western European empires and those sectors of the world's political economy in which Europeans had a stake. The rest of the world, in comparison, has been neglected, which may be seen clearly in the case of early modern India and the Middle East. This paper seeks to rectify the imbalance by offering a typology for making sense of how packages of low weight and high value were collected, transported and delivered over long distances within the region in the eighteenth century. While drawing on a wide range of sources, at the core of this analysis lies the correspondence of the headmen of a group—the Aiyangar pattamars—who specialised as couriers in pre-colonial southern India. Among the principal claims set forth are that there existed in this period two basic modes of private communication: in one, personal trust was paramount, in the other, the mode was effectively monopolised by recognised communities providing the necessary informational services within their cultural domain. These claims, if sustained, have major implications for current views on early modern India and the Middle East.

The development of France's territories in Indo-China between about 1900 and 1940 was based on an ideology of economic growth coupled with social and cultural transformation. These twin aims, what French colonial theory termed the mise en valeur and mission civilisatrice of the overseas empire, can tell us much about the attitude of colonial scientists and administrators to defining, controlling and developing the forest resources of the region. This paper examines colonial attitudes towards forest resources and the peoples who relied on the forest for their livelihoods, and explores the ways in which both economic and cultural preoccupations about the ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ use of those resources was reflected in the institutions and policies of the state. Through an examination of the origins and development of forest legislation and, in particular, its effects on indigenous peoples, the paper highlights both the mechanisms used to control indigenous peoples and practices, and the wider context within which such policies were framed.

This article focuses on Robert Hart during the Boxer Rebellion. My reconstruction of his activities is based on a recently discovered file in the archives of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service held at the Second Historical Archives in Nanjing. While it has long been known that Hart corresponded with Qing officials during the Siege itself and while a few letters have been published, the file contains more than one hundred exchanges between Hart and Qing officials written after the end of the Siege of the Legations. I have further relied on a box of documents dealing with the Boxer Rebellion in the Hart Manuscript Collection at the Queen's University of Belfast, including Hart's notes on his meetings with Qing officials. These materials provide insight into the way Hart was able to persuade the Qing and foreign countries to begin negotiations and illustrate the critical role he played in fashioning the Boxer Protocol signed on 7 September 1901.

This paper considers non-governmental famine relief in India during 1896–1898 and 1899–1901. It details the efforts of a broad spectrum of middle-class Indians, Christian missionaries, British non-officials and off-duty civil servants who were drawn into voluntary service on semi-official committees which were responsible for distributing record sums raised through international appeals. It also explores the extension of relief work by independent agencies in the 1890s. The paper considers evolving British attitudes to indigenous relief methods and the sometimes fraught relations between government and voluntary agencies. It suggests that voluntary famine relief activities during the 1890s mark a transition from traditional religious philanthropy to organised social service. Voluntary relief at this time differed from earlier responses to famine hunger because it was marked by fundraising, co-operation with other agencies and the personal service of volunteers. In conclusion, it is shown that participation in relief in the 1890s inspired a new generation of educated Indians to channel their nationalism into practical social service after 1900.

That the transition to self-governance under a nation-state has not been accompanied by the greater focus on Indian citizens’ welfare which many expected, has been the source of much confusion and disappointment. Looking at late-colonial debates about property rights under Hindu personal law, this paper seeks to explain why people assumed that independence could change the relationship between the state and Indian society, and also why this has not come about. It argues that, from the latter half of the nineteenth century, economic, social, and political changes placed pressure on the very hierarchical structures of joint-family patriarchy that colonial rule had hitherto depended on. Calls for family reform seemed, at certain moments, to critique patriarchal control and social order more generally, creating the intellectual space to rethink the place of women within the family, and the state more widely. Yet, while couched in the language of women's rights, underpinning these reform debates was an interest to change men's property rights and enhance their individual control over the family. Thus, the interwar years witnessed not just a breaking down of an old colonial patriarchal order, but also the establishment of a new, post-colonial patriarchy based around the authority of the propertied husband.

The period from 1937 to 1946, between the first and second elections to provincial legislatures held in British India under the 1935 Government of India Act, is one of great interest in Indo-Pakistani history. This was the period of ‘if only,’ the period in which it is still possible to imagine an unpartitioned South Asia.

The time has come when the communal holocaust must be confined to the Indian States, the time has come when both the Hindu and Muslim newspapers must be prevented from blowing communalism into British India. There was a time when our politicians like Gokhale rightly used to take pride in Indian States being free from communalism, which was a vice in British India.… But the table appears to have been turned.

For the last few years an imaginative programme for training Buddhist monks in basic health care has been in operation in Thailand. The scheme, originally based on two wats (temples) in Bangkok, is now being extended to the Northeast where poverty and malnutrition are most acute. The originator of the programme, Dr Prawase Wasi, a distinguished haematologist, has received several awards for his work, which is increasingly recognized as a major landmark in the implementation of health care in developing countries.

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.

This paper examines a fundamental premise of Anglo-Hindu law on succession between 1860 and 1940, that kinship was emblematic of secular modes of living, to analyse its implications for the assertion of masculinity within ascetic orders in northern India. Legal discourses engaged with rights to succession within ascetic orders, by functioning on the assumption that the renunciatory life of ascetics was antithetical to sexuality and domesticity. This institutionalization of law, that defined asceticism and fixed ascetic masculinities within a legal frame, occurred with the consent of ascetic orders concerned with the ownership and distribution of property, even though sexuality and gender played a central role in shaping relationships within sacred spaces. Myriad ties embracing the language of kinship shaped ascetic orders. Bonds of sentiment and sexual attachment over-lapped with, sustained, and produced the bonds tying spiritual preceptors to their disciples. Relationships within ascetic families, consisting of men, their female companions, children and relatives, along with their attendant obligations were validated through rights of ownership and inheritance to property. Taking advantage of Anglo-Hindu law by the early twentieth century, ascetic orders sought to ‘purify’ their genealogies through the medium of property disputes fought in colonial courts. By manipulating the legal meanings ascribed to asceticism, masculinity and renunciation, these orders effaced unwanted members from their orders with varying degrees of success, especially women and children.