This article explores how nutrition science became a significant part of the nation-building project in both Republican China and the early People's Republic of China within the context of burgeoning popular concerns over bodily health and an increasing sense of urgency. Insofar as nutrition science offered a new type of expertise about what to eat and what not to eat in daily life, it entailed harnessing the state's potential persuasive power to garner willing compliance, if not tacit obedience, from the population. Unlike previous scholarship, which takes the viewpoint of government authorities and the medical elite, this article argues that popular concerns about bodily health and culinary curiosity that were prevalent in major Chinese cities helped to popularize state-led dietary reform campaigns that culminated during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and continued even after the revolutionary regime change in the 1950s.

In 1914, the Indian Army was deployed against the enemies of the British Empire. This paper analyses the administrative mechanism as well as the imperial assumptions and attitudes which shaped the recruitment policy of the Indian Army during the First World War. From the late nineteenth century, the Martial Race theory (a bundle of contradictory ideas) shaped the recruitment policy. With certain modifications, this theory remained operational to the first decade of the twentieth century. The construction of the ‘martial races’ enabled the British to play-off different communities against each other to prevent the emergence of a unified anti-British sentiment among the colonized. During the Great War, faced with the rising demands of manpower, the army was forced to modify the Martial Race theory. However, a conscript army did not emerge in British-India. This was due to imperial policies, the inherent social divisions of Indian society, and because the demands for military manpower remained relatively low in comparison to India's demographic resources. Due to innovations in the theory and praxis of recruitment, the volume of recruitment showed a linear increase from 1914 to 1918, with maximum intensification of recruitment occurring during 1917 and 1918. But as the war ended in November 1918, despite the entry of several new communities, the bulk of the Indian Army still came from the traditional martial races.

Five years after the Meiji Restoration, on the seventh of the second month of 1873, the Japanese Government issued the following decree:

The taking of human life is strictly prohibited by the law of the land, and the right to punish a murderer lies with the Government. However, since ancient times it has been customarily regarded as the duty of a son or younger brother to avenge the murder of his father or elder brother. While this is a natural expression of the deepest human feelings, it is ultimately a serious breach of the law on account of private enmity, a usurpation for private purposes of public authority, and cannot be treated as other than the crime of wilful slaughter. Furthermore, in extreme cases the undesirable situation often arises that one person wantonly and deliberately kills anothe in the name of revenge without regard for the rights and wrongs of the case or the justification for his act. This is to be deplored, and it is therefore decreed that vengeance shall be strictly prohibited. In future, should some close relative unfortunately be killed, the facts should be set out clearly an a complaint be laid before the authorities. Let it be plainly understood that anyone who ignores this injunction and adheres to the old customs, taking the law into his own hands to kill for revenge, will be subject to a penalty appropriate to his offence.

Education and assimilation were key components of Japanese colonial policy in Taiwan: assimilation of the island's native Taiwanese population (native islanders of Chinese ancestry) was an important goal; education was an instrument for attainment of this goal. When during their fifty years of rule (1895–1945) Taiwan's administrators altered their interpretation or definition of assimilation, they modified educational policies accordingly. From beginning to end of the Japanese period in Taiwan its government intended education for native islanders to be a major tool of its assimilation policy, which although a consistent policy was not a static one.

The paradox of the authoritarian rule of the Indian Raj at the heart of Britain's liberal empire was one that ran continuously through the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism. Both as the unpaid arsenal of Eastern expansion and defence, and as the essential stop-gap to Britain's multilateral pattern of trade, India was the necessary if incongruous adjunct of Liberal England, supporting the doctrines of progress at home on the basis of the autocratic control of its British-born hierophants over the numberless ‘contented masses’ of the Indian countryside. The resulting contrast between the increasingly self-governing white dominions, and the Indian maverick upholding in chains the very fabric of the empire, was also reflected in the political thinking of the motherland itself, by way of the stresses and contradictions which the conditions of the Raj's existence served to create within the liberal framework of the Victorian intellectual world. At the core of the Victorian liberal empire stood the strictly paternalistic government of the Raj in India; at the centre of the ‘benevolent despotism’ that British rule in the subcontinent adopted stood the steel frame of the Indian Civil Service, ‘much more of a government corporation than of a purely civil service’ and the creator as much as the executor of British policy there.

It is usually thought that industry was very limited in Hong Kong until after 1947. Study of pre-war Chinese trade directories indicates, however, that industry was already well developed on the eve of the Japanese invasion. This represented partly a surge in industrial growth after 1937, and partly long-established industry rooted in the local community.

Swidden cultivators in the Southeast Asian highlands may work far from lowland centres, but certain crops attract powerful interests. During the First Indochina War (1946–54), French and Vietnamese political actors climbed the hills in pursuit of the Black River region's opium production and trade. Even after combat formally ended, opium contests continued into an independent Vietnam, intersecting with larger struggles over ethnic difference, state resource claims, and market organization. Using upland cultivators to examine post-colonial statemaking, this article tells a new story about opium's tangled relationship with socialist rule in Vietnam. Drawing on French and Vietnamese archival records, it traces the operation of successive opium regimes through war and into restive peace. Based on evidence of opium tax and purchase operations conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) from 1951 to 1960, it argues that regulating the commodity sensitized cultivators to their long, fraught relations with state power. Far from passive, cultivating subjects animated revolutionary ideals, engaged smuggling networks, negotiated resource rights, and mounted an oppositional social movement. Peaking in 1957, the movement and subsequent crackdown illustrate tensions embedded in post-colonial relations of exchange and rule.

Islam's devotional and mystical tradition, Sufism (tasawwuf), is commonly cast as antithetical to Salafi Islam. Self-identified ‘Salafis’, with their ideological roots in anti-liberal strands of twentieth-century modernist Islam, do commonly view Sufis as heretics propagating practices wrongly introduced into Islam centuries after the time of the pious ancestors (the Salaf). Yet reformist zeal that fixes on the singular importance of the Salaf (particularly the Prophet Muhammad and his principal companions) as models for correct piety can also be found amongst Sufis. This paper calls attention to the Salafist colouration of Sufism in two areas of popular culture: television preaching and the popular religious ‘how-to’ books and DVDs that make the preachers’ messages available for purchase. It reprises the teachings of two of the best known Indonesian Muslim televangelists, ‘Hamka’ (b. 1908, d. 1981) and M. Arifin Ilham (b. 1969), both of whom also happen to be champions of Sufism, and analyses the different rhetorical uses each has made of references to the ‘Salaf’ and the notion of ‘Salafist’ Islam.

This paper explores how Sri Lanka might fit into Victor Lieberman's theory of Eurasian history. Lieberman's work to date has focused on the ‘protected rimlands’ which he sees as sharing the same historical path from a milieu of warring little kingdoms to increasingly large, solid states. But what happens in a land, such as Sri Lanka, which can be considered ‘protected’ before 1500, and ‘unprotected’ thereafter? Political integration and boundaries are first discussed, followed by ethnic and historical awareness before 1500. The third section sketches the chronological development of Buddhism before 1500, while the fourth considers the impact of the European interruption, and the fifth briefly looks at the results for 1600–1800. Along the way, some problems with applying the notion of ‘early modernity’ to Sri Lanka are disclosed.

This article studies the impact of the creation of a new state in northern India through an analysis of space. The space under consideration is the town of Gopeshwar, which serves as the administrative headquarters of a district in the state of Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand was created as a distinct Himalayan state in 2000 after a prolonged period of mass agitation to this end. The movement for statehood had emphasized historical neglect coupled with exploitation of the mountains of Uttarakhand by the plains. Beginning with an analysis of the town plan, this article moves on to describe how this place is made into a space by everyday practices. In particular it concentrates on the narratives of agents of the state who express a longing to escape this ‘remote’ town. Through an interrogation of the trope of remoteness, this article argues that the creation of the new state has served, ironically enough, to accentuate the traditional characterization of the Himalaya as a backward, inferior space within India.

This paper examines the 1915 Singapore Mutiny within the context of border-crossing patriotic and anarchist movements in the early twentieth century world. It traces some of the continuities and discontinuities with later revolutionary movements in Asia, especially in terms of networks and the sites of their interactions. Through this, it reflects on the meaning of the ‘transnational’ at this moment in Asian history.

The cultural and historical dimensions of rural lives matter. However, development practitioners and writings tend to play down these aspects. This article demonstrates the significance of oral history in revealing the meanings of women smallholders’ millet-based foodways in southern India. It argues that women farmers’ cultural practices around food constitute fundamental ‘capabilities’ nurtured over a long historical duration, and are essential to any meaningful articulation of ‘development’. Drawing on age-old spiritual beliefs and practices involving non-human entities, the women demonstrate fine-tuned skills in nurturing seeds and growing crops, in preparing and cooking food, and in discerning food tastes, particularly in relation to the local staple ragi, or finger millet. They also express their creativity in the joys of performing songs and farming rituals linked to the agricultural cycle. In this way, cultural capabilities express significant dimensions of women's agency exercised in the intimately related spheres of food and farming. Oral history thus emerges as a research method capable of generating insights into concrete manifestations of culture over a significant historical duration, one that is particularly conducive to reclaiming the voices and life experiences of subaltern groups such as women smallholders who are either not heard or are marginalized in written contemporary and historical documentary records.

The spectre of civil society is haunting South East Asia. Witness Manila's ‘People Power’ in 1986, Bangkok's ’No-More-Dictatorship‘ demonstrations in 1992, and, most recently, the Reformasi movements centered on Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in 1998. Indeed, these recent waves of popular mobilization have underscored the significance of civil society—as political discourse and social terrain—for the successful launching of challenges against the non-democratic state in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. In terms of the political discourse of ‘civil society’, a common claim to spontaneous voluntarism and cross-class universalism was articulated and celebrated in some form by each of the four mobilizational campaigns identified above.

The years 1916–17 were something of a turning-point in the development of Vietnamese nationalism. In Cochinchina an abortive attack on Saigon central prison in February 1916 was followed by a great many arrests and the virtual destruction, for the time being, of the network of secret societies which had grown up in many of the colony's provinces during the previous decade. Many members of such societies were brought before special military tribunals (justified by the fact that France was at war in Europe) and sentenced to death, exile, or long terms of imprisonment. In Annam another abortive plot, probably quite separate, was hatched at Huê in May 1916, involving the kidnapping of the boy-emperor Duy-Tân; but he was found by the French two years later, before a projected rising in the provinces of Quang-Nam and Quang-Ngai could get under way. The leader of the plot, Trân Cao Vân, was executed along with three others, and the deposed emperor was exiled to the island of Réunion.2 These events in Cochinchina and Annam brought to a halt, for a time at least, the activities of secret nationalist groups which, drawing their initial inspiration from Japan, had been increasing in strength since about 1905. In Tongking there were also secret associations, mostly acknowledging the leadership of Phan Bôi Châu who was then in exile at Canton, and strongly influenced by the revolutionary methods of Sun Yat-sen. But there also, their last important operation for several years occurred in September 1917, when Luong Ngoc Quyên escaped from prison at Thai-Nguyen and was able to control the town for a week, before being driven out and committing suicide.3 Phan Bôi Châu himself was arrested by the Chinese the following year.

Scholars of Burma cannot, in good conscience, invoke the usual justification — lack of adequate primary materials — for failing to construct an economic history of the precolonial era. By comparison with Siam, Cambodia, the Malay principalities, or indeed any Indianized Southeast Asian society with the possible exception of Java, Burma offers a uniquely continuous and voluminous array of documents bearing on patterns of cultivation, monetization, taxation, and domestic and foreign trade from at least the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

In recent years, studies of the mechanics of European colonialism in Asia and Africa have largely focused on the creation of collaborative systems and dependent economic structures within the colonized societies. The part that troops played in carving out a colonial territory and crushing primary resistance is often described, but seldom do accounts of colonial rule examine in detail the means of coercion employed to maintain a favourable political and economic environment. If, however, it is even partly true that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then discussion of colonial situations must take into consideration the role that the régime's armed agencies played in containing indigenous political movements and in themselves constituting one of the principal pillars of collaboration.

Within the space of a few years a remarkable transformation took place in the taxation system of the Federated Malay States (FMS). Up until the early 1900s the British administration of these states relied, as had the sultans and chiefs from whom the British had taken control in the 1870s, on the revenue farm system for collecting many taxes. Most revenue farms were constituted according to the standard pattern found elsewhere in Southeast Asia at this time and in Europe up to the eighteenth century. The government granted a private contractor, the revenue farmer, the exclusive right to collect a certain tax in a specified area for a set number of years in return for a fixed rent, and the farmer kept for himself any money which he collected over and above what he owed the government in rent. A great variety of taxes were collected in this way. There were farms to collect the export duty on atap, firewood, timber, and rattan; most towns had market farms; and in Perak there was even a ‘farm of river turtle eggs’. But the most important farms were those which profited from what officials referred to as the ‘luxuries and vices’ of the immigrant Chinese community, particularly the workers who mined the tin which was the main source of wealth of these states.These farms were for the collection of the import duty on opium to be consume by Chinese in the mining districts of the interior, the sale of prepared opium (chandu) in coastal districts, the manufacture of spirits and the collection of the import duty on spirits, the right to run pawnshops, and the right to organize public gambling. Next to the export duty on tin, which the government collected itself, the income from these farms was the government's largest source of revenue. In the period 1890-94, 38.8 percent of the total revenue of the four states came from the export duty on tin and about 33 percent from the farms.2 But within the space of a few years the government abolished all the major farms, and by 1913 virtually none of the revenue of the FMS cam from revenue farms.

The Henan famine of 1942 occurred during the middle of the Sino-Japanese war, in a province that was divided between Japanese, Nationalist and Communist political control. Partly due to this wartime context, existing accounts of the famine rely almost exclusively on eyewitness reports. This paper presents a range of statistical sources on the famine, including weather records, contemporary economic surveys and population censuses. These statistical sources allow similarities to be drawn between the Henan famine and other famines that occurred during the Second World War, such as in Bengal, when the combination of bad weather, war-induced disruptions to food markets, and the relegation of famine relief to the war effort, brought great hardship to civilians living near the war front.

The wartime period between 1937 and 1945 provided an exceptional opportunity for the Guomindang state to experiment with a wide array of schemes that sought to further its nation-state project in the borderland regions of China. Under the rubric of ‘frontier reconstruction’ (bianjiang jianshe) it devised a series of plans that encompassed both the economic and cultural transformations of these regions. This paper discusses a particular scheme devised by Chinese anthropologist, Li Anzhai (1900–1985), during his stay at the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Labrang where he sought to transform borderland societies into a modern Chinese citizenry. A key aspect to his strategy was the mobilization of youth where trained cadres and students performed what became known as ‘frontier service’ (bianjiang fuwu) establishing a dialogue with the community's own particular demands by means of building schools, hospitals and agricultural projects. This paper argues that the notion of ‘frontier service’ and the ‘cultural reconstruction’ project propounded by Li not only sought to modernize and unify China around a distinct multicultural identity, it was also an important mobilizing force amongst sectors of wartime youth which arguably introduced young Han Chinese to a region which they had hitherto only imagined in the pre-war period.

In this article, I set out to explore the possibility of a shared life between two places in the highlands of Pakistan and Tajikistan—a region dissected by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan corridor, by present-day nation-state boundaries, by historical divisions between Central and South Asia, and by a former Cold War frontier. Moving away from a take on conviviality as specifically tied to urban spaces and face-to-face encounters, I attempt to trace the processes that determine the coming and going of shared modes of being. In doing so, I first situate the two places—Karimabad and Khorog—in their respective post-Cold War borderlands and point to their historically ambivalent status as ‘marginal’ places at the frontier, culturally diverse ‘hubs’, and sites of globalization. Then I analyse the historical build-up—material and ideological—that led to the establishment of specific forms of connection and disconnection between the two places. In the last part of the article, I discuss how people in and from Karimabad and Khorog seek out opportunities to attain shared instances of common sociality, which often remain ephemeral and subject to regimes of power. Finally, I argue that the cases of these two ‘marginal hubs’ highlight the importance of looking beyond the conventional ‘imperial centre’ when debating the dynamics that lead people to desire, create, and abandon ties across difference.