Upon inquiring into a boundary dispute between Tooringi and the Dutch-owned village of Jagannaikpuram, Leveston G. K. Murray asked generally of inhabitants ‘how far they supposed their ground extended’. But on that day in April 1795, and to Murray's dismay, he ‘received no other answer than that they did not know’. L. G. K. Murray and Mr Topander, both East India Company officials based in Masulipatam on the Teluga-speaking Andhra Coast of Southeast India, then tried a different approach, and showed those gathered a ‘Gentoo Paper’ containing a Dutch account of the nature of the boundary between the two villages. The consensus among the Telugu-speaking onlookers, in fact, was that the document was in order. No one proposed any problems with its authenticity to those Company officers.

One of the most difficult sets of questions for any imperial power or ruling group is if, when, and how to open the ranks of the imperial services to the imperialized. For a considerable period of time there may be logical enough reasons, related to imperial security and distrust of the conquered, for avoiding these questions altogether. However, sooner or later it becomes neccessary to win the collaboration of the losers, and then certain ‘liberalizing’, or just realistic tendencies begin to prevail. These are often inspired more by ‘home’ influences than by ‘out-post’ sentiment which tends to be more suspicious of its recent victims. Nevertheless, somewhere along the line a sometimes embarrassing precedent is made, and the integration or localization of the imperial civil and military services, and even of the executive, is undertaken. Usually the start is at the lowest levels, the clerks and soldiers, but later the upper or officer class also begins to lose its initial imperial or racial solidarity.

This paper quantifies the consumption and production of cotton textiles at different stages of processing in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial era (1820–1941). It discusses the main factors that impeded the development of an internationally competitive cotton textile industry, and concludes that production in the industry increased significantly in Java during 1820–71, and again during 1874–1914 and 1934–41. However, most activity involved finishing of imported cotton cloth to suit local preferences. Spinning and weaving increased only marginally, as domestic production was precluded by the high-labour intensity of small-scale production, marginal local raw cotton production, and competitive international markets for yarn and cloth. Unfavourable and fluctuating real exchange rates discouraged investment in modern spinning and weaving ventures until trade protection and technological change in small-scale weaving caused rapid growth of domestic production after 1934.

The economic impact of the West on China has long been a subject of debate among students of Chinese history. Despite numerous books and articles, however, a consensus has yet to emerge. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that the more analytical contributions to the debate have been too sweeping in their historical coverage, while those with a more limited time perspective have been insufficiently rigorous in their analysis. The aim of this paper is to renew this debate, but to do so by a method that will, hopefully, avoid the pitfalls of the past. Specifically, I intend to employ an explicitly theoretical framework to examine the facts of a particular period—the 1860s. This decade is especially important since it immediately followed the expanded opening of China by the Treaty of Tientsin in 1860. The analytical framework employed—economic theory—is applicable to any period in modern Chinese history, but as the data examined are drawn mostly from the 1860s, my conclusions, strictly speaking, are applicable only to that decade. For reasons discussed below, however, I strongly believe these conclusions to be applicable to the entire period from 1860 to 1895.

Those of us who work on the Indian princely states sometimes seem to share a certain marginalization, a certain distance from the debates shaping the writing of South Asian history today. We also share, more positively, views of that history that do not focus on British colonial rule and are not based on colonial sources, views that arguably offer more continuity with pre-British history and alternative visions of the South Asian past, present, and future.

In February 1937, the Congress party in the Madras Presidency won 159 of 215 seats in the provincial Legislative Assembly at the first elections under provincial autonomy. It was the most convincing victory for the Congress in any province of British India, and neither the Madras Government nor the Congress leaders had expected it. In the two and a half years Congress rule that followed, their ministers made adept use of their powers. They cut land revenue and dismantled the procedure for revising the land revenue demand, thus appealing to the pocket of every landholder. They re-instated all the village officers who had been dismissed for aiding the Congress during Civil Disobedience, thus instructing the leaders of rural society where the source of power and influence now lay. They passed two measures to alleviate the burden of agricultural debt, and threatened to legislate in favour of the tenants inside the major landed estates. Meanwhile, for the first time, the Cogress established a network of committees throughout the province, and by 1939 this new machine had placed virtually every local government board under a Congress régime. The number of Congerss members in the Tamil and Andhra areas rose from 115,971 on the eve of the 1937 elections to 594,397 in 1938.

Studies of Punjabi partition-related refugee resettlement have revealed a gap between official accounts and those provided by migrants. The former seek to legitimize the state by narrating its role in the transformation of helpless refugees into productive citizens. First hand accounts on the other hand frequently write the state out of the rehabilitation process. This paper seeks firstly to illustrate these processes at work by contrasting the narrative account contained in the Government of India publication, The Story of Rehabilitation, with interview material collected amongst former refugees. It then goes on to reveal the presence of state agency in cases of rehabilitation, despite refugee denial. Finally, it explores the refugee-state tensions arising from migrants’ experience of local level bureaucratic and police services’ corruption, which goes some way towards explaining the narrative dissonances.

Twentieth-century industrialization in the agricultural landscapes of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam took a very different form from other places, characterized less by a continuous spread of large-scale technology than by its destruction in mid-century and the subsequent spread of small technology which powered scooters, water pumps, and boats. The numbers of these portable motors, an everyday technology in 1960, rose from a few thousand units in 1963 to millions in the present day. The colonial and post-colonial state in Vietnam played a key role in the demise of large technology and, ultimately, of the water infrastructure. Its failures during wartime spurred farmers to adopt cheap, small engines to survive; however, the state's role was complex during this time. Several key factors, including the influence of American aid programmes and the contributions of Taiwanese agricultural advisers, especially those pushing high-yield rice, favoured the adoption of small engines. From an ecological viewpoint, the post-1960 explosion in the use of small motors, especially as water pumps, has brought people and states in Southeast Asia to an ecological impasse as unrestricted use has impacted on water tables, salinity levels, and the long-term sustainability of agriculture in many places. This paper examines the state's indirect role in shaping this silent revolution, and it considers the political and ideological factors underpinning its history.

This paper argues that our understanding of the transition to colonialism in South Asia can be enriched by examining the formation of revenue collection systems in north India between 1750 and 1850. It examines agrarian revenue systems not through the prism of legalism or landholding patterns, but by looking at the paper and record-based mechanisms by which wealth was actually extracted from India's hinterlands. It also examines the Kayastha pensmen who became an exponentially significant component of an Indo-Muslim revenue administration. They assisted the extension of Mughal revenue collection capabilities as qanungos (registrars) and patwaris (accountants). The intensity of revenue assessment, extraction and collection had increased by the mid 1700s, through the extension of cultivation and assessment by regional Indian kingdoms. The East India Company, in its agrarian revenue settlements in north India, utilized this extant revenue culture to push through savage revenue demands. These Kayastha pensmen thus furnished the ‘young’ Company with the crucial skills, physical records, and legitimacy to garner the agrarian wealth which would fund Britain's Indian empire. These more regular patterns of paper-oriented administration engendered a process of ‘bureaucratization’ and the emergence of the modern colonial state.

In the wake of the Government of India Act of 1935, provincial politics emerged as a challenge to the authority and legitimacy of all-India, centralised political parties. While the Congress and the Muslim League set up a binary opposition between secular and religious nationalism, provincial politicians refused to succumb to the singularity of either alternative. Partition historiography has been concerned with the interplay of national and communal ideologies in the 1940s, overshadowing this third trajectory of regional politics that was informed by provincial particularities. This article traces a short-lived alternative that emerged in Bengal between 1940 and 1943 under the premiership of Fazlul Huq. Huq produced a peculiar form of identity politics that appealed not only to religious sentiment but also to regional loyalty that cut across the religious divide. Significantly, he did so without resorting to secular claims. By challenging Jinnah's claim to being the sole spokesman of Muslims in India and highlighting the different concerns of a province with a Muslim majority, Huq reconciled the twin identities of religion and region within the same political paradigm, and foreshadowed the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971.

The growth of industrial suburbs with a large working-class population around Calcutta in the final years of the nineteenth century profoundly influenced the politics on the streets of the ‘second city’ of the British empire. The increasing concentration of a large industrial work force in the newly growing mill towns around Calcutta in these years was accompanied by frequent industrial action and violent confrontations between the colonial law enforcement agencies and various sections of factory operatives in the city and the suburban mill towns. In the 1890s, when the Indian Jute Mill Association (hereafter IJMA) extended working hours and increased the work load in the factories, Calcutta and suburban mill towns witnessed numerous strikes. In 1895 these strikes frightened the jute mill owners so much that the IJMA pleaded with the government to reorganize police forces in the mill municipalities in order to protect the European managerial staff from the wrath of angry workers.

Following the police raid on the ‘Muthanga’ land occupation by Adivasi (‘indigenous’) activists in Kerala, India, in February 2003, intense public debate erupted about the fate of Adivasis in this ‘model’ development state. Most commentators saw the land occupation either as the fight-back of Adivasis against their age-old colonization or the work of ‘external’ agitators. Capitalist restructuring and ‘globalization’ was generally seen as simply the latest chapter in the suffering of these Adivasis. Little focused attention was paid to the recent class trajectory of their lives under changing capitalist relations, the exact social processes under which they were having to make a living, and what had only recently—and still largely ambiguously—made them ready to identify themselves politically as ‘Adivasi’. Demonstrating the usefulness of ethnographic curiosity driven by an ‘expanded’ class analysis, as elaborated in Marxian anthropology, this article provides an alternative to the liberal-culturalist explanation of indigenism in Kerala. It argues instead that contemporary class processes—as experienced close to the skin by the people who decided to participate in the Muthanga struggle—were what shaped their decision to embrace indigenism.

In the South Asian setting, the fields of gender history and family history are still predominantly concerned with relatively elite social groups. Few studies have examined issues of gender and the family in the history of Dalit, low-caste, and socially marginalized communities, especially those that were labelled ‘criminal tribes’ from the mid-nineteenth century on. This article explores the ways in which gender patterned criminalized communities’ experiences of everyday colonial governance under Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the first two decades that it was enforced in northern India. In this early period, the colonial government did not closely regulate marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or the gendered organization of labour within communities categorized as ‘criminal tribes’. Nevertheless, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the ‘criminal tribes’, which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce ‘industrious’ families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples’ interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis. Meanwhile, different forms of leverage and evasion were open to men and women to cope with their criminalization and so the colonial state was experienced in highly gendered ways.

This article explores the joking relations that constitute conviviality in one of the largest marginal bazaars in Moscow. The marketplace is known as a hub for migrant workers and traders, and is often stigmatized in the media. It remains one of the largest commercial nodes in the bazaar network that stretches across and beyond much of ex-Soviet Eurasia. Scholars of conviviality have often claimed that convivial living represents more than hilarity and laughter; exactly how laughter actually happens and what sets of relations and interactions make it possible have been largely left out of the discussion. I will explore how a certain joking repertoire both connects Russian customers with migrant sellers and traders from Central Asia, Vietnam, Ukraine, and elsewhere, and animates relations between sellers themselves. I argue that these relations are characterized by volatility, which incorporates play and improvisation within different registers of uncertainty, conflict, enjoyment, proximity, and—ultimately—virtuality.

On one of his many visits to India Kingsley Martin was once asked how he saw the prospects for Western Europe. His reply was that he was very optimistic as most of the leaders of Western Europe then were very old. If the transition from age to youth in national leadership is a sufficient basis for hope, we certainly have much to be grateful for in India. And our young Prime Minister has already struck a very responsive chord among large sections of Indian society by his promise of change. His mother had won the 1980 election on the promise of a ‘Government that works’. Mr Gandhi promised in 1984 a ‘Government that works faster’—thus heralding a promise of greater efficiency in general. When asked about the objective of his new Government, he used the now famous phrase that his objective was to take India into the twenty-first century. Taken at its face value, this was a rather vacuous phrase. It is not necessary for anyone to carry India, Atlas-like, into the twenty-first century. It would arrive at our doorstep in due course, as it will at everyone else's, and most probably without even a whimper.

A new class is emerging in rural Kerala. Though it was christened a bourgeoisie by E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the chief minister of Kerala state during the two phases of land reform (1957–59 and 1967–69), it is not an extension of the modern industrial bourgeoisie into a rural society. Rather it is a distinctly new social formation emerging from among the farmers. The opportunities for farmers to adopt bourgeois aspirations have been created by the particular form of Keralaʼns capitalism interacting with recent changes in localized agrarian society.

By an edict of 15 February 1805 the Governor-General ordered the Chinese moneylenders from the town of Buitenzorg to report to the Commissioner of Native Affairs how much money the inhabitants of the Buitenzorg Regency owed them. Non-compliance with this order would result in cancellation of the debts. The Commissioner compiled a list, based on these reports, dated 30 June 1805. In 45 pages, consisting of 672 entries, the debtors of and debts to 26 Chinese are listed. The debtors and debts are listed under their creditor, the Chinese moneylender. The entries are probably given as they were reported by the Chinese themselves, although there is no logic in the ordering of the names. An ‘ideal’ entry yields the following data: name of moneylender, name of debtor, his place of residence, year that the debt was incurred, amount of money borrowed with sawahs (wet rice fields) as collateral, number of pétak (embanked ricefield) sawah, amount borrowed with buffaloes as a collateral, number of buffaloes, amount of cash borrowed (without securities), amount of credit for merchandise, amount of annual interest, number of years paid, number of years still to be paid.

The system of medicine known today variously as ‘international,’ ‘scientific,’ or ‘Western’ entered South Asia as early as the seventeenth century. For two centuries this system, known in India as allopathic medicine, coexisted with the medical traditions indigenous to South Asia. In 1835 the period of coexistence ended and the adherents of the allopathic tradition began to press claims that they, and only they, should be allowed to direct and staff the medical and health programs of the East India Company and, after 1858, the various Governments of South Asia. Allopathic medical men wished to decide the goal or goals of governmental medical efforts, who was to be allowed to participate in those efforts, and who was to be served by those programs. In short, allopathic medical men wanted control of the development of all facets of health policy in South Asia.

This paper examines the colonial representation of tribal raids in the Northeast frontier of India and argues that, rather than being the ‘lawless and predatory habits of the savage hill tribes’, it was an expression of hill politics. The Kukis raided British territory when they discovered that an extension of the colonial boundary threatened their very existence as an independent state-evading population. It traces how the Kukis re-ethnicized themselves in the hills by evolving a system that is state-repellent, protected by a vast strip of forested jungle around their settlements commonly known as the ‘hunting ground’. It locates the ‘raid’ in the context of the difference in the perception of space and territoriality between the colonial state and indigenous polities. Colonial spatial ideology and its hill-valley binary are seen to play a vital role in animating tension on the frontier. The raid is thus understood as the ultimate weapon of resistance against an established state by an independent ‘not-a-state-subject’ people in defence of their autonomy and essentially represents non-state practices against state appropriations. Instead of being ‘unruly’, the raid is seen as a form of organized and premeditated resistance based on the consciousness of the hillmen's lived world order.

As European influence expanded in insular Southeast Asia throughout the early modern era, colonial interests shifted from maintaining favorable trade zones along the coasts and rivers to an increasing control of territory and its human populations. The island of Borneo entered the colonial ambit relatively late in this process,Graham Irwin, Nineteenth-Century Borneo: A Study in Diplomatic Rivalry (s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955). but its eventual division between British and Dutch spheres of influence and control has had profound consequences for the peoples that fell under either. There and elsewhere, territorial boundaries sliced across well-established networks of communication, trade, common traditions, and strong ties of kinship. These boundaries came to impose different symbols of formal status on people from the same ethnic groups. From the colonial perspective, boundaries were designed to function negatively, to restrict what was deemed illegal such as smuggling and migration, and positively, to promote legitimate activities like taxation and road construction. The usual colonial attitude was that borders should be precisely defined, clearly demarcated, jealously guarded, and exclusive. A. I. Asiwaju, ‘The Conceptual Framework’, in A. I. Asiwaju (ed.), Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations Across Africa's International Boundaries, 1884-1984 (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1985), pp. 1-18 at pp. 2-3; A. I. Asiwaju, Borderlands Research: A Comparative Perspective. Border Perspectives Paper No. 6 (El Paso: University of Texas, Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, 1983), pp. 2-3; S. Whittemore Boggs, International Boundaries: A Study of Boundary Functions and Problems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), pp. 10-11. Yet the people so partitioned routinely defied the border divisions, causing no small amount of worry to the colonial states.