International trade figures prominently in the economic growth strategies of East and Southeast Asian countries. Despite the economic recession experienced across much of the world since the early 1990s, the pace of economic growth was sustained virtually unabated in the countries of East and Southeast Asia.During the entire decade of the 1980s the East and Southeast Asian economies grew more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the world economy. Along with this growth performance, international trade in the East and Southeast Asian region increased at about twice the rate of Europe and North America. Merchandise exports in East and Southeast Asia increased at an annual average rate of 10% per annum between 1965 and 1989. In 1990 and 1991 aggregate merchandise exports from Asia's Newly Industrializing Economies (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong) grew by 9.0% and 11.4%, while the four ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) developing countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) recorded average increases of 12.9% and 14.3%, respectively.Expanding merchandise exports were accompanied by surging capital inflows and rising investment rates, culminating in accelerated growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) along with a significant reduction in the incidence of poverty.

It has been assumed that the politicians and political organizations of late colonial Burma were mere shams behind which the real affairs of government were conducted by British governors and civil servants. It also has been assumed that what mass politics there was among the Burmese in the 1930s was dominated by nationalist youth, especially the Thakins, and monks who were untainted by contact and collaboration with the British and those Burmese who associated with them. Those members of the Burmese political élite who attempted to work in government and party politics during the last pre-war years, therefore, have been seen at best as mere reformers and at worst as callous opportunists.

In 1972 a land reform programme based on the objectives of maximizing agricultural production and employment and reducing inequalities in wealth and income was initiated in Sri Lanka. It commenced with the enactment of the Land Reform Law, No. 1 of 1972 which imposed ceilings on private ownership of land and provided for the setting up of a Land Reform Commission (hereafter, LRC) vested with powers to acquire privately held land in excess of the ceilings. Three years later, the scope of the reform was extended through the Land Reform (Amendment) Law, No. 39 of 1975 under the provisions of which land held by public companies was nationalized. Both these laws provided for the payment of compensation to dispossessed owners.

With the passing of the Government of India Act of 1935, the history of Indian nationalism underwent a subtle change. Though not noticeable immediately after the introduction of the Act, the provincial elections, held under its provisions in 1937, and the results thereof, made this change more apparent and clear. The Indian National Congress secured a sweeping victory in five provinces and was in a position to form coalition ministries in two other provinces—a victory which revealed the efficiency and capability of the party so far as the election machine was concerned. It proved its claim of being a ‘National Party’. The Muslim-League, on the other hand, did not fare well at all, especially in the Muslim majority provinces of the Punjab and Bengal. Although it did better in the non-Muslim provinces, yet that was not enough to enable the League to boast of being the sole representative organization of the Muslims. The success of provincial parties like the Krishak Lok Party in Bengal and the Unionist Party in the Punjab showed that the Muslim electorates still thought in terms of ‘provincial’ or ‘local’ considerations, and were not moved so much by all-India issues. What was true of the League was also true of the Congress so far as the Muslims were concerned. The latter, too, was not able to capture Muslim seats in numbers adequate enough to demonstrate its popularity amongst Muslims.

In 1857 Delhi ceased to be the seat of the Mughal kingdom, and in 1912 it became the capital of the British Empire in India. The city had always had strategic and, therefore, economic and political significance. In the half-century between 1857 and 1912 Delhi's increasing economic and commercial activity prevented the city from sinking, as some historic Indian cities did, into the obscurity of just another provincial town. Curzon described it in 1899 ‘a capital city, now of commerce as once of power’. It acted as the commercial entrepôt for all north India, after becoming the junction of a huge railway network connecting north India to the ports. Commercial expansion in turn led to a steady growth in the city's population. This physical and economic expansion was, however, affected by the government's concern for security in Delhi. The second half of the nineteenth century was the era of urban development in Britain, but when urban government was taking root in India in this same period, it was cramped not only by apathy and financial stringency, as in Britain, but also by strategic considerations. This is an aspect of Indian local government which has not been studied at all. As for Delhi itself, the city has yet to find its urban historian. In this paper I shall examine how far official considerations of military security affected the city's development.

In the epilogue to his memoirs, Bao-Dai, the last sovereign of the Nguyên Dynasty, wrote:

In ancient Vietnamese society, the social system is embodied in the person of the emperor, through whom everything religious is done, down to the lowest village level. But, if he sanctifies this act by prescribing or controlling it, he does not assume it. On the contrary, the Vietnamese ideal is that of a sovereign wise enough to reign without stirring, ‘with his hands hanging and his clothes loose…’.

It isan axiom of India's economic history that government financial resources during the last half-century of the British period were inadequate. ‘The poverty of India was matched by the poverty of its government’ writes Dharma Kumar in The Cambridge Economic History and she estimates that ‘except during the two wars of the twentieth century, the tax revenues amounted to a mere 5 to 7 per cent of the national income'. Raymond Goldsmith's assessment is of an even lower proportion realized by taxation and he further believes that the scanty share of government expenditure in national product declined after the first world war. In most of the historiography, this situation is seen as a notable shortcoming created by imperial rule, the inevitable product of the passivity of the ‘night-watchman state’. Reviewing financial policy in 1939, P. J. Thomas described its predominant characteristic as ‘conservatism’, marked by ‘extreme reluctance to venture on new experiments in raising revenue’, ‘the low burden of public debt’ and ‘inadequate expenditure on social services’.3 These features could have played an important role in constricting India's economic and social development, particularly in the inter-war period of the twentieth century. Financial weaknesses then may have undermined the 'new industrial policy' of the post-first world war era4 and in the 1930s superficially present a crucial contrast with Asia's other major industrializing power, Japan, where government appeared to stimulate the economy impressively by massive borrowing and expenditure.5

Since the early 1980s, China's rapid economic growth and profound social transformation have greatly changed the role of popular religion in modern Chinese politics. In the case of nuo, these changes have been directly responsible for the incorporation of this popular religion into the implementation of Party-state's policy on ethnic minority and the provision of evidence to support the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party's regime. Through manipulation and reinterpretation by local governments, the popular religion of nuo has not only become the target of local socio-economic development, a common phenomenon in contemporary China, but has also played a key role in ethnic identification, which is an important step for a post-Mao's CCP to maintain political stability in ethnic minority areas. In addition, nuo has through the research of Marxism-influenced schools fundamentally altered its position from an officially unrecognized religion opposed to both socialist political order and atheist ideology to a politically favoured ‘living fossil’1 of primitive culture. This proves the Marxist evolutionary theory in which socialism and communism are thought to be inescapable consequences of social development. The positive role played by nuo in modern Chinese politics has brought the popular religion much open support and endorsement from party-state officials at all levels, including top-ranking officials within the Central Committee of the CCP. Like any popular religion, nuo has over the centuries undergone significant changes, but never before has it experienced such dramatic changes in its relationship with an anti-religious and pragmatic central government, something which has significantly altered the course of its development.

An underlying premise of much of the comment on developing countries' agricultural research organizations and capabilities, has been that they are weak, and have been unsuccessful in generating new technologies and meeting farmers' needs. Indeed, one of the very justifications for the setting up of the series of international research institutes, such as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) was that national research programmes were seen to lack sufficient strength and organization to be able to respond to the urgent needs of food production that were identified in the 1960s. It was argued that a primary role of the International Centres would be to support and develop such national research programmes both through training and the provision of new plant varieties and technologies, and that the building up of local research capability in developing countries would come only after the International Research Centres had developed and transferred the new technologies.

Recent research on contemporary modalities of Islamic or Muslim philanthropy has focused on processes of subjectification through which givers and recipients of charity are habituated or craft themselves to an ethic of piety, social responsibility, and (neoliberal) economic virtuosity. These studies, however, have concentrated almost exclusively on those who give charity, leading to an over-emphasis on the perspectives of givers, and on their role in determining how the poor might deal with their everyday lives and imagined futures. As a result, small-scale gifting relations in which the Muslim poor may also be involved—making the poor simultaneously givers and recipients of charity—have been obscured or erased altogether. In this article, we argue that the concerns of the poor might not always or necessarily be those of the wealthy donors of charity. By receiving and giving sadaqa and zakat, poor and working-class Muslims in a Colombo neighbourhood imagine inclusion and belonging to the wider Muslim community in Colombo, which is not contingent upon the mediation and pedagogical interventions of charitable organizations and (middle-class) pious donors. Importantly, this imagination of inclusion and belonging comes at a time when the Muslim poor are increasingly marginalized by virtue of a (middle-class) discourse that, by framing charity as a means ‘to help the poor to help themselves’, has turned socio-economic upliftment into an ethical duty and, consequently, failure to improve oneself has become the symptom of wider moral shortcomings.

In seeking to explain the social, political and economic development of South Korea since liberation in 1945, many scholars have begun paying increasing attention to the significance of Korea’s colonial past. Most of these scholars have, for very good reasons, focused on fundamental—even revolutionary—changes in Korea's institutional structure, which for centuries had been dominated by a landed aristocracy ‘intent upon the preservation of its social, economic, and political privileges.’ Colonialism, to be more specific, replaced the factionalized and conflict-ridden institutions of aristocracy (and dynastic rule) with a modern, highly centralized, and extremely capable state apparatus, one which was used to reshape Korean society in any number of ways during Japan's 35 years of domination. The ‘strong state’ is, in fact, an enduring and undeniably powerful legacy of colonialism.

On January 29, 1901, in the grim aftermath of the Boxer Uprising and the humiliating foreign invasion of north China that followed, the Empress Dowager Cixi issued a famous edict that initiated the New Policy (xinzheng) reforms.

The weakness of China is caused by the strength of convention and the rigid network of regulations. We have many mediocre officials but few men of talent and courage. The regulations are used by mediocre men as the means of their self-protection, and taken advantage of by government clerks as sources of profit. The government officials exchange numerous documents but they never touch reality. The appointment of capable men is restricted by regulations so rigid that even men of exceptional talent are missed. What misleads the country can be expressed in one word, selfishness, and what suffocates all under heaven is precedent.

In this paper I compare late nineteenth and early twentieth-century sport hunting of markhor, a mountain goat, by British civil and military officials in the mountainous northern frontier region of Kashmir State, with their hunting of tigers, particularly man-eating tigers in the hilly and plains regions of India. Using these two instances, this paper elucidates and compares two competing visions of colonial governance. The British sportsman hunted man-eating tigers in order to protect Indian society from wild nature. Hunting them was also symbolic of their welfare-oriented governance ideology. They also hunted markhor in the northern mountainous region using begar, or forced labour, which they justified by falling back on the wider colonial representation of the northern mountainous region as a civilization-less area, where a more coercive form of governance was needed. So, rather than protecting society from nature, as in the case of man-eating tiger hunting in the plains, what was needed in the mountains was the ability of the British to introduce civilization into unruly nature via a strong disciplinary force. I argue that colonial governance entailed not simply a struggle to civilize India and its population, but a more profound struggle for control over nature.

A recent trend in the historiography of north India has involved analyses of ‘Hindu nationalist’ motifs and ideologies within both mainstream nationalist discourses and subaltern politics. A dense corpus of work has attempted to provide historical explanations for the rise of Hindutva in the subcontinent, and a great deal of debate has surrounded the implications of this development for the fate of secularism in India. Some of this research has examined the wider implications of Hindutva for the Indian state, democracy and civil society and in the process has highlighted, to some degree, the relationship between Hindu nationalism and ‘mainstream’ Indian nationalism. Necessarily, this has involved discussion of the ways in which the Congress, as the predominant vehicle of ‘secular nationalism’ in India, has attempted to contest or accommodate the forces of Hindu nationalist revival and Hindutva. By far the most interesting and illuminating aspect of this research has been the suggestion that Hindu nationalism, operating as an ideology, has manifested itself not only in the institutions of the right-wing Sangh Parivar but has been accommodated, often paradoxically, within political parties and civil institutions hitherto associated with the forces of secularism. An investigation of this phenomenon opens up new possibilities for research into the nature of Hindu nationalism itself, and presents new questions about the ambivalent place of religious politics in institutions such as the Indian National Congress.

Nationalist activity in India between the years 1909 and 1916 has generally received an inadequate treatment from historians. It seems, quite simply, that this period is not sensational enough and historical accounts tend to skip from the excitement of the Swadeshi movement, the ‘Moderate’—‘Extremist’ split, the so-called ‘Extremist’ movement in general, and the Morley—Minto reforms of 1909 only to stop at the emergence of the Home Rule leagues or, even more likely, the serious political emergence of Gandhi after 1917. For example, despite writing of ‘continuities’ from 1885 to 1947, even Sumit Sarkar sees the nationalist movement expanding ‘in a succession of waves and troughs, the obvious high-points being 1905–1908, 1919–1922, 1928–1934, 1942 and 1945–46.’ Effectively, he is saying that the years from 1908 to 1919 were characterized by a ‘trough’ or lull.

I came upon this passage in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1927: 1: 1: 19) after having spent a year in the provincial town of Janakpur, documenting the Maithili language of northern Bihar and southeastern Nepal. Many local people encouraged and assisted me in my research, but all told me in good faith that I had come to the wrong place. I should have gone twenty miles to the southeast, where the ‘authentic’ language is spoken. It seems that I had not been alone in having been urged by informants and well-wishers to go somewhere else: either in pursuit of languages that do not exist or being redirected down the road to where the language is really spoken. Unfortunately visa problems prevented me from taking up the advice of friends, yet a cursory reading of the literature on regional and social dialectology would have been enough to turn anyone into a skeptic about what one might have been gained from such a journey. Subjective dialect boundaries do not often register on maps of isoglosses, and the objective methods of linguists usually reveal local perceptions of speech behaviour to be based on stereotypes.

If the establishment of the Estado da India in the early sixteenth century owed much to indigenous aid, its survival in the ensuing two hundred years owed even more. The centuries after 1600 were indeed sad ones for imperial Portual. The mother country itself was under Spanish rule until 1640, whilst its colonies and colonial trades were everywhere attacked, and more often than not annexed by European rivals. Nowhere was the picture more depressing than in Asia where the heirs of da Gama and Albuquerque had to contend frist with the English and the Dutch and then with a whole host of indigenous opponents ranging from the ever formidable Japanese to the Mughals and the Marathas under the redoubtable Shivaji, once innocently hailed as another Ceaser, but soon identified as the ‘new Attila’. Portuguese correspondence is full of eloquent descriptions of the lamentable condition of the Estado. Trade was at a standstill; war was ubiquitous; food was at the mercy of enemies; manpower was inadequate; the funds inevitably exhausted. In fact, under competent management, the surviving fragments of empire might well show a profit, as was the case in 1680. But not for long. Four years later there was talk of quitting Goa, too large and vulnerable to defend, and by the end of the century it was gloomily reported that all that remained of the erstwhile imperial glories were Goa, its local seaborne commerce, and what was described as ‘the convoy of the China boats’.

From an Asian angle Afghanistan could easily be selected as the centre of the extra-European world. It lies at the crossroads of three different geographic regions, the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia, as much as it borders on three different cultural zones, the Islamic world, the Hindu culture, and the Chinese influence. From a political standpoint, until the Second World War, Afghanistan appeared as buffer state par excellence, sandwiched between two Great Powers, the Russian Empire protruding from the North-west of Central Asia, and the British Empire guarding the Indian glacis in the South-east.

In May 1949 the Chinese Communist Party seized Shanghai. Rather than being elated at the prospect of harnessing the economic power of China's largest city to complete the revolution, the Communists approached it cautiously. How would the Chinese Communist Party set about transforming this free-wheeling port city with a ‘semi-colonial’ past into an orderly and socialist city? How would it balance ideology and pragmatism in reshaping Shanghai? This paper uses the takeover of two British companies as case studies to explore these issues at the ground level. It is argued that the means by which these companies were transformed tell us much about the Party and its state-building policies. When cadres entered foreign companies, their priority was not radical change and anti-imperialism, but rather fostering a sense of stability and unity to avoid disrupting production. Their gradual approach was due in large part to the Party's awareness of its own limited skills, resources and manpower, but also to its leaders and cadres recognizing that before they could remake Shanghai anew they had first to deal with the material and human legacies of the past.

The night has passed,

The whole day has gone,

Lady, tie up your hair,

The hair so dishevelled:

One December 12th has passed,

Another December 12th has come.

Have you forgotten?

Did you believe that your hair could be tied?

Did you believe that this day would ever return?

(poem by Hijam Irabot)

The story of what V. P. Menon euphemistically termed the ‘integration’ of the Indian States has still not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves.