The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya represented to the British, in the nineteenth century, a conveniently ruined Indian past which could be protected, recovered and restored as both a duty and a validation of legitimacy. However, for the temple's Hindu proprietors, the shrine—aside from being a valuable estate in purely financial terms—functioned as a symbol of the triumph of ‘orthodox’ Hinduism over ‘heterodox’ Buddhism. Finally, for the Burmese Buddhists who undertook their own ‘restoration’ mission in 1874, the Mahabodhi Temple marked the site where, according to Buddhist tradition, Gautama Buddha first achieved enlightenment and thereby began the career of the religion that bears his name.

On the morning of 24 June 1932 the ‘People's Party’, a small group of civil and military bureaucrats, toppled the Thai absolute monarchy and introduced constitutional democracy. This article discusses the establishment of democracy as an endeavour in ‘democratic paternalism,’ by which is meant the Party's attempt to establish a new moral and intellectual leadership that had as its main goal the creation of a depoliticized democratic citizenry. To implement their programme for democracy, the Party embarked on an ambitious plan to modernize education and explain popular sovereignty through countrywide lectures and radio programmes. The democratic paternalist effort had mixed results. State weakness limited the reach of the educational and propaganda campaigns, and further the ‘people’ in whose name the revolution was staged, constituted two different groups: a largely illiterate peasantry and a small, incipient new intelligentsia. Because of its limited capacity, the People's Party tasked the second group with assisting in democratic mentorship of the masses, but many in this second category of people had a broader conception of democracy than the Party's ‘top-down’ model and criticized the Party for its paternalist constraints on popular sovereignty. Democratic paternalism and frustration with the limits imposed on popular democracy are two central aspects of this period of history that have endured in Thai society.

The idea of ‘developing’ Sind has been a lynchpin of government action and rhetoric in the province during the twentieth century. The central symbols of this ‘development’ were three barrage dams, completed between 1932 and 1962. Because of the barrages’ huge economic and ideological significance, the ceremonies connected with the construction and opening of these barrages provide a unique opportunity to examine the public presentation of state authority by the colonial and postcolonial governments. This paper investigates the way that ideas of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ appeared in discourses connected with these ceremonies, in order to demonstrate that the idea of imposing ‘progress’ on a province considered ‘backward’ by the state administrators survived longer than the British regime which had introduced it. The paper begins with the historical links between water-provision and governance in Sind, before examining the way that immediate political concerns of the sitting governments were addressed in connection with the projects, demonstrating the ways in which very similar projects were cast as symbols of different political priorities. The last part of the paper draws out deeper similarities between the logic of these political expressions, in order to demonstrate the powerful continuity in ideologies of ‘progress’ throughout mid-twentieth century Sind.

This special issue brings together historians with expertise on China and Western Europe who have the explicit intent of bridging the existing gap between two parallel strands of scholarship, that is, Europe in the Cold War and the history of Socialist China, and combining the different perspectives and approaches of international, diplomatic, business, and cultural historiographies. The contributors’ lively interaction and close collaboration has been the key to the conceptual development of a broader view of the relations between West European countries and Socialist China in the early decades of the Cold War, as well as of China's policy towards the capitalist world before the Reform and Opening era.

The word ‘slavery’ conjures images of cruelty, racial bigotry and economic exploitation associated with the plantation complex crucial to the Atlantic trading economy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Yet this was only one manifestation of practices of human bondage. This article examines the practice of ‘slavery’ in a very different context, looking at Central Asia, Afghanistan and the Punjab in the early nineteenth century. Here, bondage was largely a social institution with economic ramifications, in contrast to its Atlantic counterpart. Slavery served a social, and often sexual function in many of these societies, with the majority of slaves being female domestic servants and concubines. Its victims were often religiously, rather than racially defined, although bondage was a cross-confessional phenomenon. The practice continued to be widespread throughout the region into the early twentieth century.

This article frames the debate about mui-tsai (meizai, female bondservants) in late nineteenth-century Hong Kong within changing conceptions of the colony's political, geographical and cultural position. Whereas some colonial officials saw the mui-tsai system as a national shame that challenged Britain's commitment to ending slavery, others argued that it was an archaic custom that would eventually dissolve as China modernized. The debate also showed the rise of a class of Chinese elites who had accumulated enough power to defend the mui-tsai system as a time-honoured Chinese custom, even while acknowledging that in Hong Kong they lived beyond the boundaries of Chinese sovereignty. Challenging notions of the reach of the colonial state and showing how colonial policies often had unintended consequences, this debate also reveals the analytical and explanatory weakness of concepts such as ‘colonial discourse’ or ‘the colonial mind’.

The indigenous population in Java, it is generally believed, remained by and large subsistence peasants under the colonial rule in the nineteenth century. It is argued that the Javanese could not participate in the estate plantation industry or ‘transform their general pattern of already intensive farming in an extensive direction, for they lacked capital, had no way to shuck off excess labor’. Their access to waste land to became restricted and consequently they sought refuge in the wet-rice cultivation which ‘soaked up almost the whole of the’ population in a process of ‘agricultural involution’, which ‘went on steadily’ during the nineteenthcentury.’ Thus Javanese were confined to the subsistence agriculture for their living because they had neither. capital nor opportunity to embark upon a path of economic development characterized by economic diversity.

Ethnicity takes many forms, meets a variety of needs, and has a wide range of uses. No single case can provide material for an exhaustive analysis of the full complexity of the phenomenon, but all contribute pieces to the mosaic, illuminating that complexity. Analyses have been couched in terms of cultural definitions, of perceptual and cognitive categories, of social distance and solidarity of groups, of boundary definition and maintenance, of conflict and competition, of emergent versus conservative qualities of the phenomenon, and so forth—and all hold some validity, for ethnicity is multi-faceted. As A. L. Epstein points out, to define ethnicity exclusively in terms of only one of these many facets—whether its potential as a focus for political mobilization, its contribution to an individual's psychic comfort as a member of a group, or its cultural or linguistic attributes—‘is to confuse an aspect of the phenomenon with the phenomenon itself’ (1978:96).

A central problem in both the political and the intellectual history of Java is the disparity between the ideal of a unified state and the historical reality of fragmented power and authority, between the image and the reality of pre-colonial Javanese political history. An investigation of views held by literati of the kingdom of Mataram before the middle years of the eighteenth century can elucidate this problem. Turning from historical-political to religious literature in Javanese may help to resolve it.

Although there has been considerable support for primary commodity agreements in the Third World, the experience of one of the pioneering agreements, the International Tin Restriction Scheme of the 1930s, has been very critically assessed, especially as regards its impact on the largest tin producer, Malaya.

The British controlled their empire in India through the twin instruments of the army and the civil services. But the army was never used much to administer British territories and the day-to-day business of law and order was left to the civil services, headed by the élite corps of covenanted officers, the Indian Civil Service. This corps was the vital link that carried the dictates of the centre to the two hundred and fifty districts that made up British India. Obviously a Service only a thousand or so strong had a presence too thin to achieve what some hagiographers have claimed but it was, nonetheless, a vital part of the structure of British rule. In the years immediately following the first world war, this vital part seemed unable to cope with the galaxy of problems with which it was beset: its own members increasingly questioned the value of their role; Indian politicians attacked what they saw as the remnant of imperial control whilst, on the widest scale, the complex task of governing India seemed to be beyond the creaking, anachronistic and overworked I.C.S.

During the inter-war years there were significant developments in Indo-British economic and political relations. It is in the context of these developments that this paper will seek to study the complex relationships between the different fractions of businessmen, British and Indian, the Government of India, the Home Government and the Indian National Congress. The major theme of this paper is the attempts made in the 1930s by governments and businessmen to reorganize the economic relations between Britain and India to take account of changes wrought by the first world war, the world depression, and the ascent of Indian nationalism. One question which dominated these negotiations was the long-standing issue of duties on cotton goods imported into India. This issue served to bring into sharp focus the different views of the imperial rulers, British businessmen in India, Indian businessmen of different sorts, and nationalist politicians, on the immediate future of the economic link between Britain and India. The question of cotton duties dogged the talks on economic cooperation from the tariff negotiations of the early 1930s, through the period of the Ottawa agreement and Lees-Mody pact, to the Indo-British Trade Agreement of 1939.

Research on the Japanese electoral process has quite legitimately focused on a broad range of topics. Elections in Japan have been studied from the perspective of national issues and evaluation of their popular appeal, description and analysis of voting behaviour patterns, and identification of the support mobilization efforts and campaign postures of individual candidates. Of the various kinds of electoral contests, those of the House of Representatives and local elections have received the greatest attention.

The seventeenth-century crisis concept served the research in European history well, it deepened and broadedned and broadened our understanding of well-studied issues, even though we were far from agreeing on a definition of what the seventeenth-century crisis was or is. This is the kind of conceptual embarrassment which baffles our colleagues in the social sciences, but which the historian takes in his stride.

This article forges connections between two vibrant areas of current research within and beyond Asian studies: visual anthropology and the anthropology of morality and ethics. Its focus is on achieving moral citizenship as represented in Vietnam's visually spectacular capital, Hanoi, and on images as active and morally compelling, not mere reflections of the challenges of late-socialist marketization. The case of Vietnam compares intriguingly with other contexts where visuality has been fruitfully explored, including India and post-socialist Eurasia. The question asked is how images, both personal and official, can work either to provide or deny the viewer a quality of moral agency which they feel to be their due. The answer is found in the intertwining of silence and speech in relation to images. This includes what is said and unsaid in regard to public iconography, including memorial statuary and state message posters. It is proposed that the visuality of the urban street space is a continuum involving significant interaction with the intimacies of home and family image use. The article also seeks to add to our methodological ideas about treating fieldwork photographs as a basis for interaction with interlocutors, hence as active research tools rather than mere adjuncts to observation and analysis.

By the late 1800s the colonial state's increasing capacity to regulate, finance, and tax had begun to open up new opportunities for locally based French enterprises in Indochina. Chinese syndicates that had previously dominated the economy found themselves deprived of existing revenue streams and denied access to new ones. The result was an ‘Indochinese moment’ when a handful of colonial conglomerates used profits from state contracts, monopolies, and subsidies as a base for growth and diversification after 1900. Yet scaling the commanding heights of the economy was not easy, and was only achieved thanks to sustained and powerful state intervention. Moreover, one of the effects of the economic crisis after 1928 was the end of this Indochinese moment and a shift in initiative to a new partnership that linked an increasingly technocratic state with the financiers and experts of the Bank of Indochina. This article investigates this complex interaction of state power, technology, and capital flows with local Chinese, French, and indigenous Indochinese actors, using one particular conglomerate, the Fontaine group, as a case study to shed light on the mechanisms that linked an interventionist state to capitalist enterprise and ultimately to the remaking of the Indochinese economy.

The slow growth of railways is undoubtedly one of the most astonishing features of the history of modernization in China. The Chinese government often gave as its reasons for opposition to railway development the fact that improved communications would facilitate foreign military expansion, that railways obstructed the feng-shui, that mandarin and peasant alike were opposed to the railway, and that railways destroyed the livelihood of the common people. But, until recently, these explanations have never been given serious consideration, despite the fact that Ch'ing officials discussed railway-policy in these terms in a major debate in 1866–67. This is partly because historians have found it difficult to accept Chinese objections to railway development at their face-value, and partly because Chinese officials themselves, seeing that foreigners were unimpressed by Chinese arguments against railway construction, offered others which they thought would be more acceptable to the Western mind.

Our title quotation is taken from an interview with the chief trustee of a leading Hindu temple in south London, and captures the curious mixture of philanthropy, politics, and individual ambition that has emerged around Sri Lankan Tamil temples in the diaspora. During the long years of civil war, temples became centres of mobilization for the growing Tamil diaspora, and were often accused of channelling funds to the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and its various front organizations. Since the end of the war, in 2009, the same temples now support orphanages and other good works in Sri Lanka, and their efforts are starting to be emulated by temples in Sri Lanka itself. At the heart of our article is a dispute between the UK Charity Commission and the chief trustee of a London temple, who is accused of misuse of temple funds and ‘failure to dissociate’ the temple from a terrorist organization. A close reading of the case and its unexpected denouement reveals the difficulties of bounding the zone of philanthropy.

During the transition to colonialism, over thirty Indian political missions ventured to London. Representing the interests of Indian royalty directly in British public discourse, these Indian diplomats strove to reshape colonial policies. They also gathered first-hand intelligence, unmediated by Britons, for their Indian audiences; some later Indian diplomats evidently learned from their precursors. Nonetheless, they increasingly struggled against spreading British colonialism, with its expanding surveillance and control over political communication, growing colonial archives, ever more dominant military force, and cultural assertions. Nor did their relatively isolated efforts accumulate into unified Indian policies. The dynamics of these unequal contests reveal how multi-centered, conflicted, and contingent was political intercourse over this period, in Britain and in India. This article analyzes these Indian missions, concentrating on two: one from early in the transition to colonialism when all parties were exploring the nature of such interactions, and the other late in that process when some Indian diplomats and, even more so, the Company's Directors, had learned to deploy more sophisticated tactics against each other. The 1857 conflict, which ended the Company's rule and established British royal authority over India, altered imperial relations with India's ‘princes’ profoundly, ushering in high colonial rule.

With the Kangwha treaty in 1876 Korea ended its period of isolation and became exposed to foreign pressures. In 1906, after a period of turmoil in Asian international affairs, Korea was declared a Japanese protectorate, and in 1910 it became a colony of that country. Korea remained a Japanese possession until the end of the Pacific War in 1945. This essay is concerned with some of the economic and social changes that took place in Korea under Japanese rule. The first part of the paper discusses the reorganization of the traditional economy by changes in institutional control over it, and the second part describes the growth of the economy during these years.