Democracy is a symbol of the May Fourth era, and one of the two cores of the so-called ‘May Fourth spirit’ that generations of Chinese liberal intellectuals energetically want to carry forward in order to promote the liberal develop ment of democratization in China. In an essay published in January 1919 to celebrate the third anniversary of the publication of Xin Qingnian (New Youth), Chen Duxiu, one of the intellectual leaders of the New Culture Movement, respectfully gave democracy and science the nicknames ‘Mr Democracy’ (de xiansheng) and ‘Mr Science’ (sai xiansheng), and proclaimed that ‘only these two gentlemen can save China from the political, moral, academic, and intellectual darkness in which it finds itself’.Chen Duxiu, ‘Xin qingnian zuian zhi dabianshu’ (New Youth's reply to charges against the magazine), Xin Qingnian (New Youth): (hereafter cited as XQN), Vol. 6, No. 1 (15 Jan. 1919), pp. 10-11. Seven decades later, on the eve of the People's Movement on the Tiananmen square in spring 1989, many Chinese intellectuals published enormous essays or articles on the legacies of the ‘May Fourth spirit’, challenging the official monopoly over the power of historical interpretation.For more details about the ideological struggle for the historical interpretation of the May Fourth spirit between official historians and liberal intellectuals, see Gu Xin, Zhongguo Qimeng de Lishi Tujing (Historical Image of the Chinese Enlightenment) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1992). One of the major themes in these essays or articles was the appeal to the young generation of Chinese intellectuals to strive for liberty, democracy, and science by inheriting the ‘May Fourth spirit’.

The article deals with one of the under-researched themes of Indian history, which is the history of domestic servants. Thinking about servants raises two fundamental questions: who were they and what did domestic service mean? The identities of a servant as a contract wage earner or a person either belonging as a member or tied to the family through fictive/constructed claims of kinship were not mutually exclusive. Servants' identity existed in a continuum running from ‘free’ waged coolie on the one hand to ‘unfree’ slave on the other. The article traces the history of domestic servants along two axes: the slave–servant continuum, but, more importantly, the coolie–servant conundrum, which is a lesser-explored field in South Asian labour history or burgeoning scholarship on domesticity and household. Charting through the dense history of terminologies, the space of the city, and legal frameworks adopted by the Company state to regulate servants, it also underscores the difficulties of researching on a subaltern group that is so ubiquitous yet so fragmented in the archives. In order to reconstruct servants' pasts, we need to shake up our own fields of history writing—urban, labour, gender, and social—to discover servants’ traces wherever they are found. From serving as witnesses in courtrooms to becoming the subject of a city's foundational anecdote, their presence was spread across straw huts, streets, and maidans. Their work, defined through ‘private hire’, was the product of a historical process in which a series of regulations helped to intimatize the master-servant relationship.

This paper offers a gendered perspective to British domination in India through the British Indian Army—which in many ways was central to their entire structure of economic and political domination in India. Locating its understanding drawn from the political economy of south-east Punjab, it argues that the designated martial castes and military recruitment structurally and ideologically identified with and privileged those trends of existing masculinities in this region which suited their power structure and empire building. It was a constellation of marital caste status, land ownership, dominant caste syndrome and good bodily physique or physical strength that ideologically came to connect and configure dominant masculinity in colonial Punjab. An Army profession fully supported it. During the two world wars it emerged as the militarized masculinity, amply supported by legal and administrative measures introduced or apparently adopted in deference to certain popular cultural practices. The associated economic and political privileges turned ‘loyalty’ into an inherent and special ingredient of ‘masculinity’ which the nationalists had to confront and deal with till such times that it came to be firmly linked with nationalism and patriotism.

This paper examines the relationship between rubber plantations and changes in everyday technologies in rural Indochina. It also explores the effects that improvement projects had on the countryside in which those who were targeted by these programmes lived. Speeches given at the opening of the Bến Cát agricultural school in Thủ Dầu Một province in 1918, for example, show that this school was designed both to train Vietnamese assistants to work on large agricultural exploitations and to improve native agricultural practices. Officials used journals, such as the bilingual French-Vietnamese Cochinchine Agricole, which appeared between 1927 and 1930, to popularize latex-producing science and techniques. Though their motivations often differed from those of officials, the Vietnamese elite, ranging from those in the anti-colonial Duy Tân Hội (Modernisation Society) to French-trained physicians, scientists, and engineers, also often sought to address the problems of rural southern Vietnam through improvements in everyday agricultural technologies. This paper suggests that plantation agriculture, which structured the everyday meanings of rubber in Vietnam, along with the failures of native improvement, began to weaken the support of the Vietnamese elite for the colonial regime during the 1930s. Uneasy compromises and contradictions meant that neither economic profit nor social improvement alone existed in the rubber-producing industry.

In this contribution I propose to examine an aspect of Sri Lankan agrarian history which is often alluded to but rarely studied in depth: the process of high land appropriation for the development of coffee, tea, rubber and coconut plantations. The development of a land market in the Indian subcontinent is becoming a promising field of research for the study of imperial impact as a process at work in specific contexts.The Sri Lankan case differs from the Indian one in that land appropriation was originally meant for and followed by large scale land alienation to outsiders–the planters. This process has attracted the interest of most historians writing on the history of the Raj in Ceylon, but usually the only aspect stressed has been the appropriation by the Colonial State of forest and chena(land devoted to slash-and-burn cultivation) for sale to British planters.

In the opinions of J. A. Hobson and Lenin European imperial expansion during several decades following 1870 was caused by the need to export surplus capital, and aimed at expediting this process. Hobson saw this necessity as arising from over-production (or under-consumption), a curable defect of capitalism; Lenin as an inherent quality of ‘monopoly-capitalism’ which was directed principally by bankers and was heading for revolution.

The relations between James Brooke and the various peoples of northwest Borneo have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Nineteenth-century Iban experiences have been analysed extensively and continue to provide the basis for a healthy industry in historical anthropology. Daniel Chew and Craig Lockard examined the development of the Sarawak Chinese community. Sabihah Osman explored Malay political activity during the Brooke period. In contrast, although Bidayuh were the subject of a detailed anthropological survey in the 1950s, political relations between Bidayuh and Rajah Brooke's regime have been largely ignored by scholars.

An organizing principle of Britain's pre-war empire was collaboration with indigenous monarchies. Secure on their thrones, they legitimated British rule as well as assisting it in practical ways. While friendly princes were assets, however, uncooperative ones could be liabilities; they might obstruct attempts to exploit their resources or to modernize their governments. After the Second World War, British priorities and strategies changed. With their backs to the wall they switched from supporting princes to accommodating politicians. There was no obvious role for them in new nation-states and in many dependencies indigenous monarchies were swept aside by the onrush of nationalism. Yet in Malaya and Brunei they survived: the rulers of the peninsular Malay states did so by adjusting to political change, whereas the Sultan of Brunei flourished by preventing it.

The Manchus inherited from the Ming Dynasty the images of the overseas Chinese as well as the policy towards them. The tarnished images of the overseas Chinese as ‘deserters’, ‘criminals’, and ‘potential traitors’ of the Ming were taken over by the early Ch'ing rulers. These images were soon transformed into new images of ‘political criminals’, ‘conspirators’ and ‘rebels’, for in the first four decades after the Manchu conquest of North China in 1644, the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia were directly involved in the resistance movement on the southeast coast of China. The leader of the movement, Cheng Ch'eng-kung (known in the West as Koxinga), seems to have enlisted the support of the overseas Chinese, particularly from Vietnam, Cambodia and Siam, for his resistance. It is claimed that Koxinga's naval power was partly drawn from Nanyang (Southeast Asia) shipping, and financed from the profits of the Nanyang trade. Of course those overseas Chinese who supported Koxinga made no apology for their involvement. They saw the Manchus as alien usurpers and as the oppressors of the Han Chinese, and the support for Koxinga's resistance movement was seen as an act of patriotism to save Han Chinese from the oppressive Manchu rule. The government countered the overseas Chinese involvement by introducing stringent laws against private overseas trade. In 1656 (13th year of the Emperor Shun-chih), a decree was proclaimed that‘….any traders who go overseas privately and trade or supply the rebels with provisions will be beheaded, and their goods confiscated.

Narratives about the revolutionary movement have largely been the preserve of the popular domain in India, as Christopher Pinney has recently pointed out. India's best-known revolutionary, Bhagat Singh—who was executed by the British in 1931 for his role in the Lahore Conspiracy Case—has been celebrated more in posters, colourful bazaar histories and comic books than in academic tomes. These popular formats have established a hegemonic narrative of his life that has proved to be resistant to subsequent interventions as new materials, such as freshly-declassified intelligence reports and oral history testimonies, come to light. This paper accounts for why Bhagat Singh's life story has predominantly prevailed in the domain of the popular, with special reference to the secrecy of the revolutionary movement and the censure and censorship to which it was subjected in the 1930s.

The Kyamkhanis were a small Indian Muslim community who flourished in northern Rajasthan from c. 1450 to 1730. This article examines memories of the Kyamkhani past recorded in a seventeenth-century history of the ruling lineage, as a case study of both the process of Islamic expansionism in South Asia and the self-identity of rural Muslim gentry. While celebrating the ancestor who had converted to Islam generations earlier, the Kyamkhanis also represented themselves as local warriors of the Rajput class, an affiliation that is considered exclusively Hindu in India today. Their history was written in a local literary language, Braj Bhasa, rather than in the more cosmopolitan Persian that was widely used by Muslim elites at the time. The Kyamkhanis of the early modern era thus negotiated multiple social and cultural spheres, simultaneously participating in the local/vernacular as well as global/cosmopolitan arenas.

One of the principal concerns of China's ‘self-strengthening movement’ in the T'ung-chih period (1862–1874) was the question of military reform. Organizational change was not a central issue, for the Ch'ing dynasty had already found in the innovative armies known as yung-ying (lit., ‘brave battalions’) a comparatively effective military system compatible with existing economic and administrative institutions. But changes in training methods—especially officer training—and weapons came to be viewed as essential to the self-strengthening effort. Experience in the huge and devastating Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), together with the repeated humiliations suffered by China at the hands of foreigners in the two decades following the Opium War of 1839–1842, had brought the Ch'ing government to a greater awareness of the need for introducing Western-style weapons and training in Chinese armies. Particularly convincing was the effective use of foreign troops and foreign-officered contingents (such as the vaunted Ever-Victorious Army) against the Taipings in the area of Shanghai during 1862. But in Chinese eyes, the employment of foreign troops and officers could never be anything more than a temporary expedient. Ch'ing policy-makers aimed at eliminating dependence on foreigners as soon as possible, while building China's own military capabilities in order to contend with both internal and external challenges. These twin goals lay at the heart of self-strengthening.

David Washbrook's original treatment of the question of law and society, to which the title of the present paper refers, has not yet stimulated the response which might have been expected. It is a wideranging study; only part of it will be taken up in this paper, namely its arguments about landed property rights in the nineteenth century. Washbrook states that in the first half of the century private property in land remained a ‘pure farce’ in India because of continued state involvement in the economy, excessive revenue demands, the persistence of personal law (as codified), and the weakness of the system of courts. He emphasizes the political implications of the co-option of dominant groups for revenue collection and other purposes of British administration. For the second half of the century, Washbrook proposes an improvement in the position of landed and powerful interests, as the law at last ‘beat back the frontier’ of personal law and disentangled private property rights from family and communal fetters.

Nothing foments institutional change so much as a sense of past institutional failure. The New Order that came into being as a result of the October 1965 assumption of power by the ABRI (Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia) inherited a crisis situation in economic policy. Decades of economic decay and capital dis-investment had brought the Indonesian economy to the brink of catastrophe. However, just as all revolutions are born in an ancien régime, so the heritage of the bygone Sukarno era left control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy at the disposal of the state and thereby eased the institutional transformation.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal administered the largest province in India. In addition to the Bengali-speaking area, it included parts of Orissa and virtually all of Bihar. Nearly two-thirds of the population were Hindus, and just over one third were Muslims. However, the Hindus predominated mainly in Bihar, Orissa and west Bengal, while the Muslims lived mainly in the east. In Bengal Proper there were, by 1901, more Muslims than Hindus. The province was ruled from Calcutta, the only large city in the region. Until 1912 Calcutta was also the capital of India itself. The city was a great economic, political, administrative and educational centre, and few other towns exercised such an influence over their surrounding districts as Calcutta did over Bengal.

Seavoyage was a social reform issue of some concern to the Hindus of Upper India in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Clearly there were compelling incentives for seavoyage; equally clearly there was a convention which prohibited such travel in the belief that it contravened the law laid down in ancient texts. But social conflict is seldom as one-dimensional as these statements imply.

This paper explores the goals, nature and results of government interventions into the rice and palm oil markets of Malyasia since independence. Its purpose is to compare the relatively successful way in which the government has promoted the palm oil industry with the failure of interventions in the rice market. The historical comparison of public efforts in these two industries points up the importance of setting consistent goals, of encouraging crops which match the natural resource endowment of the country, of having a private sector which is capable of responding to production incentives, and of letting supply and demand determine prices when designing a strategy of market intervention. Above all, it is important to distinguish programs of intervention based primarily on efficiency criteria from those which seek to perform social welfare (e.g. income support) and political (e.g. food security) functions as well.

Since the Second World War, an important school of social science scholarship in Southeast Asia has explained pre-national social hierarchy in terms of religious cosmology, or religious beliefs in the ordering principles of merit and karma (Heine-Geldern, 1956; Geertz, 1980; Errington, 1989). With respect to Siam/Thailand, Tambiah (1970, 1976, 1984) exemplifies this approach in its strong form—he has attempted to explain all religious practices of the ‘Thais’ as expressions of Buddhist orthodoxy. For these writers, religious and cosmological meaning is fundamental, and subsumes the economic dimension. Their emphasis on cultural coherence contrasts with a second school of thought exemplified by Scott (1977, 1985) which focuses on slippage or difference between the ‘great traditions’ represented in Thailand by Buddhism, and little traditions of peasantries, based on local experience, pre-existing little traditions or the appropriation of past ‘great traditions’.

On 3 May 1945, British—Indian forces landed in Rangoon. The Japanese had pulled out. The city was liberated. On 16 June there was a victory parade, though the final victory over Japan was still distant and most of their conquests were intact. Admiral Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, took the salute while detachments representing the one million men under his command passed by in massed array. Famous regiments from Britain, India and Nepal; the Royal Navy; the Royal Air Force; men from the United States Air Force. It was an impressive sight, though the ceremony took place in pouring rain. Amongst them all was a somewhat ragged band representing the Burma National Army which, having been raised by the Japanese, had fought for three months alongside the British. Watching the parade from the central dais was a young man dressed in the uniform of a Japanese Major-General, though he also wore an arm-band with a conspicuous red star. The outfit was incongruously crowned by a pith sun-helmet—a topi. Probably most foreigners present assumed he was a Chinese officer. He was actually Bogyoke Aung San, commander of the BNA.

Of the late Ch'ing reforms, perhaps none is more surprising than the opium suppression movement. Beginning in late 1906, it had by the end of 1908 succeeded in markedly curtailing the cultivation and consumption of opium at home and in obtaining formal assurance from the British to terminate gradually opium imports. These startling achievement are further magnified when we consider the setting within which they occurred.