The social history of the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be fully understood if aspects of class structure and social mobility are not examined. Of course, the social relations of the Chinese were principally determined by kinship and dialect ties, but they were also affected by class affiliations. Class status, like kinship and dialect relations distanted Chinese immigrants from one another. This paper seeks to examine the nature and structure of Chinese classes, class relations and the channels of social mobility in the Chinese community in Singapore and Malaya during the period between 1800 and 1911. The findings of this paper may be applicable to other overseas Chinese communities in the same period outside this region.

From the 1870s onwards, debates about famine policy were central to both colonial and nationalist conceptions of the role, effectiveness and legitimacy of the state in India. Although opinions on how best to relieve famines varied, ideological opposition to a narrow laissez-faire paradigm was given short shrift in the years preceding the formulation of the Indian Famine Codes. However, specific empirical critiques of the making and implementing of famine policy were more effective. This article explores the ways in which such challenges put scientific and statistical experts within the colonial edifice at odds with those at the top of the political hierarchy, focusing on disputes over relief wages and famine mortality calculations between Sir Richard Temple and Surgeon-Major W. R. Cornish. It further examines how proto-nationalist groups and newspapers seized on the value given to statistics by the state to hold it to account for its failure to relieve famine.

Studies of student politics in Pakistan often focus on the competition between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ student groups—for example, the leftward-leaning National Students Federation, regional parties with a broadly secular orientation like the Pakhtun Students Federation, the Islami Jamiat-e-Tuleba (Islamic Students Association), and sectarian groups like the (Shi'a) Imamia Students Organization. This paper describes the emergence of an increasingly violent stalemate between and amongst these groups since the 1960s. It then argues that for a growing number of students this stalemate produced a certain disenchantment with exclusionary efforts to control the ‘state-based Muslim nationalism’ that lay behind the formation of Pakistan itself. Seeking alternatives, these disenchanted students developed an interest in non-state-based forms of Muslim solidarity—forms that rejected the constraints of territorial Muslim nationalism in favour of transnational movements focused on the revitalization of Muslim solidarity on a truly global scale—movements like the (Deobandi) Tablighi Jama'at and the (Barelwi) Da'wat-e-Islami. Tracing this development, this paper takes up one application of Talal Asad's argument that alternative expressions of religion (and religious solidarity) are ‘produced’ by specific political circumstances. It also examines this formulation in the light of other theories that take an interest in the effects—indeed the potentially ‘democratizing’ effects—of protracted political stalemates.

At one point in the novel Kanthapura (1938) the eponymous village is literally emptied of men. Thereafter, the novel focuses, for the most part, on the remaining female inhabitants of the village and their resistance to male embodiments of colonial authority, namely the policemen. The moment dramatically foregrounds the whole question of gender in the novel which, though seldom noticed by critics, is one of the most fundamental issues in the text. Yet a gendered reading has been consistently overlooked in the critical discourse in favour of a reading which approaches the novel as an account of nationalist politics. In the effort to collapse the novel's politics into merely an instance of nationalist sentiment what is missed is the possibility of gendering a reading of nationalism itself. In other words, Kanthapura offers us the opportunity to locate Rao's representations of gender and sexuality within the discursive parameters of nationalist ideology in the 1930s and in so doing enable us to examine how these gender representations are in fact overdetermined by questions of identity, both communal and national. It is important, however, to recognize that Rao's gender representations—like those of many other Indian writers, thinkers, and ideologues—operated within the discursive framework of an ideology which had, over the years, elaborated a complex symbolism around signs of femininity. It is important, therefore, to trace the genealogy of gender representations within Indian nationalist discourse.

This paper provides the first detailed assessment of British exports of silver to Asia during the initial phase of imperial expansion in India. It demonstrates that, contrary to the views of some historians, exports of silver were at times very considerable, notably after 1785, when they were used to fund war and debt-relief in India, as well as for trade. Focus is on the East India Company, but attention is paid to private exports, to British transfers of silver around Asia, and the paper ends with an analysis of ‘reverse’ flows to Britain established after 1810.

Environment and sustainable development have been accorded great emphasis since the last quarter of the twentieth century. In India, the environmental protection is enshrined in the Constitution of India (42nd Amendment) under the Directive Principles of State Policy in 1977. According to Article 48A, ‘State shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the forests and wildlife in the country’. Article 51A(g) enjoins upon the citizens ‘to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes and rivers and wildlife and to have compassion for the living creatures’.

The issue of who constituted the workforce employed in the Java sugar industry during the late colonial era remains a controversial one. Almost thirty years ago one leading Indonesian scholar made the eminently plausible suggestion that ‘on the whole, those who sought work in the sugar industry… were those who had no land. They were for the greater part recruited from the landless… who were eager to sell their labour to anyone prepared to pay wages’ [Selosoemardjan 1962: 271]. Since that time, however, the waters of debate have become a great deal murkier. In particular, the legend that the industry's workers remained ‘peasants’ is one which dies hard [e.g. Knight 1989]. Indeed, if there can be said to be a single image illustrative of the prevailing orthodoxy concerning the relations between labour and capital in late colonial Java, it is that of the peasant-worker who ‘persisted as a community-oriented household farmer at the same time that he became an industrial wage labourer’ and who ‘had one foot in the rice terrace and the other in the [sugar] mill’ [Geertz 1963: 89]

The non-cooperation movement dominated Indian politics in 1920 and 1921, and any account of the Kisan Sabhas or Cultivators Associations during those years is likely to lay less stress on their importance than on that of the wider political campaign. Linked by the name of Gandhi, the peasant movement was caught up in the whole campaign of the nationalist leaders against the government. Yet the background to the upsurge of agrarian radicalism in the United Provinces and Bihar shows that it was strongest in districts with particular tenurial and agrarian problems. Moreover, in these localities the radical leadership was independent of outside agencies, its links with wider political movements were tenuous and ambivalent, and it was little subject to external influence and control.

The formal, authoritarian organization of people with similar occupations or interests has been a feature of Japanese society throughout its history. As such, it must be of interest for its own sake and, no less perhaps, for the indications it can provide of the nature of Japanese society as a whole.

As the British Empire extended its power across the Indian subcontinent, the military and political pressures which it could bring to bear had proved to be its most significant assets. However, both to establish and to maintain an English political paramountcy which could guarantee economic dominance came over time to be revealed as two separate tasks, demanding very distinct skills. To maintain and secure this newfound power in India, the British were forced to come to know more about India. They had to grasp the ‘rules’ of India's preexisting political ‘game’ and, more frequently, to confront their need to rewrite these rules into a form which they could comprehend, in which they could compete, and where their dominance could be virtually assured.This process suggests the ‘gathering in of the threads of legitimacy’ towhich D. A. Low has to eloquently drawn our attention.

It has been generally accepted for some time that among the most valuable sources for the history of Rājasthān, especially the Rājasthān of the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries A.D., are the indigenous chronicles (vātas and khyātas), whose existence was well-known even to Tod, but which fell once again into obscurity for the hundred years following the publication of Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han in 1829–32. It is therefore a matter of no small pleasure that, during the past decade or so, many of these texts have at last been finding their way into print. Our thanks in this matter are particularly due to the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute centred in Jodhpur and to the Sadu} Rajasthani Research Institute of Blkaner, who have led the field in the publication of Rajasthani works of both historical and literary interest. This activity on the part of the publishers will certainly add impetus to research on mediaeval Rajasthan, and for this reason, as well as the obvious philological interest of a language as fully-attested and yet linguistically isolated as that of the Rajasthani prose chronicles, it has seemed worth while to prepare these grammatical notes.

It is well-known that the French colonial theory of assimilation, even though it could never be carried out completely in practice, implied the development in French colonies of an indigenous élite of people prepared to accept both French culture and a (subordinate) role in the running of the colony. In French Cochinchina, this élite was especially important owing to the circumstances of the conquest, between 1860 and 1867, when most of the Vietnamese scholar-officials who had ruled the area previously, withdrew and refused to co-operate with the Europeans. The French had no choice but to create an élite of their own, and begin to educate it in French ways. The process has been discussed in detail in a recent study by Dr Milton E. Osborne, which takes the story of colonial rule in southern Viet-Nam down to about 1905.1 During the first four decades of the twentieth century, this élite continued to grow and develop, so that by the 1940s it had become the key element in Cochinchinese society so long as colonial rule might last. The purpose of the present article is to examine the composition and role of this elite about the end of the period in which France could take its presence in Indochina for granted.

The relationship between state and society has recently attracted increasing interest (Skocpol 1985). In many cases, particularly in Asia and the ‘third world’, the question has been posed in terms of how far the state's economic policies reflect the (real or perceived) interests of the capitalist class, or whether the state and its personnel act as an autonomous force above society pursuing policies irrelevant or even inimical to capitalist interests.

Meenakshipuram is a small, dusty village in Tamilnadu's Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) district, very close to the south Kerala border. In 1981 this inconspicuous place, and several other villages in its immediate vicinity, made big headlines in the Indian daily papers when thousands of harijans or ex-untouchables decided to leave Hinduism and to embrace Islam. This spectacular case of mass conversion created a terrible shock among caste Hindus and threatened to upset the always precarious communal balance. Rumours circulated about Arabian sheikhs who had come to give tangible expression to the immense richness of Islamic belief by handsome distributions of oildollars. More serious investigation, however, showed that the harijans in this region had been suffering from oppression by aggressive landlords, harassment by police authorities and acute prejudices by caste Hindus for a very long time. A growing awareness of this social degradation has led many of these harijans to convert to Islam.

British Malaya was a very unhealthy place in the early years of this century. Malaria, ankylostomiasis or hookworm, venereal disease, tuberculosis, dysentery, pneumonia, beri-beri, cholera and still other diseases accounted for thousands of deaths annually in the 1920s. Typically, persons suffered from two or more maladies at the same time. In the Federated Malay States (F. M. S.) probably more than half of those listed as dying from malaria also suffered from hookworm. Many pneumonia deaths were due to tuberculosis. Chronic malnutrition combined with malaria, hookworm and diarrhea in many, perhaps most, pregnant women to produce high infant and maternal mortality. The majority of the living were more or less continuously afflicted with disease. Most of the diseases were debilitating and slow to kill. Most were preventable although that was imperfectly understood.

The historical trading communities of early twentieth century Ladakh, in northern India, interacted with multiple cultures through both travel and the flow of trade goods. Using a neo-pragmatic philosophical framework, I will argue that this community—largely rural and commonly thought of as isolated—was, in fact, cosmopolitan. The traders' interactions with specific commodities prompted them to traverse cultural boundaries and engage with new ideas. This view of cosmopolitanism suggests that, while particular economic, political or social contexts may be part of the settings in which both individuals and communities are engaged in cosmopolitan processes, contexts do not define the cosmopolitan.

This paper makes the case that in China's most severe food crisis of the first quarter of the twentieth century—the great north China famine of 1920–1921—considerable life-saving relief was generated by three largely-neglected segments of Chinese society: Buddhist and other native charity efforts working along parallel social channels to the better-publicized missionary and international relief groups; the Republic's much-maligned military establishment; and officials and residents of the stricken communities themselves who were operating largely ‘below the radar’ of the distant, mostly city-based chroniclers of the famine whose voices have been privileged in the later history-writing process. Despite the recent fall of the Qing and the beginnings of a fractured era of warring between provincial governors, this paper suggests that communities in the increasingly neglected periphery of 1920 north China were significantly more viable and attentive to social welfare needs than has been previously recognized.

Energy security is one of the major global challenges of the twenty-first century. Intensifying competition for ever scarcer forms of conventional energy resources is causing significant tensions in the international system. East Asia will have a more profound impact on global energy security than any other region as its burgeoning demand for energy fuels, spurred principally by China, is expected to continue growing at over twice the world average in the next few decades. This paper examines the reasons why we may expect the energy diplomacies of East Asian states to become an increasingly salient feature of East Asian states’ foreign policy and international relations in the foreseeable future, and thereby significantly shape the nature of the region's international political economy. It presents a framework of energy diplomacy analysis in order to better understand how East Asian states are formulating their energy diplomacy strategies and actions. The four prime elements of this framework comprise: empirical perspectives and generic task-oriented terms; agential influences on the formation and organization of energy diplomacy practice; the energy–development nexus; and transaction mechanisms of energy diplomacy. The main conclusions are first, mercantilist approaches to energy diplomacy will persist but continue to gradually give way to market institutionalism; second, energy diplomacy will become increasingly linked to other forms of diplomacy, such as trade, environment and development assistance; third, we may expect East Asian states to afford greater priority to multilateral energy co-operation both regionally and in a wider international or global sense as energy security interdependencies deepen; and fourth, East Asia's growing reliance on sourcing energy fuels from outside the region will make it more dependent on stable international energy markets—these markets are becoming increasingly internationalized and globalized, which will broaden the future options of East Asian states developing new international energy partnerships.

At the end of the Second World War, there were over a million displaced persons and refugees in Europe alone. Hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted with the expansion of the Japanese empire across the Pacific Theater, and many others were similarly displaced when Japan was defeated. Others later fled civil conflicts, in South Asia, for instance, and in China, where thousands left the mainland during the final days of the Chinese Civil War. Among this massive displacement in Asia, unlike in Europe, only a few groups were identified as refugees. One such group consisted of the migrants in Hong Kong who, after 1949, were understood to be refugees fleeing communist oppression in the People's Republic of China. This article examines the critical role that surveys (population studies designed to account for, and define, refugee groups) played in shaping particular, Westernized Cold War understandings of the refugee experience in Hong Kong. These surveys were organized by non-state interests and undertaken with financial support from major American philanthropies. In examining the objectives and methodologies of the refugee surveys conducted in Hong Kong in the early 1950s, in contrast with studies undertaken contemporaneously in Europe, this article observes that, although at the time the flaws in the surveys were recognized and regularly disregarded in the pursuit of broad political objectives, scholars have failed to adequately recognize the subjective nature of the surveys' supposedly empirical evidence. As a result, the dominant European-based narrative about modern refugees has obfuscated the distinctive aspects of the refugee experience in Hong Kong.

Both in terms of area and population, the fifteen changwads of the North-east constitute the largest of the four basic regions in the Kingdom of Thailand. Recent census data indicate that 37.9 per cent of the 3.2 million Thai farm households live in this region cultivating a similar proportion of the country's 69.7 million rai (I rai = 0.395 acre) of land in agricultural holdings. However, the region seems to have more than its fair share of the problems which stand in the way of the Government's efforts to accelerate the country's economic development. At present, the solution to the ‘North-east Problem’ remains as elusive as it was a decade ago. In spite of the impressive amount of public expenditure already poured into the region for improving the infra-structure and providing a wide range of rural facilities, together with an ever-increasing amount of services rendered by national and international agencies for planning and implementing the processes of growth, the per caput income of the North-easterner still lags as far behind that of his fellow countryman residing elsewhere in the kingdom as it did in the recent past. This article attempts to analyse the interaction of the physical conditions and socio-economic problems which are bound up in the existing land-use system of the North-east.