Despite the commodification of land and labor in colonial Bombay Presidency, capitalism and its associated dynamic (modern economic growth via innovation, specialization, and so on resulting in the improved productiveness of labor) did not, by and large, develop.The colonial state reformed the property structure, bringing the notion of a single owner for each property, ending the overlapping property rights of the pre-colonial regimes. Capital was freely deployed to make profits of alienation, if not profits of enterprise. Yet, small-scale family-labor farms continued as the backbone of Bombay agriculture. The peasantry could not sustain capitalist-style growth but did maintain a tenacious hold on the land with the help of the state, and its own capacity to endure horrendous levels of exploitation and poverty; the former symptomized by high land prices and low crop prices paid to the producer; the latter by mass peasant insolvency. The power of capital was in direct proportion to the peasants' desperate need for land and loans. The colonial state was fully aware that this kind of relationship was inimical to development, but did little to bring capital into a productive relationship with landed property. The colonial state came to resemble a classic agrarian bureaucracy rather than a capitalist state. Despite some commitments to modernization, it ruled over an impoverished agrarian society. This paper attempts to locate this result in the specific interests and interactions of the major social agents of rural Bombay: the state, capital and the peasantry.

The historiography of South Asian diaspora in colonial Southeast Asia has overwhelmingly focused on numerically dominant South Indian labourers at the expense of the small, but important, North Indian communities, of which the Sikhs were the most visually conspicuous and politically important. This paper will analyse the creation of various Sikh communities in one critical territory in British Asia—Singapore, and chart the development of the island's increasingly unified Sikh community into the post-colonial period. The paper will scrutinize colonial economic roles and socio-cultural formation, whilst links of Singaporean Sikhs to Punjab and their place within the post-colonial Singaporean state will preoccupy the latter portion of the paper. It will argue that more complicated notions of division relative to the social norms of Punjab must be acknowledged in this region of Sikh diaspora and indeed others. The final sections will assess the remarkable success of local Sikhs in utilizing statist policies of ‘domesticating difference’ towards altered ‘community’ ends. Such attachment to the state and the discursive parity of Singapore's Sikhs with official values, moreover, stymied the appeal of transnational Sikh militant movements that gained momentum in the West in the 1980s. The result has been the assertion of ‘model minority’ status for Singapore's Sikhs and notably successful socialization into Singaporean society.

The history of coal mining in Malaya is synonymous with the history of Malayan Collieries and Batu Arang town since coal was only ever economically mined in this small area in Ulu Selangor. The town of Batu Arang, the Malayan Collieries and the mines left an indelible mark on Malayan history. Previous accounts of the history of coal mining are restricted to mentions in general works on labour and the labour unrest of 1936–37 and 1946–47. This paper outlines the role of coal mining in the Malayan economy in the first half of the twentieth century. It also focuses on the history of labour at the collieries and the significant role that labour played in the development and growth of industrial activism in Malaya.

The concept of the city as religious centre, administrative capital and economic pivot for a society, state or kingdom, expressed in the Islamic concept of madina (Gibbs and Kramers 1961: 291; Lapidus 1969: 69) pre-dates Muslim influence in Southeast Asia. The physical as well as functional characteristics of the Southeast Asian city, deriving from its urban features, as distinct from its rural surroundings, were a culmination of gradual evolution since the rise, about the middle of the second century A.D., of the first trading ports and cities. The distinction between the city as urban centre and its rural surroundings is attested in the traditional Javanese view of the negara. In the fourteenth century Nawanatya the negara is defined as ‘all where one can go out (of his compound) without passing through paddy fields’ (Pigeaud 1960, 3: 121). It is by virtue of their evolutionary origins through their total symbiosis with the surrounding rural peripheries that Middle-Eastern and Southeast Asian cities, even pre-dating Islam, contrasted significantly with the cities of Medieval Christendom with formally constituted municipal laws and corporate institutions (Hourani 1970: 15).1 The pre-eminence of cities in their composite role as capitals for religious, political and economic activity was a significant feature of the historical evolution of pre-modern Southeast Asia and will constitute the definition of a city within the purview of this survey.

Understanding how unequal relations are reproduced over time is as significant as comprehending inequality itself. For unequal relations exist only in human practices that reproduce them. More than a play on words, the coupling of production with reproduction in recent anthropological studies highlights processes that provide the basis for production. The necessity of reconstructing practices that reproduce social relations is perhaps nowhere more neglected than in the study of South Asian history. When it comes to explaining how unequal relations between social groups were maintained, the caste system is the perennial favorite. This is particularly so where relations between landlords and landless laborers are concerned. Thus, even Jan Breman's sophisticated and rich study of dependent laborers in South Gujarat points to the jajmani system, the institutional form of caste relations in the agrarian context, as the basis for relations between laborers and landlords in the past. While his study illuminates how bonded labor relations can be understood in the light of the jajmani model, it fails to explain how these relations were reproduced. Are we to assume that the transactional norms of the caste system, once in place, simply drove laborers and landlords into actions that reproduced bondage?

This article examines the postcolonial Indian state's 20-year-long discretionary passports policy until 1967, often in collaboration with the British government in its efforts to limit growing numbers of Indian immigrants. While a vast scholarship has shown the racialized limits to mobility perpetuated by the passport and visa system against ‘coloured immigrants’, this article considers the Indian state's own restrictions over the emigration of a particular category of its ‘undesirable’ citizens. This passport regime was based on Indian diplomatic notions of the ‘international’ realm as one shaped by the journeys of migrants and imbued with discourses of indenture qua caste. The Indian state sought to prevent the mobility of ‘lower’ caste and class migrants who were deemed to be legatees of the dreaded ‘coolie’ and therefore unworthy of travelling abroad as representatives of India. Such a reading of the postcolonial Indian passport as a document of caste and class privilege goes beyond the existing literature which largely focuses on its use in the context of partition. In so doing, this article posits the histories and afterlives of indenture as a constitutive element in the making of Indian diplomacy, demonstrating that a focus on indenture facilitates a much-needed recovery of the narratives and euphemisms of caste in Indian diplomacy.

This paper makes a case for exploring the cultural facets of Mughal rule as well as for a stronger engagement with sources in vernacular languages for the writing of Mughal history. Bengal's regional tradition of goddess worship is used to explore the cultural dimensions of Mughal rule in that region as well as the idioms in which Bengali regional perceptions of Mughal rule were articulated. Mangalkavya narratives—a quintessentially Bengali literary genre—are studied to highlight shifting perceptions of the Mughals from the late sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. During the period of the Mughal conquest of Bengal, the imperial military machine was represented as a monster whom the goddess Chandi, symbolizing Bengal's regional culture, had to vanquish. By the eighteenth century, when their rule had become much more regularized, the Mughals were depicted as recognizing aspects of Bengal's regional culture by capitulating in the end to the goddess and becoming her devotees. This paper also studies the relationship of the Mughal regime with Bengal's popular cultural celebration—the annual Durga puja—and explores its implications for the public performance of religion and for community formation during the early modern period.

As early as 1613, the leadership of the Dutch East India Company [VOC] recognized the importance of direct trade with China. Attempts to gain a foothold on the Chinese coast by use of force in the early decades of the century were unsuccessful. Beginning in 1624, the Dutch used a fortified settlement on the island of Taiwan as the next best thing to a mainland base. When their position on Taiwan was threatened in the middle of the century, the VOC directors decided to try to get their mainland trading privileges through diplomacy. Although later embassies have received more extensive scholarly attention, relatively little research has been done into the expectations and strategies of the various parties involved in the first VOC embassy of 1655–1657.

In a recent and thought-provoking article, Dr Lakshmi Subramanian has forcefully made the case that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the history of the West Coast of India in general and the history of the city of Surat in particular are explained by the rise of what she terms the ‘Anglo-Bania order’, namely ‘a mercantile and political order distinguished by the mutually beneficial cooperation of the English East India Company and the Bania bankers and merchants of Surat and Bombay’.More specifically, Dr Subramanian claims that the rise of the Anglo-Bania order is at the roots of the first Hindu—Muslim communal clash about which a reasonably good documentation has survived, namely the ‘great tumult’ of August 1795, when ‘the lower orders of the Muslim population fell upon the shops and houses of the Bania residents of the city, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books’.

However surprising Russell's combination of mathematical logic and pacifist anti-capitalist ethics may appear, it becomes understandable if one looks for its psychological roots. He who is ready to overthrow the oldest traditions in logic and to uncover the illusory nature of ancient ideals will also look with more freedom at the ideals of bourgeois ethics and not be afraid to give up values which those who are tradition-bound are unable to renounce.

Around 1930, at a time of rising nationalisms in China and India, English-educated Chinese and Indians in the British colony of Singapore debated with great intensity the issue of national identity. They sought to clarify their own position as members of ethnic communities of immigrant origin, while remaining individuals who identified the territory of British Malaya as their home. Readers' letters published in the Malaya Tribune, an English-medium newspaper founded to serve the interests of Anglophone Asians, questioned prevailing assumptions of how to define a nation from the perspectives of territory, political loyalty, race, and language. Lived circumstances in Malaya proved that being Chinese or Indian could encompass a range of political, cultural, and linguistic characteristics, rather than a homogenous identity as promoted by nationalist movements of the time. Through these debates, Chinese and Indians in Malaya found ways to simultaneously reaffirm their ethnic pride as well as their sense of being ‘Malayan’.

This article explores the relationship between Chinese officials and Western European industrialists, revealing that in the second half of the 1950s, there already was a specific Western European interest in China's market potential, and that this was met with favour on the Chinese side. In order to become a strong and independent country, the People's Republic of China was especially interested in evaluating a wide range of offers in the chemical and energy sectors. By looking at the early achievements of the Italian company, National Hydrocarbon Holding (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, ENI), this article will show how its offer in terms of technology and engineering met with the favour of the Chinese at the beginning of the 1960s. This was just when the local petroleum industry was moving towards self-reliance, which China ultimately achieved, albeit for a short time. Sources show that, despite economic and political constraints, PRC decision-makers were perfectly aware of prices and commercial strategies, as well as of the state-of-the-art technology of the time. Furthermore, China's commercial cooperation with Western European companies in the 1950s–1960s meant that early on Chinese leaders had an opportunity to evaluate market alternatives to their tightly constraining alliance with the Socialist bloc.

A number of papers have been written in the west on the subject of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia. Hyer and Heaton's (1968) account of the period in the China Quarterly deals with events up until 1968, and relies heavily upon an analysis of the news reports broadcast by Radio Inner Mongolia at that time. The paper focuses upon the fate of Ulanhu, the Chairman of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region who fell from power during the Cultural Revolution. Hyer and Heaton are concerned primarily with the power struggles within the political apparatus, and they include no first-hand or eyewitness accounts. The paper gives no indication of the effects of the Cultural Revolution upon the great bulk of the population of the I.M.A.R., either Mongolian or Han Chinese. However, the article does carefully document the rapidly changing tide of Inner Mongolian government policy and the emergence of populist groups which challenged the political establishment, over the period 1965 to 1968.

The tiny, oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, situated on the north-west coast of Borneo, regained full independence at the end of 1983, when the United Kingdom surrendered responsibility for its defence and foreign policy. Internally, the predominantly Muslim, Malay State has been self-governing since 1959, albeit by an autocratic monarchy. In this article, however, I shall focus on the British ‘Residency’ in Brunei, which lasted from January 1906 until September 1959.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Uttar Pradesh, this article contributes to debates on married women's relations with their natal kin. It compares women in ‘regional’ marriages (which conform to caste and community norms with a relatively small marriage distance) with women in ‘cross-regional’ marriages (those that cross caste, linguistic, and state boundaries, and entail long-distance migration). A focus on cross-regional marriage demonstrates how geographic distance cuts women off from vital structures of support. At the same time, even for regional brides, natal kin support is complicated and relative proximity does not guarantee support. Factors such as caste, class, poverty, the gender of children, notions of honour and shame, and stage in the life-course work together in complex ways to determine the duration and kind of support available. By focusing on marital violence, marital breakdown, and widowhood, the article demonstrates both the presence and the limits of natal kin support. The opportunities to draw on natal kin support vary for women, but its significance must not be understated as it alone provides women with the possibility of leaving their marriages, even if only temporarily. The article focuses on one form of women's agency, one that is constrained and highly dependent on relationships with others (mainly male kin). In such a context of economic and social dependency, natal kin support is an important—and perhaps the only—resource available in situations of marital crisis, and its absence leaves women in a particularly vulnerable position.

Durga puja, or the worship of goddess Durga, is the single most important festival in Bengal's rich and diverse religious calendar. It is not just that her temples are strewn all over this part of the world. In fact, goddess Kali, with whom she shares a complementary history, is easily more popular in this regard. But as a one-off festivity, Durga puja outstrips anything that happens in Bengali life in terms of pomp, glamour, and popularity. And with huge diasporic populations spread across the world, she is now also a squarely international phenomenon, with her puja being celebrated wherever there are even a score or so of Hindu Bengali families in one place. This is one Bengali festival that has people participating across religions and languages. In that sense, Durga puja has an unmistakable cosmopolitan hue about it. With more than 10 million people visiting the different pandals (the temporary, covered pavilions or marquees created for the goddess) in Kolkata alone on any one of the four days of festivity (now effectively extended to a whole week), Durga puja could well be the biggest carnival on earth. Kolkata's image has become synonymous with this grand autumnal festival of the goddess.

Scholars have portrayed the 1963 ‘Buddhist crisis’ in South Vietnam as a struggle for religious freedom, as a political conspiracy, or as a manifestation of ancient religious beliefs and practices. This paper, in contrast, argues that the crisis emerged from a clash of modernizing visions. The Buddhist-led protests that took place in South Vietnam in 1963 were linked to the Vietnamese Buddhist revival, a nationalist reform movement that began during the early twentieth century. The protests also reflected growing Buddhist anxieties about the Ngo Dinh Diem government's nation-building agenda for South Vietnam. By the time the crisis began, Buddhist leaders had concluded that this agenda (which Diem referred to as the ‘Personalist Revolution’) was incompatible with their plans to realize Vietnam's destiny as a ‘Buddhist nation’. In addition to reinterpreting the origins of the crisis, this paper examines how the course of events was shaped by the personalities and agendas of particular Buddhist and government leaders, and especially by fierce rivalries among members of Diem's family. These internal tensions help to explain the failure of attempts to end the crisis through negotiations, as well as Diem's decision to crush the movement by force in August 1963.

This article aims to deepen scholarly understanding of the special political and economic connection between Britain and Socialist China during the 1950s and the 1960s. After 1949, the British government had substantive reasons to preserve a link with Beijing, despite the unfolding of the Cold War. First, British assets in China were numerous. Second, the Crown colony of Hong Kong was an indispensable strategic enclave, although militarily indefensible. Third, the Foreign Office considered that Asia should represent an exception to unquestioned British loyalty to the Atlantic alliance, since the United Kingdom needed to prove that it was able to represent and preserve Commonwealth interests in the area. The article will point out that the United Kingdom maintained a privileged role as the main trading partner of the People's Republic of China (PRC) outside the Socialist bloc, thanks to the financial and commercial role played by Hong Kong. This is proved through an analysis of the fate of British financial institutions in China, which represented a favourable exception in the bleak scenario of the PRC nationalization process, as well as of the industrial development of the British colony, which was based on importing food and labour from the mainland, while serving as a financial hub in support of the PRC economy.

In September 1687 the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, finally achieved a goal he had sought for the past forty years: the conquest of the kingdom of Golconda. After an extended siege of the great fort of Golconda, treachery and a night escalade had finally given the Mughal ruler possession of the last center of resistance in the kingdom. Abul Hasan, the last Qutb Shah ruler, became a Mughal captive. Aurangzeb wasted little time in sending the former king off to captivity in Daulatabad fort. For approximately four months the conquering emperor remained in Hyderabad in order that he could personally direct the first steps toward assimilation of the new territories into the empire.

A major transformation has occurred in rural China since reform policies were initiated in 1979. It has been particularly dramatic in the highly commercialized Pearl River delta region of the southern province of Guangdong, provenance of most North Americans of Chinese origin. The delta region has become firmly incorporated into the global economy and its external linkages, especially to Hong Kong, have been central in the process of change. The responses to reform in the areas of the delta dominated by an Overseas Chinese presence have been distinctive. Varied family economic strategies have arisen to meet the opportunities implicit in the new policies for rural reform in a region in which remittances from abroad are significant. There has also been the revival of complex kinship groupings (lineages) energized by Overseas Chinese communities, which have assumed important roles in regional economic development.