Siam managed to replace royal absolutism with limited monarchy in June 1932 without any chaos or bloodshed. But the transition quickly proved to be far from complete. The country was to undergo a major upheaval before suffering a semi-civil war only about a year after the princely rule was toppled. The new regime, accordingly, began to consider its constitution as a symbol behind which the people could be mobilized. A massive campaign for the document was then launched in late 1933 and it soon culminated in what can be regarded as the practice of constitution worship. This article will look at the campaign in detail, especially with respect to its underlying logics; the aim is to reveal and analyse the attempt by the revolutionary regime to transform the first permanent constitution into a sacred entity. Meanwhile, in pursuing such an aim, this article will shed light on the formation of a constitutional culture in Siam. Given that a basic law had never existed in the country, the article will discuss not only how the state promoted the permanent constitution, but also how the Siamese society encountered and experienced constitutional rule for the first time.

Can we find different levels of meaning in the term ‘the female voice’? From a straightforwardly narratological perspective, a female voice indicates that the narrator in the art form under discussion is a woman. Could it also suggest a female perspective, and is a female perspective distinguishable from female narration: do we assume the former is built on language that is feminized, using a different vocabulary and a different expression? Does it matter whether a female voice is created by men or by women? When a woman creates art that has a female narrator, and yet through that narrator expresses woman's experience as constructed by an overarching patriarchal ideology, is the voice nevertheless female? Is the voice of a genre contingent upon its real-life audience, or upon the implied audience within the narrative itself? These are some of the issues that I want to tease out in the present paper. As is often the case in academic enquiry, more questions may be raised than answered. At this juncture it is my aim to establish a dialogue between the study of text and the study of performance, not only to add to a well-established discussion of how text is used in performance but to incorporate into that existing discourse the relevance of the contextual dimension.

In the pilgrimage season of 1899 a ‘small but select’ group of Jains met before the temple of the deity Bharamappa near Kolhapur to found the Southern Maharashtra Jain Sabha, the dakṣiṣ mahāraṣṬrajain sabhā. The intended constituency of the Sabha was the Digambar Jain population of the Southern Maratha Country of the Bombay Presidency, the area including Kolhapur State, Belgaum, and Sangli, with their rural hinterlands. The Sabha prospers still, while so many of the other associations in that lush growth of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India have disappeared. It has been instrumental in forging a Jain ethnicity, in creating a new sense of a specifically Jain past and present, and in fostering new habits of education and of social intercourse among Jains. A good proportion of what is today taken for granted by Jains about southern Digambar samskrti, ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’, was moulded by Jains acting in and through the Sabha.

The basic administrative unit in the Spanish Philippines was the pueblo or municipal township. The pueblo encompassed both settled and unsettled districts within its geographical boundaries. The town centre Known as the población was the largest single residential zone within the municipality but was surrounded by smaller satellite communities. Beyond these areas of settlement were the sparsely populated regions of swamp, forest, plain or mountain. Size varied enormously both in geographical extent and population density from a few hundred families clustered in a single village or barangay in frontier areas to many tens of thousands of persons spread over a number of settlements in the lowland provinces of Luzon and the central Visayas.2 The administrative boundaries of one pueblo, however, bordered upon another so that all areas under Spanish suzerainty fell within one or other of these municipalities.

The story of Ya Mo is that of a great Thai heroine honoured with a grand monument (the Suranari memorial) in the centre of Khorat, a city in the north-east of Thailand. The monument is a sacred shrine embedding Ya Mo's guardian spirit which protects the people of the city. She is a grantor of protection, auspiciousness and good luck, and can fulfil wishes, needs and requests. Her spirit can be benevolent as well as ferocious and revengeful. She is a warrior and a guardian, but also a grandmother and a symbol of patriotism, kinship and loving kindness. Ya Mo and her shrine must be perceived in relation to Thai religion and the position of deities, spirits, ghosts and otherworldly beings in Theravāda Buddhism. Ya Mo represents a wide range of meanings and functions, but when viewed exclusively as a historical figure, most of these do not surface. In order to understand the Ya Mo phenomenon, the field between religion and magic in Thai Theravāda Buddhism must therefore be explored, as well as how people create and uphold distinctions between religion and magic, and how they communicate and negotiate between these two spheres or dimensions. This paper attempts to analyse how non-Buddhist monuments and shrines, in this case a historical memorial to Ya Mo, erected as part of Thai nation-building, represent a vivid part of Thai religious and spiritual life, deeply rooted in a Buddhist worldview.

This paper compares the definitions, practices, and legal constraints on labour in Britain, France, Mauritius, and Reunion Island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It argues that the way in which indentured labour was defined and practised in the colonies was linked to the definition and practice of wage labour in Europe and that their development was interconnected. The types of bondage that existed in the colonies were extreme forms of the notion, practices, and rules of labour in Europe. It would have been impossible to develop the indenture contract in the British and French empires if wage earners in Britain and France had not been servants. The conceptions and practices of labour in Europe and its main colonies influenced each other and were part of a global dynamic.

The English East India Company established a factory on the island of Condore, off the coast of southern Vietnam, in 1702 as part of its plan to maintain a settlement to direct shipping activities between trading ports in China and Southeast Asia and India. For three years, the settlement thrived and was an important part of the China trade network, especially as a stopping point for ships plying the China route. The island settlement also carried out trading activities with neighbouring ports along the Indochina coast and the Malay Archipelago. The setting up of the factory, however, coincided with the emergence of the new entity of southern Vietnam under the Nguyễn family who were expanding their power-base to the south. In the process, the Nguyễn had already subdued the Chams and were coming face-to-face with the Khmers when the English factory was established. This paper will trace the English venture on Condore Island and the reaction of the Nguyễn ruler towards this venture which culminated with the destruction of the factory in 1705. This paper will attempt to explore the following questions: the shifting importance of the islands in the Nguyễn's security and foreign relations vis-à-vis the English factory, and will also investigate the circumstances that brought about the massacre and destruction of the English factory on Pulo Condore—a historical event that has not been properly explained thus far.

Accessing the day-to-day, albeit pressing, concerns of Pakistanis in the early 1950s can be difficult as a result of the relative paucity of relevant primary material. One set of sources, however, are the letters written to the editors of contemporary newspapers during this period, in which correspondents outlined their expectations of, made demands on, and aired their frustrations with, the everyday state in the years following independence and Pakistan's creation. This paper draws on a sample of this correspondence on the letter pages of Dawn (Karachi) during 1950–1953 in order to explore the views of ordinary citizens as they grappled with problems of housing, transport, food rationing, water shortage, and corruption.

One interesting aspect of the Revolution of 1911 in China was the role of the new-style army. The new-style troops, as one category of revolutionary activists distinct from the civilian radical intellectuals, determined the opening phase of the revolution, initiating the Wuchang uprising and bringing pressure to bear on most of the provincial leaders. Their contribution was the physical strength which the revolutionary intellectuals, who provided the ideology, lacked. The army played its vital role, not in the beginning of the revolutionary movement, but at a later stage when the prevailing order had been discredited and the imperial government had lost the allegiance of the people. Indeed, the success of the revolution reflected the interaction between revolutionary ideas and military power.

In his final minute in March 1856, just on the eve of his departure from India, Lord Dalhousie, while reviewing the last eight years of his administration, describes the railways, electric telegraph and uniform postage which he introduced into India as the ‘three great engines of social improvement’. Posterity certainly knows how correct Dalhousie's description was, but under this prophetic utterance of Dalhousie flows a subtle current of philosophy which few scholars working on the Dalhousie era have been able to detect and interpret. That philosophy was the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham and his faithful and able lieutenant, James Mill. In his History of British India, which Mill undertook before 1808 and published in London in 1817, Mill had questioned the values of Indian society and suggested its reform on Benthamite principles. The key to progress in India, Mill also pointed out, lay in the introduction of Western science and knowledge. It is surprising that Daihousie, though a staunch Tory, subscribed to this view of Bentham and Mill about India and as a result ‘the natural alliance of the Scientific Benthamite administrator and the authoritative Tory gentlemen’ which ‘was never fully achieved in England’ was ‘achieved only in India’.

In Malaya, as in many underdeveloped nations, problems of the peasantry form a source of continual anxiety. One of the most intractable of these was described by the Malayan Government as ‘the unsatisfactory situation [of] overcrowding on the land and the frustration of ambitions to acquire land.’ How this situation has come about is the initial concern of this paper, which explores the historical record of agricultural development and land ownership in one area of western Malaya. By tracing changes that have taken place since 1890, it is hoped to demonstrate how and at what rates limited resources of land have become partitioned among increasing numbers of people, a process that, being the very antithesis of development, has been termed ‘agricultural involution’ by Geertz. The information is then supplemented with modern records from other areas to show typical features of ownership in the Malayan peasant sector of today. The findings suggest how traditional Malay society has responded to modern economic pressures, and may generate practical methods for dealing with some of the problems facing development planners today.

The historian who compares the disintegration of political societies like the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary with the emergence of political societies like India is immediately struck by the different meanings which nationalism can assume in different contexts. The historian who carries out such a comparison would be justified in drawing the conclusion that nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century was quite different from nationalism in India in the twentieth century. In the former instance, nationalism led to the breakdown of societies which embraced diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups into relatively homogeneous communities; in the latter instance, it ostensibly led to the fusion of peoples who spoke different languages, who belonged to different cultures, and who subscribed to different traditions, into a single nation. The nationalists of Europe pointed with pride to the close ties of language, culture and race which held together the new States of Europe; the nationalists of India, however, pointed with equal pride to their achievement in forging peoples who were racially distinct from each other, and who subscribed to distinct historical traditions, into a single political community.

Few books are exemplars of real hard work sustained over a lengthy period of time as is John Smith's The Epic of Pabuji(1991). Starting his investigation of the scroll of cloth painting in 1973, a huge structure measuring fifteen feet by four, locally termed par, before which this epic is sung by a special caste of people, lower in hierarchy, called Naik Bhopa, Smith in a span of eighteen years has accomplished a work of lasting stay in the ethnographic tradition of south Asia as well as the discipline of folklore in general. Before this book was published, he had also contributed some important papers (in 1986 and 1989) on Pabu-ji. As far as I know, it is rare that Sanskritists, which Smith is at Cambridge, pay attention to ‘popular (or “non-Sanskritic”) traditions’ of people, and if at all they do, introducing the anthropological method of fieldwork in their study, their works are still laden with Indological references and scholarship where the actual voice of people is lost in oblivion or relegated to the back seat. But it does not happen with Smith; he is not only committed to listening to people's voice in its own right and place, but also provides a fair, up to date, and scholarly account of Pabu-ji's story and its role and niche in the local culture of Rajasthan. Therefore, his work is also of considerable interest to anthropologists, especially those working on the sociology of cult, popular religion, and non- literate traditions and their meanings.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) attempted throughout his public life to mobilize the Indian populace for mass political action. He did this by means of his speeches, journalism, leadership and philosophy. His desire was to throw off the yoke of British colonialism, to deliver his countrymen out of bondage. To this end Tilak sought a cogent and comprehensive, yet distinctly Indian, justification for anti-British pro-Hindu activism. He believed that the divergent sects of India could converge to form ‘a mighty Hindu nation’ if they would only follow the original principles of the Hindu tradition as set forth in such texts as the Rāmāyana and the Bhagavadgītā. And this convergence should be the goal of all Hindus.1 Tilak's interpretations of these texts, especially the Gītā, provided him with his ‘justification’ which rationalized his political work in religious guise.

The problem of the degree of economic development which took place in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) and its effects on the modernization of Japan has given rise to considerable controversy. This is in part due to Marxist efforts to fit this development into Marxian categories, and to see in it elements of class struggle. These efforts have met stiff opposition from historians who have shown fairly persuasively how inapplicable these concepts are to the period. The trouble goes much further than this, however. Any kind of statistical measurement of the degree of economic development before 1868 is vastly complicated by the scarcity and by the notorious inaccuracy of Tokugawa statistical records, both public and private.

All historians would agree that one decisive factor in the overthrow of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the alignment against it in 1867 of several of the great domains (han), and the failure of the Shōgun to rally any comparable support among the rest. In the wider sense the reasons for this are complex, as well as being a matter of some controversy. Nevertheless, the proximate causes are obvious enough. In the anti-Bakufu domains, notably Satsuma and Chōshū, power had fallen into the hands of samurai groups which sought the destruction of the régime. In a number of others, similar groups wielded sufficient influence to prevent the daimyō or his senior officials from giving whole-hearted backing to the Tokugawa. Clearly, therefore, the study of how this came about, that is, of the nature and processes of domain politics, is important to an understanding of the Meiji Restoration.

In 1959 a collection of over twenty thousand Chinese-language documents, previously kept in the rambling Peking compound which had housed the British Legation (latterly, British Embassy) since 1861, was transmitted to the Public Record Office in London. It was given the class title Papers in the Chinese Language and the class number FO 682. The documents, some of which were rumoured to have been lying among the rafters of the Legation chapel, arrived in a state of confusion. Early attempts at listing reflected rather than resolved the confusion, but the documents are in fact far from being the trackless jumble sometimes supposed.

This article makes a case for Vietnam as a distinctive example of late- and post-socialist marketization, a painful experience that has brought widespread immiseration to rural societies within and beyond Asia. Building on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a northern Vietnamese village, I explore a hitherto under-researched aspect of Vietnam's massive social and economic transformation in the 30 years since the onset of market transition or Renovation (Đổi mới): the surprising ways in which rural households have negotiated both the risks and opportunities of the state's push to de-cooperativize and marketize village livelihoods. The state expects that a minority of rich farmers will rapidly move into large-scale, mechanized farming, while the majority will abandon small-scale subsistence farming to specialize in trade or participate in industrial waged employment. Surprisingly, all village households insist on being đa gi năng, that is, on retaining multiple livelihood options instead of following the official modernization scripts. Their refusal to follow state plans is not market-averse ‘resistance’, but something rarely documented in the literature on peasant life in marketizing contexts: a local sense of agency and taking personal responsibility for the security and long-term welfare of their families, in the face of highly unpredictable state policies.

After the Taiping Rebellion, Governors-General and Governors had access to resources and performed functions which were formerly outside their purview. These resources were mainly the new provincial armies which had defeated the Taipings, and the likin taxes which had been invented to sustain the armies. Leading provincial officials such as Li Hung-chang also found themselves initiating and implementing, on a local basis, ‘self-strengthening’ economic projects ranging from arsenals to mines. They tended to be stationed longer in the same posts, and to have a certain amount of say in the appointment of their subordinates.

The build-up and development of the Okinawan struggle for reversion to Japanese administration does not figure prominently in the English-language literature on the American occupation of Okinawa, nor does it occupy a central place in Japanese analyses of this subject. Rather there is a tendency to view Okinawa as a subset of US-Japanese postwar relations, and to explain reversion as a process carried through by senior American and Japanese officials, largely governed by high-level diplomatic and military-strategic considerations. There is often only passing mention of the rising tensions within Okinawa itself and, perhaps more importantly, the increasing effectiveness through the 1960s of the indigenous reversion movement centred on the Okinawa Teachers' Association (Okinawa kyōshokuinkai). For example, John Welfield's trenchant account of the ‘three years of tortuous negotiations’ that culminated in November 1969 in an American pledge to return the islands hardly mentions conflicts within Okinawa itself, remarking only that ‘the swing to the left’ in 1968 foreshadowed major problems for the US if Okinawan demands for reversion were not met.