Mishima Yukio killed himself on 25 November 1970 at the age of forty-five in the traditional Japanese warrior manner of seppuku after a vain attempt to incite a unit of the Self-Defence Forces to a coup d'état. The event shocked and alarmed not only the Japanese but also people abroad. Many were reminded of the 1936 coup by young army officers, and some, especially abroad, became worried about a possible revival of Japanese militarism. But the jeering by the rank and file troops whom Mishima tried to rouse to action proves that such a possibility is very slight. The Japanese Government, including Mr Nakasone, the Minister of Defence, positively disapproved of Mishima's action. The Prime Minister, Mr Sato, was anxious lest such scandalous behaviour on the part of an eminent writer might tarnish the reputation of the country founded on economic prosperity. Nevertheless, nothing seems farther from the truth than the Prime Minister's statement that Mishima had ‘gone mad’. In every detail Mishima's suicide was an act calculated well in advance. In its political implications it was a challenge to the kind of stability and prosperity of present-day Japan of which the Prime Minister himself is the representative. Mishima detested the progressive or left-wing Japanese intellectuals, but he did not align himself with the Liberal Democratic Party either. Nor was he prepared at all to link with the right-wing organizations, in spite of the ultra-nationalism of his own Shield Society. Ironically enough, Mishima could have agreed with the dissident students of the New Left who played the leading role in the 1968–69 university upheavals.

When, more than ten years ago, Professor Harry Benda urged Southeast Asian historians to consider the significance of peasant movements, he wrote with singular perspicacity. The attention that had been paid to the peasantry as a political force in the literature published up to the middle 1960s was limited. Nevertheless, on the basis of his own research into the Samin movement in Java and a shrewd estimation that much available evidence had been neglected, he argued for both the possibility and the worth of studying peasant movements throughout colonial Southeast Asia. Like many other students, I was struck by the force of Harry Benda's arguments, and the following essay owes much to his scholarly inspiration.

This paper sheds light on the long-distance politics of a small and rather young diaspora—the Acehnese overseas—which proved to be very influential on homeland politics despite its relatively small size, especially with regard to the separatist conflict in Aceh, Indonesia. Special attention is therefore given to the close connections between the politicized migrant population overseas and their involvement back home. Born out of the suffering of people in Aceh and in Malaysia—the main destiny for refugees—the Acehnese overseas started to organize informal associations and networks to foster mutual support. During the almost 30-year-long conflict, material, financial, and other forms of support were directed not only to members of the diaspora, but also to people in Aceh, as well as the separatists, which enabled them to continue their struggle for Aceh's independence from Indonesia. Unlike larger conflict-generated diasporas that can afford to send home large sums of money, the Acehnese diaspora's greatest strength was the ideological and moral support they provided to people back in Aceh. The evolution of the diaspora and its activities were closely linked to developments in the homeland. By emphasizing the dependence of diasporas on homeland developments, which dictates the level of their political engagement, this paper draws attention to the diaspora's support for both the perpetuation of conflict and conflict resolution. After the end of the conflict in 2005, the diaspora lost its prominent role, and became involved in rudimentary forms of long-distance engagement.

The imperial institution's capacity for survival, despite the many transformations in Japanese society and politics over the past thirteen hundred years, has few parallels in the history of human institutions. In 1965 the Imperial Household Agency could legitimately claim that the structure for managing the palace even today, though changed several times, including the ‘epoch-making’ renovation of 1947, could be traced back to the Taihō Institutes of 701.

Elsewhere in this number, Sushil Chaudhury has provided a critique of a part of Chapter VIII of my book The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal 1630–1720 (Princeton University Press, 1985). An earlier version of this part of the chapter had appeared as ‘Bullion for Goods: European Trade and the Economy of Early Eighteenth Century Bengal’ in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1976. Chaudhury is worried about the bad influence I have had on fellow researchers such as Michael Twomey who have found it useful to follow in their own work the methodology that I had developed. Chaudhury is even more concerned about the use of my work and of the conclusions I had arrived at by fellow scholars such as Peter Marshall, Niels Steensgaard and John Richards.

Lord Curzon was the imperial gatekeeper who opened the way to parliamentary government in India by composing Edwin Montagu's declaration of 20 August 1917. He defined British policy as ‘the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’. Curzon himself acknowledged his authorship in an endorsement on his own printed copy of the declaration. On the eve of the War Cabinet's agreement to the declaration he included his proposed key words in a letter to Montagu, a document strangely overlooked in all of the many accounts of the matter. The only Cabinet departure from Curzon's key words was the substitution of ‘progressive’ for ‘fuller’. Montagu questioned the latter term and Curzon proposed the former. There was nothing impromptu about the drafting. For months variations on it had been floated in correspondence between the authorities in India and London. The use and meaning of ‘self-government’ had been widely canvassed. It is generally understood that ‘responsible government’ went beyond ‘self-government’, for in constitutional parlance it must mean a parliamentary system (with a responsible executive), whereas ‘self-government’ might be achievable in non-Westminster forms. The justification for dyarchy, the essence of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, lay in its apparent satisfaction of the declaration's espousal of the principle of responsiblity.

The death of Nehru did less to change the Indian political system than the talk about his charismatic leadership might have led us to expect. But one simplification is not to be replaced by another; the assessment of his influence is a matter of real difficulty. Most delicate of all the tasks perhaps is that of distinguishing between his influence on the actual behaviour of political actors and institutions and his influence on the views taken by observers of such behaviour. How much, that is, of what appears novel in the post-Nehru period is merely the coming to light of features which were already present but obscured or unnoticed by virtue of the attention focused on the great man himself? In no area of the Indian political system is this question more important than in the Congress Party.

The soil and productions of this country are of the richest description, and it is not too much to say, that within the same given space, there are not to be found the same mineral and vegetable riches in any land in the world (James Brooke, 1838).

In the conventional rhetoric of Japanese social criticism, factionalism is an endemic condition caused by the lingering heritage of feudalism. Much the same kind of charges familiar in the political arena are common to discussions regarding cliques within the Japanese academic world, although there is almost no detailed research directly on the latter subject in Western languages. The following attempts to explicate one outstanding prewar example of factional strife in Japan's most prestigious university, the case of the Department of Economics at Tokyo Imperial University. It has been chosen for three reasons: (1) the Economics faculty were among the most deeply involved intellectuals in the dramatic prewar struggles over academic freedom; (2) the charge of factionalism has been raised explicitly and repeatedly by participants as well as others; and (3) the issues over which the struggle raged as well as many of the personalities have continued to be of significance in Japanese politics and within the universities down to the present. Because of its significance, there is available far more information than is common on such intramural factionalism.

Given the system of parliamentary democracy that India developed after its independence in 1947, it is understandable that pluralism came to be the major paradigm used to explain Indian politics. But just as the persistence of economic inequality was instrumental in calling pluralism into question as an appropriate model for explaining the American political system, so the continuation and even increase of inequality in India led social scientists to question the pluralist approach for India. And, as in the American case, a number of scholars turned to a Marxist class analysis to explain the Indian situation; by the mid-1970s a political economy model had begun to take shape that did offer a reason able explanation of the pervasive inequality in India. Also, Mrs Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977 fits very easily into this class analysis approach. But then came the elections of 1977 and the ouster of Mrs Gandhi at the polls, an event not explicable in terms of the Marxist model, but which fits very well into the pluralist framework. Which model, then, is more appropriate to employ in accounting for the Indian system ? The best answer seems to be to try to fit the pluralist approach within the Marxist one, with the latter carrying most of the explanatory load.

A Feature which has long characterized the study of Indian administrative history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the tendency of scholars to identify the British Raj with the Government of India, or more narrowly still, with the Governor-General in Council. Certainly one would not write a general history of British India and ignore the pronouncements of Calcutta. Yet by the same token one should not overlook the actions and attitudes of the several provincial governments, and especially of the Presidencies of Bombay and Madras, which, though under the general suzerainty of Calcutta, enjoyed substantial freedom of action within the limits of their own jurisdiction.

Discussion of the minority problem in India has been largely concerned with the relations between the two major communities of Hindu and Muslim, an emphasis justified by the less important part played by non-Muslim minorities in the communal conflict that preceded independence. The Indian Christians repay close study, however, for a number of reasons.

In contrast to India, where communal affrays were ordinary incidents of life, there was little inter-communal hostility in Ceylon throughout British rule. The clash between the Sinhalese and the Muslims that occurred in May–June 1915 was the major exception to this general trend of peace and tranquillity2. Not only did the disturbance take the Ceylon government by surprise, it placed the Colonial Office in a quandary. In this paper it is proposed to examine the reactions of the Ceylon government and the Colonial Office to what was an unprecedented disturbance in the ‘senior colony of the new empire’3.

The vital importance of the Indian Army as the guardian of the imperial order in India was never more evident than during the interwar years. The period from 1919 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 was a testing time for the Raj; state authority was being challenged by a mounting nationalist movement, and public order was frequently disrupted by civil disobedience campaigns, as well as recurrent outbreaks of communal violence. In maintaining public order the colonial state had always been prepared to rely on that ultimate guarantee of its authority and power–the Indian Army. However, in frequent discussions of the deployment of the military in 'aid of civil power', the continued loyalty of the bulk of the army the Indian soldiers and officers, was never questioned, and seemed to be taken for granted.2 Yet, both the Government of India and the to be taken for granted.2 Yet, both the Government of India and the Army Headquarters were well awar that the 'loyalty' of the Army could never be guaranteed, and that it was conditional upon a stable and pacified recruiting base; if that base were to be 'subverted', then the Indian Army, or portions of it, would not only cease to be of use as an instrument of state power, but could ultimately pose a threat to the Raj itself

Soon after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC), youth exchanges came to be a major part of the Chinese campaign to reach out and influence the people of other nations. Despite the growing scholarly discussion regarding the role of people-to-people diplomacy and external propaganda in China's foreign policy, so far no direct attention has been paid to the Chinese Communist Party's efforts to institutionalize youth exchanges and use them as a tool to promote the new Chinese government's foreign relations. This article locates the position of young people within the PRC's people-to-people diplomacy. It attempts to explore youth exchanges with the West in the early years of the Cold War by focusing on relations between Italian and Chinese youth groups in the 1950s. Relying mainly on unexplored archival material and memoirs, this article documents contacts and exchanges between adult-led youth organizations and their members, and shows how Italian left-wing party-affiliated youth groups and Soviet-dominated transnational organizations provided important channels for Sino-Italian encounters and for building long-lasting contacts among potential future leaders of these countries.

Building on recent scholarship that highlights social change caused by the Anti-Japanese War, this paper traces the politicization of women working in the cotton mills of Chongqing, the Nationalist wartime capital. Upon joining the workforce in the late 1930s, most cotton mill hands were young, uneducated women expected to endure hard work and remain physically confined to the factories. By 1945, women workers were at the forefront of a militant labour movement, writing manifestoes and petitioning government officials. This process of politicization stemmed from their decision to work in factories, which breached societal norms, and their experience of disciplined labour regimes and brutal working conditions, which fostered an incipient class-consciousness. Moreover, Nationalist-sponsored factory education campaigns had the unintended effect of leading women to challenge class exploitation and sexual discrimination. Their participation in the labour movement, which was fuelled by their struggle for economic justice and desire for higher social status, used both legal forms— especially petitions and letters to the press couched in the wartime nationalist rhetoric of shared sacrifice—and extralegal means, namely class violence. The paper concludes that the social changes and conflict that accompanied women's wartime work helped prepare the terrain for Communist rule.

The historiography on the Partition of Bengal has tended to see it as a culmination of long-term trends of Hindu and Muslim communalism within the province. This essay offers a counter-narrative to the ‘inevitability’ of the Partition by focusing on Bengali public discourse in the months leading up to the Partition. The possibility of a division generated a large-scale debate amongst the educated in Bengal and they articulated their views by sending numerous letters to leading newspapers, district political and civic organizations and sometimes published pamphlets for local consumption. A critical examination of these public debates for and against Partition reveals the countdown to August 1947 as a period of multiple possibilities. Rather than being pre-determined, the stands for a separate or a United Bengal were contingent in nature. Understanding the genesis provides the starting point and the necessary corrective to evaluate India's path to post-colonial nationhood.

The arrival of Indian sipahis (or ‘sepoys’) to fight alongside soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force in France in October 1914 was both a victory and a source of concern for the British Raj. It proved to be the zenith of martial race fantasies that had been carefully codified from the 1890s, and birthed fears about the effects that Europe and the rapidly intensifying conflict on the Western Front would have upon the ‘best black troops in the world’. The situation resulted in the appointment of a special military censor to examine the letters sent to and from Indian sipahis and compile a fortnightly summary of Indian letters from France for the duration of the First World War. This paper investigates a portion of the letters contained in these reports. More particularly, it investigates the life of a single chain letter and the effect its chiliastic message had upon Muslim troops of the Indian Army during the First World War. As the letter was read, rewritten, and passed on, it served as a rejoinder to missionary efforts by the Ahmadiyya Movement, reinterpreted as a call for soldiers to purify their own bodies and oppose interracial sexual relationships, before, finally, being used as a critique of the British war effort against the Ottoman empire.

The economy of eighteenth-century Bengal was closely tied to the political, with the indigenous state, the Nizamat, maintaining a stake in the success of commercial circuits. The Nizamat played a positive role in keeping the structure operative through its patronage and regulating activities. Besides its direct involvement in trade, the article examines the indirect facilitating and co-ordinating role it played, the elaboration of a distinct court culture and the policies it pursued which had a bearing on the health of the economy. The conditions necessary for the functioning of marketing networks—protection of property and enforcement of contract—were maintained. It was a mutually beneficial system with the state with its seat in Murshidabad, the landed élite of the region, and the commercial sector symbiotically tied together.

This article focuses on the interplay between the political authorities and economic actors in the Federal Republic of Germany in the process of establishing relations with the People's Republic of China after 1949. Within this framework, the article will assess the role played by the Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft (Eastern Committee of German Economy), a semi-official organization recognized by the West German government. Both the ability of German economic actors and China's urgent need for economic contact with the West caused German-Chinese trade relations to circumvent the strict non-recognition policy followed by the West German government. The article also argues that, while economic relations heralded official recognition of the People's Republic of China by other Western European countries, in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany a division between the two spheres was finally accepted by the major actors involved, and ended only after the change of attitude imparted by the Nixon presidency in the United States during the early 1970s.