Around the turn of the twentieth century, electric tramways made their appearance in the cities of Asia, but despite being a universal technology, and despite the considerable impact they had upon life in these cities, the history of tramways in Asia has hardly ever been studied. Trams, wherever they ran, mobilized the urban population to a degree unseen before—their track network could restructure the urban topography and re-evaluate its segments, as independent villages became suburbs and residential quarters rose or fell in status, and add to the segregation of workplaces and residential areas. The two cities of Singapore and Rangoon, which have been selected because of their comparability, provide two contrasting examples of how trams functioned and eventually failed in an Asian urban environment.

The authority of political leaders in Bangladesh rests on diverse qualities, not least of which are the muscle and finance they can mobilize, and the relationships they can craft with senior party members. These are utilized to confront rivals both within and outside their own party. In some instances, the intensity of intra-party competition can be so severe that a further quality emerges: the capacity to find allies among enemies. Building local inter-party alliances can bolster the authority of politicians, yet be to the detriment of party coherence. This argument is developed through an analysis of mayoral and parliamentary elections held in the past decade in a small Bangladeshi city, where a ruling party member of parliament (MP) and opposition mayor appear to have developed such a relationship. This has thwarted the electoral ambitions of their fellow party members and has posed a serious challenge to party discipline. While political competition is often seen as being either inter- or intra-party, here it is focused around inter-party alliances. This portrayal suggests we need to give greater emphasis to the decentralized and local character that political authority can take in Bangladesh.

This article re-examines the meanings of Chinese nationalism and its relationship to vibrant and recurring National Products movements in modern China through the case of the Shanghai Coca-Cola protest of 1947–1948. In a campaign to revitalize national industry, the Chinese business community of Shanghai targeted Coca-Cola as a foreign luxury, and asked the Nationalist government to prohibit the importation of raw materials for Coca-Cola. However, archival materials show that not only was the Coca-Cola bottler in Shanghai—Watson's Mineral Water Company—a Chinese company but they had made large contributions during previous National Products movements. Using imported raw materials was also a very common practice in the Chinese soft drinks industry in the first half of the twentieth century. By revealing inconsistencies between the Chinese business community's statement of protest and the actual character of Coca-Cola's Shanghai bottler, this article argues that in this case Chinese nationalism became a pretext and tool for business competition. This research suggests that Chinese nationalism as an analytical lens remains complicated and its role and meaning in history must not be over-generalized. Rather than the existence of a unified and singular nationalism, Chinese nationalisms have been socially constructed over time, with multiple faces, interpretations, and functions for different interest groups.

‘Tax avoidance’ and ‘tax evasion’ are terms so frequently referred to in economic and business relationships today that they constitute part of our conversational language and people in general use these terms even without knowing their exact meaning and difference. Whereas tax avoidance implies a situation in which the taxpayer reduces his tax liability by taking advantage of the loop-holes and ambiguities in the legal provisions, in the case of tax evasion, facts are deliberately misinterpreted and the tax liability is understated. Thus, while tax avoidance is perfectly legal and is, at times, referred to as ‘tax planning’, tax evasion is illegal and, therefore, carries with it the risk of penalties and prosecutions under the tax laws. As such, the black economy comprises the sum total of all the various methods of tax evasion but does not include tax avoidance. Accordingly, whereas the consequences of the two phenomena are different for the taxpayers, both reduce the revenue of the Exchequer and consequently need to be checked to the greatest extent possible.

Youth frustration was a front-running issue during Nepal's decade-long civil war (1996–2006) and democratic protests (2003–2006). Young activists were mobilized as foot soldiers in these political battles, but they also capitalized on their position to establish themselves politically. They earned public recognition for their direct action; however, they have struggled to stay relevant as their parties shifted from protesting against the government to running the government. In response, youth activists leveraged the public support they earned and general concern over youth disenfranchisement to demand an active role in state restructuring. The Maoist-majority Constituent Assembly government partially heeded them by handing over the task of drafting the National Youth Policy to their youth wings and other youth activists. This policy shaped the youth-focused agenda of the newly designed Ministry of Youth and Sports and other government bureaus. This article uses the National Youth Policy as the context for an examination of how youth activists are establishing public authority beyond (violent) protest. By focusing on the micro-politics of the committee appointed to draft the Policy, I analyse the techniques its members used to assert their political values and agendas through policymaking in order to secure their positions during politically turbulent times. This article elucidates how formalized governing practices and revolutionary politics blend to reconstitute state order in the aftermath of civil war.

In the years 1856–60, Great Britain, France and China were involved in a war, which has been referred to by different names, depending, naturally enough, on the nationality of the historian. Scholars in China, almost without exception, call it the Second Opium War. Historians in England, however, usually prefer to call it the Second Anglo-Chinese War or even the Second China-foreign War. It has been given yet another name, the Arrow War. None of these names is, strictly speaking, entirely appropriate. To begin with, the war was not fought over the question of opium, although in many ways it was a continuation of the Opium War of less than two decades before. In the last analysis, it was a consequence of an ever-expanding British economy. Secondly, although it is true that Great Britain and China were the chiefcontenders, the title Anglo-Chinese War ignores the part played by France in the campaign. Then the name Second China-foreign War, apart from betraying the English desire to forget that part of their past, is misleading because it focuses attention on China herself rather than on British encroachment on that country. Finally, the Arrow incident was, like the burning of opium by Commissioner Lin, an immediate cause of the quarrel; but once London had decided to resort to arms, little further reference was made to it in British diplomatic documents. The name Arrow War is particularly irrelevant for the period after the scene of confrontation had changed from Canton to Tientsin and then Peking. On balance, however, the names Second Anglo-Chinese War and Arrow War seem preferable because they do not carry overtones of nationalist prejudice. The latter title has the additional merit of illustrating how, in the age of European expansion, a small diplomatic incident could be magnified to justify the use of force to press home demands unrelated to it. It reflects the fact that the receiving end—in this case China, and in particular her Imperial Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, Yeh Ming-ch'en—tried throughout to argue the case over the specific casus belli, whereas for the British the whole affair was merely a pretext for wider demands to be made on China. Thus it seems more appropriate to call the conflict the Arrow War; and in order to examine its origins, the first step will be to analyse the documentary evidence related to the Arrow incident. Some papers in the Chinese language have only recently been made available to scholars in the Public Record Office. London, and these provide additional information for a re-investigation of the origins of the war.

This paper argues that the concept of moral economy, formulated by E.P. Thompson and developed in Asian contexts by James Scott and Paul Greenough can be usefully employed to analyse the peasant narratives of Premchand, one of the greatest writers in Hindi-Urdu literatures. But such an application is possible only if the concept is expanded further. In Premchand's works related to peasantry we find several ideological currents. However, the idea of peasantry's own cultural resources in opposition to other social groups appears to be predominant in his later works. There is a sense of centrality of peasant culture which Premchand and some others among the Hindi literary intelligentsia came to acquire, and deployed for various purposes—against colonial regime, against the products of colonial modernity (e.g., factories, English schools, courts, medical profession), against the new urban middle classes and their culture, against urbanism as a whole and, sometimes, even against the Congress, the representative of organized nationalism. Distinct from both the everyday forms of resistance and open rebellion, Premchand visualizes a comprehensive peasant paradigm in opposition to colonialism, and urban middle-class perspectives.

Debates about secularism in post-independence India have often revolved around the visions of two of the country's founding fathers—M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. A sharp distinction is drawn between them by those who argue that the Gandhian model (or, what in common parlance and state discourses is called communal harmony) stems from Indian cultural and religious values, and lies beyond the realm of the state. The Nehruvian model, however, is a state project through and through. This article transcends this dichotomy to show that the association of Nehru and Gandhi with these models does not necessarily mean that secularism and communal harmony faithfully reflect their ideas and, despite the differences in their aims and methods, both models are united in the discourses and practices of the state as strategies of ‘governmentality’. After redefining the core of communal harmony as reciprocity (rather than tolerance), I show how it is performed, how it supplements the state's efforts to keep the peace in a religiously plural society by the force of law, and shores up the state's legitimacy deficit. However, the state's simultaneous involvement in Nehruvian and Gandhian projects is not an innocuous fact because it undermines the state's constitutional and secular obligations to non-discriminatory citizenship in the Indian nation. The argument is that the state's endorsement of dargah-centred Islamic piety as an exemplary site of communal harmony and particular ideas of the Indian nation legitimized by communal harmony ‘problematizes’ the national belonging of certain kinds of pious Muslims.

Wireless radio broadcasting in colonial Singapore began with amateur organizations in the early 1920s, followed by commercial ventures and, finally, the establishment of a monopoly state broadcasting station. Listeners followed local broadcasting as well as international short wave radio. Both participants in and the content of radio reflected the multiracial, cosmopolitan make-up of a colonial port city which functioned through the lingua franca of English. The manner in which early broadcasting developed in Singapore sheds light on the creation of different imagined communities and the development of civil society. There was an increasing presence of non-Europeans, women, and youth, many of whom were drawn by the mystique of this new technology. Wireless radio also brought about a transformation in the public soundscape. These themes contribute to our understanding of the global history of radio as well as the nature of colonial societies within the British empire.

This article examines the memoirs of Indian Civil Service officers as they continued to work in what became the Indian Administrative Service after independence. Rather than being understood solely as historical archives, these texts constitute a genre that can be called the ‘bureaucratic memoir’ which reveals masculinities that are both colonial and post-colonial. These memoirs, and their publication decades after independence reveal attempts by elites to preserve the power of the bureaucracy into subsequent decades. The texts hope to disavow but instead also reveal the patriarchal intimacies of these elites, even as these were challenged by charges of corruption and failure which emerged almost from the first moments of independence.

In Taiwan, the legalised gambling sponsored by the government—the Public Welfare Lottery—was re-introduced on January 2002. Since then, the unprecedented lottery fever has become a social phenomenon that deserves our attention. This research focuses on the ‘public welfare’ effects as the name of the lottery was billed. The study consists of qualitative and quantitative analyses, which has served effectively to assess the advocacy of the ‘social ill’ for the ‘social good’.

By conducting a web survey on the Internet, the empirical study enables us to examine the statistical significance of socio-economic and demographic variables on the behavioural tendency of purchasing the lottery. The results of the logistic regression model reveals that those who are younger, have-nots and with experiences on any previous lottery games are more likely to wager on the Public Welfare Lottery. Other major findings include two distinctive perspectives perceived by those who purchase the lottery and those who do not, i.e. lottery buyers tend to legitimise their action into socially justifiable causes, and those who do not purchase the lottery, by contrast, believe that the lottery has negative impacts on society. The paper concludes by discussing its methodological limitations and opportunities for future research.

This paper looks at the establishment of experimental winter overland postal routes in the late 1870s and 1880s, which eventually led to the creation of the Great Qing Imperial Post Office in 1896. The history of this experiment sheds much light on important issues in the establishment of what was to become the country's most crucial information-bearing network, in particular those related to collaboration and negotiation between foreign and Chinese officials, and those between local interests and the central authorities. It also explores how foreign processes and management had to be adapted in order to function in a Chinese context.

In March 1878, Robert Hart, inspector general of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, instructed Gustav Detring, commissioner of Tianjin Port, to investigate the possibility of introducing overland public postal routes in China, beginning with Beijing to Tianijn, Niuzhuang, Yantai, and then to Zhenjiang, a treaty port on the lower Yangtze River.

The three main challenges involved were: to establish a reliable workforce, to design appropriate routes, and to win the cooperation of local governing officials. Although the winter service was initiated on time, problems repeatedly arose from each one of these challenges.

Less than fifteen months after Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi was fatally wounded by the right-wing fanatic Sagoya Tomeo on 14 November 1930, the ‘mysterious priest’ Inoue Nissho orchestrated the Ketsumeidan jiken, or ‘Blood-Pledge Corps Incident’, in which the former Finance Minister Inoue Junnosuke and the Director-General of Mitsui Dan Takuma, were shot and killed, on 9 February and 5 March 1932, respectively. What made the Ketsumeidan Incident all the more shocking in the troubled context of the Depression and the Manchurian Incident was the fact that at one point the terrorists had planned to kill twenty of Japan's political and financial leaders, not just Inoue Junnosuke and Dan Takuma. The grim implications of this bold conspiracy were soon driven home when Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was also gunned down in the 15 May Incident that year.

This essay looked into how a group of residents in a Chinese community negotiated with the ideological tropes inscribed in the spatial, which aimed to build up state–people trust on the future course of national development. Under investigation was a slum-turned-socialist-model community called “Cucumber Lane” in two historical junctures in which its spatial settings were radically reorganized. It was argued that the two spatial reorganizations exemplified two major state-led projects of modernity, each of which entailed a specific representation of space that ideologically adumbrated a specific course of national development. It was found that while the residents welcomed the project of modernity launched in the 1960s with enthusiasm, they received the other in the 1990s largely with apathy, and even with mistrust and disbelief.

This paper takes a critical look at a recent attempt by the Pakistani state to manage religious thought and practice, under the broad banner of ‘Enlightened Moderation’. One of the key Islamic thinkers associated in popular imagination with this project is Javed Ahmed Ghamidi. In contextualizing the work and role of Ghamidi, it is tempting to work backwards from his opinions on Islamic truth to situate him as a reformer whose interventions are primarily oriented to the task of reconciling Islam to conditions of liberal modernity. Against such a tendency it is argued here that such an exercise of classification and categorization needs to be undertaken with greater care as against a critique of the imperialist typology of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Islams, a project of delineating authentic from inauthentic Islams has also more recently been activated.

The basic objective of this paper is to assess India's acquisition of nuclear weapons in light of the general debate why states ‘go nuclear’ and build nuclear arsenals. In general, analysts proffer four arguments about proliferation of nuclear weapons. They are: (1) security concerns; (2) prestige; (3) technological imperatives; and (4) domestic politics. The first posits that security concerns directly related to a state's physical security and survival might drive a state to acquire nuclear weapons. A state, when operating in an environment of anarchy and acute security dilemmas, remains very concerned with national security and survival. Depending on the intensity of security dilemmas, states often resort to developing lethal military forces, including, in some instances, nuclear weapons. For example, the ‘first generation’ nuclear powers (the USA, the USSR, the UK, France and China) and the ‘second generation’ nuclear states (India, Pakistan etc.) acquired nuclear weapons because they each faced an acute security threat from a strategic adversary.

‘It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.’ Machiavelli, The Prince

Central Xinzheng Reform and the Twentieth-Century Chinese State

The effort of the Qing dynasty to transform itself and forge a new set of relationships with society in its last decade has been one of the less explored areas in the scholarship on modern China. Although this set of radical initiatives, collectively known as the xinzheng (‘New Policy’) reforms attracted a good deal of commentary from its contemporaries, until recently it has been relatively understudied. There are two reasons for this neglect. First, conventional periodization has divided historical turf between Qing historians (for the Qing dynasty 1644–1911), Republican historians (for the period between 1911 and 1949 ) and political scientists (who cover 1949 to the present). Second, since the dramatic narrative for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century has been largely understood as a process of ever more radical forms of revolutionary change, scholars have understandably been more taken with exploring the antecedents of revolution and/or locally based studies of elite transformation than they have been with exploring a case of seemingly bona fide failure.The central government-initiated xinzheng reform period (1902–1911) has thus borne the full brunt of a Whiggish interpretation of history; too late to command the attention of most Qing historians, too early for the majority of Republican historians, at best a prologue for the real revolution to come, and at worst an abortive failure.

From 1919 to 1922 the Indian National Congress carried out its first country-wide programme of mass agitations against the British. For the next six or seven years the party concentrated on the electoral arena. By fits and starts, it also carried on a programme of so-called ‘constructive’ work among the mass of the people. This helped to maintain some of the popular contacts earlier established. Elections, and the bitter communal conflicts that were a feature of the mid-1920s, at least in the United Provinces (U.P.), forged other links.

Given their sheer numbers, it is hardly surprising that the fate of peasants during British Rule in India should have become a principal index for evaluating its successes and failures. Since the Raj was much more than another effete political superimposition on supposedly timeless villages, the question of agrarian growth or stagnation during its currency is intertwined with more general issues. In so far as colonialism meant a sizable expansion of trade to and from the rural areas, its impact on village social structure in India bears comparison with that of a modern market on peasantries in other parts of the world. Perhaps, the classic case of a peasantry coming face to face with a growing market happened in Russia between 1860 and 1930. The history of that period has generated conceptual discussion about the dynamics of peasant society. The possibility of some of those ideas shedding light on the situation in India has prompted Indo-Russian contrasts and comparisons in agrarian history on more than one occasion (Charlesworth: 1979; Stein: 1984). As a sequel to these writings the Russian debate is considered here briefly in order to suggest some ways in which it might be useful in the Indian context.

The significance of the coup d'état of 1861 in late-Ch'ing history has been appraised by many scholars. A fairly typical viewpoint has been expressed by the eminent Chinese historian Wu Hsiang-hsiang: ‘Had there not been the coup of 1861, there would not have been the coup of 1898.’ One need not entertain the same degree of determinism to acknowledge, with Wu, that the coup of 1861 was important in its effects on the exercise of imperial power in later decades. The coup did, in fact, not only provide the immediate circumstances which favored an unprecedented experiment with the Ch'ing imperial form, namely, a regency formed by the empresses-dowager, but it did also enable the famous (or infamous) empress-dowager, Tz'u-hsi, to secure her rise to a supremacy in court affairs which ended only with her death in 1908. In view of this second development, scholars have long argued that Tz'u-hsi was both the mastermind and chief beneficiary of the coup, which was the product of her intrigues and manipulations. In fact, it has been called her (Yehonala's) coup d'état. While this view will presently be examined, my main purpose here is to define the nature of the political crisis from which the coup of 1861, as well as the idea of the female regency, originated. This, I believe, is one aspect of the subject that has not been sufficiently investigated.