What did women's bodies in pre-colonial South Asia have to do with the birth of capitalism? South Asia's pre-colonial integration into a globally emerging, early modern capitalist order reached deep into the hinterland to transform both state and society in eighteenth-century Marwar. Driving the change was an emergent elite, consisting largely of merchants, that channelled its energies towards reshaping caste. Merchants, in alliance with Brahmans, used their influence upon the state to adjudicate the boundary between the ‘illicit’ and the ‘licit,’ generating in the process a typology and an archive of deviant sex. In the legal framework that generated this archive, women were configured as passive recipients of sexual acts, lacking sexual personhood in law. Even as they escaped legal culpability for ‘illicit’ sex, women experienced, through this body of judgments, a strengthening of male proprietary controls over their bodies. Alongside, the criminalization of abortion served as a means of sexual disciplining. These findings suggest that post-Mughal, pre-colonial state formation in South Asia intersected with global economic transformations to generate new sex-caste orders and archival bodies.

Grassroots accounts of the tragic events of partition are increasingly in the spotlight in studies of the transfer of power. This paper approaches the local perspective through the memories of British civil servants during their last few months in Punjab, assessing what these reflections suggest about the mentality of the departing ruling elite. The similarities between these recorded experiences suggest a process of coming to terms with grief and guilt for what they had witnessed through the creation of a narrative of transition from total power to total loss; a simplified imagery of a fully operational and peaceful pre-1947 Punjab descending with shocking suddenness into the violence of partition. This process of shaping memories not only offers an insight into the British civil servant's need for self-affirmation and a reaffirming of their sense of personal as well as professional value, but also has a broader importance in understanding the mentality of a group of people at the heart of pre-partition Punjab, who were instrumental in defining the emerging independent nation.

Indonesia is no obvious entity. The present borders of the largest archipelago in the world are the result of its colonial past; the only deviation from the borders of the former Netherlands Indies is the eastern part of the island Timor, which was annexed shortly after the departure of the Portugese in 1975. Thirty years earlier, following the declaration of independence of 17 August 1945, the young Republic of Indonesia had unambiguously proclaimed its ambition: the formation of a unitary state of Indonesia, encompassing all the former Asian territories of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Several times separatist movements in different regions ran up against the barrier of the unitary state doctrine.

The available literature on the uprising of 1857 is fairly voluminous. Successive generations of historians have studied the subject in its varied aspects. Their concern, however, quite often lay with long-term political issues, with questions of the growth of the colonial state, of nationalism, of the unity and integrity of the country. These problems were made central to the study of the rebellion not because they were of any relevance to the rebels but because contending imperialist and nationalist historians were seeking to accommodate the event in a longer time span of history.The rebellion of 1857 was thereby assimilated to a linear order related to a context that largely lay outside of the occurrence itself. To most early English writers the mutiny marked the watershed between Company rule and Crown rule, an interlude in the transition to a better imperial system. For Indian writers it was the beginning of India's struggle for national independence

There is a striking disconnect between the imaginative range of interests which preoccupy historians of World Wars I and II in Europe and North America and the much more narrow political concerns of China historians working on the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. Since Jacoby and White's Thunder Out of China (1946) and Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism (1966), Western historiography on the Sino-Japanese War has focused not on the war itself but on the continuing political struggle for supremacy between the Communists and Nationalists. The war is seen as the key to the eventual triumph of the Communists over Chiang Kaishek's Nationalists by 1949. Other issues like the military history of the war itself or its long-term impact on Chinese society and culture have received scant attention.

In early 1983 Digambar and Svetambar Jains forced into public prominence their struggle over the local Jain pilgrimage site of Bahubali hill in Kolhapur District in southern Maharashtra, in India. By the end of that year the majority Maratha community, Harijans, the local and State Congress Party, the police, the district administration, and the State and Union governments were also entangled in the conflict. These Byzantine and sometimes violent events became known as ‘The Bahubali Affair’ (Marathi bāhubalīprakaran).

A compelling vignette of the use of political influence for private gain in the expansion of the British empire is provided by the way King Thebaw' s legendary ruby mines in Upper Burma were acquired by British speculators in the late 1880s. The details of how the ruby-mine concession was awarded to a syndicate soon after Upper Burma was annexed to Britain in 1886 are not well known, although the concesion-mongering created a furore in the India Office and the House of Commons. There was even, at the time, a suggestion that the rubymine affair infleunced Lord Dufferin's decision to resign as Viceroy in 1888.

In my article entitled ‘The Arrow Incident: A Reappraisal’,1 I recently analysed the existing documentary evidence relating to the Arrow incident. But an investigation of this incident in itself does not reveal the process which transformed a small dispute into a war between Great Britain and China. In this article I shall attempt to study this crucial transformation. Such a study would amount to an examination of the role of Harry Parkes in British diplomacy in Canton immediately after the incident. Before embarking on this project, however, it might be useful to give a brief introduction to Parkes and his background.

The knowledge of indigo culture that developed on indigo plantations in colonial Bengal was remarkably cosmopolitan in its borrowings. The protean knowledge that was assembled in the first plantations in the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century had roots in various peasant traditions on the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere in the world. French naturalists committed this knowledge to texts, making them legible and portable whilst the needs of European empires ensured the perfection of this knowledge on separate continents even as it picked up heterogeneous forms at numerous sites. The heterogeneity of the knowledge attached to the practice of indigo manufacture was reproduced on the Indian subcontinent when indigo was reinvented as a colonial commodity. European planters generously drew on the texts describing indigo-making that were easily available, as the practice of dye making continued to evolve in the colonial locality. Some surviving peasant traditions of indigo culture on the subcontinent also impinged on the evolving knowledge. Thus multiple logics rather than the single colonial logic lay beneath the development of colonial indigo plantations in Bengal. An understanding of the process requires attention to the global genealogies of this knowledge system.

Kim Yôn-su (pen name Sudang 1896–1979) was among the few widely successful Korean entrepreneurs during the years of Japanese colonial rule on the peninsula.1 He served as managing director and later as president (1935–1945) of the Kyôngsông Spinning Company (Kyôngsông Pangjik Chusik Hoesa), the largest of the Korean-owned industrial enterprises. He also founded, managed and owned the Samyang company, the largest indigenous agricultural company of the period.2 What distinguished Kim was not merely the extent of his investments and administrative responsibilities, but the continuity of indigenous ownership and management in his ventures despite strong Japanese dominance of the colonial Korean economy.

In 1941–42 Japan destroyed the empire of the British in Southeast Asia. They were determined to return and, with the assistance of the US, they were able to do so in 1945. The plans they developed in preparation for their return were unrealistic. Rightly they took account of some of the weaknesses of their prewar régimes in Burma, in Malaya, in Borneo. But the policies they developed for dealing with them required an assumption of authority that, with their comparatively diminished power and their devastated economy, the British were unable to sustain in the immediate postwar years, and took too little account of the changes that had taken place since they left. They adjusted their policies with some success. Their essential aims were security and stability, the conditions for economic revival. The re-establishment of colonial régimes was one means to such ends: other means might have to serve. If Burma's leaving the Commonwealth promised stability more than attempts to keep it in, then that course could be accepted. If a Malayan Union seemed to promise division rather than consensus, greater weakness rather than greater strength, it must be replaced by Federation. The choices may still not have been right: Burma virtually collapsed; the Emergency began. But they were the only ways the British could perceive of achieving their aims in the circumstances in which they found themselves.

The study attempts to delineate the degree of system rigidity of three major dialect groups, namely, the Cantonese, the Hakkas and the Hokkiens. The principal source of data is derived from inscriptions collected by Chen and Tan (1972). The findings reveal that at the individual level the system boundary of the Hokkiens was more rigid than that of the Cantonese and the Hakkas. This confirms earlier observations made at the organizational level.

Earlier observations dictate that after 1854 the Cantonese and the Hakkas were, at the organizational level, not on good terms. This was, however, not the case at the individual level. We also found that the system boundary of religious organizations, i.e., temples and burial ground bodies, was least rigid.

It is the events of the late 1890s in China which represent the most notorious example of a ‘scramble’ or ‘battle’ for concessions in the era of Western imperialism. The five years following her defeat in her war with Japan of 1894–95 seemed to reduce China to chaos and the brink of dismemberment, when the so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ was crushed by an international army comprised mainly of Russian and Japanese troops. But the powers could not agree on how to extend the concessions they had previously secured, and the ‘open door’, championed by Britain, the United States and initially Japan, prevailed. The ultimate blow to Western imperial expansion on a world scale was then delivered by Japan against Russia in the war of 1904–05, and a mere six years later, the Chinese launched out on their own revolutionary path which was to culminate in the Communist victory of 1949.

These four essays were first presented to an audience in Washington, D.C. in April 2002 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. Richard Horowitz, the panel organizer, argued that:

the roots of China's modern state can be found in the Xinzheng or ‘new policy’ reforms during the last decade of the Qing dynasty. These reforms marked a radical departure for the Chinese state, involving a sustained effort to import foreign models and adapt them to Chinese realities. Although scholarship on reforms to provincial and local state institutions in this period is substantial, the transformation of the central government in Beijing has received little attention.

During the Open Port period and Japanese colonial period (1876–1945), Koreans generally had a positive image of the United States. This positive view of the United States held by Koreans persisted until after liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. The United States was a ‘liberator’ that saved the Koreans, and was viewed as ‘a cooperator’ with whom Korea was to solve its national task of establishing a new country. However, the concept of ‘American imperialist warmonger’ had begun to be promoted in North Korea from 1948–49. It was a concept advanced by the Soviet Union and the North Korean leadership. The negative image of the United States, which spread throughout North Korea from the early years of the Cold War, was merely a perplexing stigma lacking substantiated grounds. However, the experiences of the Korean War actualized the image of the United States as a ‘warmonger’ in the hearts of the North Korean people. Alleged indiscriminate aerial bombings, mass slaughters, sexual assaults, and arson attacks against Korean civilians became the most important reason for the expansion of intense sentiment. Anti-Americanism began to be systemized and routinized in every aspect of North Korean life after the Korean War.

This article demonstrates how the Great Bengal Famine of 1943–1944 and relief activism during it fed the politics of the Hindu right, a development that has not previously received much scholarly attention. Using hitherto unused primary sources, the article introduces a novel site to the study of communal politics, namely, the propagation of Hindu communalism through food distribution during a humanitarian crisis. It examines the caste and class bias in private relief and provides the first in-depth study of the multifaceted process whereby the Hindu Mahasabha used the famine for political purposes. The party portrayed Muslim food officials as ‘saboteurs’ in the food administration, alleged that the Muslim League government was ‘creating’ a new group of Muslim grain traders undermining the established Hindu traders, and publicized the government's failure to avert the famine to prove the economic ‘unviability’ of creating Pakistan. This article also explores counter-narratives, for example, that Hindu political leaders were deliberately impeding the food supply in the hope that starvation would compel Bengali Muslims to surrender their demand for Pakistan. The politics of religious conversion played out blatantly in famine-relief when the Mahasabha accused Muslim volunteers of converting starving Hindus to Islam in exchange for food, and demanded that Hindu and Muslim famine orphans should remain in Hindu and Muslim orphanages respectively. Finally, by dwelling on beef consumption by the army at the time of an acute shortage of dairy milk during the famine, the Mahasabha fanned communal tensions surrounding the orthodox Hindu taboo on cow slaughter.

This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

This paper studies the contradictions of peasant politics in Sri Lanka’s dry zone frontier in a highly militarized colonization scheme (‘System L’ of the Mahaweli Development Programme in Weli Oya in northern Sri Lanka). Through a detailed ethnographic study of the life histories of settlers who came in two waves to this scheme (1980s and post-2009), we show the workings of what we call the ‘lure of land’: first, as the (al)lure that attracts landless families to live out the mythical dream of becoming a paddy farmer; second, this lure of land is intimately tied to a nationalist territorial aspiration that transforms the settler into a patriotic colonizer of the land: due to its strategic location in the frontier zone between Sinhalese and Tamil inhabited territories, settlers became ‘home guards’ who live on and protect the frontier. But the lure of land is not without contradictions: Life in the frontier is dangerous (for the early settlers) and economically precarious (for the early and late settlers), because the state is unable to deliver the promise of land and water. Government officials deploy various tactics of repeatedly deferred promises and subtle threats to discourage settlers to abandon the colonization scheme despite the settlers’ precarious life conditions, disappointments, and frustrations. A ‘cunning state’ thereby betrays its own ‘frontiersmen’, while safeguarding its nationalist territorial agenda.

In this paper an attempt is made to outline the basic structure of taxes on trade and commerce at the Mughal port of Surat during the seventeenth century. This is explored chiefly from documents relating to the English East India Company. By the very nature of the Company being a foreign corporate body, it did not represent a typical ‘peddling’ tax-payer. But the system in so far as the ordinary merchants were concerned, can be restored for us indirectly by considering how far the Company was favoured in taxation matters. We may also reconsider the common view that the English enjoyed ‘invidious trading privileges’ by virtue of the orders of the imperial court, and that it was their privileges that explain their ultimate success in India.

The contributions in this collection, with one exception, are revised versions of papers prepared for a workshop on ‘The Eurasian Context of the Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia, 1400–1800,’ which was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, 22–24 June, 1995. This gathering was organized thanks to the imagination and infectious enthusiasm of Dr Ian Brown, then Director of the Centre of South East Asian Studies at SOAS, and was funded with grants from SOAS, Modern Asian Studies and Cambridge University Press, and the British Academy.