This article focuses on France's policy towards Socialist China in the decade preceding the spectacular and well-studied decision by President Charles de Gaulle to officially recognize the People's Republic of China (PRC). It argues that since the mid-1950s successive French governments discreetly orchestrated a process of rapprochement with the Communist authorities in Beijing. The article demonstrates that, at a time when the international situation discouraged steps towards official relations, the French government used commercial diplomacy as a means to open unofficial diplomatic channels with the Chinese and prepare the ground for future recognition. Relying mostly on French archival sources, this article brings to light evidence of the evolution of French diplomacy's thinking about Socialist China and assesses the rationales behind the French government's growing determination to normalize relations with it. It argues that the intensifying contest among European countries to reach out to Beijing, concerns about the PRC's appeal to developing countries, and an early appraisal of Sino-Soviet rivalry prompted French authorities to work for Sino-French rapprochement, while, at the same time, annoyance at the White House's obstinate refusal to revise its reading of Cold War dynamics weakened France's disposition to fall into line with American demands to maintain a harsh stance towards the PRC.

In this Afterword I argue that public authority in South Asia is produced in a dynamic interplay between ever-more segmented publics and the ubiquity of highly performative violence. Drawing on Indian examples, I suggest that the success of vernacular publics in producing a sense of cultural intimacy within language communities in turn has prompted a new segmentation of publics. This has occurred along lines of caste and community, defined by social experience and symbols, rather than language as such. The concomitant routinization of violence in public life—whether as physical destruction of public property, attacks on other communities, or as symbolic elevations of victims of violence to the status of martyrs—indicate that today valorization and experiences of violence, however incommensurable, have emerged as a universal medium, or general equivalent, in public and political life in India.

Despite the existence of a large Indian diaspora, there has been relatively little scholarly attention paid to India's relations with overseas Indians after its independence in 1947. The common narrative is that India abruptly cut ties with overseas Indians at independence, as it adhered to territorially based understandings of sovereignty and citizenship. Re-examining India's relations with Indian communities in Ceylon and Burma between the 1940s and the 1960s, this article demonstrates that, despite its rhetoric, independent India did not renounce responsibility for its diaspora. Instead, because of pre-existing social connections that spanned the former British empire, the Government of India faced regular demands to assist overseas Indians, and it responded on several fronts. To understand this continued engagement with overseas Indians, this article introduces the idea of ‘post-imperial sovereignty'. This type of sovereignty was layered, as imperial sovereignty had been, but was also concerned with advancing norms designed to protect minority communities across the world. India’s strategy to argue for these norms was simultaneously multilateral, regional, and bilateral. It sought to use the United Nations, the Commonwealth, and the 1947 Asian Relations Conference to secure rights for overseas Indians. As those attempts failed, India negotiated claims for citizenship with governments in Burma and Ceylon, and shaped the institutions and language through which Indians voiced demands for their rights in these countries. Indian expressions of sovereignty beyond the space of the nation-state, therefore, impacted on practices of citizenship, even during the process of de-recognition in Asia.

This paper uses a study of strikes of railway workers in Bihar and Bengal from 1918 to 1922 to set out and examine the complexities of workers' politics. Three broad themes related with workers' politics, viz. racial ideology, actual ‘event’ of striking and the related activities of workers, and techniques of mobilization have been covered in this paper. In each of these cases, it has been argued that rigid categories like racialism or nationalism are of little help in unravelling the complexities of workers' choices and their politics. Their politics were more flexible than what meets the eye, and their choices were created through dialogue, if not determined by the various factors surrounding them. However such choices were also being limited by the larger context provided by the ideologies and institutions of racialism, nationalism, and colonialism.

One of the most neglected aspects of the history of Korea under Japanese colonial rule is the significant role of the drug trade during the colonial period. Korea emerged as a major producer of opium and narcotics in the 1920s, and in the 1930s became an important supplier to the opium monopoly created by the Japanese-sponsored Manchukuo regime. The latter development sparked an international controversy due to Manchukuo's unsavory reputation in connection with the illicit drug trade, and would later lead the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to identify Korea as the ‘principal source of opium and narcotics at the time of the Mukden Incident and for some time thereafter.’

This paper provides empirical evidence from Durgapur (a post-Independence, industrial new town of eastern India) which tends to support the Harris–Todaro model of migration and introduces the concept of how the age of a town and growth of its indigenous population may affect a potential migrant's expected probability of finding a job. Thus a new town like Durgapur can be expected to experience distinct phases of labour force migration with different proportions of different types of employment certainties which in turn will guide the growth of squatter colonies in the town.

‘The rise of Japan is surely one of the great epics of modern world history’. Yet it is not easy to obtain an overview of the development of Japanese civilization. Since the 1960s there has been an explosion of research which has overturned many of the older orthodoxies. The Cambridge History of Japan provides us with an unique chance to take stock. Here I will consider the four volumes covering the period from the twelfth to the later twentieth century.

Since the early twentieth century, reforms of the social institution of marriage in China have profoundly curtailed the power of the senior generation to influence the marriage decisions of their offspring. Yet the marriage considerations of graduates from economically deprived rural family backgrounds in China's northwestern Gansu Province reveal a definite impact of feelings of social obligation towards the family as well as of a local understanding of marriage market stratification which (also) reflects these obligations. In this rural region, higher education mainly aims at long-term upward mobility into the formal urban sector of the economy. After all, the basic ‘citizenship divide’ between rural and urban residence rights established by the socialist hukou (household registration) system continues to determine rural families’ structural exclusion from access to various urban resources. Feelings of indebtedness for financial and other support received from parents and family members during years of higher education entangle graduates from economically deprived rural family backgrounds in webs of social relations that oblige them to also consider the interests of others when deciding on whom to marry. When choosing a marriage partner they thus often face dilemmas of negotiating material versus emotional interests, as well as collective versus individual ones. While higher education empowers them to reject others’ interference in their marriage decisions, if they do so, they have to cope with feelings of having disappointed all the hopes their supporters invested in them.

Even without this wonderful sixteenth-century hyperbole, forts remain an impressive feature of India's landscape. A thoughtful traveller, seeing the jagged walls high above the road, might well wonder who built them, and when, and what events took place within the gates. Scholarly writing on the subject will disappoint him. Toy, in his seminal book, noted that ‘this writer has been struck with the dearth of reliable litetature on the forts of India.’

The Khilafat movement, which took place among Indian Muslims immediately following the First World War, was so called because it was a political agitation designed to pressure the British government to preserve the defeated Ottoman Empire and its ruler, the Caliph of Islam. The Khilafat movement was also, more fundamentally, a campaign to unite Indian Muslims politically by means of religious and cultural symbols meaningful to all strata of the community. The movement gained added significance because it took place simultaneously, and cooperated fully, with Gandhi's first non-violent non-cooperation movement against British rule. Muslim and Hindu were thus engaged in parallel political activity: the broadening of national political participation from the élite to the mass through new techniques of organization and communication.

To the South Asianist India appears unique in the modern world. A country characterized by vast poverty and widespread illiteracy, it nevertheless has managed to maintain the civil liberties and democratic politics bequeathed to it by an enlightened colonial power. In spite of a two-year long hiatus of ‘Emergency Rule,’ few third world countries can make such a proud claim. Of those that can, such as Sri Lanka, none have the extraordinary size or social complexity of India.

Bureaucratic capital—that is, capital accumulated through public office, or state revenue diverted by individual officials for capital investment— has had a long history in China since early Han times. This paper is concerned with the development of bureaucratic capital for ‘modern’ industry during the last forty years of the Ch'ing dynasty.

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.

It is an historical commonplace that the renewal of Western diplomatic contact with Japan, after the Tokugawa seclusion, seriously disturbed the Japanese political system, and contributed to the Meiji Restoration. Undoubtedly foreign demands for commercial and diplomatic privileges, combined with the presence of warships and military garrisons, cut sharply into the minds of all politically conscious Japanese, and added to the bitterness of internal conflict. But in the past numerous historians have gone much further than these general statements, and drawn far more specific conclusions about the policies and impact of Britain in these crucial years.

The purpose of this article is to analyse Gandhi's ideology and more particularly his understanding of authority. The first part will consider the main elements of Gandhi's ideology as they emerged during his nationalist experience, and their relationship to his style of leadership. The second part will turn to a comparative analysis of Gandhi and Rousseau, in an attempt to illuminate further implications of Gandhi's conception of authority.

This article outlines the spread of the Bahá’í religion—known in Chinese as Datong jiao 大同教)— as a form of religious cosmopolitanism in Republican China (1912–1949). Originating in Iran, its spread to China can be traced to links with the Ottoman empire, British Palestine, the United States, and Japan. By tracking the individuals, connections, and events through which knowledge of the Bahá’í movement spread in China, our study reveals an overlapping nexus of networks—intellectual reformers, liberal Christians, Esperantists, Confucian modernizers, redemptive society activists, and socialists—that shared cosmopolitan ideals. The Bahá’í connections thus serve as a thread that reveals the influence of a unique ‘cosmopolitan moment’ in Republican China, hitherto largely ignored in the scholarly literature on this period, which has focused primarily on the growth of modern Chinese nationalism. Leading nationalist figures endorsed these movements at a specific juncture of Asian colonial modernity, showing that nationalism and cosmopolitanism were seen as expressions of the same ideal of a world community. We argue that the sociology of cosmopolitanism should attend to non-secular and non-state movements that advocated utopian visions of cosmopolitanism, map the circulations that form the nexus of such groups, and identify the contextual dynamics that produce ‘cosmopolitan moments’ at specific historical junctures and locations.

In the 1920s and 1930s China was racked by civil strife. Although the Nationalist government was established in Nanking in 1928, it exerted its power only in a small part of China, mainly in the lower Yangtze valley. When the Nanking government endeavored to unify China by force, the local warlords, who strove to maintain their own armies and bases, directed against this central government. Political divisions and tensions persisted between Nanking and the local governments until 1936.

For all the attention paid to the economic, social, and moral dimensions of prostitution in Thailand, no scholar has thus far conducted an empirical study of the relationship between the vice and political change in the countryside, where most sex workers come from. Using the case of Phayao Province in northern Thailand, I attempt to redress this lacuna. I show how rampant prostitution, the most acute social issue in Phayao, has ushered in the rise to power of one virtuous woman from an ethnic minority family—Ladawan Wongsriwong. Located on the economic and social margins of Thailand, many village families in Phayao traditionally relied on prostitution for income, causing a massive influx of young girls into the lucrative sex industry in Bangkok and abroad. In the 1990s, however, AIDS started taking a heavy toll on Phayao's small population. Against this backdrop, Ladawan emerged as a prominent female leader in the male-dominant rural society of Phayao by conducting an extensive issue-oriented campaign against prostitution. This case questions much of the literature on rural politics and female leadership in democratizing Southeast Asia that underestimates the importance of social issues.

Rapid population growth and widespread unemployment are twin dilemmas in all the South-east Asian nations. In other more developed countries, increases in population have coincided with the growth of industry and towns. Consequently serious rural unemployment has been avoided. However, the pace of industrialization in South-east Asia has not been able to cope with the natural growth of the cities, let alone to absorb immigrants from the countryside. Yet, even the very limited opportunities for employment in the towns has attracted people to them with concomitant spreading of slums, poverty and squalor. It can be argued that ‘urban growth in the underdeveloped areas is not a feature of the expansion of the industrial base but an expression of the severity of the agrarian crises’. Further, it seems unlikely that the current rate of urbanization and industrialization in South-east Asia will solve the unemployment problem in the region. A solution must be found within a rural context.