This paper attempts to establish broad orders of magnitude for the colonial period as a whole, and the results are necessarily rough and tentative. Nevertheless, this kind of quantitative macroestimation is useful in illuminating the plausible size of the magnitudes which are usually implicit in qualitative assessment.

Thispaper is exclusively concerned with developing broader conceptions of state and state-formation in pre-colonial India, and thus with problems of synthesizing diverse elements separately discussed and researched in the literature. It seeks to argue that certain critical aspects of the development of state and society in the long term have been neglected with serious consequences for overall conceptions and expectations.

Once the British Empire became world-wide, the sun never set upon its crises. The historian who studies any of these crises in isolation does so at his peril, for their consequences tended to interlock. In the astounding geometry which the British Government constructed across the map of tropical Africa, many of the lines they drew were guided by pressures far away, in Ireland, in Egypt and in India. During the years between 1919 and 1922 a new and more elaborate set of crises marched indefatigably on through the body politic of Empire, like gout through the enfeebled frame of a toper. By this time Britain was threatened by the rolling up of her old interests in East Asia as well as by the phasing out of her new interests in West Asia; while in the classical centres of disaffection Zaghul Pasha, Gandhi and Mr de Valera pursued the old aims by new methods. No analysis of any of these crises will be complete without establishing its interplay with the others. Each joined in the rataplan which frayed the minds and the nerves of the policy-makers. But at a deeper level, each of them was part of a general problem; and there is much to be said for studying problems, not regions. In the case of underdeveloped subjects, such as African or Indian history, it is important not to study them as though they were merely the annals of the parish.

Laos constituted one of the five territorial entities making up French Indochina—comprising in addition the colony of Cochinchina and the protectorates of Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia. It was never, however, one among equals. Even before the annexation of Lao territories east of the Mekong river in 1893, Laos was perceived as little more than an extension of Vietnam west towards Siam (Thailand), a much more significant potential prize. The addition of minor extensions west of the Mekong demarcated by treaty in 1904 and 1907 still gave France no more than half the former Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang. Any possibility of reconstituting a greater Lao state was thereafter lost.

This paper stems from a dissatisfaction with the present state of historical writings on India's international economy in the nineteenth century. While the task of reducing the mass of literature available on the subject to a coherent and meaningful survey is a difficult and perhaps not a very fruitful exercise, it is rather easier to understand why such writings on Indian economic history in general and trade history in particular have remained confused and often internally contradictory.

This article explores new definitions of good mothering among middle-class families in Calcutta and the way early years education, which has become popular over the last two decades has reshaped women's lives as daughters-in-law and mothers of successful future white-collar workers. Through a detailed ethnography of mothers attitudes to preschool education and the parenting practices associated with it the article explores their roles as consumers within a highly competitive local educational landscape, and argues that it is in through preschool education and the related practises that these women actively shape discourses of politics and modernity.

In this paper I argue that the manner in which piety is perceived and propagated among Muslims in Sri Lanka must be understood as located within the context of ethnic conflict and the polarization between ethnic groups that occurred in its wake. I explore the work of one Muslim women's da'wa (preaching) group—Al Muslimaat—that pioneered the process of making piety popular among lower-middle and middle-income Muslim women in a semi-urban Colombo neighbourhood. Looking at the group's activities and specifically through analyses of the bayan or lay sermons delivered by their most charismatic member, I look at the nature of the pious practice that is preached. I argue that in making a self-consciously pious Muslim female subject, Al Muslimaat bayans are affecting ideas of masculinity and femininity among the suburban Muslims with whom they work, and recasting Muslimness in a manner exclusive of ethnic others. I argue also that by marginalizing the kafir in propagating the new Muslim, Al Muslimaat and the greater piety movement in Sri Lanka is mirroring the particular incommensurable identities already espoused by the violently strident Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms in the country.

Why did European countries abandon colonies after the Second World War? No acceptable theory exists to help us with this question—theory neither in the sense of conceptualizations which ‘map out the problem area and thus prepare the ground for its empirical investigation’, nor in the sense of a set of interconnected hypotheses about the specific reality of the end of colonialism which can be validated or refuted by empirical research. Lenin's classic work on imperialism develops powerful theoretical insights regarding the establishment, growth and nature of imperialism, but it does not refer directly to the end of the specific form of imperialism which concerns us here, namely colonialism, although one may infer from Lenin's work the very general proposition that imperialism disappears when capitalism is replaced by socialism. Imperialism as a consequence of capitalism is still with us today, yet colonies have been abandoned. Lenin's theory is not refuted, but at the same time it does not help us directly with an explanation for the end of colonialism.

India and federalizing Nepal represent distinct types of federal polity: their origins lie not in the unification of previously autonomous states, but in the devolution of power by a previously centralized state. The boundaries of their constituent sub-units are therefore open to debate, and settling their contours is central to the project of state-building. Written by a political scientist and an anthropologist, this paper presents a comparative exploration of the reciprocal relationship between state structuring and ethnicity in India and Nepal, with a focus on the effects of territorial versus non-territorial forms of recognition. It pushes against recent tendencies within South Asian Studies to see ethnic identity as called into being solely by state practices or ‘governmentality’ on the one hand, or as a newly commoditized form of belonging produced through neoliberal reforms on the other. Instead it argues that ethnicity must be understood as a multivalent concept that is at once embedded in specific histories of state and sub-state formation, and generative of them. Comparative in scope yet driven by qualitative data collected over years of engagement across the region, the paper charts a middle way between detailed ethnographic studies and large-scale comparative endeavours.

Digital telecommunication technology has expanded the potential of the mobile phone to be used increasingly as a weapon against authoritarian rule and censorship. Since the content of mobile communication is unpredictable and unregulated, mobile phones have the capability to breach state-sponsored blockage of information. This in turn helps the Chinese people to maintain contact with each other, receive information from outside the country, and make political waves in an aggressive battle for control over information. This paper examines spontaneous mobilization via mobile phones, with a focus on two concrete popular protests in rural and urban areas, demonstrating how Chinese citizens have expanded the political uses of mobile phones in their struggle for freedom of information flow, social justice, and the rule of law, while seeking to build an inexpensive counter-public sphere. These processes destabilize China's conventional national public sphere by shaping political identities on an individual level as well as the notion of citizenship within the evolving counter-public sphere. The political significance of mobile phones in the context of contemporary China's political environment can be observed by various social forces that communicate their struggles with the aid of this technology, pose challenges in governance, and force the authorities to engage in new kinds of media practices.

Judith Brown, in her Epilogue to Volume IV of The Oxford History of the British Empire (OHBE), states that of the legacies of the British Empire, the ‘most significant of all is the legacy of the school and the university’, and in particular the role of English as an international language. Brown's acknowledgement of the importance of colonial education renders all the more striking the lack of attention given to this subject in the OHBE as a whole. For example, while Volume IV contains chapters on ‘Gender in the British Empire’, ‘Critics of Empire in Britain’, ‘The Popular Culture of Empire in Britain’, and ‘The British Empire and the Muslim World’, education receives barely two dozen references, buried in the text of other chapters. These offer glimpses into the development of literacy in parts of Africa, the expansion of state educational provision in Ceylon, and the concern of Nigeria's colonial authorities regarding the socially and politically destabilizing effects of the spread of Western education; but taken together they provide no overall analysis of colonial education policies, systems of schooling or curricula. Notwithstanding what some have criticised as its ultra-orthodox overall approach, with regard to this particular field the OHBE more-or-less accurately represents the current state of research. Despite a number of interesting forays on the periphery, the history of colonial education remains a vast and largely unexplored field of enquiry: the dark continent of imperial historiography.

After nearly two decades of revolutionary rule in China, the break with the past which Communist direction has seemed to represent is increasingly being seen in a wider perspective. Few scholars would attempt to argue that the Communists have not brought a genuine revolution or that their ascendancy is merely the equivalent of a new dynasty. But as the character of the new order has become clearer with time and as an analysis both more detailed and less concerned with short-term matters has become possible, many scholars have been as much impressed by continuities with the pre-Communist past as by discontinuities. To take perhaps the clearest example, the current Chinese view of their relation to the rest of the world appears to represent little change from the traditional Sinocentric image. Ideological absolutism is also not new to China with Mao Tse-tung, nor is the conception of individual subsevience to public good, the unquestioned rightness of close social limits on individual actions. And contemporary China retains, for all its professed egalitarianism, a strongly elitist and hierarchial pattern.

The pressing preoccupation of the British administration in the early decades of the nineteenth century to clip the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings was in sharp and in a sense valid contrast to their earlierperceptions of the Indian shroffs and their Hundi empire. By 1807, Mr Rickards, senior member of the Bombay establishment, was urging the Governor-General in Council to establisha General Bank whose operations would extend throughout India, facilitate remittances andcredit transfers from one part of the country to another, and above all ‘free the mercantile body from losses and inconveniences suffered in the exchange and from the artifices of shroffs’. Their ‘undue and pernicious influence over the course of trade and exchange’ could no longer be treated with forbearance, and the urgency of remedy was stressed. It was both strange and ironical that such advice should stem from a quarter where in the crucial years of political change and transition in the second half of the eighteenth century, the cooperation and intervention of the indigenous banking fraternity and their credit support had proved vital to the success of the Imperial strategy. The experience was admittedly not unique to Bombay and the English East India Company (hence-forth E.E.I.C) and in a sense the guarantee of local credit and the support of service groups for a variety of reasons, was clearly envisagedas a basic ingredient to state building in the eighteenth century.

Chinese leaders have repeatedly insisted upon the contemporary relevance of the ‘War of Resistance to Japan’ (1937–1945). However, the content of the official history of the war and the lessons drawn from it have changed dramatically from 1949 through 2010. This paper begins by reviewing theories of collective remembrance and then covers four historical periods: China's ‘benevolent amnesia’ on Japan's wartime atrocities before 1982; China's patriotic education campaign from the mid-1980s; the rise of history activism in China in the late 1990s; and the post-2005 reversal in official rhetoric on Japan and the wartime past. It concludes that, while the party-state retains an impressive capacity to shape the narratives of critical periods of modern Chinese history, Chinese leaders are likely to find themselves increasingly constrained by domestic forces and by external events beyond their control.

Asia is the world's most linguistically diverse continent and its diversity largely conforms to established global patterns that correlate linguistic diversity with biodiversity, latitude, and topography. However, one Asian region stands out as an anomaly in these patterns—Tibet, which is often portrayed as linguistically homogenous. A growing body of research now suggests that Tibet is linguistically diverse. In this article, we examine this literature in an attempt to quantify Tibet's linguistic diversity. We focus on the minority languages of Tibet—languages that are neither Chinese nor Tibetan. We provide five different estimates of how many minority languages are spoken in Tibet. We also interrogate these sources for clues about language endangerment among Tibet's minority languages and propose a sociolinguistic categorization of Tibet's minority languages that enables broad patterns of language endangerment to be perceived. Appendices include lists of the languages identified in each of our five estimates, along with references to key sources on each language. Our survey found that as many as 60 minority languages may be spoken in Tibet and that the majority of these languages are endangered to some degree. We hope our contribution inspires further research into the predicament of Tibet's minority languages and helps support community efforts to maintain and revitalize these languages.

In September 1950, the Government of West Bengal dispatched 500 Hindu refugee families to the village of Jirat in Hooghly district. It intended to build a camp there permanently to house these refugees, who had fled from East Bengal in the turbulent aftermath of the partition of India. Some forty miles from Calcutta, Jirat was situated on the west bank of the River Hooghly. It had once been a substantial and prosperous village, significant enough to earn a mention in Rennell's Atlas of 1786, where wealthy people built large homes and temples. Indeed the ancestral home of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee—educationist and politician, founder of the Hindu nationalist Jana Sangh party, and ironically, one of the most vociferous champions of the Hindu refugees in Bengal after partition—was situated in the village. In the 19th century, however, the river had changed its course and Jirat's population was ravaged by a particularly virulent strain of the dreaded ‘Burdwan fever’. By 1950, when the refugees arrived at Jirat, the village had long since been abandoned, its waterways choked with silt, its ponds filthy and overgrown with water hyacinth, its great buildings crumbling and derelict. A rare ‘empty’ corner in crowded West Bengal, the Government of West Bengal deemed it to be an appropriate place to house and rehabilitate two and a half thousand refugees: men, women and children.

Models of industrialization and social change, whether Marxist or functionalist, have been derived largely from the historical experience of Western Europe and, especially, of Britain. Social theories came to be constructed upon a specific reading of a particular, and in some respects, unique, historical development. These theories or models, now deepseated in our historiographical consciousness, increasingly offer yardsticks against which industrial development elsewhere in the world is measured. On closer examination, universal postulates thus derived have appeared to generate a large number of special cases. Vast expanses of the globe are seemingly littered with cases of arrested development or examples of frustrated bourgeois revolutions.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and until after the First World War the imperial cities of the Indian Ocean became thriving centres for cultural exchange and intellectual debate. Entrepôts like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore witnessed the emergence of a non-European, western-educated professional class that serviced the requirements of expanding international commercial interests and the simultaneous growth of the imperial state. Learned elites drawn from the ranks of civil servants, company clerks, doctors, teachers, public inspectors, communications workers, merchants, bankers and (above all) from the legal profession began to form themselves into intelligentsias by immersing themselves in discursive activity, and quickly developed habits of intellectual sociability that became organized and systematic. The Bhadralok of Calcutta, the Theosophists of Madras and the peranakan (local born) Chinese reformers of Singapore, to name but three of these groups, shared similar concerns for reform and oversaw parallel campaigns for religious revival, social and educational improvement and constitutional change. Associational life and journalism flourished in this environment, both in the bureaucratic centres of the British Empire and beyond, in such places as the Dutch port of Batavia and French-administered Saigon, to such an extent that one can fairly speak of a transformation in the public sphere across the Indian Ocean region.

Several powerful constructions of Dalit social and political identity are now circulating in very influential ways within the public sphere in North India, as various groups including both the Bahujan Samaj Party as well as Hindutva organisations compete to assert their influence over how these identities are defined, who they include, and what they mean. In this context, the rise of Hindi Dalit autobiographies as a source of Dalit cultural identity becomes especially important in North India, as they contest traditional conceptions of the Dalit community as ‘untouchables’ and attempt to re-inscribe Dalit identity in positive, self-assertive terms. However, Dalit autobiographies retain certain ambivalences, as the authors struggle to reconcile their low-caste identity with their current urban middle-class status, and more recently, as their claims to represent all members of the Dalit community are challenged by Dalits of the younger generation.

The British in India have always fascinated their fellow countrymen. From the eighteenth century until the demise of the Raj innumerable publications described the way of life of white people in India for the delectation of a public at home. Post-colonial Britain evidently still retains a voracious appetite for anecdotes of the Raj and accounts of themores of what is often represented as a bizarre Anglo-Indian world. Beneath the welter of apparent triviality, historians are, however, finding issues of real significance.