The consolidation of numerous regional polities in the aftermath of Mughal imperial decline presented favourable socioeconomic opportunities for South Asian service communities. Protracted armed conflicts in southern India allowed a variety of mercenaries, soldiers, and war bands to accumulate resources in exchange for mobilizing manpower on behalf of states with weak standing armies. This article focuses on British imperial efforts to obtain sufficient quantities of military labour during its struggle with the Mysore sultanate. As the sultanate assumed an increasingly hostile attitude towards independent warrior power, local strongmen sought more amenable arrangements with alternate entities. The British East India Company received crucial support from autonomous warrior groups during its southern wars of conquest. Warriors in turn utilized British resources to consolidate local sovereignties. Thus, the initial British intrusion into peninsular Indian society further fragmented the political landscape by patronizing petty military entrepreneurs.

In recent years the issue of human rights in China has been in the international limelight, especially since the Beijing Massacre of 4 June 1989. It is, however, not a new issue in the history of modern and contemporary China. Earlier in the 1970s and 1980s, a movement for Chinese democracy and human rights was launched by dissidents, though with little success. Nor is it widely known that during the first years of the Nationalist rule there was a short-lived Human Rights Group (HRG) made up of a small number of Western-educated intellectuals.

This article presents methodologies towards a multilingual literary history of Sri Lanka in the twentieth century by examining multilingual encounters or cultures through places, people, and institutions. Massey's concept of plural space underpins the study and gives rise to various strategies to build a multilingual literary history. The guiding research questions are: How do we construct multilingual literary histories in the context of language-based conflict? What can conflict environments teach us about approaches to multilingual literary histories and spheres? In addition to discovering future directions for intra-national comparative literary studies and documenting multilingual cultures and sites, I also focus on the changing geography of multilingualism in the twentieth century. As ideological separation of language spheres turned to real-world segregation through a series of policy shifts and institutional changes, we see that the pursuit of multilingual research takes us from organic, or naturally occurring, sites of multilingualism to orchestrated, or purposefully created, sites. Orchestrated sites work to counterbalance the decreasing opportunity for organic multilingual encounters in the context of ethnolinguistic conflict.

The expansionist policies of the early colonial regime led to a significant emphasis on the importance of a large cavalry, but horses of a suitable quality appeared difficult to obtain within the subcontinent. Several measures were consequently taken to encourage horse-breeding, including the establishment of government studs and policies directed towards the creation of a ‘native’ market in quality horses. However, these measures did not appear to produce any significant results, despite sustained implementation. This paper examines in detail colonial policies on horse-breeding and links them to the larger economic logic of empire. It touches on several related themes such as early colonial interaction with ‘native’ agents, the question of free markets, and the impact of utilitarian and physiocratic doctrines on colonial policies.

The foreign missionary was always a prominent source of Sino-foreign friction. The appearance of Protestant missionaries in China's interior, and their intrusion into Chinese society in the latter half of the nineteenth century, caused strong resistance from the Chinese and many outbreaks of xenophobia. After the Boxer Uprising of 1900, however, this resistance and these outbreaks greatly declined. And the foreign missionary in the second and third decades of the twentieth century had to face new problems: namely, tension between the foreign and Chinese members within the church. In the late 1910s the missionaries found that their well-educated Chinese colleagues demanded equal treatment. Between 1925 and 1928 the missionaries and their Chinese members were involved in a severe conflict between ‘foreign’ Christianity and ‘Chinese’ nationalism, and this created even greater tension. How the missionaries responded to these problems, and how they influenced Christianity in China, deserve further analysis.

Families, while usually thought of in local terms, also have their global dimension: some families stretch around the world, while families anywhere are affected by worldwide declines in mortality. This study addresses the local and global changes brought to family structures by migration. Through comparisons of five pairs of regions from the early modern Indian Ocean world and Atlantic basin, the study shows how migration created distinctive regional age and sex ratios. It also traces the flows of migrants between Atlantic and Indian Ocean and compares the intensity of migration in each zone. It argues that expanding migration reinforced familial mixing and family frontiers in virtually every region and every social grouping. The resulting complexity in family mixes often caused families to become smaller, yet brought new criteria (birthplace, colour, religion, etc.) for hierarchy and social order.

This paper explores the nature of film exhibition amongst the Chinese community in Manila during the Japanese Occupation of that city. Based on advertisements and film listings published in the Chinese-language press of the day (as well as on pre-war records concerning commercial Chinese entertainment in the Philippines), it explores the continuities in film exhibition practice undertaken by various theatre operators within the Binondo area of Manila both before, during, and after the war. The paper suggests not only that such practices represented a quite different trajectory from that experienced in other parts of Occupied Manila, but also that a more thorough exploration of the Manila Chinese during wartime—one which goes beyond questions of mere collaboration and/or resistance—will encourage us to question some of the assumptions that underpin recent scholarship about this community.

Many scholars, politicians, and the lay people alike believe that Urdu in North India symbolizes a Muslim identity and culture. Based on an eight-month long ethnographic study and quantitative language data collected in Old Delhi, this article challenges this notion and shows that the symbolic meanings of Urdu have been mutating in post-colonial India. A cross-generational study involving both Muslims and Hindus shows that different generations assign different meanings to Urdu. Unlike the older generation, Muslim youth do not identify themselves with Urdu. A study of the Urdu sounds /f/, /z/, /kh/, /gh/, and /q/ in the speech of Muslim youth further demonstrates that they are losing three of these sounds. Another transformation involves the adoption of the Devanagari script to write Urdu by many Muslims. This change in the literacy practices of Muslims reinforces the shift in the symbolic meanings of Urdu. I argue that the transformation in the symbolic meanings of Urdu is reflective and constitutive of the sociopolitical changes that Muslims have undergone in the twentieth century.

Independent India's new state-owned infrastructural industries were not only entrusted with the mission of producing essential public commodities, but they were also required to promote the economic and social advancement of their workforces. To achieve this objective, big public enterprises in particular, helped by the financial power they derived from their control over the strategic sectors of the domestic economy, established generously endowed welfare programmes. This article argues that such a developmental ideology shaping managerial policy orientations is central to understanding why accepted explanations for the rationale of employer-sponsored social benefits are insufficient when it comes to studying similar initiatives in the Indian public sector. To substantiate its argument, the article explores the provisioning of social needs over a period of roughly half a century (1948–2002) at a large state-run producer of telecommunications equipment, Indian Telephone Industries. The welfare regime as it evolved here boasted one unique feature: it rested on dual foundations, with both the company and the trade union assuming independent responsibility for the well-being of employees. A range of informal self-help schemes devised by workers further supplemented the institutionalized social security net set up by the management and the union. The article also discusses how the firm sought to scale back its largesse in the aftermath of economic liberalization.

In recent studies of warlordism, one source has not, to my knowledge, been used. This is the collection of reports of the Sino-foreign salt inspectorate held in the Toyo Bunko. Of all the institutions of the China coast, the salt inspectorate, its offices deep in the interior, its revenues a magnet for predatory armies, was perhaps in closest touch with warlordism. This paper studies the relationship of salt and warlordism in Szechwan between 1914 and 1922. Szechwan in this period has been selected for 3 reasons. First, the reports from the inspectorates of Ch'uan-nan and Ch'uan-pei, which together covered not only Szechwan but also Yunnan, Kweichow and Hupei as supplied by its salt, are unusually informative on politics. Second, between 1914 and 1922, Szechwan, a border province both northern and southern or neither, ran a full gamut of warlordism: regional, provincial, subprovincial and stabilized. It also attracted the attention of ‘guest armies’ from outside. Third, 1914–1922 has coherence; 1914 saw Yüan Shih-k'ai ascendant and the inspectorate established in Szechwan; 1922 saw Yüan's legatee Hsü Shih-ch'ang descendant, and Liu Hsiang, the embodiment of stabilized warlordism in Szechwan, ascendant.

Colonial regimes have frequently shown a preference for sharing the burdens of defence with certain ethnic groups of the countries under their control. The advantages of a policy of this type—the essence of the divide and rule system—were many and varied. Binding natives to the service of colonial defence solved the functional problems of manpower in situations where no adequate corps of white regulars was readily available. The practice was cheaper to maintain and found to be an effective instrument of control. Its employment also drew off warlike elements that might have made trouble.

If Indian history is not timeless, some parts of Indian historiography certainly seem to be. Habib's paper is a notable example, with its reverence for sacred texts, vigilant even of the order in which the great ones are mentioned, and its repetition in substantially unchanged form of arguments that have been made and answered several times already.

I have no stomach for this ancient battle, and do not propose to answer Habib point by point. But those new to the literature should be warned of some of the peculiarities of his style of controversy.

The jute mills of Bengal had witnessed communal violence as well as bursts of working men's unrest even in the late nineteenth century. In the eyes of the employers, however, they were merely localized and disorganized flashes of protest, which could be typically nipped by the arrival of the Scottish mill manager and his entourage of Nepali darwans. A quick arbitration by the sahib under the peepul tree, liberally laced with pidgin Hindi abuse, was followed by the protector's judgment. Some would be happy with the verdict, others would remain aggrieved while the bara sahib, after a few words with the European assistant and the native sirdar, would imperiously stride back to his office, acknowledging numerous salams on his way. With such powerful ma-baaps, the mills rarely felt the need to report what they considered were piffling matters to the local police or the district magistrate. Thus, in February 1886, the Indian Jute Mills' Association could rule that ‘all hands whose work stopped during the days the mills were closed [for short-time working] should cease to be paid for that time’ without the slightest fear of serious protest from the labouring people. And in the late 1920s, in spite of the Rowlatt satyagraha, the Khilafat and the non-cooperation movement, the Chairman of IJMA could note with great satisfaction that ‘for many years the jute mill industry has been more or less immune from industrial disputes’.

Many cultures include in their narrative discourse tales of women who have gone to war or joined the hunt and indeed Chinese culture has produced a plethora of tales which relate the deeds of such strong and exceptional women. The general opinion from Western academics about these women is that they are rebelling against restraints imposed upon their sex by patriarchal society and ‘under the guise of patriotism or wifely devotion [find] an understandable motive for rejecting hearth and home.’ That patriarchal discourse should perpetuate through history and literature a subversive mode of thinsimply because it was duped by the invocations of patriotism an loyalty appears less than convincing. Certainly, if these are the woman warrior's motives then they have been exceptionally well disguised by the literary redactions of the deeds of the women warriors in Chinese culture. It is the intention of this article to explicate the complexity of the woman warrior in Chinese culture and reveal the multiplicity of discursive functions she fulfils by using the specific case of two mid Qing texts, Honglou meng and Jinghua yuan. The contradictions embodied in the recurring form of the woman warrior and her Amazonian sisters hold a key to understanding the complex and ambiguous signifying systems of sexual ideology in mid Qing Chinese culture. In this respect I will be invoking an Althusserian notion of the specific relationship between ideology and literature whereby the particular feelings or perceptions generated by the literature are regarded as being produced by the ideology within 'which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes' through an internal distanciation from that very same ideology.2 In Honglou meng and Jinghuayuan this internal distanciation is made apparent by the elaborate use of myth in the former and irony in the latter.

As an aspect of the Kansei Reforms at the end of the eighteenth century initiated by the Councilor of the Elders, Matsudaira Sadanobu, the Tokugawa bakufu officially took over the administration of the Shōheikō (The Confucian University in Edo). The Shōheikō had been operated as a private school by the Hayashi family, who held the hereditary position of education councilors to the bakufu. With the expansion of the faculty and facilities under the new administration, ways were opened even for the children of any domain retainer and for those of peasants and merchants.

Entries in Mao Era reference works today serve as windows into the world of words and meanings of a bygone era. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias, though, did not speak with one voice, even under Communist Party control. Lexicography and the question of who would get to publish on and explain the meaning of the ‘new terms’ and ‘new knowledge’ of ‘New China’ were subject to constant debates. Lexicographers, editors, and publishers specialized in the business of setting up categories and, together with readers and state censors, they policed them. Following on their heels, this article examines four moments in Mao Era lexicography, ranging from the early years of transition to Chinese Communist Party rule to the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Internal reports and letter exchanges on the production and circulation of single-volume encyclopaedic dictionaries show who contributed to encyclopaedic work, how it was controlled, and why control and censorship were often far from simple. Taking lexicography seriously as a component of the socialist information economy after 1949 sheds light on complex processes of knowledge transmission that defy simple models of socialist state propaganda.