‘It is one thing to divide a country on a map’, writes Lieutenant-General Duong Van Minh, Commander-in-Chief and destroyer of the late President Ngo Dinh Diem (and Head of State for a time in succession to him), ‘but it is not so easy to divide a people—to sever bonds of family, culture, and history. The Vietnamese people are one; they cannot be separated into northerners or southerners’.

If one wishes to understand something about the political mobilization of Chinese communist society, then it is necessary to concentrate primarily on the aims behind that political mobilization. The ways in which the Chinese try to direct matters so that those aims may be attained, determine the content and character of the mobilization. An analysis which is mainly concerned with such dimensions of the phenomenon ‘political mobilization’ as intensity, globality, tempo, structuring, organization, etc., is not suited to the Chinese situation, simply because these dimensions are to a large extent determined by, and can be explained by, the meaning and content of the underlying values and aims.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) employed hundreds of Indian sailors in Surat in western India to man its ships plying the Asian waters. The Moorse zeevarenden (Muslim sailors) performed a variety of tasks on board ships and in the port of Batavia, and made it possible for the Company to carry out its commercial ventures across the Indian Ocean. The relationship between the two, however, was rather complex and even contentious. Based on Dutch sources, this article investigates the political-economic contexts of this relationship, examines the structure and organization of the maritime labour market in Surat, and illuminates the role and significance of zielverkopers (labour contractors) and of the local administration. The analysis of the social, economic, and familial aspects of the market and labour relations in Surat sheds light on pre-capitalist forms of labour recruitment and the institutional dynamics of the Indian labour market.

As the Qing state launched its full-scale educational reform at the turn of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of new schools mushroomed all over China. Their urgent and enormous demand for textbooks created a thriving new market that attracted both Chinese and foreign publishing firms. Nurtured in China's traditional book trade, Chinese print capitalists had local knowledge of distribution networks and cultural politics, but not a real command of producing educational Western knowledge. To keep up with Chinese students’ increasing demand for Western knowledge, they pirated textbooks published by foreign companies. Meanwhile, leading American and British publishing corporations were expanding their international business by targeting developing countries that had recently established a modern general education system, like China. Drawing from government and company archives, as well as personal papers and legal documents, this article traces the multinational competition, copyright disputes, and business collaborations between a leading textbook provider in China and their Anglo-American competitors between the 1900s and the 1930s. It illustrates an unexpected and uneasy partnership some foreign publishers formed with Chinese pirates in order to gain better access to China's textbook market. Chinese publishers, on the other hand, used piracy and their local knowledge to bargain for better import credit and deals with their foreign rivals. Both sides were dependent on each other to gain the advantage in their transnational business operations in the globalizing Asian textbook business.

Boundaries were smashed and broken as modernity struck its first blows in Asia in the nineteenth century. The British and the French chipped away at the borders of China, and the USA ripped open the seal that enveloped Japan in sakoku. Imperialism, or neo-imperialism, represented a way of overcoming boundaries, of decreasing the salience of other territorial units. However, it was also a way of expanding boundaries, of projecting one's own territory and sustaining the priority of these new (modern) borders over the claims of (allegedly pre-modern) indigenous peoples. Boundaries themselves began to take on a distinctly modern persona–and they were the property of the modern, Western powers.

In 1989 India's political system underwent a process of profound change which affected the entire institutional setup of the country. Power was radically redistributed—it began to flow from the central government to the states, and from the Prime Minister's Office to the other institutions of the state. By analysing the severe institutional crisis which occurred during Mrs Gandhi's final term in office, this paper seeks to show how state institutions worked on the eve of such a redrawing of India's institutional setup. In addition, an effort is made to link the working of India's institutions to the configuration of the party system, thus stressing the importance of political dynamics in the functioning of parliamentary democracies.

This paper examines how an ethnic Miao uprising in West Hunan in 1937 became the site for the interaction of a broad range of competing local, provincial, and national interests. The target of the uprising was a tuntian system formed from confiscated Miao lands in the early nineteenth century to support a military system defending against Miao disturbances. Surviving anachronistically into the twentieth century, the military land rents of this system formed a base for warlord power on Hunan's western frontier. The uprising arose opportunistically in the context of a struggle over the resources of this system between the warlord of West Hunan and a provincial governor whose provincial state-building project sought to end the region's long political autonomy. The uprising consequently drew the attention of Nationalist Party factions who saw it as an opportunity to use the uprising to undermine the provincial governor in the interest of their own centralizing state-building project. Finally, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War allowed uprising leaders to recast the uprising as a patriotic movement, seeking equality for the Miao of West Hunan by the abolition of the tuntian system and offering the mobilization of uprising forces for service at the front once this goal was achieved. In the end, the uprising functioned as a palimpsest upon which the multiple motivations and desires of its participants, in their broad social, political and personal contexts, were written and overwritten.

The purpose of this article is to examine what was involved when the great linguist George Grierson framed the history of Indian bhakti in terms of ‘the four churches of the reformation’ in one of his most widely read publications, ‘Bhakti-Mārga’, an entry in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1910). This was his translation of the concept of catuḥ (or cār) sampradāy, which plays a significant role in Nābhādās's Hindi Bhaktamāl (circa 1600). The weight of the target language and its enveloping culture (‘church’, ‘reformation’) raise obvious red flags. Grierson did not submit them to the sort of self-critical scrutiny we might today, nor did he examine the adequacy of Nābhādās's historiography. But did he get it all wrong? I will suggest that there are in fact some intriguing, if distant, analogies between the early modern world out of which Nābhādās wrote and its contemporary Protestant European counterpart, and I will ask whether Nābhādās may have been encouraged to adopt the framework he did because of precedents established in contemporary Muslim historiographical practice. In outlining his four sampradāys, Nābhādas played a role in creating a set of assumptions that long survived his own time in North India—and not just because Grierson would later be listening.

This article explores the acceptance of Marxism by a non-Marxist Chinese philosopher, Feng Youlan, before and after 1949. Previous studies have largely focused on establishment intellectuals in the study of Marxism and intellectuals in China, and this article seeks to fill the lacuna on the intellectual potential Marxism offered to non-Communist intellectuals in China. This article finds that for Feng Youlan, a non-Marxist Chinese intellectual, Marxism was able to provide meaningful venues for his attempt to modernize Chinese knowledge and transform Chinese culture. A Marxist emphasis on universal rules governing all human societies on the same stage of development, Marxist presentist approaches to history, and most of all, a Marxist emphasis on praxis, aided Chinese intellectuals like Feng in constructing new approaches to learning the Chinese past. The Marxist emphasis on praxis helped deepen the discussion of experience, a concept central to a reconstruction of Confucian learning in modern China, after the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Eventually the state monopoly of the definition of Marxist praxis stifled the spontaneous search for a new understanding of experience in Communist China. Nonetheless, Marxism had a transformative and lasting impact on modern Chinese scholarship, as seen from the example of Feng Youlan.

In a political culture that experiences inordinately high levels of petitioning, what makes for a successful petition? This article studies petitions that have been efficacious in their appeals to capture or kill big cats in Himalayan India. The rates of success for any appeal against big cats are low in contemporary India, given the stringent legal regime that is geared almost exclusively towards the protection of the charismatic and endangered big cats as well as the hegemonic position occupied by wildlife conservationism. Furthermore, not only is it difficult to petition against cossetted big cats, but it is also not an easy task for any petition to be heard and acquiesced to. Through an ethnography of efficacious petitions, this article makes three related interventions. First, and in the process of attending to the rarity of a handful of efficacious petitions, this article argues for expanding our conceptualization of what, in practice, a petition is. It does so by outlining the changing forms of efficacious petitions, which can range from a telephone call, a register entry, a WhatsApp message from a smart phone, to the more ‘traditional’ paper-based petition. Beyond its ever-evolving medium, this article demonstrates the criticality of folding petitioning into a wider process that involves planning, performance, perseverance, repetition, and the capacity to elicit visceral responses. Finally, through an ethnographic foregrounding of human-big cat interactions, it demonstrates how an acceptance and elaboration of animal agency enriches the study of politico-legal processes.

This article deals with the convergence of ethnicity and faith in the context of Christian Yunnan. Contemporary Evangelical missionaries working in Yunnan encourage the preservation of ethnic markers while attempting to create a form of ‘pristine faith’: a religiosity that severely limits the role of ethnicity in the construction of identity, emphasizing instead individualism and globalism—processes that may be beneficial for the Chinese state. My discussion here revolves around the distinction made by many Evangelical Christians in China between ‘true’ faith, based on an individual experience of salvation and rebirth, and ‘nominal’ faith, a traditional understanding of religion as an identity that is acquired at birth. Thus, minority Christians whose ancestors converted en masse prior to the 1949 revolution and retain a distinctly ethnic form of religiosity are often labelled ‘nominal’ by contemporary missionaries and converts. In contrast, the latter represent a faith that stems from personal experience and belongs to a global and transnational community, transcending the narrow limits of ethnic culture.

Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simplify the historical nexus of relations between missionaries, converts and the colonial state. Challenging the view that conversions were ever only about material gain, this paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leprosy-affected people in South India to consider the role that conversion has also played in establishing alternative, often positively construed, identities for those who came to live in leprosy colonies from the mid twentieth century onwards. The paper draws out the distinctive values associated with a Christian identity in India, exploring local Christianities as sets of practices through which, for example, a positive sense of belonging might be established for those otherwise excluded, rather than being centred upon personal faith and theology per se. Biographical accounts are drawn upon to document and analyse some of the on-the-ground realities, and the different implications—depending on one's wider social positioning—of converting from Hinduism to Christianity in South India.

Through the lens of the multinational staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS), this article argues that a technocratic programme of reconstruction evolved in the Nationalist government's wartime efforts on post-war planning, which refashioned a cadre of foreign (semi-)colonial-era experts into technocrats serving a sovereign state. This episode, in which the weakened Customs Service reclaimed its significance for the Chinese state, occurred in China's wartime capital, Chongqing. After the abrogation of the so-called ‘unequal treaties’ with foreign powers in January 1943, China entered a post-treaty era, and the question of retaining long-serving foreign Customs Service employees perplexed Nationalist leaders. Eventually, China's huge post-war need for foreign expertise, networks, and imports led to a moderate staff reorganization of the CMCS, with foreign technocrats being kept on and other bureaucrats either shifted to advisory positions or being forced to retire. Technical expertise provided a new guise for the European and American presence in post-imperialist China. Taking the rehabilitation of coastal lighthouses as an example, this article demonstrates the significance of foreign technocrats to the Chinese state during the last phase of the Sino-Japanese War and in its immediate aftermath. In showing the ambition and preparations of the Nationalist government for a post-war era, this article corrects a narrative of an all-out collapse of the Nationalist government from the mid-1940s. The wartime evolution of the Customs Service further highlights the growing importance of technocrats in the decolonizing world.

The Khyber Pass Railway is a defunct 42-kilometre-long railway line that connects the western reaches of Peshawar to the Afghan border. Completed in 1925 mainly to carry British troops, the railway line failed to attract decent passenger or commodity traffic. Instead, it made an impact on a more primal register. Negotiations carried out between the British Government of India and populations from around the Khyber to allow its construction reproduced and rearranged lines of authority among the latter. They also embedded colonial administrators in tribal hierarchies. Efforts to acquire land and labour opened up spaces of collaboration between the colonial administration and members of frontier tribes, effectively contributing towards a reconfiguration of sovereign power in the area. This article weaves questions of customary law and colonial legal cultures into a retelling of the history of the Khyber Pass Railway. Examining transactions across three domains of sovereign power—the economic right to use land, extension of juridical regimes, and territorial control—it argues that the operation of sovereignty in the late-colonial Indo–Afghan frontier did not adhere to conventional ideas about its concentration and monopoly. The colonial government as well as members of frontier tribes deployed the inconclusive nature of their transactions strategically and, often, sovereign power lay with the stakeholder who could determine which domains fell within the bounds of the sovereignty question and which domains fell without.

This article writes the agrarian history of an obscure locality, Cuttack, in early-nineteenth-century British India. In doing so, instead of exalting the explanatory power of the local, or the particular, it interrogates the category of the ‘local’ itself by demonstrating how it was assembled as the object of agrarian governance in British India through a densely interwoven network of discursive practices. I present this network as various inter-regional practices and debates over agrarian governance in British India and some methodological debates of political economy in contemporary Britain. This article argues that the governmental engagement with locally specific, indigenous forms of interrelationship between landed property and political power in British India can be more productively understood as internal to the transformed vocabulary of contemporary political economy, rather than lying outside it, amid the pragmatism and contingency of governance. Accordingly, it shows how the particularity of agrarian relations in a locality was produced out of a host of reconfigurations, over different moments and sites, of a universal classificatory grid. In the process, I question those histories of British India which, being rooted in a series of hierarchized binary oppositions, like inside–outside, abstract–concrete, or universal–particular, reproduce the rationality of colonial governance.

This article presents an ethnography of a contemporary residential madrasa for teenage Muslim girls in a North Indian town undertaken by a team of two researchers. We focused on different aspects of the overall study, with Sanyal conducting participant observation within the madrasa and Farah interviewing a select number of graduates and former students in their home environments. The result is a comprehensive picture of the madrasa's transformative role in the socio-religious lives of its students, which highlights the importance of the connections between the madrasa and the home.

Of significance are the religious and denominational orientation of the madrasa—Barelwi Sunni Muslim—as well as the working-class status of the girls and their parents’ low level of education. With limited resources, the madrasa inculcates in the students, and by extension their neighbourhoods and wider communities, a new awareness of religious duties and mutual obligations, and gives its students confidence and a voice within both their families and communities. The long-term potential impact of madrasas such as this one appears to be significant in contemporary North India.

Although the Thai electronic media remain subject to considerable state control, newspapers in Thailand have gained some latitude to report and comment on political developments. The Thai press is one of the freest and most outspoken in Pacific Asia. In particular, the Thai language press frequently engages in antagonistic exchanges with political office-holders, and has often been credited with contributing to major upheavals. Most recently, the press was involved in the downfall of the Democrat-led government coalition over a land reform scandal in May 1995. Traditionally, however, Thai newspapers have been regarded as platforms for articulating the political views of their owners. Politicians have typically cultivated close personal ties to newspaper editors and columnists in order to further their own objectives. In recent years, the character of some Thai newspapers has changed. Whereas old-style newspapers such as Thai Rath and Daily News remain private family companies, newspapers such as Matichon, Phujatkarn, and Siam Post are part of larger corporate entities.

This article examines the Indian poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal's appropriation by three Nadwat al-‘Ulama scholars: Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi (d. 1953), Abu'l-Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi (d. 1999), and ‘Abd al-Salam Nadwi (d. 1956). It argues that the particular depictions of Iqbal by the Nadwa ‘ulama can be mapped onto larger evolutions within the institute. The early Nadwa ‘alim Sulayman Nadwi imagines Iqbal as a Muslim leader par excellence. A more conservative understanding of Islam emerged with the later Nadwa ‘ulama. They emphasize traditional theological ideas, particular modes of piety, and ritualistic actions. The article suggests that the later Nadwa ‘ulama’s writings on Iqbal are reflective of this particular understanding of Islam and morality, although there are two distinct responses to the poet. The above examination of the Nadwa is placed within its broader historical context. In so doing, the article contends that the impact of the political milieu in India must be taken into account to understand shifts in the Nadwa and South Asian Islam more broadly. It also asserts that the political environment in South Asia influenced Iqbal's reception by the Nadwa ‘ulama as well as by Muslims in South Asia and beyond. Additionally, this article argues that all three works by the Nadwa ‘ulama are subjective portrayals informed by the social imaginaries of their authors. In fact, in a broader sense, all works of narrative historiography are subjective accounts. This realization problematizes the boundaries between the categories of historiography and hagiography, and this research calls for a rethinking of these tensions.

Japan's early postwar leadership and American occupiers alike asserted that democratization was a new lesson that the Japanese public would have to learn. In fact, the ideas of democratic reformers had been broadcast to a large audience as feasible programmes decades before 1945. Miyatake Gaikotsu, the editor of Democracy in 1919, outlined the benefits that democratic reforms might provide in a post-World War I world. Decades later, Japanese people faced a new postwar struggle, not as victors but as the vanquished. Gaikotsu, writing in 1945, reflected on democracy in these new circumstances in his study, Amerika-sama. Although the situation was vastly different, victory and defeat in world wars had opened paths to new possibilities. This paper examines Gaikotsu's prewar writings as prescient prescriptions that he revisits in his essay Amerika-sama, or ‘Honourable America,’ at the point they begin to be played out, in some instances only partially and at times for ill as well as good, in occupied Japan. These reflections strikingly demonstrate the continuity of ideas during the prewar past and postwar present. Amerika-sama is a representative expression of many programmes Gaikotsu and likeminded humanistic activists attempted to put into practice from the late nineteenth century until they were suppressed during the wartime years. Mainstream political parties, prewar and postwar, often found it difficult to embrace Gaikotsu's ideas and political programmes. Nevertheless, the general public embraced them and they now find legal support in the Constitution of Japan.

In the late 1950s, work began on the Kaptai hydroelectric dam, a massive project in the verdant Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), an area bordering northeast India, east Pakistan (today Bangladesh), and Burma (now Myanmar), largely populated by indigenous hill communities. At the time, the CHT was situated in newly created East Pakistan, and Kaptai had become a focal site for the development of hydroelectric power. In the process, Pakistan relied upon international networks, including global aid organizations and American multinational construction firms, to fulfil its development dreams; in return the United States found a useful ally to contain Soviet influence and the growth of communism in Asia. In the high stakes exchange of economic aid for political alliance-making, East Pakistani administrators, US State Department officials, and American corporations became inherently entwined in a shared vision of development, to the detriment of local ecologies and the indigenous peoples who lived within them. This article will explore how both the public and private sectors used the language of primitivity, wildness, and atavism to marginalize minority ‘tribal’ populations in the devastating name of development and modernity.