The subject of this paper is the fate of progressive taxation in South Asia. This is a subject about which Kingsley Martin himself would have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he strongly advocated a redistributive fiscal strategy. On the other hand, he was never at all comfortable examining the kind of economic analysis with which it is usually justified. Somewhat unfairly, he distrusted all orthodox economists on moral grounds (Martin, 1966: 34). Moreover, his prolonged encounter with the unorthodox economics of Maynard Keynes was equally unsatisfactory as an educational experience. Lord Boothby summed up Martin's efforts to learn the technicalities of economics from Keynes as follows: ‘Kingsley simply never understood economics and yet he was always trying to understand. “Explain it to me, then” he would say, but his attention soon wandered’ (Rolph, 1973: 195).

With the climax of imperialism in China at the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese nationalism in its modern form grew rapidly and became ever more assertive. As the imperialists concentrated on economic gains, the frustrated nationalists gave increasing attention to economic defences. The prime target of the imperialists was the control of mining and railway construction in different areas; so ‘to resist the imperialists’ became the catchword of the day, and the movement for recovering mining and railway construction rights highlighted the development of Chinese economic nationalism. While revolutionaries and the fugitive reformers abroad worked out their political programmes for the salvation of China, the conservative Manchu government and scholar-gentry tried to resist imperialism by promoting economic nationalism. To recover the mining and railway rights, to find the alternative capital for economic modernization and to play one power against another, became the strategic aims of economic nationalism.

This article explores the history of the Husainabad Trust (‘the Trust’), a quasi-religious endowment that supported a number of key Shi‘a institutions in Uttar Pradesh (UP). It asks how Shi‘a elites were able to sustain their political clout and cultural independence in India whereas, in neighbouring Pakistan, they struggled. The fate of the Trust after independence led to a contest between the Shi‘as and the state, but also among Shi‘as themselves. The resulting confrontation between the Shi‘a community in Lucknow and across UP was, it shows, complicated by internal divisions among Shi‘as who, though united against state interference in their religious and royal trusts, were divided on how best to manage them. The Trust assumed importance for Shi‘as after independence because they lost some of the Trust properties to Pakistan and also because the Trust provided the means to support the largest public manifestation of Shi‘a presence in Awadh, Muharram. Husainabad, it suggests, helps to explain how and why Lucknow re-emerged after independence as the heartland of the Shi‘as of India, and arguably of South Asia.

In analysing a campaign launched by the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board in a Hindi literary periodical, this article seeks to read tea advertisements within the cultural history of gendered lives and nationalism in the decade leading up to Indian Independence. More specifically, it explores how multiple versions of feminized Indian modernity came to feature in the construction of black tea as a healthy, social, and national beverage. As the habit and custom of tea drinking was not common amongst the Indian population of the first half of the twentieth century, the advertisements focused on the creation of a culture of ‘proper’ tea preparation and ‘correct’ consumption. Not only did the middle-class woman and her family feature centrally in these advertisements; aristocratic and working women as well as movie actresses were all associated with the beverage drunk to reenergize and savour. While the advertisements addressed middle-class society and consciousness, this article argues that they did so by also drawing on, and not distancing from, diverse class, caste, and professional contexts.

Exploring how the history of the Fifteen-year War was dealt with in pre-1982 mainland China is an essential step towards understanding the currently explosive Sino-Japanese History Problem; furthermore, this might shed light on various issues in the post-war history of China and Sino-Japanese relations. However, available research on the pre-1982 period is scarce and problematic. Earlier political scientists argue that the history of the war was ruthlessly manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party regime, while some recent studies believe that the war was conveniently ‘forgotten’ as Sino-Japanese friendship was vital for the government of the People's Republic of China. This article aims at providing an accurate and thorough picture of how the history of the Fifteen-year War was positioned in the diplomatic practice of the Chinese Communist Party regime in relation to Japan during the period.

It has long been noticed that there is a lack of comparative studies of the economies of China and India. Bardhan (1970) points out that, in numerous textbooks on comparative economic systems, the reader can hardly find any mention of a China-India comparative study, which should be a very important part of any discussion on comparative economic systems in the present world. One reason for this may be the unavailability and unreliability of data, particularly from China. This situation is now changing. A statement prepared by a Delhi-based China Study Group in 1988, clearly points out that ‘it has become possible to secure more reliable data on China, data that can be checked from various sources and collected through field observation’ (Bhattacharjea, Deshingkar, Deshpande, Gupta, Huang, Mohanty, Rao, Tan and Uberoi, 1988).

The Nilgiri hill communities have for a long time been the focus of anthropological inquiry, though they have rarely been the focus of historical inquiry that delves more deeply into the past than the colonial period. And, while the fields of history and anthropology have moved beyond tropes of primitive and timeless, our studies of those formerly so-called ‘timeless primitives’ have remained stuck in time. I argue, therefore, for an interdisciplinary modified Subaltern Studies approach, integrating data from anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and genetics, to develop a longue durée social history of the Nilgiri hills. For the Nilgiri communities, as with other tribal communities, narratives about their past have tended to emphasize their isolation until the modern period. In this article, drawing together data from several disciplines, I argue that the communities of the Nilgiris, especially the Toda, so frequently held up as examples of cultural isolation, were not truly isolated, neither from neighbouring tribal communities, nor from the states and empires of the plains below. I argue that the maintenance of distinctive religious, subsistence, and linguistic practices, despite contact with a wider world, is evidence of an active process of isolationist group formation/maintenance and resistance to other ways of being.

This article argues that ideas of health and disease in the Assam tea plantations of northeastern India exceeded instrumental logics of bodily disorder, medical ‘objectivity’, and preventive cure. It looks at cholera, kala-azar (or black-fever), and malaria—the three main killers in these estates—to show that imperatives of private capital and law conditioned and constrained parameters of well-being, mortality, and morbidity in these plantations. It therefore suggests that epidemiological theories and praxis emerged from a simultaneous—but expedient—reading of three versions of the labour body: the pathological, the productive, and the legal. The overlaps between commerce, law, and pathogens provide for a unique, if not exceptional, social history of health in colonial India.

To explore the importance of death and the dead to the study of religious conversion, this article adopts an ethnographic and comparative approach to the lives and deaths of two male Muslim converts in the southwest Indian state of Kerala. Paying attention to the treatment of their dead bodies, which were donated and cremated, contrary to their wishes for an Islamic funeral, and the problematization of their proper names, it is argued that death is the point at which selves are made/remade. Death provides the opportunity for the dead, their kin, friends, and state institutions to make claims about religious identities and familial relations. I conclude that these multiple and often contradictory stances converted the dead into religiously indeterminate figures, though their belonging to their kin was successfully established.

Hunan produced the largest number and most able leaders for the Chinese Communist Party. How could this land-locked, sleepy and conservative province produce so many revolutionaries? This article examines the consequences of three consecutive political theatres and their actors that turned Hunan into a laboratory of reform and land of revolution. It focuses on what three generations of Hunanese did that pushed Hunan into and kept the province in the national spotlight. The Hunanese, be they Qing loyalists, constitutional reformers, Han nationalists or communists, dominated China's political stage from the 1850s to the 1980s. They were patriotic and pragmatic in their patriotism. Would the Communist Revolution have been so fundamental and bloody had Champagne liberals or those with no militarist tradition controlled the helm? With the tide of Hunan gone, we must re-examine this province to see how it had shaped and changed the course of modern China.

The students of transnational flows, including James Rosenau,1 have pertinently highlighted the growing assertion of ‘sovereign free actors’ at the expense of ‘sovereign bound actors’ in what they call postinternational politics.2 Dealing mostly with the end of the Cold War era, they have tended to focus on the increasingly important role of not only the multinational firms but also of the financial companies on newly globalized markets, and not only law-abiding but also illicit traffickers (of drugs, arms etc.) which have prospered along with increasingly more effective means of communication.

They have almost completely ignored the transnationalization of religions, except from the point of view of fundamentalisms and related terrorist networks. Sociologists have paid more attention to this development.3 But these studies, which have mostly focused on the impact of migrations,4 have tended to under estimate the resilience of state boundaries5 and have often neglected the circulation of ideas, especially from the point of view of the learning networks—the very object of this Special Issue which concentrates on one particular creed: Islam.

In the aftermath of the Nanjing Massacre, one way in which Wang Jingwei's Reorganized National Government sought to impose social order was to implement a corporatist labour strategy. Inspired by European fascist theory and building on the pre-war Nationalist-Government labour legislation, corporatism sought to prevent union autonomy, stifle class-based sentiment, and undermine the pursuit of class interests whether on the part of capitalists or of workers. It aimed to ensure government control and loyalty to the state, and promote production. An analysis of approximately 50 records of labour–capital disputes mediated by the Shehui yundong zhidao weiyuanhui (Social Movement Guidance Committee) during the early 1940s suggests that the Wang regime carved out a sphere autonomous from Japanese oversight and exerted state control over commercial associations and artisans employed in the handicraft sector. Even so, worker actions show that workers did not trust corporatism to provide social unity. Contrary to much of the Chinese historiography on occupied Nanjing that emphasizes either social repression or resistance, one finds that state authorities in most cases granted trade unions’ economic demands for higher wages. The state provided workers with a modicum of agency while pressuring commercial associations to accept worker demands. In response to inflation and to preserve their breadwinner status, male artisans actively participated in the arbitration process. Workers’ agency did not reflect an endorsement of Wang Jingwei's regime or of corporatism. It was a tacit form of consent as a means of survival.

In the middle years of the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty, temples dedicated to the Fourth Son Golden Dragon Great King (jin long si da wang) began to appear on dikes and in administrative centers along the Yellow River and the Grand Canal. The Golden Dragon cult originated as an ancestral cult dedicated to an apotheosized Southern Song (1127–1280) patriot from the Hangzhou area. It later became popular with boatmen and merchants who travelled on the Grand Canal. Beginning in the sixteenth century, hydraulic officials promoted the cult as an adjunct to their administration of the Canal and the Yellow River.

Late 1946 was a time of anticlimax in the history of Sino-American relations. For four years since the outbreak of the Pacific War, thousands of American servicemen had been in China rubbing shoulders with the Chinese. When victory finally came, more United States troops (mainly the marines of the Third Amphibious Corps) poured in, and the Chinese hailed them as heroes. In less than a year, however, as hostilities between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closed in, the Americans were caught in the crossfire. Along the communication lines in North China, armed clashes between US and CCP forces escalated; in the cities, anti-American rallies became daily occurrences. The Chinese now became hostile to its erstwhile allies; wherever US servicemen went, they received boos from the locals. The rupture seemed to be irreversible: US forces started to evacuated, George Marshall, the presidential envoy to China, also ended his yearlong mediation, thus bringing the extraordinary intercourse between the two nations to an anticlimactic conclusion.

This paper re-examines the nature of the Muslim League's mobilization of the UP Muslims during the period of Congress party rule and the extent to which it was successful in emerging as their ‘authoritative, representative organization’. In the light of such a re-examination, the paper makes two arguments. First, in contrast to the existing historiography which highlights the role of Jinnah in the ML's revival, this paper underlines the agency of the local leadership of the ML in this process. Second, the paper argues that even though the ML emerged as a popular political party among the UP Muslims in this period, its strength still remained uncertain. This became evident during the Madhe Sahaba agitation between 1938 and 1939 that led to serious tensions and riots between Shias and Sunnis in the city of Lucknow. These tensions threatened to fracture the political base of the ML in the UP besides snowballing into a wider all-India conflict. During this crisis the ML stood aside helplessly, unable to exert its authority as the ‘premier’ organization of the Indian Muslims. These divisions within the Muslim community in the ML's putative bastion in the UP demonstrate that the party still had a task ahead in terms of rallying the Qaum.

The administrative (Chakri) reforms in Siam which took place around the turn of the twentieth century are probably one of the most studied topics in the history of Thailand. This period is usually described as the time when the royal elite worked to create a Siamese nation-state under the guidance of the absolute monarchy. This transformation encompassed both territorial integration and administrative centralization. Here we offer a new perspective on this transformative period through an analysis of changing documentary and spatial practices in Siam from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, which were one of the most crucial, intrinsic dynamics of state formation. The emphasis is on the mundane practices of documentation—among other spatial-material practices and processes—that produce the effect that the state exists. We show how this new paper regime articulated a standardization of written official documents, the birth of the file as a technology to deal with the avalanche of documents circulating between sections of the burgeoning administration, and the spatial organization that created the office—fields where officials produced and stored documents according to specific regulations. We exemplify this new regime of documentary practices in Bangkok and beyond, with special reference to the paper and spatial works of the provincial gendarmerie.

By writing about the late eighteenth-century revolution which led to the East India Company rule, members of a largely Muslim pre-colonial administrative elite in eastern India sought take control over their own history. They explained the society and ancien régime of India, as well as themselves, to the new British rulers for whom they worked. In so doing, they strove to inform and guide the new British colonial authorities into employing them in the new administration as well as into valuing the cultural mores and bureaucratic experience which they embodied. They also wrote introspectively for the own class, trying to understand the causes of the revolution that had displaced their own traditional rulers and themselves with rule by Europeans and administrations staffed increasingly by Indians with backgrounds different from their own.

When A‘la Hazrat [Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan] was born, his . . . paternal grandfather put him in his lap and said, ‘This [grand]son of mine will be a great ‘ alim’ ...

And one day someone knocked on the door. A‘la Hazrat, who was then ten years old, opened it and saw an elderly holy man (faqir) standing outside. . . . the man put his hand on A‘la Hazrat's head and said, ‘You are a great scholar.’

Six months after [Maulana Mustafa Riza's] birth, Nuri Miyan Sahib [Shah Abu'l Husain Ahmad Nuri] came to Bareilly. Putting his finger into [the child's] mouth, [Nuri Miyan] entered him into [his] chain of spiritual authority, and gave him permission (ijazat) [to have disciples of his own] and investiture as his successor (khilafat), and he predicted that this child would be a great ‘alim in his time as well as a perfect saint (wali).

When Mutfi-e A‘zam-e Hind [Mustafa Riza Khan] was nine years old, his father A‘la Hazrat invited all the famous men and ‘ulama to Bareilly and announced . . . this son of mine is a wali. Learn from him.

This is an essay about a father and a son, who were individually revered as ‘ ulama (scholars) and pirs (spiritual preceptors), whose lives together spanned more than a hundred-year period, between 1856 and 1981. Both were leaders of the reform movement known to its followers as the Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jama‘at (lit., ‘people of the [prophetic] way and the [majority] community’) and to others as the Barelwi movement.

One of the most common themes in the literature on political development is the assumption of an elite—mass gap based on differing educational, occupational, income and social class backgrounds. The saliency of such differences are presumed to be more important in developing than developed nations because of an overlay of Westernization to be found in the elite sectors and a strong traditional orientation among the masses, particularly the rural masses. Urban dwellers are often thought of as residing in a transitional limbo between the old and the new, between a disintegrating traditional self-identity and an emerging modern one.