To an Englishman of my generation, whose schooling took place during the 1920–30s, the practice of comparing Japan with Britain has long been a commonplace. School geography lessons on Japan invariably began with a reference to the temperate offshore island kingdom of eastern Asia as the ‘Britain of the East’, and this theme was often elaborated to include the characterization of Osaka and Kobe respectively as the Manchester and Liverpool of Japan. But following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 the climate of opinion began to change, and so did the analogy. In 1936, Freda Utley, in a book which attracted widespread interest, observed:

Although the real Japan comes a little closer to being the Prussia of Asia than the Britain of Asia, it is fundamentally unlike all these romantic pictures, and in so far as it resembles another country, that country is Russia under the tyranny of the Tsars.

Writing in the Malay-language press from the late 1910s to the 1930s, literate women in colonial Java and Sumatra engaged deeply with understandings of modernity mediated through concepts of healthfulness and hygiene. Piecing together the views of writers who participated in conversations about health, child-rearing, child-feeding, and socio-political progress, and situating them against the backdrop of both imperial policies of hygienic modernity and systems of indigenous knowledge, this article argues that these women deployed their own agency and negotiation efforts to articulate a singular paradigm of progress. The article focuses on practices of infant-feeding, showing that these literate colonized women's conscious manipulation of the colonial discourse on scientific modernity was grounded in their awareness of the racial project of control of their own bodies. The promotion of ‘traditional’ breastfeeding was a way to affirm a path to progress that shared the underlying conditions for, but not the modalities of, Western modernity. Examining the processes of negotiation and subversion that emerged in these women's writings provides a productive space to question and reframe scholarly understandings of ‘modernity’ as a category of analysis.

This article expresses some dissatisfaction with the state of interpretation of economic and social trends in Japan during the Tokugawa period from 1603 to 1867. At one time there was a universal view that the Tokugawa economy was stagnant and characterized by extreme oppression of the peasantry. This view has been demolished by the writings of, for example, T. C. Smith, E. S. Crawcour, S. Hanley, Kozo Yamamura and C. D. Sheldon. Yet, it is argued here, much confusion remains after a close examination of these and other works. Crawcour and Yamamura have shown that the financial crisis at the end of the period is closely associated with a sharp deceleration of the spread of commercial transactions, but it is at least arguable that the picture of ‘a happy and prosperous peasantry’ (which is, apparently, derived from T. C. Smith's description of a dynamic, expanding economy in the eighteenth century, with steady growth in agricultural productivity and increased urbanization) has been overdrawn.

This article introduces South China's jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of affective and industrial labour, which are produced by migrant women's yearnings for people and places far away. Temporary sites and precarious forms of low-wage production serve as fragmented and provisional resources of sociality and labour as migrant workers and urban villages gradually become incorporated within the urban fabric. The unrequited longings of migrant women who work in factories and as caretakers demonstrate how marginal hubs are created through disjunctures of emplacement and mobility, which are intensified as these women attempt to bridge the contradictions entailed in care work and industrial labour across the supply chains.

In this article, Mughal understandings of their own past are reconstructed from the standpoint of Mughal paramountcy in around 1700. That was the moment of the empire's greatest territorial reach, when it knew no peer nor threat. To reconstruct contemporary understandings of how this situation came about, histories of the Mughal empire composed by governing officials of the time are analysed using a novel approach rooted in a particular distinction between constants and contingencies. These understandings allow us to recapture the political sociology of empire as apprehended by the Mughal elites. The article's findings are of value for two reasons. Narrowly construed, they help fill a lacuna in mainstream views on Mughal historiography, traditionally dominated by Akbar and his reign, and imbued with the logic of decline (and of its corollary, the transition to colonialism). More broadly, because of the weight accorded to knowledge of the past in the formation of Mughal ruling elites, the findings provide fresh insights into the cognitive framework within which these elites operated at a moment recognized as highly significant then, and in retrospect.