If Calcutta of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a city of ‘banians,’ can Madras of the same period be called a city of ‘dubashes’? The parallels in the early history of these two port cities, and particularly in the emergence of similar groups of Indian collaborators, are not hard to find. Nor are they especially surprising in view of the common goals and needs of the English traders who founded them. The need for intermediaries and collaborators was built into the very economic and political structures of these towns. In turn, these groups inevitably had a tremendous influence on the development and environments of these colonial urban centers.

In the aftermath of the Opium War of 1839–42, China was continuously subjected to increasing Western political and economic penetration. The Treaty of Nanjing was only the first of a series of unequal treaties which led to the opening of over 100 treaty ports along the coast and in the interior of China. In many of these ports Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, Japan and other imperialist powers set up concessions under their administration and outside Chinese jurisdiction. There their nationals could freely trade, invest in banking, industry and construction, and engage in missionary and other cultural activities. Thus, although China never completely fell under the direct control of any imperialist power, the treaty ports were functionally similar to the port cities of Western colonies as linkages to the metropolitan countries.Did these treaty ports serve as beachheads of imperialism which facilitated foreign extraction of raw materials, exploitation of a cheap labor market, and displacement by cheap imports of native handicrafts left unprotected by the loss of tariff autonomy, as neo-Marxist historians charge? Or, as the revisionist scholars contend, were they centers of political and economic modernization where Western ideas and institutions were communicated to the Chinese, and where Western entrepreneurship and capital not only pioneered in modern industry, but also prompted imitative responsesfrom Chinese entrepreneurs? And yet, did the ports fail to have any major impact at all on Chinese political organization and socio-economic development, as Chinese mercantile interests thwarted Western attempts to penetrate the economy?

The papers in this number of Modern Asian Studies were originally prepared for a symposium that took place in London in December 1981. It was sponsored jointly by the Japan Foundation and the School of Oriental and African Studies in order to provide an opportunity for discussion of the cultural background to an important exhibition of Japanese art mounted by the Royal Academy during the winter of 1981–82.

Until recently the Malayalam-speaking region of southern India—once known as the Malabar coast and now the state of Kerala—was portrayed as a bastion of orthodox high Hinduism. The region's caste system was famous for its intricacy and supposed rigidity; its temples were rich, numerous and heavily patronized by Malayali rulers; and there was a general sense of the area as a picturesque backwater hidden away behind the western Ghats, untouched by the turbulent forces at work elsewhere in south Indian society. According to this view Kerala was a static society, ‘pure’ in culture and religious tradition, and ripe for drastic modernization once British suzerainty was established during the nineteenth century.

As Peter Gay has observed in his stimulating and standard work on the European Enlightenment: ‘Even the most genial Christian had to regard his religion as absolutely true (and therefore all others as radically false), and heathens as unwitting precursors, or unregenerate enemies, or miserable souls in need of light.’ This conviction was held by the great majority of Europeans for centuries, and not least by the Roman Catholic Portuguese and the Calvinist Dutch who were successively the main intermediaries between Japan and the Western World. Of course, there were always some exceptions, such as the Portuguese fidalgo in the Moluccas, c. 1544, who commented that in spite of racial and cultural gaps, differences, and prejudices, ‘still, as the proverb says, the whole earth is one, and all its peoples are basically alike.’ However, as a general rule, many, perhaps most, Europeans were either hostile or else indifferent to Asian cultures. The Italian Jesuit Visitor Valignano stated that this applied especially to the Portuguese ‘who often termed even the Chinese and the Japanese “Niggers”.’ He also noted on one occasion that the Portuguese merchants from Macao seldom or never ventured further inland than Nagasaki and the Kyushu ports. ‘And because of the great difference in language, manners, and customs, the Japanese think very little of them, and they still less of the Japanese.’ This was written in 1583, and was probably an exaggeration even then. By the end of the century, it was quite inapplicable.

The British controlled their empire in India through the twin instruments of the army and the civil services. But the army was never used much to administer British territories and the day-to-day business of law and order was left to the civil services, headed by the élite corps of covenanted officers, the Indian Civil Service. This corps was the vital link that carried the dictates of the centre to the two hundred and fifty districts that made up British India. Obviously a Service only a thousand or so strong had a presence too thin to achieve what some hagiographers have claimed but it was, nonetheless, a vital part of the structure of British rule. In the years immediately following the first world war, this vital part seemed unable to cope with the galaxy of problems with which it was beset: its own members increasingly questioned the value of their role; Indian politicians attacked what they saw as the remnant of imperial control whilst, on the widest scale, the complex task of governing India seemed to be beyond the creaking, anachronistic and overworked I.C.S.

When Le Myre de Vilers arrived in Saigon in mid-1879 as the first civilian to be appointed governor of Cochinchina after nearly two decades of rule by admirals, he carried a letter of instructions in which the Minister of the Navy and Colonies, Admiral Jaureguiberry, outlined his mission: to endow the colony with the institutions of a civilian government and administration.In his instructions, Jaureguiberry noted the desirability of giving the Vietnamese a role in running the affairs of Cochinchina.

INDIAN hill stations have often been portrayed as islands of European settlement, providing colonists with a retreat, both from the heat and the native culture of the plains.British planners meant them to be English enclaves, but the image owes not a little to the innumerable references available in accounts written by the British in India. Hill stations, with their thickly wooded hills and swirling mist, afforded colonists an opportunity to build around themselves a replica of English life. The presence of European women in large numbers at hill stations enhanced the image. They, more than their men, tended to withdraw within the closed circle of European society. It was an endless succession of balls, archery, fetes, picnics and amateur theatre. Their diaries, letters and novels covering almost a century, hardly ever went beyond an account of the rounds of social engagements. The view has been perpetuated by fiction. Simla had its Rudyard Kipling, and that hill station was peopled by larger-than-life images created by the writer in the 1880s. But so vivid was the evocation that British visitors seemed to search for them in Simla even a quarter of a century later.

The British Empire established itself and expanded largely through its incorporation of existing indigenous political structures. A single British Resident or Political Agent, controlling a regional state through ‘advice’ given to the local prince or chief, became the norm for much of the Empire. India's princely states, where from the mid-eighteenth century the British first employed and developed this system of indirect rule, stood as the conscious model for later imperial administrators and politicians who wished to extend the Empire without the economic and political costs of direct annexation. In dealing with Malaya, East and West Africa from the mid-nineteenth century onward, officials in the field and notables in London sought to justify imperial expansion and to establish indirect rule efficiently by drawing upon the Indian example.Thus, during a century of empirical learning from relations with India'sprincely states, the British established a body of theory and policies about indirect rule which then spread throughout the rest of the Empire.

The continuities between the study of the West through Dutch in Tokugawa Japan and the program of modernization in the Meiji period seem self evident. The influence of Holland through Deshima became the focus of the life work of Itazawa Takeo and others well before the war, and it received detailed discussion from Charles Boxer in 1936. Nevertheless issues of the importance and influence of Tokugawa rangaku continue to be debated, and that debate greatly enriches our feel for Japanese society then and now.

The first attempt to bring together all women interested in female education in Bengal was the convocation of a Bengal Women's Education Conference in February 1927 which led to the formation of the Bengal Women's Education League. The problems of female education had received considerable attention from social reformers in nineteenth-century Bengal, but the formation of the League signified that for the first time women were taking over the responsibility for leadership of the women's education movement. The All-India Women's Education conference had been held in January of the same year, 1927, indicating that the formation of the League in Bengal was part of a national trend of coordinated activity to improve educational opportunities for women.

One of the most intriguing questions in the modern history of North India is why the Muslims of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh, and referred to hereafter as U.P.; see Map 1) supported the demand for Pakistan when it was obvious that if they were successful they would have either to remain in a Hindu dominated India, or suffer the upheaval of migration. In recent years Paul Brass and Francis Robinson have debated the general question of Muslim separatism in U.P., taking positions which Brass has described, respectively, as ‘instrumentalist’ and ‘primordialist’. Brass argues that the Muslims were modernizing at a faster rate than Hindus, that they had a larger share of government jobs than their fourteen percent of the population would warrant, that Muslim politicians erected a myth of ‘the backward Muslim’ to protect this privilege, and then selected communally divisive symbols to mobilize support for their own drive to power. In short, the ‘instrumentalist’ position argues the autonomy of the ‘game of symbol selection’ on the part of the politicians, and therefore of the significance of symbol response on the part of those who supported the Muslim League and its demand for Pakistan. Robinson, on the other hand, first disagrees that the backwardness of the Muslims was a myth, especially relative to the role they perceived they had played in U.P. society for many centuries, and secondly, he seeks to demonstrate that the religious and cultural assumptions of the Muslim political leaders shaped and directed their actions.

It is generally accepted that nationalism has two frames of reference. One is external: the pursuit of national independence, asserting the nation's freedom from domination by other states or groups. The second is internal: a commitment to national unity, requiring political and social cohesion. Both are associated with awareness of cultural identity, which is the nation's image of itself in terms of those characteristics that are held to be common to its members.

An extensive body of literature has grown up in recent years devoted to the analysis of the causes of what is certainly the most pressing economic issue of our time: the unequal distribution of the world's wealth and income, and in particular what in shorthand may be called ‘the underdevelopment of the Third World’. Tremendous progress has been made by radical as well as more conventional social scientists, and our understanding of the processes of interaction, economic as well as otherwise, between the metropolitan core of western colonial powers and indigenous societies in the periphery has benefited commensurately. Naturally, the debate has tended to focus on the major sectorsinvolved in the processes of economic growth and modernization, agriculture and industry, with infrastructure a poor third. Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising to observe that what to many students ofEuropean expansion has appeared to constitute the essential element intheir ability to explore, gain access to, and exploit the periphery, hasbeen completely neglected: ocean transport, or to put it differently, themain body of the infrastructure of the world economy. In some ways, no dependence is felt to be so absolute as that of the country that sees itscoastal traffic dominated and its exports carried by foreign-owned ships.

With increasing income disparity between the developed and the developing nations of the world, there is an increasing tendency on the part of various governments of the Third World countries to export labour power among other commodities, with the hope of getting overseas remittances to improve their unfavourable balance of payment vis-à-vis the developed nations and/or to improve the economic well-being of the country as a whole. As well, some individual families and communities in dire straits are eager to send their members overseas not only to reduce the number of mouths to be fed but also to earn extra income to keep themselves from sinking too far below the poverty line.

The study of federal political systems, particularly parliamentary or representative federal political systems, such as those in the United States, Canada, or India involves complexities that do not exist in unitary states such as Great Britain or France. In the first place, there are three or more institutional levels in such systems, each of which has its own arena in which political struggles take place. Second, the balance of power among the levels in federal systems varies in different systems and in the same system at different times. Third, the study of the extraparliamentary organizations, such as political parties, and of social movements, also becomes a more complex task since it cannot be assumed that a political party or social movement with the same name is the same sort of formation in New York and Mississippi or in Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Moreover, in federal systems with a high degree of regional cultural diversity, each federal unit in the country may have a distinctive configuration of extraconstitutional political formations and social forces. This is certainly the case in India, the most culturally diverse of all existing federal parliamentary systems in the world today. Fourth, politics in federal systems takes place between levels as well as within levels, again in far more complex ways than in unitary systems.

As had been the case throughout much of Chinese history, government during the Ch'ing dynasty (1644–1911) was largely in the hands of a civil bureaucracy staffed by the Confucian literati. Prevailing political thought held that moral suasion and commonly held ideals were in a large way responsible for keeping both the society and the body politic running smoothly. For this and other reasons, the court assigned a rather small number of bureaucrats to manage a truly vast population. In addition, it was commonly assumed by rulers and the ruled that China's was and should be primarily an agrarian society of self-sufficient peasants. The only orthodox avenue of social, even spatial, mobility was the Confucian examination system which led successful candidates into the bureaucracy. This view denigrated the importance of commerce, of technological advancement, of learning outside the Confucian classics; and it acted as a brake on social, political, and economic development.

Little did it occur to me when I began to translate Ogyū Sorai's Kyōchūkikō (‘Report from Journey to Kai’) some years ago that this endeavour would lead me to the first work that was written by this philosopher. Even after I had shown that the Kyōchūkikō was only a new and shorter edition (1710) of the earlier travelogue Fūryūshishaki (‘Report of the Elegant Emissaries’), written in 1706, it still took time before I realized that this must be the very first work to come from Sorai's brush. The Fūryūshishaki must be his first work and this means that he was 40 before he wrote anything that was literary, and of any length. What we have from before that time are short pieces, letters, poems, and memoranda; also the lexical work Yakubun sentei, which was probably written, at least partially, before 1706.

A cornerstone of Wallerstein's (1974) theory of the capitalist world system is that economic development occurs in certain (core) regions of the world system at the expense of development in other (peripheral) regions. This thesis, accepted in one form or another by scholars following a dependency, neo-Marxist, or unequal exchange conception of economic development (as, for example, Amin 1976 or Laclau 1971; see discussion in Foster-Carter 1973 and Kahn 1980: 203ff) provides the foundation for their avowal of the ‘development of underdevelopment.’ The development of the core industrial capitalist nations required, so they argue, the distorted and repressed economic development of the third world.

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.