This paper explores how Sri Lanka might fit into Victor Lieberman's theory of Eurasian history. Lieberman's work to date has focused on the ‘protected rimlands’ which he sees as sharing the same historical path from a milieu of warring little kingdoms to increasingly large, solid states. But what happens in a land, such as Sri Lanka, which can be considered ‘protected’ before 1500, and ‘unprotected’ thereafter? Political integration and boundaries are first discussed, followed by ethnic and historical awareness before 1500. The third section sketches the chronological development of Buddhism before 1500, while the fourth considers the impact of the European interruption, and the fifth briefly looks at the results for 1600–1800. Along the way, some problems with applying the notion of ‘early modernity’ to Sri Lanka are disclosed.

This paper considers the creation of a ‘coolie’ work-force for the Assam tea industry and the local dimensions of tea plantation enterprise. While the industry has flourished through its use of migrant labour and export markets for tea, it has retained important connections with the locality. The Assam tea industry was a predominantly colonial enterprise manned by white British planters. It allowed participation, albeit in subordinate and dependent roles, by local peasants and gentry, though mainly based on the labour of migrant ‘coolies’ recruited on indentured contracts. The prominence of ‘imported’ coolie workers has obscured the significance of various local groups as well as the tea industry's importance in the local ‘imagination’. Despite the gradual development of nationalist antagonism towards the white ‘Planters' Raj’, tea enterprise retained a hallowed place for the Assamese middle classes, as tea workers continued as a racialized labouring class.

India and China were the most important producers of textiles in the world prior to the industrial revolution. However, whereas the Western historiography usually discusses Indian cotton and Chinese silk in connection with European imports, or with their sales in the Indian Ocean and the Middle East, cotton and silk were also exchanged between India and China. Indeed, Indian cotton and Chinese silk were probably the principal manufactured goods exchanged between these civilizations. Although Indian records are fragmentary, especially when compared with the voluminous Chinese sources, Indian cotton goods are known to have reached the Indianized states in Xinjiang in the early Common Era (CE), and may have been produced there, in Khotan and the neighbouring states, by the time that indigenous silk production was known to exist in India in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Yet, while in later centuries large amounts of cotton cloth were produced in China while indigenous centres of silk production developed in India, exchanges of the finest types of cotton and silk cloth continued, usually driven by cultural and social factors in each civilization.

The paper attempts to understand the challenges and opportunities which the penal settlement at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands presented to colonial governments in twentieth-century India. To this end, the paper examines a scheme drawn up in the 1920s which saw the introduction of a much more liberal regime for convicts in Port Blair. Under these plans, convicts were granted access to land and encouraged to bring their families from the mainland. This research reveals that the policies which determined the history of the settlement in this period were defined by two tensions. First, there was a constant battle between the central authorities and provincial governments over the shape and purposes of the settlement. Second, there was a contradiction between the penal objectives of the colony and the larger strategies which aimed to develop the islands for the greater British empire.

This paper examines a fundamental premise of Anglo-Hindu law on succession between 1860 and 1940, that kinship was emblematic of secular modes of living, to analyse its implications for the assertion of masculinity within ascetic orders in northern India. Legal discourses engaged with rights to succession within ascetic orders, by functioning on the assumption that the renunciatory life of ascetics was antithetical to sexuality and domesticity. This institutionalization of law, that defined asceticism and fixed ascetic masculinities within a legal frame, occurred with the consent of ascetic orders concerned with the ownership and distribution of property, even though sexuality and gender played a central role in shaping relationships within sacred spaces. Myriad ties embracing the language of kinship shaped ascetic orders. Bonds of sentiment and sexual attachment over-lapped with, sustained, and produced the bonds tying spiritual preceptors to their disciples. Relationships within ascetic families, consisting of men, their female companions, children and relatives, along with their attendant obligations were validated through rights of ownership and inheritance to property. Taking advantage of Anglo-Hindu law by the early twentieth century, ascetic orders sought to ‘purify’ their genealogies through the medium of property disputes fought in colonial courts. By manipulating the legal meanings ascribed to asceticism, masculinity and renunciation, these orders effaced unwanted members from their orders with varying degrees of success, especially women and children.

When is a modern religious education also a modern democratic education? Drawing on research conducted in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (2003–2005), this question is addressed with reference to the views of those who draw upon the resources of local maktabs and madrasas to provide their children with religious and, more specifically, Islamic instruction. Within this group—a group that, I argue, constitutes a clear majority in Pakistan—concerns about religious and sectarian diversity are given special attention. Most parents, stressing the importance of religious unity, conformity, and consensus, believe it's better to ignore these differences ‘for the sake of the nation.’ For those with an interest in combining the terms of Islam, Islamic education, and democracy, however, I argue that these differences cannot be ignored; instead, they must be acknowledged and engaged.

In 1915 the south-western quadrant of Ceylon was convulsed by a week of rioting in which the Buddhist Sinhalese majority attacked a Muslim minority known as the Moors. The consensus amongst historians has long been that the pogrom (as it is best described) was the spontaneous result of religious tension and/or economic grievances at the popular level, with no leadership beyond the uncoordinated activities of local agitators. The consensus ignores significant evidence of wider orchestration, including the activities of itinerant gangs and other mobile agitators, the deliberate propagation of identical false rumours throughout the affected area, and the activities of individuals and societies associated with the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist movement. Although the picture is far from complete, the best interpretation of the evidence is that this movement orchestrated the pogrom, albeit with varying degrees of success in each locality. That it was able to do so shows that Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism (as opposed to non-communalist, Ceylon-wide nationalism) was more deeply entrenched than is usually thought, which helps to explain Sri Lanka's political direction later in the century.

This paper discusses shifts within Islamic life, ritual and practice in the town of Amroha in the United Provinces of India, during the eventful period of approximately 1860–1930. Based primarily upon Urdu writings produced about or by Muslim residents of the town during this period, it examines the ways in which wider religious reformist movements such as those associated with Aligarh, Deoband and Bareilly were received and experienced within nearby smaller, supposedly marginal urban settlements. The paper argues that broader currents of religious reform were not unquestioningly accepted in Amroha, but were often engaged in a constant process of dialogue and accommodation with local particularities. The first section introduces Amroha and its sharif Muslim population, focusing upon how the town's Islamic identity was defined and described. The second section examines a plethora of public religious rites and institutions emerging during this period, including madrasas and imambaras, discussing how these were used by eminent local families to reinforce distinctly local hierarchies and cultural particularities. A third section considers public debates in Amroha concerning the Aligarh movement, arguing that these debates enhanced local rivalries, especially those between Shia and Sunni Muslims. A final section interrogates the growing culture of religious disputation in the town, suggesting that such debate facilitated the negotiation of religious change in a transitory social environment.

Since the late 1970s, historical studies of colonial Bengal have been dominated by the recurrent theme of the ‘return of the peasant’, generally set against the previously predominant notion that British-created landlords were omnipotent agents of agrarian relations. Although the new historiography restores agency to the peasant, it seeks to attribute the agrarian decline in the late colonial Eastern Bengal, roughly Bangladesh, to the ‘rich peasant’. It is argued that the rich peasant wielded hegemonic authority on their poor fellow co-religionists by forging a ‘communal bond’, while exploiting them from within. Such development is often considered linked to the separatist idea that offered a ‘peasant utopia’ in the form of Pakistan against perceived Hindu domination. This article, while not altogether denying the role of the rich peasant, argues that the bhadralok, or the non-cultivating middle-class gentry, were far more powerful as a catalyst in agrarian relations in Eastern Bengal than is conceded in contemporary historical debates. In so arguing, this article re-examines the post-structuralist turn that appeared to replace the classical Marxist paradigm of class by that of culture and consciousness.

The economy of eighteenth-century Bengal was closely tied to the political, with the indigenous state, the Nizamat, maintaining a stake in the success of commercial circuits. The Nizamat played a positive role in keeping the structure operative through its patronage and regulating activities. Besides its direct involvement in trade, the article examines the indirect facilitating and co-ordinating role it played, the elaboration of a distinct court culture and the policies it pursued which had a bearing on the health of the economy. The conditions necessary for the functioning of marketing networks—protection of property and enforcement of contract—were maintained. It was a mutually beneficial system with the state with its seat in Murshidabad, the landed élite of the region, and the commercial sector symbiotically tied together.

Mundane knowledge of how information flows is essential for a proper understanding of large organisations and complex activities. It gives us valuable insights into the prevailing constraints of the era and the creative responses that enabled the demands of its cosmopolitan residents to be met. Though the sinews of communication have been a major topic of historical inquiry in recent decades, the focus has been decidedly uneven; much of the attention has been directed towards modern times and, for earlier periods, has been confined almost entirely to Europe, the western European empires and those sectors of the world's political economy in which Europeans had a stake. The rest of the world, in comparison, has been neglected, which may be seen clearly in the case of early modern India and the Middle East. This paper seeks to rectify the imbalance by offering a typology for making sense of how packages of low weight and high value were collected, transported and delivered over long distances within the region in the eighteenth century. While drawing on a wide range of sources, at the core of this analysis lies the correspondence of the headmen of a group—the Aiyangar pattamars—who specialised as couriers in pre-colonial southern India. Among the principal claims set forth are that there existed in this period two basic modes of private communication: in one, personal trust was paramount, in the other, the mode was effectively monopolised by recognised communities providing the necessary informational services within their cultural domain. These claims, if sustained, have major implications for current views on early modern India and the Middle East.

While trade in opium was of limited financial significance in the eighteenth century to the larger accounts of the Dutch East India Company as a whole, this article shows its critical importance to the Company's comptoir accounts at Batavia. The article examines the VOC's commercial operations at Batavia in the eighteenth century and places opium trade and opium revenues within that larger context. It examines how the trade in Bengal opium through Batavia changed over time, based on a statistical analysis of the Company's accounts. These results show that opium dwarfed all other individual or groups of commodities that were available to the Company to sell profitably on Java and in the Indonesian Archipelago over the long eighteenth century.

Twinned as Urdu has become with the fate of India's largest religious minority, Muslims, and with the emergence of the independent state of Pakistan, for which Urdu is the official national language, the story of Urdu holds a peculiar place and a special significance in histories of the subcontinent. Stories of the Urdu language are dramatic, bound up as they are in questions of politics, the fate of Hindus and Muslims and the vicissitudes of both the Urdu and the Hindi languages. Though Hindi–Urdu language politics are an important part of these languages' colonial history, this article emphasizes another story. For, like the other vernaculars of south Asia, Urdu had to contend as much with English as with Hindi, and it is that story that is emphasized here. This article details how early-twentieth-century Hyderabad's Urdu educators engaged with questions of native education, language, and Western science. It highlights the discussions and disagreements that accompanied this educational project as Urdu advocates re-evaluated their language and its sources of authority, attempting to make the Urdu language a worldly vernacular, useful for more than the subcontinent's Muslim population.

This article examines the role of Chinese revenue farmers in defining the borders of the various colonial territories and the states of Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century. Their significance has largely been neglected in writing on the formation of state boundaries. Nicholas Tarling notes, ‘Between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth almost all southeast Asia was divided into colonies or protectorates held by the Western powers, and new boundaries were drawn with the object of avoiding conflict among them’ (Tarling, 2001:44). This paper argues that Chinese revenue farmers were of considerable significance in giving substance to the formalistic pronouncements of remote diplomats and statesmen.

Among anti-colonial nationalists, Bhagat Singh and M.K. Gandhi are seen to exemplify absolutely contrasting strategies of resistance. Bhagat Singh is regarded as a violent revolutionary whereas Gandhi is the embodiment of non-violence. This paper argues that Bhagat Singh and his comrades became national heroes not after their murder of a police inspector in Lahore or after throwing bombs in the Legislative Assembly in New Delhi but during their practice of hunger strikes and non-violent civil disobedience within the walls of Lahore's prisons in 1929–30. In fact there was plenty in common in the strategies of resistance employed by both Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. By labelling these revolutionaries ‘murderers’ and ‘terrorists’, the British sought to dismiss their non-violent demands for rights as ‘political prisoners’. The same labels were adopted by Gandhi and his followers. However, the quality of anti-colonial nationalism represented by Bhagat Singh was central to the resolution of many of the divisions that racked pre-partition Punjab.

The historiography on the Partition of Bengal has tended to see it as a culmination of long-term trends of Hindu and Muslim communalism within the province. This essay offers a counter-narrative to the ‘inevitability’ of the Partition by focusing on Bengali public discourse in the months leading up to the Partition. The possibility of a division generated a large-scale debate amongst the educated in Bengal and they articulated their views by sending numerous letters to leading newspapers, district political and civic organizations and sometimes published pamphlets for local consumption. A critical examination of these public debates for and against Partition reveals the countdown to August 1947 as a period of multiple possibilities. Rather than being pre-determined, the stands for a separate or a United Bengal were contingent in nature. Understanding the genesis provides the starting point and the necessary corrective to evaluate India's path to post-colonial nationhood.

In the post-colonial shifting of material, legal and ideological bases, some of the given patterns of relationships between individuals and caste groups have changed and weakened because of the introduction of new, parallel and alternative structures of relationships. This change has left the dominant caste groups feeling palpably insecure in relation to the dalits. While delineating this relationship, this article seeks to argue that the cases of dalit and dominant/upper caste members' elopement and marriage represent a high point in the ongoing conflictual relationship between them, as these are viewed as forms of dalit assertion. Although many caste groups and communities are involved in inter-caste marriages and associations that defy customary norms and caste practices and have no social acceptance, it is in relation to a dalit and non-dalit association or marriage that certain aspects, which impinge on wider issues, come to the surface more pronouncedly. For the dominant caste groups such associations remain the most viable and potent issues to garner a wider collective support, cutting across class/caste/community and age divides. These cases are selectively made a public spectacle by the dominant caste groups to settle wider issues at stake verging on contemporary political and economic interests.

In contemporary times, Hundi has collected countless labels; the international press has spurned innumerable villainous descriptions, the bulk of which have helped to perpetuate a dense fog of notoriety. The critical problem lies in definition. As there is an incomplete understanding of hundi's form and remit, there is also a rather limited understanding of why the system persists, set against the backdrop of modern banking. In many ways the problem of definition presented legal and financial authorities of the early and late twentieth century with core issues which remain unresolved and problematic for authorities in the twenty-first century. By drawing on archival and other historical material pertaining to the system's usage amongst Indian merchants, this paper attempts to tackle much of the confusion and many misconceptions surrounding hundi. The discussion explores the idea that hundi is more accurately described as an indigenous banking system endowed with a complex range of functions, but whose central purpose is trade.

First authorised in 1987, local village elections in China have been much studied by China scholars to assess the emergence of democracy in the People's Republic. Elected village committees were to manage ‘local affairs’, including village lands, as a step towards local self-governance. In place of democracy, this article highlights access and control over natural resources in relation to a local village election first held in Mengsong village, Yunnan, in 2000. A comparison of resource access in 1997 and 2002 shows that over this period, Mengsong villagers lost access to forests, agricultural lands, pastures and mineral resources—‘local affairs’ that an elected committee might have managed. National and local events from 1998 to 2002 signalled a recalibration of people of high and low ‘quality’ (suzhi) in China, with Mengsong shifting cultivators emerging as ‘low quality’ people who threatened China's environment and economic development. These changes in status signified a dramatic shift in who was qualified to manage resources, run local affairs and contribute to China as it entered the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001. The discourse of ‘quality’ resulted in Akha farmers being blamed, and blaming themselves, for their own poverty and resource loss, deflecting attention from the political economic processes that caused their dispossession. Far from the emergence of democracy, the local village election in Mengsong entailed increased state control over people and resources, as China geared up for environmental protection and engagement with the global economy.

Like so many features of the British Empire, policy for colonial higher education was transformed during the Second World War. In 1945 the Asquith Commission established principles for its development, and in 1948 the Carr–Saunders report recommended the immediate establishment of a university in Malaya to prepare for self-government. This institution grew at a rate that surpassed expectations, but the aspirations of its founders were challenged by lack of resources, the mixed reactions of the Malayan people and the politics of decolonisation. The role of the University of Malaya in engineering a united Malayan nation was hampered by lingering colonial attitudes and ultimately frustrated by differences between Singapore and the Federation. These differences culminated in the university's partition in January 1962. In the end it was the politics of nation-building which moulded the university rather than the other way round.