In the history of links between people from the Pearl River Delta with the countries of South-East Asia and the Pacific, the role played by Hong Kong cannot be ignored. It is the purpose here to examine the role and contribution of Hong Kong to these Pearl River Delta links over the period 1842 to 1942. Such an examination, it is hoped, will also allow the impact of Pearl River Delta links on Hong Kong to be investigated. Much of the material presented by this paper is not new, rather the aim is to view Hong Kong from the perspective of the Pearl River Delta qiaoxiang. A perspective, it is suggested, that will enable aspects of Hong Kong's history and its contribution to the history of the Pearl River Delta counties and their overseas links to be seen in a new way.

Girls' education has been enduringly controversial in north India, and the disputes of the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century still echo in debates about girls' education in contemporary India. In this paper, we reflect on the education of rural Muslim girls in contemporary western Uttar Pradesh (UP), by examining an Islamic course for girls [Larkiyon kā Islālmī Course], written in Urdu and widely used in madrasahs there. First, we summarize the central themes in the Course: purifying religious practice; distancing demure, self-controlled, respectable woman from the lower orders; and the crucial role of women as competent homemakers. Having noted the conspicuous similarities between these themes and those in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century textbooks and advice manuals for girls and women, the second section examines the context in which the earlier genre emerged. Finally, we return to the present day. Particularly since September 11th 2001, madrasahs have found themselves the focus of hostile allegations that bear little or no relationship to the activities of the madrasahs that we studied. Nevertheless, madrasah education does have problematic implications. The special curricula for girls exemplifies how a particular kind of élite project has been sustained and transformed, and we aim to shed light on contemporary communal and class issues as well as on gender politics.

From November 1963 to July 1965, the militant Buddhist movement was the primary cause of political instability in South Vietnam. While the militant Buddhists maintained that they represented the Buddhist masses and were fighting merely for religious freedom, they actually constituted a small and unrepresentative minority that was attempting to gain political dominance. Relying extensively on Byzantine intrigue and mob violence to manipulate the government, the militant Buddhists practiced a form of political activism that was inconsistent with traditional Vietnamese Buddhism. The evidence also suggests that some of the militant Buddhist leaders were agents of the Vietnamese Communists.

The seven papers in this special issue focus primarily on the development of British colonial rule between the 1780s and the 1840s. Over the course of these decades, the East India Company extended and consolidated its political and military control throughout much of the Indian subcontinent. Many of the crucial developments in the formation of the colonial state occurred during this period. These include the conquest of Mysore and the defeat of the Marathas, the implementation of the Permanent Settlement, the reforms undertaken during the Viceroyalty of Lord Bentinck, the introduction of Utilitarianism and missionary activity, the establishment of the Trigonometrical Survey, the development of the systems of control based upon indirect rule in the ‘princely states’, the emergence of new concepts of ‘race’ and social hierarchy, and the reshaping of British social life in South Asia. Outside of India, Ceylon's maritime provinces were captured from the Dutch and, in 1815, the interior Kandyan kingdom was annexed, paving the way for the island's transformation into a Crown colony focused on plantation production. In Britain, too, there was a growing interest among the public in the British territorial possessions in South Asia and an increasing awareness that this empire helped to define Britain as a great national power within Europe. For these reasons alone, this period, which begins when the Company was seeking to entrench itself as the de facto ruler of Bengal and ends shortly before the 1857 rebellions and the formal end of the Company rule, requires serious attention by historians.

Readers in the historiography of colonial south India have every reason to feel puzzled by the answers available to even the most straightforward of questions. Was the colonial conquest achieved through the imposition of ‘superior’ European arms, technology and ideology or was it more in the nature of an internal subversion of the pre-existing Indian state system? Did British rule fundamentally alter the structures of South Indian society or did it rest lightly on top of pre-existing structures and serve to sustain established elites? Did it undermine the hold of ‘indigenous’ cultures on society or did it merely scratch their surface or even did it promote their revival?

The introduction of modern concepts like adulthood and sanctity given to individual rights has legally turned the individual settlement of marriage between two consenting adults to be legitimate. Under the Hindu Marriage Act 1955, except for certain incest taboos, the legal restrictions on marriage of two adult Hindus are almost non-existent. Briefly speaking, this means that under the law both sagotra (same gotra) and inter-caste marriages are permitted. Yet, the customary rules regulating marriages in most parts of north India are based upon caste endogamy, village and clan exogamy. While keeping within caste, they adopt the gotra or got, as is known in rural north India, rule of exogamy (gotra are an exogamous patrilineal clan whose members are thought to share patrilineal descent from a common ancestor). For marriage certain prohibited degrees of kinship have to be avoided. As a rule three or four got exogamy is followed by most caste groups upper or lower. Any break in this, though legally allowed, is not acceptable.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Chinese, Western, and Japanese scholarship debated the success or failure of the government schools and regional arsenals established between 1865 and 1895 to reform Qing China (1644-1911). For example, Quan Hansheng contended in 1954 that the Qing failure to industrialize after the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) was the major reason why China lacked modern weapons during the Sino-Japanese War. This position has been built on in recent reassessments of the ‘Foreign Affairs Movement’ (Yangwu yundong) and Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 (Jiawu zhanzheng) by Chinese scholars. They argue, with some dissent, that the inadequacies of the late Qing Chinese navy and army were due to poor armaments, insufficient training, lack of leadership, vested interests, lack of funding, and low morale. In aggregate, these factors are thought to demonstrate the inadequacies of the ‘Self-Strengthening era’ and its industrial programs.

An organizing principle of Britain's pre-war empire was collaboration with indigenous monarchies. Secure on their thrones, they legitimated British rule as well as assisting it in practical ways. While friendly princes were assets, however, uncooperative ones could be liabilities; they might obstruct attempts to exploit their resources or to modernize their governments. After the Second World War, British priorities and strategies changed. With their backs to the wall they switched from supporting princes to accommodating politicians. There was no obvious role for them in new nation-states and in many dependencies indigenous monarchies were swept aside by the onrush of nationalism. Yet in Malaya and Brunei they survived: the rulers of the peninsular Malay states did so by adjusting to political change, whereas the Sultan of Brunei flourished by preventing it.

Historians of Indonesia often think of states, and especially colonial states, as predatory institutions encroaching aggressively on the territory and autonomy of freedom-loving stateless peoples. For Barbara and Leonard Andaya, early European expansion in Sumatra and the Moluccas was synonymous with the distortion or destruction of decentralized indigenous political systems based on cooperation, alliance, economic complementarity, and myths of common ancestry (B. W. Andaya 1993; L. Y. Andaya 1993). Anthony Reid (1997: 81) has described tribal societies like those of the Batak and Minangkabau in highland Sumatra as ‘miracles of statelessness’ which ‘defended their autonomy by a mixture of guerilla warfare, diplomatic flexibility, and deliberate exaggeration of myths about their savagery’ until ultimately overwhelmed by Dutch military power. Before colonialism, in this view, most Indonesians relied for security not on the protection of a powerful king, but on a ‘complex web of contractual mutualities’ embodying a ‘robust pluralism’ (Reid 1998: 29, 32). ‘So persistently’, concludes Reid (1997: 80-1), ‘has each step towards stronger states in the archipelago arisen from trading ports, with external aid and inspiration, that one is inclined to seek the indigenous political dynamic in a genius for managing without states’. Henk Schulte Nordholt (2002: 54), for his part, cautions against any tendency to downplay the violent, repressive aspects of colonial and post-colonial government in Indonesia, expressing the hope that ‘a new Indonesian historiography will succeed in liberating itself from the interests, perspective, and conceptual framework of the state’. An even more systematic attempt to demonize the (modern) state in Indonesia and elsewhere can be found in the work of James Scott (1998a, 1998b).

Ever since the late eighteenth century, no subject has been more prominent in histories of ‘the transition to colonialism’ in south Asia, than the issue of taxation. In particular, the complex system of agrarian taxation that was developed under the Mughal empire, and further elaborated by various post-Mughal regimes, has often been seen as the defining institution of both the pre-colonial and colonial states. What the British called ‘land revenues’, which included taxes on land proper (mal) and taxes on trade and markets (sair), were the main source of income for both Indian and British rulers. Assessments of the impact of colonial rule have often depended on supposed changes in the tax regime. Since the nineteenth century historians have tended to focus their attention on the relationship between the land tax and structures of agrarian property. They have generally argued that British rule both substantially increased the tax burden, and modified structures of agrarian tenure by splicing together rights of revenue collection and private property in land. But they have focused much more on early colonial policies with regard to private landed property, and less on the issue of the actual tax assessment. This paper takes up the issue of the land tax demand (known as jama in the terminology of Mughal and post-Mughal administration) tracing British debates about tax assessments through the first three decades of colonial rule in Bengal.

Siam and the Semi-colonial Issue

The issue of Siam as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation, mooted by Thai Marxists in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s, has by the 1990s by and large been set aside by critically-minded academics for its inability to provide a lineage for the strain of capitalist mode of production that has emerged by the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the ‘semi-colonial’ as an analytical framework retains its force in confronting the assumed independence and an unreflexive racially based elite nationalism that has so defined Thai self-representations and public culture, but also in how Thailand is understood by others.

In this article I examine the similarities between colonialism and postcolonialism in Sabah, Malaysia. I argue that the strategies of rule employed by the colonial and postcolonial states can be viewed as a sustained interaction in which the power of colonial discourses, institutions, and forms of rule still operate in postcolonial Sabah, particularly in terms of control over and access to natural resources. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data I present case studies from the colonial and postcolonial period that demonstrate that whether the focus of state rule is native land management systems and property rights or the conservation of biodiversity the result is the same: both states construct images of what types of agricultural practices and uses of forest resources are appropriate, what types of property regimes can persist, and how rural people should look and act in order to appear modern.

I conclude that the colonial and postcolonial states share the following characteristics: 1) they control access to resources through legal institutions that privilege private property law over customary practices; 2) they invent discourses that justify centralized rule while obfuscating the realities of those who live on the margins and whose lives depend directly on natural resources; 3) they utilize certain ideals of protection and/or commercialization of resources that privileges elite concerns over local concerns and subsistence uses; 4) they blame rural people for resource degradation while overlooking legal, political and economic structures that influence how rural people use resources; and 5) both the colonial and postcolonial states make it difficult for marginal people to define their own interests in their own terms.

The Qing Myanmar campaign (1765-1770) was the most disastrous frontier war that the Qing dynasty had ever waged. In the beginning, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-1795) of the Qing dynasty had envisaged winning this war in one easy stroke, as he deemed Myanmar no more than a remote barbarian tribe without any power. But he was wrong. After the Green Standard troops in Yunnan failed to bring the Myanmar to their knees, Qianlong sent his elite Manchu troops in. A regional conflict was thus escalated into a major frontier war that involved military maneuvers nationwide. At the front, the Manchu Bannermen had to deal with the unfamiliar tropical jungles and swamps, and above all, the lethal endemic diseases. Not only did one after another commander-in-chief of the Qing dynasty fail to conquer Myanmar, but the Qing troops also suffered extremely heavy casualties. After a gruelling four-year campaign, a truce was reached by the field commanders of the two sides at the end of 1769 with the Qing invading expedition failing to conquer Myanmar and withdrawing in disarray. To rehabilitate itself, the Qing dynasty kept a heavy military lineup in the border areas of Yunnan for about one decade in an attempt to wage another war while imposing a ban on inter-border trade for two decades.

For over a millennium before the 20th century, the Korean state had maintained a system of household registration, or hojok. In the Choson dynasty (1392-1910), these registers, through their specification of each household head's status either as a tax-paying commoner or tax-exempt aristocrat or low-born, reinforced the hereditary status delineation of each locality and in turn determined everything from tax and service obligations to the courtesies and behaviors of social interaction. Within the span of a few years at the turn of the 20th century, however, this stalwart institution of household registration, which proved so central to both the strengths and problems of the Choson government, was thoroughly reorganized, revealing the myriad facets of the state's changing relationship with the populace.

For more than a century after its introduction into China in 1807, Protestant Christianity remained an alien religion preached and presided over by Western missionaries. In fact the Christian enterprise, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, was given protection as Western interests by the Qing court after China's defeat in the Opium War of 1839–42. According to the treaty signed with the United States in 1858, for instance, the Qing government was to shield from molestation ‘any persons, whether citizen of the United States or Chinese convert, [who] peaceably teach and practise the principles of Christianity.’ In the Convention of 1860 signed with France, the imperial court promised that in addition to the toleration of Roman Catholicism throughout China, all Catholic properties previously seized should be ‘handed over to the French representative at Beijing’ to be forwarded to the Catholics in the localities concerned. By the time of the Boxer Uprising of 1900, Protestant converts numbered about 80,000 and the Catholic Church (whose modern missions to China had begun in the late sixteenth century) claimed a membership of some 720,000—a following that was perhaps disappointing to the Western missions yet aggravating to those who saw both the Confucian tradition and Chinese sovereignty eroded by the coming of the West. As a perceived foreign menace the Christian community became the target of the bloody rampage by famished North China peasants known as the Boxers. Before the revolt was quelled in August by the eight-power expedition forces, it had visited death on more than 200 Westerners and untold thousands of native converts.

In the center of the clearing, an aging warrior tries to draw his sword, fury etched upon his face. He faces two young warriors with raised swords who are racing to attack. A distraught old woman restrains the old warrior, while two younger men attempt to calm his attackers. A young boy holding a bow, arrows tucked in his waistband, dashes toward the combatants, in hopes of intervening. In the flash of a moment, perhaps as a result of a misspoken word or a perceived affront, harmony has given way to fracture. The anger on some faces, and despair on others, suggests an earlier time of friendship and love. Only one person is unperturbed. In the foreground a placid young woman observes the unfolding battle while tending a crying newborn. A young boy by her side also looks upon the scene, but with an expression of horror on his face. She, by contrast, seems utterly unconcerned. Indeed, she almost appears to enjoy the collapse of the social world around her. This is a hint, perhaps, about the nature of the conflict, namely, that it somehow revolves around her.

During the early years of British expansion in Bengal, from the 1770s to the 1840s, British courts ruled on at least three dozen domestic violence cases. In the process of ruling on crimes in which native women were victims of burglary, rape, and murder at the hands of European men, judges on the Supreme Court of Calcutta became intimately involved with enforcing domestic peace and containing the social threat posed by interracial conjugal relationships between lower-class European soldiers and merchants and the native women with whom they cohabited or married. While high-ranking, upper-class men may have also physically abused native women with whom they were intimate, these relationships were rarely the subject of judicial scrutiny. Through criminal trials of domestic crimes or ‘intimate violence’, British judges and magistrates, who were among the highest status positions in the civil service, managed the sexual and familial transgressions of lower-ranking European soldiers, merchants and civil employees, thereby ‘making empire respectable,’ while simultaneously enabling lower-ranking men to enjoy continued sexual access to local women.

On June 8, 2001, Takuma Mamoru, a former psychiatric patient, broke into the Ikeda Elementary School in Osaka City and killed eight schoolchildren. This incident, which journalists have described as the Ikeda Massacre, resurrected public concerns about the mentally ill. The Osaka District Court declared that psychiatric evaluations had revealed that Takuma was sane enough to recognise the criminal nature of his actions. Discussion among the public and officials nevertheless remained focussed on the question of how to handle suspects in criminal cases who are not fit to stand trial as a result of psychiatric disorders. In August 2003, the same month that Takuma was sentenced to death, the National Diet passed legislation that could compel defendants, even those found innocent, to enter or regularly visit a mental hospital if judges and psychiatrists deemed them mentally ill and possessing a propensity to commit crimes.

The term ‘crony capitalism’ describes the close relationship between the state and big business in contemporary Southeast Asia. Yoshihara argued in 1988 that cronyism produced an entrepreneurially weak, ersatz capitalism. Crony capitalists were ‘private-sector businessmen who benefit[ed] enormously from close relations’ with leading officials and politicians, obtaining ‘not only protection from foreign competition, but also concessions, licences, monopoly rights, and government subsidies’. Yoshihara's thesis has been subject to some criticism, but, in summarizing that debate, Ian Brown states that ‘there are…substantial areas of the South-East Asian political-economic landscape where government and business remain bound to the protection of inefficient vested interest, to the defence of monopoly and preference, and where speculations and short-term profit-taking are rife’. Entrepreneurial weaknesses in Southeast Asia appeared fully exposed by the financial crisis of 1997, when the economies of the region could not withstand the cruel buffetings of the international economy.

In the past twenty years or so the history of Sri Lanka has become a site of vibrant controversy, largely because the current ethnic conflict has loaded any kind of reflection on the historical boundaries of political, ethnic or religious identity with an immediate emotional charge. The intellectual reverberations of post-colonialism and the vigorous contributions of anthropologists have added rich strata of theoretical thinking. However, despite one or two calls to the contrary, the periods of Portuguese (1505-1658) and Dutch influence (1658-1796) in the island have tended to moulder on the periphery of these debates. The purpose of this article is to bring some of this thinking to bear on the evidence from the sixteenth century in order to stimulate fresh perspectives on both the events of that time and the models themselves. With the arrival of the Portuguese and their increasing involvement in the affairs of the island during the long reign of Bhuvanekabahu VII (1521-51), the darkness of the Kotte period is suddenly illuminated by wonderfully detailed flashes of events. The flurry of letters written by contemporary Portuguese settlers, officials and missionaries, and the attentions of Portuguese chroniclers such as João de Barros, Diogo do Couto, Gaspar Correia and Fernão de Queirós bring quite new forms of evidence into the historian's purview.