A striking feature of Marathi vernacular literature towards the end of the nineteenth century lies in the sudden surge of interest in the Maratha warrior hero, Sivaji, and his feats of leadership in the great expansions of Maratha power that took place in the seventeenth century. Of all the work on Sivaji written at this time, the most familiar is probably Mahadev Govind Ranade's Rise of the Maratha Power, published in 1900, in English. Besides this, there appeared in the last three decades of the century an unusually large number of Marathi works celebrating Sivaji's exploits.

‘I am of course opposed to the driving out of the Malay, but would rather have the land occupied and planted with rubber than lying absolutely uncultivated as it had been’. J. S. Mason, British Adviser Kelantan, 21.7.1911.

For nearly 100 years the Indian Congress organization has flourished in and through the press. Of the 72 representatives who gathered in Bombay at the first Congress meeting in 1885, more than a dozen were professional journalists. Not only did the early and subsequent nationalist leaders collect news for, editorialize in, or own outright, important vernacular and English-language newspapers—one thinks of, among others, Tilak's Kesari, Surendranath Banerjea's Bengalee, Motilal Nehru's Leader and Mahatma Gandhi's Young India and Harijan—but they readily submitted themselves to the curious, often naive probings of foreign correspondents from Europe and America. It was Gandhi who taught the Congress both how to spin its cotton and how, when it served a purpose, to wash its linen in public. Jawaharlal Nehru, when prime minister, brought to a high art the interview granted to the favored Indian or foreign correspondent.

In an age sceptical of the historic role of great men there is universal agreement that Mahomed Ali Jinnah was central to the Muslim League's emergence after 1937 as the voice of a Muslim nation; to its articulation in March 1940 of the Pakistan demand for separate statehood for the Muslim majority provinces of north-western and eastern India; and to its achievement in August 1947 of the separate but truncated state of Pakistan by the Partition of India. Subcontinental judgements of Jinnah are bound to be parti pris and to exaggerate his individual importance. While Pakistanis generally see him as the Quaid-i-Azam, Great Leader, or father of their nation, Indians often regard him as the Lucifer who tempted his people into the unforgivable sin against their nationalist faith. Among distinguished foreign scholars, unbiassed by national commitment, his stature is similarly elevated. Sir Penderel Moon has written:

There is, I believe, no historical parallel for a single individual effecting such a political revolution; and his achievement is a striking refutation of the theory that in the making of history the individual is of little or no significance. It was Mr Jinnah who created Pakistan and undoubtedly made history.

In north India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several great landed estates played a crucial part in the consolidation of imperial rule and in the support of the social and economic order. These estates have attracted considerable scholarly attention, but previous research has concentrated primarily on their relations with the colonial administraton and on their general intermediary role in north Indian society. The only study directly concerned with their internal affairs is Dr. P. J. Musgrave's ‘Landlords and Lords of the Land: Estate Management and Social Control in Uttar Pradesh 1860–1920’ (Modern Asian Studies, 6, 3 (1972), pp. 257–75), in which official sources are used as the basis for an account of the internal operations of the great estates in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. Hitherto the major obstacle to the examination of the administration of the great estates has been the absence of comprehensive estate records. Fortunately the extensive and well-organized archives of the Raj Darbhanga of Bihar recently have been opened to scholars. In this paper the Raj archives have been drawn upon to provide evidence for an account of the structure and operation of the administration of the Raj Darbhanga during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paper argues that despite substantial difficulties the Raj Darbhanga effectively pursued its interests by means of a bureaucratic system of management and that therefore Dr Musgrave's conclusions concerning the limited power of the great landed estates need substantial qualification and correction.

The aim of this paper is to interpret the life experience of a south Indian landholder at the end of the nineteenth century. The basis for interpretation comes from the author's analysis of the values of political economy among, chiefly, warrior castes as they adjusted to constraints of imperial rule from 1800 in Madras Presidency. The method of exposition is, for the most part, descriptive and narrative, with the intention of highlighting and contextualizing major concepts governing the man's thoughts and actions. Because the subject, a wealthy Tamil zamindar, kept English-language diaries, problems of cultural anachronism in the prose below are mitigated. Having the English vocabulary—or a small part of it—of our subject subverts the bugbear of ethnosociology, the cultural distortions inherent in using an alien language as one discusses the values of a social group. Contemporary newspaper commentary in English also lends cultural accuracy to the narrative. Memories of the subject linger still in Madurai Town, scene of many of his activities. I wrote the major part of the piece in Madurai and was honoured with a request to read it to the membership of the local Historical Society. That membership gave me paradoxical relief in saying of this cultural account, ‘She has told us nothing new about Baskara Setupati.’

Within the space of a few years a remarkable transformation took place in the taxation system of the Federated Malay States (FMS). Up until the early 1900s the British administration of these states relied, as had the sultans and chiefs from whom the British had taken control in the 1870s, on the revenue farm system for collecting many taxes. Most revenue farms were constituted according to the standard pattern found elsewhere in Southeast Asia at this time and in Europe up to the eighteenth century. The government granted a private contractor, the revenue farmer, the exclusive right to collect a certain tax in a specified area for a set number of years in return for a fixed rent, and the farmer kept for himself any money which he collected over and above what he owed the government in rent. A great variety of taxes were collected in this way. There were farms to collect the export duty on atap, firewood, timber, and rattan; most towns had market farms; and in Perak there was even a ‘farm of river turtle eggs’. But the most important farms were those which profited from what officials referred to as the ‘luxuries and vices’ of the immigrant Chinese community, particularly the workers who mined the tin which was the main source of wealth of these states.These farms were for the collection of the import duty on opium to be consume by Chinese in the mining districts of the interior, the sale of prepared opium (chandu) in coastal districts, the manufacture of spirits and the collection of the import duty on spirits, the right to run pawnshops, and the right to organize public gambling. Next to the export duty on tin, which the government collected itself, the income from these farms was the government's largest source of revenue. In the period 1890-94, 38.8 percent of the total revenue of the four states came from the export duty on tin and about 33 percent from the farms.2 But within the space of a few years the government abolished all the major farms, and by 1913 virtually none of the revenue of the FMS cam from revenue farms.

As a daily necessity for human life and also as a taxed commodity, salt has played an important part in the economic and political development of China. As salt is used regularly by all people, its annual consumption is largely predictable so that a tax on salt, as a disguised poll tax, provided the government with a reliable source of revenue. For this reason, it has drawn the special attention of statesmen and financiers throughout China's history. In terms of economic magnitude, the business of the production and marketing of salt was a major industry in agrarian China for centuries and the largest single economic undertaking in Ch'ing China (1644–1911). Control of salt and its financial gains frequently became the immediate objectives of revolutionaries, rebels, brigands, and other organized malcontents in China. The sources of salt supply in Ch'ing China were widespread. Several distinctive methods of production were employed in different areas. The distribution of salt involved all types of transportation available in traditional China. Its flow was well geared to the national, regional and local trade. This paper reconstructs the salt trade in Ch'ing China in its geographical context. It stresses five aspects: centers of production, state control, trade networks, means of transportation, and spatial structure of market areas.

Malaysia's planning organization has become the institutional centrepiece of that country's development effort. Indeed, Malaysia ranks as one of the non-Communist developing countries where planning is most highly institutionalized. Malaysian planning evolved as an effective policy mechanism for directing the authoritative allocation of public resources towards declared developmental objectives. Despite this attachment to national planning, Malaysia remains a staunchly market-oriented, open, and predominantly private enterprise economy. Nevertheless, as the role of planning expanded, private sector activity became increasingly subject to policy interventions predicated upon the politically-determined goals of development planning.

Recent historiography of India has focused much needed attention on rural economy and society. The literature has dealt with a number of issues, such as merchants, credit, impact of communications, land-tenure (revenue), rural politics, rich peasants and general essays on the ‘agrarian structure’ of various regions of the sub-continent. In many of the studies a common theme emerges. It is suggested that with the establishment of an integrated market economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rural wealth and power tended to concentrate in the hands of relatively few rich peasants or a rural elite. In the case of south India, the contention of increased rural stratification on these lines is most convincingly put forth by David Washbrook and Christopher Baker in a series of articles and books. The present analysis will concentrate on Washbrooks' writings in reference to the agrarian structure of the ‘dry’ districts. His works provide the most comprehensive and coherent statement of the ‘rural magnate’ interpretation of agrarian organization.

In absolutist Europe the administrative device called ‘farming’ covered at most the collection of customs and a number of other indirect taxes. In contrast we find in India and in many Muslim states that, in addition to customs, indirect taxes, and a wide range of less important miscellaneous items, the land-revenue itself could be farmed as well. It is chiefly with that of the latter, as implemented by the Maratha government, that this article is concerned. We will attempt to show that a variety of forms of land-revenue farming prevailed not only under the much-discredited Baji Rao II, the last of the Peshwas, but was also of regular occurrence under comparatively paternalistic rulers like Madhav Rao I and Nana Fadnis, and in fact throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Secondly, it will be argued that revenue farming was either a characteristic response to crisis, or otherwise occurred only under frontier conditions.

The significance of the coup d'état of 1861 in late-Ch'ing history has been appraised by many scholars. A fairly typical viewpoint has been expressed by the eminent Chinese historian Wu Hsiang-hsiang: ‘Had there not been the coup of 1861, there would not have been the coup of 1898.’ One need not entertain the same degree of determinism to acknowledge, with Wu, that the coup of 1861 was important in its effects on the exercise of imperial power in later decades. The coup did, in fact, not only provide the immediate circumstances which favored an unprecedented experiment with the Ch'ing imperial form, namely, a regency formed by the empresses-dowager, but it did also enable the famous (or infamous) empress-dowager, Tz'u-hsi, to secure her rise to a supremacy in court affairs which ended only with her death in 1908. In view of this second development, scholars have long argued that Tz'u-hsi was both the mastermind and chief beneficiary of the coup, which was the product of her intrigues and manipulations. In fact, it has been called her (Yehonala's) coup d'état. While this view will presently be examined, my main purpose here is to define the nature of the political crisis from which the coup of 1861, as well as the idea of the female regency, originated. This, I believe, is one aspect of the subject that has not been sufficiently investigated.

In 1959 a collection of over twenty thousand Chinese-language documents, previously kept in the rambling Peking compound which had housed the British Legation (latterly, British Embassy) since 1861, was transmitted to the Public Record Office in London. It was given the class title Papers in the Chinese Language and the class number FO 682. The documents, some of which were rumoured to have been lying among the rafters of the Legation chapel, arrived in a state of confusion. Early attempts at listing reflected rather than resolved the confusion, but the documents are in fact far from being the trackless jumble sometimes supposed.

The year 1927 marked the beginning of a new Anglo-Chinese relationship. The Northern Expedition had split the Nationalist camp into the Nanjing and the Wuhan régimes, both of which conducted a savage purge, one after the other, against the Communists. Especially the Nanjing régime, which ultimately triumphed over Wuhan, wrought a significant change in Guomindang foreign policy. In line with the purge against the Communists, and with the rise to power of the right wing and the military faction, the Guomindang abandoned mass movements and eschewed mob violence as far as possible as a means of achieving foreign policy objectives. Indeed, as it reviewed its position on anti-imperialism which had been an important element in the revolutionary movement during the period 1924–26, the Party reverted to a policy of international co-operation as an essential part of China's self-strengthening and reconstruction, and sought a peaceful solution to the decades-old question of treaty revision. This change is well illustrated by China's new relationship with Great Britain, which, in December 1926, had announced a new, conciliatory policy towards China after having for years been one of the chief targets of Chinese nationalism.

There is no part of the sacred law … which is regarded with such pride by Muslims, or has been worked out by their jurists in such extravagant detail, such meticulous precision or such a spirit of religious devotion. There is even a famous dictum attributed to the Prophet that a knowledge of the shares allotted to the various heirs under this system is equivalent to half the sum total of human knowledge.

Using reproduced inscription data the present study examines two social facets of the Chinese in nineteenth-century Singapore. The first facet pertains to group participation (economic and social) and it was found that the average amount of donations made by the Hokkiens to their subcommunal organizations was much higher than that given by the Cantonese and Hakkas.

On the other hand, more Cantonese and Hakka people contributed to their subcommunal organizations. The interplay of differential economic status and organizational objectives is heuristic in explaining this discrepancy.

The second facet is about leadership cohesiveness of the respective subcommunal leaders, and it is derived from percentage of deviant donors which comprises mean percentage of non donors and of cross line donors. The findings show that the Hakka subcommunal leaders were least cohesive, while those of the Chang-Ch'uan Hokkiens most among the four dialect groups being studied. Differential exposure to secret society influence is given as an important explanatory factor. Nepotism prevailing at the leadership hierarchy is also suggested as a crucial factor.

Thestudy of Indonesian history is still very much in its infancy. There is as yet nothing like the breadth or depth of historical writing on Indonesia that there is on China or India, let alone on Europe or the United States. Nowhere is this more evident than in the dearth of urban history. Certainly, Indonesia was, and is, predominantly an agricultural society, but since the 1870s an increasing number of Indonesians have lived in towns and cities, earning their living from the urban economy. In the colonial period many worked in the Indies bureaucracy, while others formed a small but growing professional class of doctors, lawyers, engineers and teachers. From this group came most of the intellectual and organizational leadership of the nationalist movement. Through their writings and speeches we have a reasonably clear picture of their changing perceptions of the world and their struggle to work out what it meant to be an Indonesian in the last three decades of colonial rule.

To call Chinese nationals who have emigrated abroad ‘overseas Chinese’ seems very natural, especially since most joined together to form communities of fellow nationals outside of China. (It is not always appropriate to include the children and grandchildren of these emigrants, however.) The term implies a uniformity to the communities that Crissman made explicit in a model which proposed to tie them together and link them to cities in China.

The 1870s witnessed mounting tension among East Asian countries. In 1874,. Japan sent an expeditionary force to Taiwan to punish the aborigines there who had, in 1871, killed fifty-four shipwrecked Ryūkyūans (Liu-ch'iuans). By doing so, according to many scholars today, Japan was able to claim retroactively that the Ryūkyūan castaways were legally Japanese subjects, thereby ending the Sino-Japanese dispute over the ambiguous political status of the Ryūkyū Islands (the Chūzan Kingdom of Ryūkyū paid tribute to both China and the Satsuma-han of Japan before the 18705).

This paper is a reappraisal of this episode of the ‘Quasi-war’ in East Asia. By going into the Chinese, Japanese, Ryūkyūan, and Western sources, it unfolds some unknown events which directly and indirectly led to the Japanese decision to send forces to Taiwan, as well as the Chinese reactions. The conclusion of this paper refutes the customary view which holds that China had in 1874 ‘renounced her claim over Ryūkyū and yielded to the Japanese claim she had earlier disputed.’ As this paper will show, neither Soejima Taneomi nor Ōkubo Toshimichi had succeeded in securing any Chinese endorsement of Japan's sovereign right over Ryūky¯. Nor did the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1874, concerning the settlement of the Taiwan crisis, legally settle the Ryūkyū problem, since Ryūky¯ was never mentioned in the Treaty. As a result, the issue continued to trouble Peking and Tokyo in the years that immediately followed.