Islamic almsgiving is on the rise among Muslims in India, as charitable donations by individuals come to supplant landed endowments as the lifeblood of many Islamic associations. Techniques of mass fundraising in India by Islamic revivalist movements such as Deoband facilitated their expansion across the subcontinent. Such fundraising depended on documentary practices such as verification letters, lists of donors, and receipts for donations. This article illustrates how charity receipts and other documents that change hands in ritual Islamic almsgiving are also a key part of new Indian Muslim collective identities. Moral ties as well as money circulate in this Islamic charity economy. Financial documents are Islamic philanthropy's answer to ‘print capitalism’, serving as material rituals of symbolic community across vast distances. Moreover, the use of documents in traditional Islamic almsgiving is also inflecting pious Muslims’ spiritualities. Islamic charity receipts in particular are contributing to the individualization of religiosity among Lucknow Muslims. New modes of accounting (originally intended to ensure financial compliance) also allow Muslim almsgivers to ‘account’ for accrued piety in a perceived spiritual merit economy.

In this Afterword I argue that public authority in South Asia is produced in a dynamic interplay between ever-more segmented publics and the ubiquity of highly performative violence. Drawing on Indian examples, I suggest that the success of vernacular publics in producing a sense of cultural intimacy within language communities in turn has prompted a new segmentation of publics. This has occurred along lines of caste and community, defined by social experience and symbols, rather than language as such. The concomitant routinization of violence in public life—whether as physical destruction of public property, attacks on other communities, or as symbolic elevations of victims of violence to the status of martyrs—indicate that today valorization and experiences of violence, however incommensurable, have emerged as a universal medium, or general equivalent, in public and political life in India.

Mount Paektu/Changbai is a massive stratovolcano situated on the current border between North Korea and China, in a region that has historically lain at the edges of competing Eurasian polities. Formed by a past of dramatic eruptions, Mount Paektu/Changbai has long been held as a powerful, sentient entity by those living near it, but the mountain's unique geographical features and distance from political centres rendered it extremely elusive as an object of elite empirical knowledge. This article examines narratives of multiple expeditions to Mount Paektu/Changbai from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries in order to understand the role of space in the creation of knowledge about the mountain, and to probe how that knowledge intersected with political goals. Consideration of human experience of the mountain's topography and environment reveals a complex relationship between proximal and distal perceptions of nature. Even as they sought to create rational, ‘universal’ forms of knowledge about the mountain, Asian elites appropriated more localized belief in the mountain's powers, creating a hybrid knowledge that combined science and miracles. As the political context shifted in the late nineteenth century, the positioning of this hybrid knowledge shifted to become an indiginized basis for national resistance. This consideration of Mount Paektu/Changbai highlights the virtues of making space and environment central to the political and cultural history of northeast Asia.

This article revisits the issue of the offshore islands in the Taiwan Strait during the Cold War. Benefitting from archival materials only recently made available, specifically Chiang Kai-shek's personal diaries, CIA declassified materials, Taiwanese Foreign Ministry files, and rare publications from the Contemporary Taiwan Collection at the Library of the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, this research examines the cloud of suspicion surrounding the secret contacts between Taipei and Beijing leading up to and during the 1958 offshore islands crisis, elucidating how such a political tête-à-tête, and the resultant tacit consensus over the status of the islands, gradually brought about an end to the conflict between Taiwan and Communist China. In hindsight, the crises over the offshore islands along China's southeast coast momentarily brought the United States closer to war with Communist China, while putting the relationship between Taipei and Washington to a serious test. The end result, however, was that, while these isles were technically embedded in the unfinished civil war between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists, they provided, ironically, an opportunity for secret communications and, ultimately, a kind of détente between the two supposedly deadly enemies across the Taiwan Strait. A close examination of the details of these crises, along with their attendant military, political, and diplomatic complexities, reveals an amazing amount of political intrigue at both the local and international levels that has not been fully realized until now.

Recent research on contemporary modalities of Islamic or Muslim philanthropy has focused on processes of subjectification through which givers and recipients of charity are habituated or craft themselves to an ethic of piety, social responsibility, and (neoliberal) economic virtuosity. These studies, however, have concentrated almost exclusively on those who give charity, leading to an over-emphasis on the perspectives of givers, and on their role in determining how the poor might deal with their everyday lives and imagined futures. As a result, small-scale gifting relations in which the Muslim poor may also be involved—making the poor simultaneously givers and recipients of charity—have been obscured or erased altogether. In this article, we argue that the concerns of the poor might not always or necessarily be those of the wealthy donors of charity. By receiving and giving sadaqa and zakat, poor and working-class Muslims in a Colombo neighbourhood imagine inclusion and belonging to the wider Muslim community in Colombo, which is not contingent upon the mediation and pedagogical interventions of charitable organizations and (middle-class) pious donors. Importantly, this imagination of inclusion and belonging comes at a time when the Muslim poor are increasingly marginalized by virtue of a (middle-class) discourse that, by framing charity as a means ‘to help the poor to help themselves’, has turned socio-economic upliftment into an ethical duty and, consequently, failure to improve oneself has become the symptom of wider moral shortcomings.

This is a review article of four new books on plantation histories of Asia which offer a sophisticated analysis of the configurations of liberal imperialism, colonial capitalism, and the construction of post-colonial nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The works discussed here are Rana Behal's A hundred years of servitude (2014); Jayeeta Sharma's Empire's garden (2011); Ulbe Bosma's The sugar plantation in India and Indonesia (2013); and Kumari Jayawardena and Rachel Kurian's Class, patriarchy and ethnicity on Sri Lankan plantations (2015).

Drawing on field research principally from contexts of medical blood donation in North India, this article describes how gifts that are given often critique—by obviation—those that remain ungiven: the care not provided by the Indian state for Bhopal survivors, the family members unwilling to donate blood for their transfusion-requiring relative, and so on. In this way, giving can come to look like a form of criticism. The critiques that acts of giving stage are of absences and deficits: we present cases where large paper hearts donated by survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster to the prime minister of India signal his lack of one, where donated human blood critiques others' unwillingness to do so, where acts of blood donation critique and protest communal violence, and where similar acts of giving over simultaneously highlight a deficit in familial affects and an attempt to resuscitate damaged relational forms. We thus illustrate how critique can operate philanthropically by way of partonomic relations between the given and not-given.