The contributions in this collection, with one exception, are revised versions of papers prepared for a workshop on ‘The Eurasian Context of the Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia, 1400–1800,’ which was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, 22–24 June, 1995. This gathering was organized thanks to the imagination and infectious enthusiasm of Dr Ian Brown, then Director of the Centre of South East Asian Studies at SOAS, and was funded with grants from SOAS, Modern Asian Studies and Cambridge University Press, and the British Academy.

The notion that tribal peoples are destructive of the forest environment is not a new one. The political struggles that fostered it are only just beginning to engage the attention of historians. This essay is a preliminary exploration of the experience of the indigenous minorities—the Orang Asli—of peninsular Malaysia during the period of colonial rule. It examines their relationship to the society outside the forest. The politics of the forest it addresses are not narrowly environmental. Indeed, what follows is based on the assumption that the relationship of the aborigines to their environment was transformed, not so much by the changing ecological conditions of the forest as the colonial economy expanded, but by the changing political circumstances of the frontier as the Orang Asli were drawn into a widening orbit of relations with external powers. ‘Orang Asli’ means literally ‘original people’. It is a polite term that took on a legal status from the 1950s. Before then, in common parlance, the aborigines were ‘Sakai‘—a derogatory term synonymous with ‘slave’. The term Orang Asli encompasses three basic types of communities: the Negritos, nomadic hunters and gatherers of the northern forests; the Senoi —whose two main subdivisions, the Temiar and the Semai, together make up the larger part of the Orang Asli population of the central highlands, following more settled forms of swidden agriculture; and the proto-Malays of the south, fishermen and cultivators with a more similar economy to neighbouring Malays.1 Their shared history has become an issue of great sensitivity in modern Malaysia, and Malaysian politicians have in recent years bitterly questioned the legitimacy of western criticism of the present circumstances of the Orang Asli. To explain why this is so, I want to examine the preoccupations of British administration during the period when it was trustee of the forests of the peninsula and directly responsible for the welfare of their inhabitants. Three themes dominate the discussion that follows.

‘The rise of Japan is surely one of the great epics of modern world history’. Yet it is not easy to obtain an overview of the development of Japanese civilization. Since the 1960s there has been an explosion of research which has overturned many of the older orthodoxies. The Cambridge History of Japan provides us with an unique chance to take stock. Here I will consider the four volumes covering the period from the twelfth to the later twentieth century.

Generally speaking, there are two dominant schools of thought with regard to the British annexation of Sind in the Indian sub-continent in 1843. One takes the view that individuals on the spot make history. It was a harsh, bitter and frustrated soldier by the name of General Sir Charles Napier who was determined to seek glory and wealth for himself by annexing Sind. In this respect, the eminent historian and former Special Commissioner for Sind (1943–46), H. T. Lambrick, has put his case extremely well. The other school interprets the annexation in strategic terms, as part of a search for a defence system which would safeguard British India from the dangers of attack from the northwest. In about 600 pages, the distinguished historian M. E. Yapp has achieved his goal with remarkable success. Furthermore, Yapp has done so without discounting the first school of thought. Indeed, the two are not mutually exclusive. In this paper I wish to suggest that there is a third dimension, an economic one; and that the three are not mutually exclusive either. Indeed, all three appear to have different weights at different levels of the policy-making process.

A major transformation has occurred in rural China since reform policies were initiated in 1979. It has been particularly dramatic in the highly commercialized Pearl River delta region of the southern province of Guangdong, provenance of most North Americans of Chinese origin. The delta region has become firmly incorporated into the global economy and its external linkages, especially to Hong Kong, have been central in the process of change. The responses to reform in the areas of the delta dominated by an Overseas Chinese presence have been distinctive. Varied family economic strategies have arisen to meet the opportunities implicit in the new policies for rural reform in a region in which remittances from abroad are significant. There has also been the revival of complex kinship groupings (lineages) energized by Overseas Chinese communities, which have assumed important roles in regional economic development.

In the midst of Pol Pot's struggle for the control of the Cambodian Communist Party in the 1970s, the subject of the Party's history came to assume a crucial importance. In 1976, the date of the foundation of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) became so important an issue that veteran Party members who remembered that the Party had been founded at a date previous to that claimed by Pol Pot, were tortured and killed for that reason. History was rewritten to suit the interests of Pol Pot's faction and the political circumstances of the time. A particularly sensitive subject was the role played by the Vietnamese in the formation of the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party, the predecessor of the CPK in the 1950s. After the relations between the Vietnamese and Cambodian Parties turned sour in the mid-1970s, the CPK deleted all allusions to the Vietnamese role from its official Party History.

Although the question has assumed at least two principal forms, most scholars who would compare the history of Europe and Asia have long been absorbed with a single query: Why was Asia different?

This is an essay about the establishment and expanding roles of the colonial state in India, and their probable correlation with developments of Indian identity. As I have argued elsewhere, identities are always multiple, contingent and continuously constructed, so that traditions, also continually reinvented, are shared and reiterated practices and beliefs which reflect the collective memories of previous constructions. There is no analytical contradiction therefore between long-term civilizational continuities and emerging forms of ‘constructed’ identity. This paper is about a particular form of identity that is currently associated with concepts of public space and rights, and with the nation-state, or at least political and territorial units. For convenience I refer to it as ‘modern Indian identity’ because it has been defined and been growing in significance in the modern era; but no inference should be drawn that I consider it to be the only form in India.

In an earlier draft of his essay, Professor Lieberman quoted, with some bemusement, a remark by Edwin O. Reischauer that has flown from the text but stuck in memory. Japan during the Tokugawa era, observed E.O.R., achieved ‘a greater degree of cultural, intellectual, and ideological conformity … than any other country in the world … before the nineteenth century.’ The claim is remarkable—no less for its tone than for its unlikelihood (were we even remotely able to test it). Still, the claim is tantalizing, and versions of it, more hesitant, continue to resonate in the survey literature.

The medical profession in modern China comprised two radically different schools—modern (Western) medicine and native medicine. The difference in philosophy, theory, and technique made a conflict between the two schools almost inevitable, and the conflict was intensified by the modernization process that was quickened during the Republican period. Western-trained or modern doctors advocated national salvation through science and denounced native medicine as superstitious, unscientific, and an impediment to the development of medical science in China. On the other hand, native medical practitioners insisted that what they learned and practiced was part of the national essence (guocui) and should be protected against the cultural invasion of imperialism (diguo zhuyi wenhua qinlue) including Western medicine. To be sure, both sides used such rhetoric to camouflage the business competition between them, but this rivalry and its implications did point to a profound cultural conflict between Chinese tradition and Western influence in China's modernization. It epitomized a burning issue of the day: whether or not China's modernization meant Westernization and whether a respectable position for China in the modern world was to be achieved through Westernization or preservation of what was regarded or claimed as national heritage.

When the concept of Western nationalism travelled to India in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century it was carried by British officialdom and an increasingly mobile and articulate Indian élite that was educated in English and in the tradition of British society. Not only did it inspire the all-India nationalist movement, but it encouraged regional politics as well, mainly in ethnic and religious terms. Most of today's ethnic and religious movements in South Asia could be traced back to their antecedents before independence. Looking closer at the three major regional movements of pre-independence India, the Pathans, the Sikhs and the Tamils, one finds a striking similarity in patterns of mobilization, conflict and concept irrespective of their association with the national movement (Red Shirt movement of the Pathans, Sikh movement of the Akalis) or independent existence in opposition to Congress (non-Brahmin/Tamil movement)

A new class is emerging in rural Kerala. Though it was christened a bourgeoisie by E. M. S. Namboodiripad, the chief minister of Kerala state during the two phases of land reform (1957–59 and 1967–69), it is not an extension of the modern industrial bourgeoisie into a rural society. Rather it is a distinctly new social formation emerging from among the farmers. The opportunities for farmers to adopt bourgeois aspirations have been created by the particular form of Keralaʼns capitalism interacting with recent changes in localized agrarian society.

Although they still differ considerably in their willingness to acknowledge it, specialists in the history of north-western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE are increasingly treating it as that of the emergence of a new civilization in what had previously been a peripheral region of the Mediterranean-based civilization of the classical west, rather than as a continuation or revival of that civilization itself. In this light Europe, or Latin Christendom as it saw itself, offers a number of striking resemblances to the developments which Lieberman discusses. The most dynamic regions of the new Europe—north-western France, Flanders and lowland England, north-eastern Spain, northern Italy, southern Italy and Sicily—were all peripheral, though in various senses, both to the long-defunct classical civilization and its direct successors, the Byzantine and Abbasid Empires, and to the transitional and much more loosely based ninth-and tenth-century empires of the Franks and Saxons (Ottonians). To this one might add that by the end of the twelfth century the remaining rimlands of the Eurasian continent in a purely geographical sense—Scandinavia, including Iceland, and still more the southern coast of the Baltic and the areas dominated by the rivers which drained into it—were developing very rapidly indeed.

The British in India have always fascinated their fellow countrymen. From the eighteenth century until the demise of the Raj innumerable publications described the way of life of white people in India for the delectation of a public at home. Post-colonial Britain evidently still retains a voracious appetite for anecdotes of the Raj and accounts of themores of what is often represented as a bizarre Anglo-Indian world. Beneath the welter of apparent triviality, historians are, however, finding issues of real significance.

The formation of the Dalit Panthers and the flourishing of Dalit literature in the 1970s saw the advent of a new connotation for the Marathi word ‘Dalit’. Chosen by the Mahar community leaders themselves, the title ‘Dalit’ was used by them to replace the titles of untouchable, Backward or Depressed Classes and Harijans, which had been coined by those outside the Dalit communities to describe the Mahar and Chambhar jatis. ‘Dalit’ identified those whose culture had been deliberately ‘broken’, ‘crushed to pieces’ or ‘ground down’ by the varna Hindu culture above them. As such, it contained an explicit repudiation of all the Hindu cultural norms of untouchability, varna structure and karma doctrine which varna Hindu society had imposed. The adoption of this new title was an affirmation of the Dalit community's struggle for cultural independence and separate identity. Yet this struggle for an independent cultural identity was not merely a cultural struggle of the 1970s, but one which stretched back almost a century to what, retrospectively, must be seen as the inception of Dalit literature and culture in the activities of the Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal and the first Dalit writings of Gopal Baba Valangkar in 1888. This article aims to recover this much-neglected early history of the Dalit communities of western India at the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, it examines how these early Dalit communities came to articulate an emergent Dalit cultural identity through the construction of a syncretic form of bhakti Hindu culture.

The north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has the dubious distinction of being the heartland of communalism in India. The years between the two world wars, in particular, saw the most widespread and unprecedented outbreak of communal conflict in this state. One of the significant factors underlying this escalation of communal tensions was Hindu religious resurgence and a gradual, but radical, transformation in the nature of Hinduism. Hinduism became increasingly militant and martial in its public expression. Indeed, some of the roots of so-called ‘muscular Hinduism’ that characterizes Hindu nationalism of recent years can be traced back to the 1920s and '30s. The public face of Hinduism, from this period, appeared less and less to be that of devotion and religious worship and more and more that of aggressive chants and armed displays. The dominant image of Hinduism emerged to be one of very large crowds of people, wielding staffs, flags, swords and other arms, marching in processions during religious festivals. These festivals imparted an aura of triumphant and aggressive expansionism to Hinduism, which in turn, elicited counter Muslim reactions, and contributed to the aggravation of communal tension and violence. The spread of communalism in north India in this period was marked by another, equally significant, development. Communal conflicts came to be increasingly concentrated in urban centres and a section of the urban poor came to play a pivotal role in the upsurge of Hindu martial militancy.

This paper is directed first at identifying where and by whom military influences or topics manifested themselves in the periodical pressʼns coverage of India in the period up to the Indian Rebellion. How such manifestations changed over time, as well as the convergence of Anglo-Indian and British newspapers and magazines on Indian topics, will form an important component of this study. Stemming from these initial enquiries, I will further suggest that the model often employed to comprehend such representations —namely ‘orientalism’ —is, as it is often configured, too simplistic and reductionist to account for all the forces at work in the production of images of India. Instead, the mid-Victorian image of India was produced by a very fractured discourse. Racial stereotypes and affirmations of British superiority were certainly to the forefront, but these were frequently inflected by quite separate agendaʼns, such as the military's pursuit of political and professional status and influence, publishers’ search for profits, and the quest for suitable middle-class role models. Moreover, it was a discourse constrained by the dominant contemporary literary conventions and tropes, notably the historical romance in fiction and didacticism in history and biography. Yet there is one strand that runs through these various agendas and literary strategies and that is the one provided by the Indian army. India was by the third decade of the nineteenth-century as much a military as it was a commercial site. In 1850, the then reigning governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, was reminded by John Lawrence of this fact when the latter insisted that ‘public opinion is essentially military in India. Military views, feelings and interests are therefore paramount’.

Nationalist activity in India between the years 1909 and 1916 has generally received an inadequate treatment from historians. It seems, quite simply, that this period is not sensational enough and historical accounts tend to skip from the excitement of the Swadeshi movement, the ‘Moderate’—‘Extremist’ split, the so-called ‘Extremist’ movement in general, and the Morley—Minto reforms of 1909 only to stop at the emergence of the Home Rule leagues or, even more likely, the serious political emergence of Gandhi after 1917. For example, despite writing of ‘continuities’ from 1885 to 1947, even Sumit Sarkar sees the nationalist movement expanding ‘in a succession of waves and troughs, the obvious high-points being 1905–1908, 1919–1922, 1928–1934, 1942 and 1945–46.’ Effectively, he is saying that the years from 1908 to 1919 were characterized by a ‘trough’ or lull.

Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Western European political units shared with political units elsewhere in Eurasia both underlying structural factors—population trends, bullion influx, an increasingly integrated world economy—and challenges, above all the rising costs of military activity. Western Europe reacted in ways similar to other regions to the stresses of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries: greater territorial integration (most notably in France, England, and Spain), stepped-up efforts to establish cultural hegemony in given territorial units, higher levels of taxation, increased military spending and larger military forces, sharply more standardized institutions and administration.

In 1880, the area north of Calcutta was a ‘jungle’, an area with swamps and marshes and a few scattered villages. With the expansion of the jute industry, the area was rapidly transformed. Factories were set up, and large numbers of people came to the area in search of work. Until the late 1920s, the industry prospered and the population of the industrial area increased enormously, but since then employment growth has stagnated and the population has increased only moderately. At present, the industrial area still shows the features described in the reports at the beginning of this century: ‘mill lines’ crowded with migrant labourers, bad housing conditions, particularly in the private bastis, small houses with little ventilation and light, open drains, public bathing places.