Scholars of Burma cannot, in good conscience, invoke the usual justification — lack of adequate primary materials — for failing to construct an economic history of the precolonial era. By comparison with Siam, Cambodia, the Malay principalities, or indeed any Indianized Southeast Asian society with the possible exception of Java, Burma offers a uniquely continuous and voluminous array of documents bearing on patterns of cultivation, monetization, taxation, and domestic and foreign trade from at least the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

South Asian Muslims migrating throughout the world usually establish tight-knit communities in which most of their socioeconomic and religious activities occur. The social organization of South Asian Muslims in Hong Kong is unique in that their separation and isolation into a cohesive ethnic group is a relatively recent phenomenon. Communal orientations have undergone substantial change over time, often paralleling the kinds of changes occuring in Hong Kong as a result of its relationship to the British Empire. This paper seeks to understand the characteristics of the early South Asian Muslim community in Hong Kong and contrast these with social themes which are found in the contemporary community so as to discover the principles underlying social cohesion and cultural identification within this group.

Communism as an ideology was first introduced to Malaya by Chinese anarchists, and not by Kuomintang Left, Indonesian communists or Chinese communists as claimed in existing scholarship.1 A handful of Chinese anarchists arrived in British Malaya during the First World War to take up positions as Chinese vernacular school teachers or journalists. These Chinese intellectuals harboured not only anarchism but also communism, commonly known then as anarcho-communism.

While a number of in-depth studies have been carried out on the role of the formal financial market (Gurley and Shaw, 1955; Patrick, 1966; Porter, 1966; Goldsmith, 1969; McKinnon, 1973; Shaw, 1973, to mention a few), the informal or unorganized financial sector has largely been neglected. While discussions about the operations of the informal market were popular about 20 years ago (Geertz, 1962; Ardener, 1964; Anderson, 1966; Kurtz, 1973) they have gradually been relegated to the side-lines and this is despite the fact that the said market is neverthel ess of significant size and importance (as will be illustrated elsewhere in the paper).

The necessary vocabulary has not yet been created to encompass both the ‘informing spirit’ and ‘whole social order’ of British India. In part, at least, this is because research has generally concentrated on either British or Indian realms of action, rather than the interaction between them. But British colonial rule shaped a distinctive social system in India, one that drew on both British and indigenous values as well as notions of authority. This essay analyzes aspects of this colonial social order by focusing on its legal system, particularly that portion designed to deal with what the British identified as ‘extraordinary’ crime. Indeed, criminal law may be among the most revealing aspects of a social order. For, as Douglas Hay has observed for a similar elaboration of the English legal structure, ‘criminal law is as much concerned with authority as it is with property … the connections between property, power and authority are close and crucial.’

In 1976 I published an article in the Acta Historiae Neerlandicae (an annual series of publications in English on the history of The Netherlands, alas abruptly discontinued in 1982 for financial reasons) in which I tried to summarize the main causes of the decline of the cultivation system in Java (Fasseur, 1976, 143–62). Being then a young and ambitious historian with little respect for the big names in the field of Indonesian sciences, I stated that the literature on the cultivation system contained many misunderstandings as to the origins of the ‘decay’ of the system. In this connection I mentioned in particular Wertheim's well-known study on Indonesian Society in Transition and Clifford Geertz's stimulating essay on Agricultural Involution (1963). Although this latter book is certainly not without its shortcomings, it has greatly obliged all historians by reviving the interest in the role played by the cultivation system in the development of Java during the last century and a half. The period of the cultivation system, in the words of Geertz, was ‘the classic stage’ of colonial history, ‘the most decisive of the Dutch era’. Although I did not realize that fully in 1975, it was thus an opportune moment to publish, twelve years after Geertz's provocative study, a doctoral dissertation on the history of the system. The main flaw of Geertz's work was its weak historical component. The only ‘historical’ data Agricultural Involution provided, were borrowed from an agricultural atlas ofJava published in 1926.

The relationship between state and society has recently attracted increasing interest (Skocpol 1985). In many cases, particularly in Asia and the ‘third world’, the question has been posed in terms of how far the state's economic policies reflect the (real or perceived) interests of the capitalist class, or whether the state and its personnel act as an autonomous force above society pursuing policies irrelevant or even inimical to capitalist interests.

When Marx in 1853 denounced the exploitation of India under British rule and wrote of ‘The British intruder who broke up the Indian handloom’ he laid the foundation for an economic critique which has endured to the present day. In the twentieth century, the fate of the Indian handloom weaver has been at the center of the controversy over the concept of the ‘deindustrialization’ of India on which there is now a substantial body of literature. Did the handloom industry collapse in face of competition from manufactured British imports as proponents of this thesis contend? Or were the handloom weavers able to survive the competition and at least retain (and, as has recently been argued, perhaps even improve) their position, as demand for cloth rose with rising per capita income, the fall in cloth prices was offset by the cheaper price of machine-spun yarn, and the handloom weavers diversified into higher-valued products and adopted new technologies? This paper is intended as a further contribution to this debate. It examines what happened to the handloom industry in one part of India (the region that from 1861 was called the Central Provinces) over a period of roughly one hundred and fifty years. It is in four parts. The first part studies the changes that occurred in the nineteenth century as British power spread throughout the subcontinent. This is the period when deindustrialization is said to have occurred to a significant extent.

The assumption of the passive peasant in Indian history has been existent at least since the time of Max Weber, and continues to return, phoenix-like in its appearance, every few decades. Its importance, however, lies in the responses the generality spawns. Morris D. Morris refuted Max Weber's thesis, detailed in The Religions of India, in 1967, while Barrington Moore, Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was aptly rebutted by Kathleen Gough in 1974. Since then, the concept of the rational peasant, particularly during colonial times, has undergone a metamorphosis. Various modes of peasant dynamics have been amply demonstrated in recent works, stepping into the realms of peasant rebellion, desertion, banditry, and the like. Of particular import, in terms of peasant consciousness, has been the rise of the ‘Subaltern School’ of study. Beginning with Ranajit Guha's seminal work, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, and continuing with volumes of articles by a variety of authors, the Subaltern Studies group has attempted, in their own words, to offer an alternative to historical writing ‘that fails to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contributions made by the people on their own, that is independently of the elite.…’ These scholars thus use the term subaltern for those social groups which they believe have been ignored through the course of history.

This essay explores the division between ‘things Japanese’ and ‘things foreign’ in contemporary Japanese life through an analysis of modern retailing. Japanese department stores domesticate ‘foreign things’, including customs, holidays, goods, and people, by creating for these meaning consistent with the existing fabric of Japanese culture. Their role in gift-exchanges, in the adoption of foreign holidays and in establishing special advocacy centers for foreigners reinforces the distinction between ‘Japanese’ and ‘other’ that shapes and affirms Japanese identity (economy, national identity, symbolism, popular culture, gift-exchange, Japan).

The Narmada valley and adjoining districts of Madhya Pradesh came under British administration following the defeat of Sagar and Nagpur in 1818. Known from 1820 as the Saugor and Nerbudda (Sagar and Narmada) Territories (map 1), the area was administered, variously, as an agency of the governor general or as a commissioner's division of the North Western Provinces. As officials made the area part of the British imperial and capitalist system, they met with increasing resitance from notables, smaller chiefs and malguzars. A first round of protests occurred between 1818 and 1826, though these proved no much for the new administration or the troops still in central India. A more determined agitation took place in 1842–43, to meet the same fate. In 1857–58 the traditional landowners launched a third and more coordinated revolt against British rele, but were again unable to dislodge it from the region. This essay explores the origins and nature of that revolt and it does so against the background of colonial beginnings in Madhaya Pradesh.

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta [sic], since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin [sic], priest of Brahma and Vishnu, and Indra, who sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The purc Walden water is mingled with the sacred waters of the Ganges. With favouring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the Periplus of Hanno, and floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

The ethnocentric and racialist overtones of the Victorian empire have long been acknowledged. Most work in this field has generally centred on the mid to late nineteenth century and, by emphasizing the intellectual and cultural currents in domestic society, has focused our attention on the metropole. This reveals only part of the equation; British attitudes towards the outside world arose from a complex matrix of ideas, assumptions and contacts that linked the metropole and colonial environments. In order to understand more fully British responses to non-European societies, and the impact these had on imperial developments, this paper will examine the Bengal army in the 1820s and demonstrate that it was during this period, and under this institution, that many of the assumptions were established under which the later Raj would operate. Of great importance were experiences in the Burma War (1824–26) and the simultaneous mutiny at Barrackpore which, by bringing to the surface doubts about the loyalty and reliability of the Bengal army, hastened a transition from an army modelled on caste lines to one that rested principally on race. This transformation from a caste-based army to an army of martial races was not fully completed, although the foundations were laid, in the years before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, largely because even those who rejected Bengal's dependence upon the highest castes could not bring themselves to argue for the recruitment of the lowest castes no matter what ‘race’ they were drawn from.

Meenakshipuram is a small, dusty village in Tamilnadu's Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) district, very close to the south Kerala border. In 1981 this inconspicuous place, and several other villages in its immediate vicinity, made big headlines in the Indian daily papers when thousands of harijans or ex-untouchables decided to leave Hinduism and to embrace Islam. This spectacular case of mass conversion created a terrible shock among caste Hindus and threatened to upset the always precarious communal balance. Rumours circulated about Arabian sheikhs who had come to give tangible expression to the immense richness of Islamic belief by handsome distributions of oildollars. More serious investigation, however, showed that the harijans in this region had been suffering from oppression by aggressive landlords, harassment by police authorities and acute prejudices by caste Hindus for a very long time. A growing awareness of this social degradation has led many of these harijans to convert to Islam.

The individual works of Hariścandra in prose, poetry and drama have been little analysed or exploited by western scholars for the light they throw on social and political attitudes, and on language issues, in north India in their author's time. Yet many of these works are of interest from the above point of view. One such work is an essay based on an address given by Hariścandra in the town of Ballia, to the east of Banaras, in 1877. In the following pages the content of this interesting essay is outlined and analysed; an introductory account is first provided of Hariścandra, his activity, and its historical context.

The opening up of regions in the high mountains for motorized traffic has led world-wide to consequences concerning the penetration of these formerly remote areas.

Not only have running-times and means of transport been reduced through the modern routes, but also radical developments in the mountains have been induced. In this context physio-geographical and socio-political frame conditions are of predominant importance for the installation of functional communication systems. Especially in the high mountain regions of Asia relief, snow-covers in passes, glacial movements, earthquakes, water level fluctuations of rivers at fords and limited possibilities of fuel, fodder and foodstuff supplies all restrict the chances for the development of major trade routes.

One basic phenomenon characterized administrative development in the Bombay Presidency between 1800 and 1820: a fundamental transformation in the British administrative mentality. In brief, this transformation amounted to a shift, completed by 1813, from a cautious conservatism to one of innovation for the sake of administrative regularity. This shift can in part be explained as the natural product of the territorial cessions by the Marathas to the Bombay Government in 1802–3: Bombay ceased from that date to be solely a commercial presidency and became a government with territorial responsibility. It took about a decade for this new role to be fully accepted and to be reflected in the attitudes of Bombay administrators.

India's Parsis as a group have long been noted for their entrepreneurial talent. Parsis have played an important role in the growth of Indian industry in the nineteenth century, pioneering cotton textile industries in western India. Parsis were first described by early European visitors like J. Ovington as the principal weavers of Gujarat who worked primarily in ‘silks and stuffs’. In the late seventeenth century, Parsis began to participate in trade as ‘a large number of Parsi merchants began to operate in Swally and some of them like Asa Vora bought pinnaces (small coastal ships) to transport their goods to Basra and other ports in the area.’

The legendary Gurkhas have inspired a considerable literature about their character, quality and exploits under British command. Some years ago, after I returned from fieldwork in an area of east Nepal inhabited by the Limbu people, many of whom had served in Gurkha regiments, I began to read some of this literature for background purposes. It struck me then, although not nearly so forcibly as it did later when I had read Edward Said (1978), and returned to the Gurkha material after a long absence, that these writings have a very distinctive character, constituting a particular mode of ‘orientalist’ discourse.

Of the late Ch'ing reforms, perhaps none is more surprising than the opium suppression movement. Beginning in late 1906, it had by the end of 1908 succeeded in markedly curtailing the cultivation and consumption of opium at home and in obtaining formal assurance from the British to terminate gradually opium imports. These startling achievement are further magnified when we consider the setting within which they occurred.