This paper investigages the role of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. (P&O) in the maritime organization of the Asian specie network between 1850 and 1920. In this period the specie network comprised several strands and layers but this paper will concentrate on those involving the flow of gold from Australia to India.

Reviewing his long reign in 1792, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795) hailed his military triumphs as one of its central accomplishments. To underscore the importance he ascribed to these successes, he began to style himself ‘Old Man of the Ten Complete Victories’ (Shi Quan Lao Ren), after an essay in which he boldly declared he had surpassed, in ‘Ten Complete Military Victories’ (Shi Quan Wu Gong), the far-reaching westward expansions of the great Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and Tang (618–907) empires. Such an assertion, together with the program of commemoration discussed below, served to justify the immense expense incurred by frequent long-distance campaigning; to elevate all these wars to an unimpeachable level of splendor even though some were distinctly less glorious than others; and to align the Manchu Qing dynasty (16–191 i) with two of the greatest native dynasties of Chinese history and the Qianlong Emperor personally with some of the great figures of the past.

As the capital of the Estado da India, the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia and East Africa, Goa was subjected to a blizzard of policies designed at once to transform and fossilize life there. Desiring to preserve much of the precolonial village economic structure, yet determined to force their Goan subjects to total conversion to Catholicism, the Portuguese created policies that had a dramatic impact on Goan culture and identity. The focus of this article will be on the Hindu resistance to the policies that were appiled by the colonial regime and its role in the shaping of the regional culture: in the face of over-whelming physical force, direct defiance revealed itself primarily in the religious life of Hindu Goa as archival records of the Portuguese rule and temple histories demonstrate. Even formsof religious syncretism that are pervasive in Catholic Goa and might initially be perceived as indications of the success of Portuguese repressive and discriminatory policies represent a subtle pattern of ‘everday resistnce’ and are not simply the blending of Portuguese Catholic and Hindu cultures.

On 11 January 1943, Britain signed the ‘Treaty Between His Majesty In Respect Of The United Kingdom And India And His Excellency The President Of The National Government Of The Republic Of China For The Relinquishment Of Extra-Territorial Rights In China And The Regulation Of Related Matters (With Exchange Of Notes And Agreed Minute)’ with China.

For many students of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century British intellectual and literary history, Sir William Jones (1746–94) has lately come to seem a figure of great significance for our understanding of the period. A notable if implicit claim for his importance is to be found in Jerome McGann's revisionist New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993); A Hymn to Na'ra'yena (1785), Jones's translation from the Sanskrit, is symbolically placed as the anthology's first item. This essay will argue that Jones's Indian scholarship will be better understood in the light of its links with contemporary developments in biblical criticism.

Nie Er (1912–1935), a young Communist musician from Yunnan, could not possibly have imagined that when he wrote this patriotic song (with lyrics by the left-wing writer Tian Han [1898–1968]) for the 1935 film Children of Troubled Times (Fengyun ernü) it would soon become one of the most popular tunes in China. The overwhelming success of the song reflected a nation, long frustrated by imperialist (especially Japanese) aggression, thwarted reforms, domestic armed conflicts, and government ineptitude, venting its anger and crying out for a solution. When the Japanese invaded China two years later, ‘The March of the Volunteers’ was rapidly transformed into the quintessential song of resistance against Japan, sung at schools, in the army, at rallies, and on the streets. The song was influential in capturing the hearts and minds of millions during China's eight-year War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945); its impact, in the words of one contemporary song critic, was ‘similar to that of the “Marseillaise” [in the French Revolution]’. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized power in it adopted the song as the official national anthem.

Tokyo: 25 November 1970, midday. The parade ground of the Self Defence Force's Ichigaya garrison was crowded with personnel. All looked up at the balcony of the main hall, knowing that in the adjoining room the commandant had been taken hostage. On the parapet of the balcony stood one captor, dressed in a brown uniform and donning a headband with an ancient samurai motto, shichishōhōkoku (‘serve the nation for seven lives’). He was Mishima Yukio, the famous writer and founder of a militia named Tatenokai (Shield Society). Hardly able to make himself heard through the wail of sirens and the jeers from the crowd, Mishima held a speech in which he called the constitutional curtailment of the military a threat to Japan's culture. Nothing new, as he had been flirting openly with the extreme right for years. His plea to the men below to follow him in a revolt was greeted with howls of derision.

Religion in India has always been profoundly politicized, which is why it has remained of enduring importance, instead of ‘withering away’ as in the West. Though its presence is somewhat hidden in parties that profess a secular view, it is of vital importance, at the local village level, as a focus for the organization of political factions. More precisely, even if local political parties in Tamilnadu do not organize around religion, they use religion and ritual events for their political purposes, in their struggles to dominate local politics. The fact that this politicization of religious ritual is implicit, not explicit, only testifies to the fact that power-relationships—and struggles—exist in all aspects of life (as Foucault often noted), including apparently ‘innocent’ rites such as religious possession.

There is a striking disconnect between the imaginative range of interests which preoccupy historians of World Wars I and II in Europe and North America and the much more narrow political concerns of China historians working on the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. Since Jacoby and White's Thunder Out of China (1946) and Chalmers Johnson's Peasant Nationalism (1966), Western historiography on the Sino-Japanese War has focused not on the war itself but on the continuing political struggle for supremacy between the Communists and Nationalists. The war is seen as the key to the eventual triumph of the Communists over Chiang Kaishek's Nationalists by 1949. Other issues like the military history of the war itself or its long-term impact on Chinese society and culture have received scant attention.

This essay concerns the labile boundary between the familiar and the exotic in an early nineteenth-century Orientalist text, entitled Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han, by James Tod. Written by the first British political agent to the western Rajput states, Tod's Rajast'han, particularly the several chapters he devoted to the so-called ‘feudal system’ of Rajasthan, remained implicated in colonial policy toward western India for over a century. By situating Tod's Rajast'han in the specific circumstances in which it was written and then tracing the fate of that text against a historical background, this essay aims to restore an open-ended, historical sensibility to studies on Orientalism that most critics of Orientalist writing have ironically forfeited in their laudable efforts to restore history to the indigenous peoples who have been the objects of Orientalist discourse.

The book Angāre, a collection of ten short stories by Sajjād Ẓahīr, Rashīd Jahān, Aḥmed 'Alī and Maḥmūduzẓafar published in Lucknow in December 1932, marks a major turning point in the history of Urdu literature. Acting as a powerful catalyst, it initiated a major change in the form and content of Urdu literature and helped to lay the basis for the establishment of the Progressive Writers Association, the most significant Urdu literary movement of the twentieth century.

General Zhang Zizhong, commander of the eight divisions that constituted the Chinese 33rd Army Group, was killed at approximately 4:00 P.M. on May 16, 1940, in fighting at Shilichangshan (‘Ten li mountain’) near Nanguadian in Northern Hubei. The battle was one engagement of the Zaoyang-Yichang campaign that rumbled through late spring of that year. Surrounded by the Japanese, his forces had refused either to retreat or to surrender. In the ensuing hand-to-hand combat, General Zhang had been wounded seven times in all, by grenade, bullet, and finally by bayonet. The victorious Japanese realized Zhang's identity only when a major discovered, in the left breast pocket of his blood-soaked yellow uniform, a fine gold pen engraved with his name. The major quickly summoned senior officers; they ordered a stretcher brought and the body was carried away from the battlefield. (This was observed, through half-opened eyes, by Zhang's long-time associate, the Chinese major Ma Xiaotang, who lay nearby, bleeding from a bayonet wound, and who later gasped out the story to Chinese as he died).

‘Communist, Revolutionary, most capable and most implacable of the enemies of the British connection with India,’ this is how Winston Churchill described Jawaharlal Nehru in 1937. Most British politicians, and the ‘guardians’ of the Empire would have agreed with the verdict.

Communist sources record that between 20 August and 5 December 1940, the Eighth Route Army (8RA) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fought 1,824 large and small engagements with Japanese and puppet troops from the plains of Hebei to the mountains of Shanxi. These engagements are known collectively as ‘the Battle of the Hundred Regiments’ and they are the subject of this essay.