All too often the study of land tenure in agrarian states is treated either as a dimension of economic organization or, with respect to its more specifically formal characteristics, as pertaining to the sphere of law. With both approaches there is the danger of ignoring or at least underplaying the fact that the formulation and regulation of tenural arrangements is an expression of the political order of society. Paradoxically, familiarity with this idea has tended to limit its appreciation. Awareness of the ‘classic’ and explicit example of feudalism and its place in grand social theory may well direct attention away from the detailed examination of more diffuse forms of the relation between land tenure and political structures. Such a lack of interest is readily observable in the case of Thailand where the history of the relationship is both unusual and highly significant for the analysis of contemporary social change.

Both Moluccan cloves and Bandanese nutmeg and mace played an important, even crucial, part in the elaborate network of exchanges of commodities which for many centuries before the intervention of the Europeans had been the characteristic feature of inter-island trade in the Indonesian archipelago. From the early sixteenth century the Portuguese, and to a lesser extent the Spanish, added a new strand to this network, but even in the spice islands, the commercial domination of which was their chief goal, they did not seriously disrupt its traditional pattern. This was particularly so in the Banda Islands, which they soon discovered were markedly different from the Moluccas, not only by virtue of the different spices which they produced and in which they traded, but in the economic and political organization of their societies, in the manner in which they reacted to the European intervention and in the effect which that intervention had upon their commercial activities. Both acted as magnets to the Portuguese and Spanish, and later on the Dutch and English, drawn by the lure of great profits, as they had to Asian traders for many centuries before the arrival of the Europeans. But both presented rather different problems to those traders, Asian and European alike, once commercial relations had been established

The relationship between business and politics in preindustrial societies has seldom been clear from historical records. I have argued elsewhere that the major banking firms of Mughal India were central to the imperial system. These ‘great firms’ were not parasites, passively supportive of the state because it preserved the law and order necessary for trade; they were not self-contained caste communities interacting with the government through the leaders of panchayats or guilds. Their functions were as important to the government as those of its official treasurers, and their desertion of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century helped bring about its collapse.

Once the British Empire became world-wide, the sun never set upon its crises. The historian who studies any of these crises in isolation does so at his peril, for their consequences tended to interlock. In the astounding geometry which the British Government constructed across the map of tropical Africa, many of the lines they drew were guided by pressures far away, in Ireland, in Egypt and in India. During the years between 1919 and 1922 a new and more elaborate set of crises marched indefatigably on through the body politic of Empire, like gout through the enfeebled frame of a toper. By this time Britain was threatened by the rolling up of her old interests in East Asia as well as by the phasing out of her new interests in West Asia; while in the classical centres of disaffection Zaghul Pasha, Gandhi and Mr de Valera pursued the old aims by new methods. No analysis of any of these crises will be complete without establishing its interplay with the others. Each joined in the rataplan which frayed the minds and the nerves of the policy-makers. But at a deeper level, each of them was part of a general problem; and there is much to be said for studying problems, not regions. In the case of underdeveloped subjects, such as African or Indian history, it is important not to study them as though they were merely the annals of the parish.

One of the most difficult sets of questions for any imperial power or ruling group is if, when, and how to open the ranks of the imperial services to the imperialized. For a considerable period of time there may be logical enough reasons, related to imperial security and distrust of the conquered, for avoiding these questions altogether. However, sooner or later it becomes neccessary to win the collaboration of the losers, and then certain ‘liberalizing’, or just realistic tendencies begin to prevail. These are often inspired more by ‘home’ influences than by ‘out-post’ sentiment which tends to be more suspicious of its recent victims. Nevertheless, somewhere along the line a sometimes embarrassing precedent is made, and the integration or localization of the imperial civil and military services, and even of the executive, is undertaken. Usually the start is at the lowest levels, the clerks and soldiers, but later the upper or officer class also begins to lose its initial imperial or racial solidarity.

When in 1913 Count van Hogendorp edited the letters and papers of his ancestor Willem, who had served in Java as one of the secretaries of the Commissioner General Du Bus from 1825 to 1829, he characterized the early nineteenth century in Java as a time of ‘systems.’ His use of this word was not meant to be complimentary. Ancestor Willem had taken great pride in being the inspirational genius behind one such ‘system’; one, incidentally, which was not adopted.The characterization of the time seems to me particularly relevant as an opening wedge into the contents and theme of this paper, for all 'systems' relative to nineteenth-century Java had at their core the stimulation of export commodities derived from the agricultural process. A system, as I use the term here and as it was used by nineteenth-century policy planners, was an orderly andlogical arrangement of thoughts and objects into a complex .whole according to some scheme which drew its inspiration from fundamental economic and social principles. Such systems for Java were devised bypersons in positions of high authority either in Europe or in Java on the basis of what they had seen or heard about Java. Invariably the purpose of the system was to make the island of Java profitable to its European‘possessor’; the prevailing colonial theory holding that through treatyand conquest the European power had gained sovereign rights over the land and its people and should make use of them in accordance with its best judgment. Such judgment was embodied in a ‘system’ which hopefully provided benefits for both the possessor and the possessed.

Since the nineteenth century scholars have depicted Indian castes as timeless, fixed communities whose customs, rituals, and occupational specialities evolved at an unidentifiable point in the distant past. It has now been shown, however, that many jatis are of relatively recent origin, and historians have been able to trace the economic, political, and religious changes which acted to form individual caste groups during the colonial period. Several recent works on south India have argued that the agglomerations of artisans and cultivators described as castes in British ethnographies and Census reports had no real cohesion and were often no more than unstable political alliances or ‘administrative fictions’. In this view it was the misconceived European notion of castes as rigid, competing corporations which stimulated the formation of many south Indian castes after 1880.

During the last ninety years of British rule in India, the ‘Jewel of the Empire’ was, as Lord Salisbury remarked in 1882, easily regarded by many British imperialists as ‘an English barrack in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them’. In more prosaic terms India was seen as a permanent strategic reserve and the principal means by which British interests were secured throughout Asia, from Suez to Wei-hei-wei. As such, India was a central component in the British imperial system. The empire's matchless prestige, its wealth and apparent power all stemmed in large measure from India. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Raj, the East India trade and the Indian Army demonstrated a combination of power which Britain's imperial rivals might envy but never surpass. The central importance of India is illustrated by the Victorian conception of imperial defence, which was seen to depend on the twin pillars of naval supremacy and the defence of India. The only serious military commitment which British planners admitted before the turn of the century was the possibility of meeting a Russian invasion of India across the North West Frontier. This threat existed mostly in the minds of British generals. Britain and Russia came closest to war on the Frontier at the time of the Penjdeh incident in 1885, but even then the likelihood of a Russian expedition against India was hardly more than remote. Nevertheless, the threat of invasion was the principal rationale for the nature and size of the Army in India and this consideration guided Lord Kitchener's reforms of the Indian Army during his time as Commander-in-Chief from 1902 to 1909.

Ethnicity takes many forms, meets a variety of needs, and has a wide range of uses. No single case can provide material for an exhaustive analysis of the full complexity of the phenomenon, but all contribute pieces to the mosaic, illuminating that complexity. Analyses have been couched in terms of cultural definitions, of perceptual and cognitive categories, of social distance and solidarity of groups, of boundary definition and maintenance, of conflict and competition, of emergent versus conservative qualities of the phenomenon, and so forth—and all hold some validity, for ethnicity is multi-faceted. As A. L. Epstein points out, to define ethnicity exclusively in terms of only one of these many facets—whether its potential as a focus for political mobilization, its contribution to an individual's psychic comfort as a member of a group, or its cultural or linguistic attributes—‘is to confuse an aspect of the phenomenon with the phenomenon itself’ (1978:96).

In the nineteenth century, the British succeeded in deriving growing benefits from their Indian territories. With dominion firmly established, and the colonial connection beginning to take its modern shape, India came to fit less awkwardly with British economic interests. India now became Britain's best customer for her most important industry, a useful supplier of raw materials, a safe field for capital investment, a crucial element in her balance of payments and key to the multilateral system of settlements which sustained the continued expansion of her world trade.The pattern of trade and investment, which brought such signal benefits to Britain, depended upon dominion over India. Dominion had given Britain the levers of power to open up Indian markets to her trade,knock down the internal barriers to the free flow of her goods, and prevent the erection of external tariffs to protect the Indian product.Dominion enabled Britain to build, at Indian cost, a system of transport by rail and road which linked the ports, themselves the creation of British rule, to their hinterlands, and to tilt the advantage in favour ofher own nationals who dominated India's foreign trade; it helped to give British shipping, banking and insurance a virtual monopoly over the invisibles of Indian trade and it imposed upon India a currency and banking system which protected the ratio of sterling to the rupee. Butthese balance-sheets of imperialism do not reveal the full importance of the Raj to the British world system. Just as India's growing foreign tradehelped to push British influence into east and west Asia alike, so her growing military power underwrote that influence, whether formal or informal, in those regions. An oriental barracks, where half of Britain'sworld force was billeted free of charge, India was the battering ram of British power throughout the eastern arc of its expansion. Before the First World War, India seemed triumphantly to have justified the efforts of generations of empire-builders.

IN the post-1857 decades of the nineteenth century, the British rulers of India controlled the vast territory and population of the Indian subcontinent (of the size and cultural diversity of Western Europe) under nearly ideal conditions of peace, stability and order. By this time as well, they could count on the active cooperation and loyalties of both old and new major indigenous elites in urban and rural India. The annual and decennial assessments of the ‘Moral and Material Progress of the Peoples of India’ recited to Parliament the areas in which appreciable progress had been made.On the material side, British policy makers in the latenineteenth century concentrated imperial or state resources in agricultural development. Their simultaneous, often conflicting, goals were soto improve the security and efficiency of food-crop production that they could eliminate or at the very least sharply diminish periodic drought-inspired dearth and famine mortality in the countryside. The other major goal was to develop substantial export crops—wheat, cotton,sugar, indigo, tea, coffee, opium, etc.—as income producers for thepeasant, the landlord and for the regime. To meet both objectives the Government of India directed its major resources into capital investment in public works: immense canal systems designed to improve andextend cultivation; railroads, to draw production from remote areas to the seacoast; breakwaters, warehousing, docks, navigational aids at the great port terminii to increase the speed and security and reduce the costof sea-borne exports. These public enterprises meshed with intricate structures of agency houses, export brokers, and commission agents,both British and Indian, who jointly penetrated to the most distant centers of cash crop production.

The Kheda (or Kaira) district has lately attracted great interest among Indian historians, not only because it was the area in which Gandhi chose to launch the very first peasant ‘satyagraha’ in resistance to government revenue demands, but also because it harboured a highly progressive class of peasant farmers, known as the Patidars, who to this day rank among the wealthiest cultivators in Western India.

When the British came to power in India, it was certainly not in the face of the organized resistance of Islam. Yet the British Raj came to its end among political and social convulsions in which Hindus and Muslims cut each other's throats and large populations were shunted across the new frontiers of a sub-continent, now divided into two nations on the basis of religion. Events of such magnitude have encouraged historians to seek explanations of matching significance which may account for the growth of Muslim separatism. This article is concerned with the period of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, before the onset of the end game when the communal quarrel burst out in deadly earnest. Explicit rival-ries between the communities tended to exist at two main levels, the level of organized politics at the top where Hindu and Muslim elites were rivals for influence with government and eventually for the control of government itself, and the level of mob violence in the streets. This article is concerned with organized politics at the top, although it does not deny the existence and importance of tensions at the base. Its main emphasis will be upon the provincial stage, in particular the Muslim majority province of the Punjab. In the period before 1919 the development of Muslim politics suggested that a specifically Muslim separatism orchestrated by the United Provinces had emerged upon the all-India stage. But the coming of the reforms reversed the situation of the preceding decades, and there was less incentive for Muslim politicians in the United Provinces to claim to be the spokesmen of Muslims in the nation.

SINCE Malaysian independence over two decades ago, rubber production there has undergone a significant and far-reaching structural transformation, in social as well as economic dimensions. This transformation represented the outcome of policy responses to changing world market conditions for the export of natural rubber, which coincided with a political transition to independence and parliamentary government. In its response, government policy since the mid-1950s released many of the earlier administrative constraints on the spread of new rubber planting. The ensuing entrepreneurial re-awakening led to large-scale re-planting and new planting with high-yielding rubber. This increasingly widespread wave of technological innovation was accompanied by the dissolution of marginal estate enterprises, which was more than offset by a parallel expansion of peasant participation in rubber cultivation. Productivity and therefore producer incomes generally tended to improve, notwithstanding cyclical fluctuations in world rubber prices. Yet, by the middle 1970s this policy trend favouring technological cumentrepreneurial innovation appears to have altered direction. Indeed,recent Malaysian rubber policy indicates that structural transformation has run its course, at least for present intents and purposes. As will be seen, the current policy goal has reverted to protecting the newly established economic and social order in the Malaysian rubber planting against further pressures for developmental change.

The Manchus inherited from the Ming Dynasty the images of the overseas Chinese as well as the policy towards them. The tarnished images of the overseas Chinese as ‘deserters’, ‘criminals’, and ‘potential traitors’ of the Ming were taken over by the early Ch'ing rulers. These images were soon transformed into new images of ‘political criminals’, ‘conspirators’ and ‘rebels’, for in the first four decades after the Manchu conquest of North China in 1644, the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia were directly involved in the resistance movement on the southeast coast of China. The leader of the movement, Cheng Ch'eng-kung (known in the West as Koxinga), seems to have enlisted the support of the overseas Chinese, particularly from Vietnam, Cambodia and Siam, for his resistance. It is claimed that Koxinga's naval power was partly drawn from Nanyang (Southeast Asia) shipping, and financed from the profits of the Nanyang trade. Of course those overseas Chinese who supported Koxinga made no apology for their involvement. They saw the Manchus as alien usurpers and as the oppressors of the Han Chinese, and the support for Koxinga's resistance movement was seen as an act of patriotism to save Han Chinese from the oppressive Manchu rule. The government countered the overseas Chinese involvement by introducing stringent laws against private overseas trade. In 1656 (13th year of the Emperor Shun-chih), a decree was proclaimed that‘….any traders who go overseas privately and trade or supply the rebels with provisions will be beheaded, and their goods confiscated.

The Indian court system is by all accounts unusual. The proceedings are extraordinarily dilatory and comparatively expensive; a single issue is often fragmented into a multitude of court actions; execution of judgements is haphazard; the lawyers frequently seem both incompetent and unethical; false witness is commonplace; and the probity of judges is habitually suspect. Above all, the courts are often unable to bring about a settlement of the disputes that give rise to litigation. So great are these failings that the Indian judicial process can reasonably be seen as a ‘pathology’of a legal system.

The spectacular decline of the expatriate business houses of eastern India in this century is one of the many underdeveloped areas of Indian economic history. The extent of the decline itself seems hard to exaggerate. In 1900 almost all the commanding heights of the colonial economy appeared to the dominated by expatriate and foreign firms, most of them British. Not only was the foreign trade of Bengal almost exclusively in their hands, but so was the industrial and banking structure. In addition, most historians of the period have stressed that the expatriate sector was able to dominate internal trade, operating in amonopsony position in regard to cash crop production and marketing and also, thanks to its contacts with government, the railways and the port trusts, to enjoy hegemonic powers that impeded the development of indigenous rivals. Thus, as A. K. Bagchi has stressed, 'social discrimination was complemented and supported by political, economic, administrative and financial arrangements which afforded European businessmen a substantial and systematic advantage over their Indian rivals in India.' The fate of the expatriate groups since 1950 has beenvery different. Many suffered considerable depredations during and after the second world war, losing important sectors of their business to Indian rivals, and even being bought out entirely by native enter-prise. Such expatriate interests as survived after Independence have generally failed to perform well. Their recent history has been agloomy one of a steady erosion of profitability and viability, so that most of those that still remain are now taken seriously only by a new generation of indigenous speculators and asset strippers.

From an Asian angle Afghanistan could easily be selected as the centre of the extra-European world. It lies at the crossroads of three different geographic regions, the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia, as much as it borders on three different cultural zones, the Islamic world, the Hindu culture, and the Chinese influence. From a political standpoint, until the Second World War, Afghanistan appeared as buffer state par excellence, sandwiched between two Great Powers, the Russian Empire protruding from the North-west of Central Asia, and the British Empire guarding the Indian glacis in the South-east.

Viewed from an historical, comparative perspective, the newspaper has proven itself an unusually adaptable tool of communication. It has served many masters: national states with different political ideologies; political parties of right, left and centre; economic interests of capital and labour; national movements and individuals. The contents of newspapers have been equally as varied, ranging from newspapers of record, newspapers offering their readers news of national and local politics, finance, and international affairs to those specializing in news of sex, crime, sport and scandal. Newspapers have differed, too, in their physical dimensions: some print enough in a single issue to fill a weighty book, others are no more than a single page of type.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the three Southeast Asian societies of Thailand, Burma, and Vietnam were confronted rather suddenly with a large and growing foreign demand for their principal product, rice. Without detailing the development of this demand, we may note that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European countries had begun not only to consume large amounts of rice as a cheap dietary staple, but also to make use of it in the brewing industry, as a supplement to wheat in flour products, as a starch for sizing textiles, and as feed for livestock. At the start of the nineteenth century, new milling and processing techniques enabled European consumers to look abroad for their rice needs, and the Indian provinces of Bengal and Madras and portions of the southern United States became major sources of supply. Towards the middle of the century, the Indian Mutiny and the American Civil War disrupted these sources at a time when improvements in transportation were making it possible for European importers to purchase their rice in even more distant areas, primarily Southeast Asia.