I should like to pay my tribute to the memory of Kingsley Martin by calling in question a part of the conventional wisdom of what passes for comparative sociology. I hope I shall not appear unduly contentious in doing so. I should not like to speak badly of comparative sociology. At the same time, it has to be admitted that a truly comparative sociology exists less in the work that scholars actually do than in the ideals they profess. The principal obstacle to its growth is, in my opinion, neither lack of wit nor lack of words: it is prejudice.

Clio, the Muse of History, has not been kind to the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi (1835–1908). Traditional Chinese historians always have been prejudiced against feminine influence in court. Moreover, historians have long relied upon the works of men such as K'ang Yu-wei (1858–1927) and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (1873–1929), the two leaders of the radical reform movement, and other pro-Emperor radical reformers, most notably Wang Chao (1859–1935), Yün Yü-ting (1863–1918), Lo Tun-jung (d. 1923), and Li Hsi-sheng, for their information about the workings of the Ch'ing court during the period 1898 to 1900. Since these men were opposed to the power and conservatism of the Empress Dowager, their prejudice is reflected in their writings about the court at that time. Many historians also have relied upon the works of Western writers such as J. O. P. Bland, Sir Edmund Backhouse, and Hosea B. Morse for their information about this period. In fact, Bland and Backhouse's China Under the Empress Dowager is the book which has shaped many of our present-day negative images of Tz'u-hsi. Recently the reliability of Sir Edmund Backhouse has been seriously challenged by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his excellent study, Hermit of Peking. There can be no doubt that Western writers drew their facts from exchanges with the writings by the Chinese radical reformers, from unreliable eunuchs, and from highly biased newspapers, such as the North China Herald (a pro-reform Western-oriented Shanghai newspaper) and the Ch'ing-i pao [China Discussion], which was edited by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and published in Yokohama.

Even without this wonderful sixteenth-century hyperbole, forts remain an impressive feature of India's landscape. A thoughtful traveller, seeing the jagged walls high above the road, might well wonder who built them, and when, and what events took place within the gates. Scholarly writing on the subject will disappoint him. Toy, in his seminal book, noted that ‘this writer has been struck with the dearth of reliable litetature on the forts of India.’

The role of the State in promoting Indian economic development in the nineteenth century is one of several aspects of modern Indian economic history which have been ‘re-interpreted’ in recent years. The conventional wisdom once portrayed the policy of the British government in India as one essentially geared to serving British economic interests. By means of ‘discriminatory interventionism’ in economic affairs, it was argued, the Government encouraged the development of a primary commodity export economy, with all its attendant defects, in India. However, over the last two decades the reputation of the Government of India has undergone a rather noticeable transformation. Economic imperialists became, first, benevolent nightwatchmen, and then ‘development-orientated’ officials formulating an embryonic unbalanced growth model for Indian development. Parallel with this improvement in the Government of India's reputation has been a deterioration in the economic reputations of certain other governments in nineteenth-century developing economies, governments whose performances used to be favourably compared with that of the British in India. In the cases of Japan and Tsarist Russia, for instance, both the extent and effectiveness of State intervention in the economy has been questioned, and there has been an increasing recognition of the primacy of non-governmental factors in the economic growth of those countries. Given the ideological and organizational parameters limiting the range of possible activity by any nineteenth century government in its economy, the performance of governments in other developing countries of the period, and the political constraints imposed by being a subordinate section of a world-wide Empire, it is no longer possible regard the actions of British officials in India as wicked, and many would now regard them as almost respectable.

The legacy of the Portuguese Jesuits and Spanish mendicant orders in Japan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was strongly felt both in Japan and in the Catholic Church. In Japan the alien religion had been suppressed in the early Edo period and throughout the decades of sakoku measures continued to be taken to ensure that Christianity would not re-emerge. In Europe, however, the determination of Christian missionaries to return to Japan persisted. Already in the seventeenth century, after the expulsion of the Iberian missionaries and at a time when the French Société des Missions Etrangères (established in 1658) had been granted by the papacy the exclusive right of missionary work in the Far East, on two occasions bishops of the Société were appointed Apostolic Vicars to Japan—even though, needless to say, they never set foot in the country. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Japan remained little more than a distant memory of the past and a distant hope for the future. Following the French Revolution, the end of the Napoleonic wars, the onset of the Bourbon Restoration and with increasing French naval activity in the Far East, however, the Société's interest in Japan revived.

The English East India Company's Coromandel trade provided a spectacle of steady, if unspectacular, growth from its first inauguration early in the seventeenth century. It was not subject to the violent ups and downs, or the extremes of great success and utter failure that characterized the Company's trade in some other regions of India and Southeast Asia. An expanding trade on this coast was matched by an expanding presence. By the end of the century it was well-founded in two substantial Forts (St George and St David) and a number of residencies in important ports of outlet from Vizagapatnam in the north to Cuddalore in the south. By investment and enterprise, by diplomacy and force, English interests and influence on the coast grew and their settlements became nodal points of Indo-British exchange and interaction. The timely demonstration of controlled power, both when faced with threats from the ‘country’ powers of the hinterland and from European rivals on the seafront, helped in the growth of these settlements beyond mere centres of trade. Providing, as they did, not merely trade and investment, but also security of person and property, they were naturally an attraction to many groups in Indian society in the hinterland.

India's military intervention in East Pakistan was an instance of the clear use of force for the achievement of limited political and security objectives. Indian policymakers' responses to the events in Pakistan were spread over a specific period of time and their decisions can be viewed in a series of distinct phases. The totality of actions involved diplomatic maneuvering in global, regional, and subcontinental geopolitical contexts. There were, in Indian perceptions, easily identified internal and external dimensions to the situation within East Pakistan such as to create potential threats to the Indian state, its territoriality, self-images, and international status in real and symbolic terms. The eventual settlement indicated a flexibility for action and achievement not ordinarily attributed to Indian capability.

The May Thirtieth Incident which occurred in Shanghai during 1925 has been regarded by the Chinese as one of the most important events in modern Chinese history, and the incident has been called ‘Wu-san Ch'an-an’ (the May 30th Tragedy) ever since 1925. Yet only a few studies in the Western languages deal with such an important event. Among those few studies, two of them concentrate on the role of labor in the movement, and the other after collecting a lot of source materials decides to add a subtitle, ‘an outline’, to recognize the vastness and complexity of the subject without making much effort to analyze or discuss the movement.

The colonial port cities of Asia have recently attracted renewed attention not only from students of European imperial expansion, but also from others concerned with urban growth and change. These cities, founded by Europeans or developed by them as central links in worldwide colonial political and economic networks, stood apart from precolonial urban centers. Their foreign origins or control, their coastal locations, their central positions within European colonial systems, their emphasis on commercial rather than ritual activities, and their ethnic and cultural heterogeneity are important features which distinguish them from most indigenous cities in Asia. Many possessed a dual social and spatial structure, furthermore, which contrasted with the more unitary and often ritualized order of the noncolonial centers. Products of a changing political world order, these colonial cities became recognized centers of change in their own societies.

In the summer of 1920, when the Khilāfat movement (1918–24) was at its height, thousands of British Indian Muslims, under severe emotional stress, began to emigrate to the neighbouring Muslim country of Afghanistan. Believing that British India was no longer safe for Islam they had sought refuge in the hijrat or voluntary withdrawal as the only course left open to them.

The Purpose of this essay is to portray the missionary activity which the Japan Congregational Church (Nihon Kumiai Kirisuto Kyōkai) undertook in Korea between the years 1911 and 1921, and the various criticisms raised against it from both inside and outside the Church (owing to limited space we shall treat only the period up to the 1st March Movement).In doing so we shall try to illustrate at least partially the general views which Japanese Protestants held about Korea at the time.

This essay is the sequal to ‘The Missionary Activity of the Japan Congregational Church in Korea’. In the first part, I showed that the Congregational Church's missionary activity which started in 1911 was actually supported by the Government-General of Korea, and also mentioned a number of conscientious Christians such as Uchimura Kanzō and Kashiwagi Gien who not only opposed the Church's missionary activity in Korea but even went so far as to criticize the Japanese imperialist rule of Korea itself.

William L. Langer, the eminent scholar of imperialism, has succinctly defined the nature of the Russo-Japanese War:

The Russo-Japanese War still remains the classic example of a conflict waged for purely imperialistic motives. There was no sentiment, no tradition involved. The Japanese and the Russians were equally disliked by the population of the territories which they desired to control. At bottom it was merely a question of which nation should victimize the moribund Korean and Chinese Empires.

Education and assimilation were key components of Japanese colonial policy in Taiwan: assimilation of the island's native Taiwanese population (native islanders of Chinese ancestry) was an important goal; education was an instrument for attainment of this goal. When during their fifty years of rule (1895–1945) Taiwan's administrators altered their interpretation or definition of assimilation, they modified educational policies accordingly. From beginning to end of the Japanese period in Taiwan its government intended education for native islanders to be a major tool of its assimilation policy, which although a consistent policy was not a static one.

To debate about patterns of economic and social mobility within peasant societies is hardly a new game. In particular, our modern discussions are the heirs of a Russian heritage, inevitably mirroring, in some aspect, the great arguments about agrarian change which raged there between the late nineteenth century and collectivization. Two elements ensured for the Russian literature a special cogency and the potential for widespread application. Firstly, the mass of zemstvo statistics provided a more reliable empirical base to theoretical discussions than in any other equivalent society. Secondly, the debate over the peasantry was at the very forefront of the economic and political struggle over Russia's future. Russia between 1890 and 1930 was a society uniquely torn between the advanced and the less developed worlds, bouts of extensive, feverishly quick industrial growth coexisting with an agriculture where Malthusian crisis seemed inexorably to be gathering. The economic performance of the peasantry, three-quarters of the population, clearly provided the key to Russia's developmental fate. In addition, understanding agrarian society was crucial to the political battle for the country. If a large and powerful rich peasant class existed or, as Stolypin hoped, could be created, then the countryside's loyalty could be secured for a conservative régime. Alternatively, Lenin's interpretation of an impoverished, embittered majority within the peasantry seemed to promise a much sounder basis for political revolution than the support of the tiny Russian industrial proletariat. This immediate, practical importance of the Russian peasant debate sharpened the cut and thrust of the arguments.

The late nineteenth century was a period of selective institution-building by the British in India. Government's efforts were directed primarily towards the development of a more effective control and communications infrastructure. The initial impetus for such changes in Bengal came during the energetic administration of Sir George Campbell, the Lieutenant Governor from 1871 to 1874. Under his auspices, attempts were made to extend the administrative machinery down to the sub-district levels by the creation of sub-deputy collectorships and the revitalization of such local officials as kanungos (registrars), patwaris (village accountants) and chaukidars (village watchmen). Better connections to local society were also sought through institutions which linked government to its allies, such as municipal, local, and district boards, and the Court of Wards.

The capitulation of China to the Western powers' military, commercial, and diplomatic offensive by 1860 removed the immediate formal façade of resistance to improved Sino-western relations which the West had sought. Not so easily removed were the endemic institutional and cultural obstacles to China's understanding and effective handling of foreign affairs which accompanied these expanded relations. Increased involvement with the West, both at the capital and in the provinces, generated more complex problems and renewed suspicion which made a practical knowledge of the Western powers and their behavior all the more urgent. Yet in a society which had consistently underestimated and depreciated the importance of the West, the requisite knowledge of the Western world did not lie readily at hand, and specialists in foreign affairs were few. This article examines the career of one foreign affairs expert in this critical period. Its purpose is twofold: First, to illuminate the origins and quality of ‘foreign affairs’ expertise in China, broadly defined here as the understanding and dealing with the West (including the knowledge of foreign activities and policies in China, of characteristics of, and distinctions among, foreigners and foreign nations, and policies with respect to foreigners); and second (and closely related to the first), to examine the role and significance of the specialist in Chinese society.

Financial chaos was the rule during China's warlord period from 1916 to 1928. The Central Government in Peking was often short of funds because the warlords who controlled the provinces refused to forward tax receipts to the capital. The effectiveness of the financial administrative machinery in each province varied greatly, and if careful accounts were kept by the provincial governments, they have not been made public. Most confusing of all was the assortment of currencies circulating in the provinces. A bewildering variety of coins and paper notes, generally issued by local banks and money-changing shops, were used in each province, though they would probably not be accepted at face value in the neighbouring province. In some areas foreign currency, such as Mexican silver dollars or Japanese gold yen notes, could also be found in the key market towns. So many currencies were in use that local chambers of commerce met daily to calculate the relative values of the currencies traded in their immediate area.

The rural history of modern India has been and is being written for the most part within the terms of that dictum of Louis Dumont, that ‘a certain hierarchy of ideas, things and people, is indispensable to social life’. Even the scholar who has most recently questioned the distributions of power between sections of the community in North India, arguing for inter-dependence of landlords, peasantry and traders, has still emphasized village controllers, and ‘momentum towards social differentiation’, ‘to produce groups of rich peasants, or rather to continue their existence’. The identity of such rich peasants remains obscure or at least specific to the region being studied; but obviously it would be very useful to have similar generalizations about social stratification in the study of modern Bihar. Hitherto the foundation at least of political histories there has been caste or caste groups, yet economic hierarchy, that related but more enigmatic pecking-order, is surely equally important. In this paper I seek a basis for making such generalizations. Grave difficulties stand in the way. My conclusion throws doubt on the applicability to Bihar of the idea of stable hierarchies, and suggests an alternative approach.

Seavoyage was a social reform issue of some concern to the Hindus of Upper India in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Clearly there were compelling incentives for seavoyage; equally clearly there was a convention which prohibited such travel in the belief that it contravened the law laid down in ancient texts. But social conflict is seldom as one-dimensional as these statements imply.