These four essays were first presented to an audience in Washington, D.C. in April 2002 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. Richard Horowitz, the panel organizer, argued that:

the roots of China's modern state can be found in the Xinzheng or ‘new policy’ reforms during the last decade of the Qing dynasty. These reforms marked a radical departure for the Chinese state, involving a sustained effort to import foreign models and adapt them to Chinese realities. Although scholarship on reforms to provincial and local state institutions in this period is substantial, the transformation of the central government in Beijing has received little attention.

An important branch in recent debates on the nature of the judiciary in colonial south India has focused on the extent to which the judicial institutions—and the social transformations mediated through them—were controlled by the colonial state. This debate is of interest not only from the point of legal history. From the broader perspective of social and cultural history the debate is important because it draws attention to issues such as indigenous agency, conceptual negotiation and the hybrid nature of institutions under colonial rule. It is these issues I intend to address through an analysis of indigenous litigation in the Mayor's Court in late eighteenth-century Madras. The analysis falls in two parts. First, I analyse how indigenous agents availed themselves of the court, despite an official colonial policy of excluding disputes between Indians from its jurisdiction. In the second part, I focus on the ways in which the nature of property was contested and negotiated in complex dialogues between indigenous litigants and representatives of the colonial judiciary. Both parts of the analysis indicate that important aspects of the litigation in the Mayor's Court were largely beyond the control of the colonial authorities.

The history of opium is a major theme in modern Chinese history. Books and academic careers have been devoted to its study. Yet the question that scholars of the opium wars and of modern China have failed to ask is how the demand for opium was generated. My puzzle, during the initial stage of research, was who smoked opium and why. Neither Chinese nor non-Chinese scholars have written much about this, with the exception of Jonathan Spence. Although opium consumption is a well-acknowledged fact, the reasons for its prevalence have never been fully factored into the historiography of the opium wars and of modern China. Michael Greenberg has dwelt on the opium trade, Chang Hsin-pao and Peter Fay on the people and events that made armed conflicts between China and the West unavoidable. John Wong has continued to focus on imperialism, James Polachek on Chinese internal politics while Opium regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, the latest work, has studied the political systems that controlled opium. But the political history of opium, like the opium trade and the theatre of war, is only part of the story. We need to distinguish them from the wider social and cultural life of opium in China. The vital questions are first, the point at which opium was transformed from a medicine to a luxury item and, secondly, why it became so popular and widespread after people discovered its recreational value. It is these questions that I address. We cannot fully understand the root problem of the opium wars and their role in the emergence of modern China until we can explain who was smoking opium and why they smoked it.

The paper shows how production, marketing and uses of wool changed in colonial India (1858-1947). The changes involved location, products, people, and nature of the firm, and were induced by two circumstances, one arising from the raw material side, and the other from the consumption side. There were limitations on access to common grazing lands, a theme that takes us to those of herding, customary rights, and the economics of wool production. The economic character of weaving was bound with that of wool production. The nature of that bond changed in the colonial period. On the consumption side, imported garments altered tastes and introduced new standards. This latter process encouraged standardization, larger scale, and urban production, and in a more limited way diversification and technological change. Power-looms, hosiery, and worsted were the outcomes of the last process.

On January 29, 1901, in the grim aftermath of the Boxer Uprising and the humiliating foreign invasion of north China that followed, the Empress Dowager Cixi issued a famous edict that initiated the New Policy (xinzheng) reforms.

The weakness of China is caused by the strength of convention and the rigid network of regulations. We have many mediocre officials but few men of talent and courage. The regulations are used by mediocre men as the means of their self-protection, and taken advantage of by government clerks as sources of profit. The government officials exchange numerous documents but they never touch reality. The appointment of capable men is restricted by regulations so rigid that even men of exceptional talent are missed. What misleads the country can be expressed in one word, selfishness, and what suffocates all under heaven is precedent.

This paper offers a preliminary exploration of the multi-faceted ways in which the railways of South Asia have been represented in textual, aural and visual media. I do this despite my reservations about some representational-type studies presented via language and theories I find opaque. Nonetheless, I do want to signal that I am not a closed-minded trainspotter; I am not one of those railway historians a reviewer of Michael Freeman's Railways and the Victorian Imagination labelled ‘“trainspotters” to a man…combining the enthusiasms of the hobbyist and the econometrician in scholarly mimicry of that singular British type.’ The reviewer, of course, was referring to those railway devotees who haunt British railway stations desperately taking pictures of locomotives and recording their serial numbers and not to the alienated characters in a recent movie of similar name.

In the wake of Partition—the break-up of British India in 1947—millions of people moved across the new borders between Pakistan and India. Although much has been written about these ‘Partition refugees,’ a comprehensive picture remains elusive. This paper advocates a rethinking of the study of cross-border migration in South Asia. It argues especially for looking at categories of cross-border migrants that have so far been ignored, and for employing a more comparative approach. In the first section, we look at conventions that have shaped the literature on Partition refugees. The second section explores some patterns of post-Partition migration to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and the third uses oral evidence from cross-border migrants to present a number of case studies. The concluding section underlines that these cases demonstrate the need for re-examining historiographical conventions regarding Partition migration; it also makes a plea for linking South Asia's partition to broader debates about partition as a political ‘solution’ to ethnic strife.

No less than in modern times, law under imperial systems can do many things. Its enactment can be a focus for bureaucratic debate and struggle. Its implementation may provoke bitter resistance or creative adaptations. It can be ignored or it can spur unpredictable social change. In eighteenth-century southwestern China, law did all this: issues of law are paramount in the burst of Qing (1644–1911) expansion and Han Chinese colonization which brought many local non-Han societies directly under imperial governance for the first time. This paper examines both its development and its effects in the remote region of the Eastern Miao (Hmong) (see map), a group based on settled agriculture in the Hunan/Guizhou provincial border zone west of the Yuan river. It begins with administrative incorporation (which occurred in two stages in 1703–4 and 1727–32) and ends on the eve of the Miao uprising and its suppression in the 1790s.

‘. . . [T]he awakened untouchable today is repeatedly asking them [the Congress] if they could not remove the ‘social evil’ of their own creation without political power, how do they expect us [the untouchables] to liberate ourselves without political power’. (Shastri, Poona Pact. 1946, p. 24)

‘This is 1946, not 1932’. (Shastri, Poona Pact. 1946, p.76)

Shankaranand Shastri's statements help us locate two related propositions that came to constitute Dalit politics in Uttar Pradesh in the 1940s. The first proposition deals with claims made by Dalits to acquire political power—specifically in the form of adequate representation in the provincial legislative assemblies and in the Constituent Assembly. They demanded positive discrimination in the form of reservations within legislative and executive institutions. Safeguards for Dalits, it was argued, should be incorporated into the proposed constitution for Indian citizens. The second proposition concerns achhut identity, through which Dalits hoped to reconstitute their polity in UP. The Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) and even a section of Congress Harijans staked a claim for achhut identity to distinguish their difference from ‘other communities.’ Dalit writings increasingly depicted the Poona Pact as a great betrayal by the Congress and the British. From their experience of the two general elections of 1937 and 1946, they argued that the electoral mechanism worked out under the aegis of the Poona Pact was structured against the Dalits.

Two of the main practical problems which confronted the Xinzheng reforms (1901–1911) were, on the one hand, financial issues, and on the other, personnel issues. In this paper, I will concentrate on the latter. When one thinks of the reforms in relation to administrative personnel, the main aspects generally brought up are centered upon innovations introduced at that time. Among other things, we could mention the new schools or, to be more general, the new educational system that was built up around the empire—mostly after 1900—to prepare a new generation of officials trained in specific fields of ‘modern’ knowledge. They, in turn, were expected to fill in the positions in the newly set up administrative institutions at the central and local levels. Their new training was to allow them to be in charge of the new responsibilities the reformed Qing bureaucratic apparatus had set out to perform in such fields as justice, fiscality and finances, the military and police, education or public health, to name but a few. To summarize, the search for talented men, a Chinese age-old principle for sound government, was trusted to that for new talents. The 1905 disbanding of the traditional examination system did much to reinforce this trend. During the first decade of the 20th century, the steady increase in the number of Chinese young men going abroad to study—especially to Japan—can serve as a testimony to this `new knowledge and new talent fever' of the late Qing. The fights against one another to which some of the central and provincial administrative offices resorted in order to secure for themselves the services of those deemed of talent are but another exemplary illustration of this aspect.

During the early years of British conquest in India [and elsewhere] indiscriminate and frenzied looting often followed military action. Certainly, the acquisition of plunder had always been used as an incentive for the troops, though its distribution was often disproportionate and the source of much discontent. Officially appointed prize agents ought to have lessened any animosity, though like the Admiralty Prize Courts which were a ‘public scandal’, the military agents were mostly thought to be ‘sharks’ and men often went collecting for themselves rather than for the ‘official’ pot. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, collection of plunder had also become the ‘collecting’ of curios and artefacts for both personal and institutional reasons. This material had become increasingly important in the process of ‘othering’ Oriental and African societies and was exemplified in the professionalism of exploration and the growth of ethnographic departments in museums, the new ‘temples of Empire’. The gathering of information may have reached new heights but the British attempt at a monopoly on knowledge was not particularly ordered or controlled and events within the Empire offered the world's press numerous opportunities for criticism. Nearer home, reports of looting often became ammunition in the hands of liberal critics of Empire who had their cause strengthened after the disastrous events of the South African War with its burning, looting and removal of non-combatants to concentration camps. So looting may have become morally questionable, but it was institutionalized and symptomatic of the British imperial state's desire for artefacts with which to provide information about ‘exotic’ societies. There was literally a ‘scramble’ for information out of which, it was hoped, an ordered and systematic scheme of knowledge would realize the dream of an ‘imperial archive’ in which fantasy became reality and ultimate knowledge became ultimate power.

The title of the paper alludes to Milton Singer's book When A Great Tradition Modernizes: an anthropological approach to Indian civilization, and particularly to Part IV of the book. This has the title ‘Modernization and Traditionalization’ and includes a long essay called ‘Industrial Leadership, the Hindu Ethic and the Spirit of Socialism-described in a review by Richard Park at the time as ‘the capstone’ of the book as a whole.

The Banten Rebellion of 1750 has been described in two recent standard accounts in totally different ways. M. C. Ricklefs emphasizes the political conflicts between the ruler and the elite in court circles as a principal cause of the uprising, while J. Kathirithamby-Wells views this event as a consequence of the economic exploitation of an oppressed people. Why has this same event been depicted so differently?

Those of us who work on the Indian princely states sometimes seem to share a certain marginalization, a certain distance from the debates shaping the writing of South Asian history today. We also share, more positively, views of that history that do not focus on British colonial rule and are not based on colonial sources, views that arguably offer more continuity with pre-British history and alternative visions of the South Asian past, present, and future.

Just days before the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, the Foreign Office in London received a letter from Ian Morrison, late Honorary Attaché to the British embassy in Tokyo, who was returning to the United Kingdom via south China. For the past month, Morrison had been enjoying the allure of Hong Kong. Astounded by the bustle and ‘ever-fresh beauty’ of this prosperous corner of empire, one of the first impressions upon his arrival in the colony was its remarkable isolation.

‘It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.’ Machiavelli, The Prince

Central Xinzheng Reform and the Twentieth-Century Chinese State

The effort of the Qing dynasty to transform itself and forge a new set of relationships with society in its last decade has been one of the less explored areas in the scholarship on modern China. Although this set of radical initiatives, collectively known as the xinzheng (‘New Policy’) reforms attracted a good deal of commentary from its contemporaries, until recently it has been relatively understudied. There are two reasons for this neglect. First, conventional periodization has divided historical turf between Qing historians (for the Qing dynasty 1644–1911), Republican historians (for the period between 1911 and 1949 ) and political scientists (who cover 1949 to the present). Second, since the dramatic narrative for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century has been largely understood as a process of ever more radical forms of revolutionary change, scholars have understandably been more taken with exploring the antecedents of revolution and/or locally based studies of elite transformation than they have been with exploring a case of seemingly bona fide failure.The central government-initiated xinzheng reform period (1902–1911) has thus borne the full brunt of a Whiggish interpretation of history; too late to command the attention of most Qing historians, too early for the majority of Republican historians, at best a prologue for the real revolution to come, and at worst an abortive failure.

The Parsi theatre was the dominant form of dramatic entertainment in urban India from the 1860s to the 1930s. Named for its Bombay-based pioneers, the Parsi theatre blended certain European practices of stagecraft and commercial organization with Indic, Persian, and English stories, music, and poetry. Through the impact of its touring companies, it had a catalytic effect on the development of modern drama and regional theatre throughout South and Southeast Asia. Moreover, Parsi theatre is widely credited with contributing to popular Indian cinema its genres, aesthetic, and economic base. With Hindi films now the major cultural signifier for the middle classes and the ‘masses’ in South Asia and its diaspora, documentation and evaluation of the Parsi theatre is much needed, especially to connect it convincingly to the cinematic medium that followed.

As Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, the ‘dominant’ view of colonial rule in Hong Kong is one of a state which governed through ‘a deliberate policy of indirect rule—a combination of economic laissez-faire and political non-intervention’. It depicts a government which was disengaged from the population, preferring to see the colony as a trading opportunity, whilst leaving the condition of the peoples it held sway over to the philanthropy and humanitarianism of the colony's Chinese elites. This view of British rule was even supported by the primary representative of the imperial state when Sir David Trench admitted in 1970 that social policy, in the sense of responding to the needs of the populace, only began in the colony in 1953. But as Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, these ‘established narratives’ of Hong Kong's colonial history need to be reassessed and a more nuanced approach adopted to reveal the complexity of even Hong Kong's seemingly simple ‘colonial state-society’ relations.

The 24th of April 1905 is a date of no particular significance in the current historiography of China. However, the memorial submitted this day by the Imperial Commissioners in charge of legal reforms, Wu Tingfang and Shen Jiaben, entailed the immediate suppression of so-called ‘cruel punishments’ (kuxing), such as dismemberment (lingchi), exposure of the head (xiaoshou) and desecration of the corpse (lushi). Judicial torture and bamboo flogging were suppressed straight after. From then on, cruelties of the past were illegal, and prohibited in practice, even though a penal code conforming to modern standards was not completed before 1928. China thus entered into the age of uneven and uncertain eradication of illegal but recurrent practices of torture. Though spectacular outbursts of violence occurred in contemporary China, with the complicity or under instigation of the highest authorities, those were not openly authorized by law, and they were eventually denounced, and some of their authors prosecuted. The shift from cruelty openly legitimized and practiced by the state to its official prohibition and ashamed toleration is an epochal change, which stems from the April 24th 1905 memorials.

Looking at an early picture of the French colonial hill station of Dalat circa 1925, one is struck by the centrality of an edifice around which the entire European resort seems to have been conceived. Completed in 1922, this monumental hotel, known at the time as the Lang Bian Palace (since rebaptized the Dalat Palace Hotel), was designed as a site of colonial leisure and power at the centre of Indochina's premier site of French villeggiatura, ‘discovered’ by Dr Alexandre Yersin in 1893, and earmarked for development into a hill station by the Governor General of Indochina, Paul Doumer in 1897–8. According to the geographer Robert Reed, the Lang Bian Palace ‘function[ed] almost immediately as the nerve center of proper Western colonial society in the highlands.’