The voluminous Blechynden diaries, in the British Library, offer incomparable opportunities for studying (among other things) domestic life among middle-level British residents of Calcutta around the start of the nineteenth century. This paper is concerned with a small part of the history of the Blechynden household, focusing on Arthur Blechynden, son of Richard and his successor as superintendent of roads. Richard's diary runs to more than 70 volumes and Arthur's to seven. These sources permit none of the structural analysis that was made the basis of family history by Peter Laslett and others; but they touch several points of the richer canvas painted by Laurence Stone, and those genres that are concerned with individual lives, with emotion, with relationships, and with identity, the kinds of subject approached by the contributors to Roy Porter's collection Rewriting the Self. In this paper some of these issues will be taken up, with particular reference to ideas of individuality and of race. That discussion will then lead on to another, on the construction of British imperial identity outside Britain and in the context of the formation of empire, an aspect that seems worthy of more attention than it has received.

‘Provincialism’, or the separation of inferior spaces from normative ones, is seen in this essay as a key trope for interpreting modern Indian history. Provincialism, or provinciality, is a space recognizable instantly. It is marked by slowness, by absence of the new and recent, by what is seen on the national level as a brake-effect in an otherwise promising march forwards. Cities, which is what I concentrate on in this essay, are characterizable as provincial by a certain appearance: a topography of narrow streets, by the sloppy merger of the inside and outside, by an absence of discrimination between the jungle and the civilized as animal life proliferates on the roads. Their space is marked by a lack of discipline, and this lack is further exacerbated by an attitude almost aggressive, at any rate stubborn, that seems to embrace every other dimension of life. The provincial citizen is one whose body identifies with the provincial space. It revels in an indifference to the rules of obedience to arbitrary external exercises of power. The provincial space and its citizen are marked in the use of languages by the dominance of regional language over English. Overall, the provincial space is signified in the state as an obstacle, political, economic, and most of all cultural, to what could otherwise be the smooth march forward of unfettered forces of rationality and order. But it signifies itself by an alternative code. That which is indiscipline to the center is freedom to the margins; that which is coarse, is cultured; that which is backward, is rich; that which is alien is intimate; and that which is unable to keep step with a march forward is precisely the intelligent and crafty that refuses to play a non-reflexive, mechanical game.

Thailand has a long, well-established practice of publishing books to commemorate events and personages. Among these are volumes commemorating deceased persons which are distributed to participants at cremation ceremonies. They contain obituaries written by the deceased's superiors, peers, and subordinates as well as relatives. Commemorative books are also published by government agencies, private companies, schools and individuals. While most are published in the Thai language, Chinese communities in Thailand also produce a large number of such books in Chinese. There has been no slackening of the practice; rather the publication of commemorative books has been gaining strength over the past decades.

There was nothing unusual in an indemnity per se. Indeed, an indemnity could be seen as a forward step in European civilization, replacing the regime of indiscriminate plunder which preceded it—although it could equally be argued that in their pacification of north China following the razing of the Siege of the Legations in 1900 the Allies, through their looting of the Tientsin and Peking areas in disregard of recently agreed definitions, had acquired both indemnity and plunder. Indeed the chaos was such that among the first financial and contradictory consequences of the post-Boxer period was Sir Robert Hart's successful arrangement with the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation of a loan of Ts10,000 a month for the chief Chinese negotiator, Prince Ch'ing [I-K'uang], on the one hand, while in Shansi the Protestant Church refused to accept any indemnity for the Christian lives lost; consequently the authorities voluntarily agreed to establish a University on Western lines, to be maintained by the authorities, and to operate under joint control for ten years at the annual cost of Ts 50,000.

In August 1851, James Russell travelled to London from his estate on the banks of the Tweed. As a young man decades earlier, Russell had served as a cavalry officer in India, and he was anxious to exploit this visit to the metropolis to renew his acquaintance with the men who had formed his social circle years ago in Hyderabad. Having arrived in London, James Russell called on Charles Russell (no relation) at the latter's residence in Argyle Street. Chairman of the Great Western Railway, Charles Russell too had passed his youth in India, serving as a lieutenant in the Company's army and as an assistant to the diplomatic Resident at Hyderabad—his older brother, Henry. In a letter to his brother—now Sir Henry and (thanks to his Indian fortune) the proprietor of an extensive landed estate in Berkshire—Charles described James Russell as ‘still a great oddity, almost mad I think’, but conceded that ‘all his feelings are those of [a] gentleman and his pursuits have always been intellectual’. To substantiate this assessment of his old friend's sensibilities, he instanced James Russell's retention and use of a dictionary given to him by Charles in Hyderabad. ‘He gratified me by telling me that he still retained “a handsome Greek Lexicon” which I gave him, when he resumed the study of Greek’, Charles informed his brother Henry. ‘On his way home [from India] he followed the retreat of the ten thousand with Xenophon in his hand; and he has since worked hard, he tells me, at the Greek historians, poets & dramatists’. Having reminisced in London with Charles, James Russell journeyed to Berkshire to visit Sir Henry Russell, who read excerpts from Charles's letter aloud to his guest. ‘I always liked him’, Sir Henry wrote to his brother upon James Russell's departure, ‘and when I read to him your reference to early days, his eyes filled with tears’.

The division of domestic space within South Asian households is indicative, and even reflective, of the social status of South Asian women. This article argues the dependence of South Asian women's positionality upon their position within the confines of the home, making a case for the correlation between women's domestic roles and their (self and social) identities.

Through an analysis of the contemporary literature written by South Asian women, this article will analyse the joint family system, with its particular gendered spaces and hierarchies of power, exploring how these dictate and limit the interaction of its members, and pattern the relationships formed within them.

The positionality of second wives will also be investigated, to trace exactly how the newcomers establish themselves in relatively hostile environments. The body language of the women will be paid particularly close attention, as much of what is being investigated is often not directly verbalised.

This article also examines how the private spaces of home can be both sanctuary and prison for South Asian women. It will be seen that for South Asian women, not only their identities, but their survival, may be dependent on their successful staking out of positions within their domestic territories.

Indian labour migration to Burma and Malaya in the late nineteenth century was an important dimension of British colonial rule in Southeast Asia and coincided with the region's greater integration into the international economy. Compared to the Chinese, Indians formed an important minority only in these states where they filled a critical need in the urban manufacturing sector (Burma) and the plantation sector (Malaya). Their importance declined after World War Two, both in absolute and comparative terms. There were fewer millionaires and traders among them and their emigration to these territories was largely regulated by law. Moreover, the specific political and economic relationship between the Colonial Office in London and these territories determined recruitment patterns and influenced employment relations and working conditions. In turn, these impacted on the living conditions and mortality suffered by workers and shaped the structure of health services.

For John King Fairbank the establishment of the foreign inspectorate of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service was a key symbolic moment in modern Chinese history. His landmark 1953 volume Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast culminates with the 1854 Inspectorate agreement, which, he argued, ‘foreshadowed the eventual compromise between China and the West—a joint Chinese and Western administration of the modern centers of Chinese life and trade in the treaty ports’. Without the CMCS, he implied, there could be no modern China. It was the ‘the institution most thoroughly representative of the whole period’ after the opening of the treaty ports down to 1943, he wrote. By 1986 he was arguing that it was the ‘central core’ of the system. ‘Modernity, however defined, was a Western, not a Chinese, invention’, he claimed, and Sir Robert Hart's Customs Service was its mediator.

This article examines issues pertaining to the growth of ‘informal’ economic exchanges and relationships of patronage in the Tibetan refugee community of Dharamsala (H-P), India. I firstly review the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by investigations of Tibetan refugee modernity, then focus on one particular form of exchange in the informal economy of exiles: rogs ram, or the sponsorship of Tibetans by foreigners. The article argues that symbolic capital comes to play a particularly important role in communities where economic capital is scarce, acting in fact as a proviso to economic capital. The highly unstable character of symbolic capital means that, for Tibetan refugees as for other communities, its conversion into economic capital is arduous and engenders a tense field of negotiations between sponsors and beneficiaries.

Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while,

Till we can clear these ambiguities,

And know their spring, their head, their true descent…

And let mischance be clove to patience.

–Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Sinim. A name…taken by many scholars as meaning China under the name Ts'in, but modern opinion mostly regards it as referring to Syene…

–Couling, Encyclopaedia Sinica (1917)

The current paper is part of an interdisciplinary project focusing on the intellectual dimensions of the French colonial experience in colonial Viet Nam, particularly in relation to the archaeology of Southeast Asia. As such, the work presented here is intended as a follow-up to the recently published exploration of intellectual movements under colonialism in French-ruled Viet Nam produced by Susan Bayly. Its wider aim is to contextualise the work of the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient in order to better understand why its product, the cultural history of Viet Nam, is now so far out of step with the rest of mainland Southeast Asia that despite more than thirty years of post-colonial fieldwork by Vietnamese scholars, and more than fifteen years of collaboration with Western institutions, our understanding of Vietnamese protohistory has advanced little since, in a now famous review of the then current state of Vietnamese archaeology, Jeremy Davidson opined that ‘our knowledge of Champa remains so fragmentary, vague and inaccurate that the whole subject must be reworked’. The current work has many points of concordance with Bayly's interdisciplinary study. Here too it is argued that the distinctive understandings of race, culture and polity brought to the colony by French scientists, profoundly affected the thought and actions of Vietnamese as well as Europeans, and that the effects of their work were felt both within and beyond the French empire.

In July 1997, when Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty, this former British colony became a new kind of place: a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In the several years leading up to the 1997 transition, a sudden outpouring of Mainland Chinese scholarship stressed how Hong Kong had been an inalienable part of China since ancient times. Until then, however, Hong Kong had rarely figured in Mainland Chinese scholarship. Indeed, Hong Kong suffered from what Michael Yahuda has called a “peculiar neglect”: administered by the British but claimed by China, it was “a kind of bureaucratic no-man's land.” Only one university in all of China had a research institute dedicated primarily to studying Hong Kong. As part of this new “Hong Kong studies” (Xianggangxue), in 1997 China's national television studio produced two multi-episodic documentaries on Hong Kong: “One Hundred Years of Hong Kong” (Xianggang bainian) and “Hong Kong Vicissitudes” (Xianggang cangsang). The studio also produced two shorter documentaries, “One Hundred Points about Hong Kong” (Xianggang baiti) and “The Story of Hong Kong” (Xianggang de gushi). The “Fragrant Harbor” that PRC historians had generally dismissed as an embarrassing anachronism in a predominantly postcolonial world suddenly found its way into millions of Mainland Chinese homes.

‘An imperial policy is essentially a commercial policy’

(Charles Addis, 1905)

‘Look at the way we have swindled the Chinese in the case of the Pekin Syndicate and still worse in the case of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company’

(G.E. Morrison, 1906)

Caste in contemporary Indian society has often been seen as a remainder of waning tradition. Advent of egalitarian liberalism and/or capitalism is taken to be the force of change which is destroying or restricting the relevance of caste in contemporary society. Against such a view, this paper will argue that caste remains an important frame of reference for defining people's identity especially in rural society. In particular, I would like to discuss the role of people's agency in the reshaping of caste in contemporary rural Orissa. It is the aggregate efforts of different groups of people in local situations to constantly redefine the form and meaning of caste that maintains its relevance. I feel this aspect has been neglected in many previous theories, which have tended to consider caste concerns merely in terms of the presence or absence of ‘hierarchy’ or in terms of ‘substantialized’ group formations.

This paper situates the economic performance of independent India in historical perspective to evaluate the past and reflect on the future. It shows that the turning point in economic growth was circa 1951 in the long twentieth century and circa 1980 in India since independence. Thus, it is not possible to attribute the turnaround in India's performance to economic liberalization beginning 1991. During the period 1950–1980, economic growth in India was respectable, for it was a radical departure from the past and no worse than the performance of most countries. During the period 1980–2005, economic growth in India was impressive, indeed much better than in most countries. The real failure in both these periods was India's inability to transform this growth into well-being for all its people. And India's unfinished journey in development cannot be complete as long as poverty, deprivation and exclusion persist. Even so, with correctives, it should be possible to reach the destination.