The historiography of precolonial Southeast Asia remains remarkably fragmented and inaccessible, even by the standards of that variegated region. We have a limited number of country monographs. But no systematic overview of Southeast Asian political or economic history has been attempted for all, or even part, of the period between the waning of the classical states in the fourteenth century and the onset of high colonialism in the early nineteenth. Scholarly surveys, like the magisterial and still standard magnum opus of D. G. E. Hall, make discretion the better part of valor by providing separate country chapters without integrative theme or comment.

The nature of the pre-colonial Indian state, especially as one could see it in similarity or opposition to the state in Europe, has exercised a particular fascination since the seventeenth century, when François Bernier spelled out his theory about Oriental monarchies, with special reference to the Mughal Empire and Turkey. It may be recalled that he saw eastern states different from the European in two major particulars: (1) The king here was the owner of the soil, in other words, the exactor of rent; and (2) those who actually collected the tax-rent held only temporary tenures, as holders of jagirs or timars, unlike the hereditary European lords. The temporary tenures, which were a necessary reflex of state ownership of land led to over-exploitation of the peasantry, and, therefore, a progressive decline of the economy and polity. This was in contrast to Western Europe, where the limitation of state right of sovereignty and the dominance of private property over the land, under its protection, were the surest means to progress and prosperity. Already in Bernier we have the articulation of the contrast between the Oriental despotic state and the occidental laissez faire state.

It is a commonplace in modern Chinese history that the twin-concept of t'i–yung espoused a doctrine of cultural conservatism in late-Ch'ing China. Briefly, the dichotomy is seen as a call to preserve the ‘substance’ (t'i) of the Chinese cultural tradition by adopting the ‘function’ (yung) of Western technology, or simply, to strengthen Confucian China by implementing Western-inspired reforms; hence, the famous slogan, ‘Chinese learning for fundamental principles and Western learning for practical application’ (Chung-hsueh wei-t'i Hsi-hsueh weiyung). Both the slogan and the position it reflects have long come under criticism. An early, influential critic was Yen Fu, the well-known interpreter of Social Darwinism in late-Ch'ing China. In 1902, in a published open letter to the editor of Wai-chiao pao (Foreign affairs magazine), Yen expanded on an earlier view of a contemporary schlar, Ch'iu T'ing-liang, that the notion of t'i-yung, when properly applied, refers to the two complementary aspects of a single entity and not to attributes from two different juxtaposed objects. To drive home his point, Yen cites an analogy. An ox as t'i has its yung, which is to carry heavy loads, whereas a horse as t'i has its yung, which is to go long distances. Now the attempt to combine a t'i with an extraneous yung is like ascribing a horse's function to an ox's body, or vice versa, and the result could only be a bizarre mismatch, an affront to nature's purposes.

In this paper an attempt is made to outline the basic structure of taxes on trade and commerce at the Mughal port of Surat during the seventeenth century. This is explored chiefly from documents relating to the English East India Company. By the very nature of the Company being a foreign corporate body, it did not represent a typical ‘peddling’ tax-payer. But the system in so far as the ordinary merchants were concerned, can be restored for us indirectly by considering how far the Company was favoured in taxation matters. We may also reconsider the common view that the English enjoyed ‘invidious trading privileges’ by virtue of the orders of the imperial court, and that it was their privileges that explain their ultimate success in India.

Most contemporary scholars involved in economic development research think that the government should be playing an important role in the technology transfer being carried out in developing countries. However, during the end of the Ch'ing Dynasty no plan for large-scale technology transfer was made owing to financial difficulties, and railways were the only enterprise which proceeded at a constant rate. At the end of the Ch'ing Dynasty railways, in the eyes of government officials and the gentry, would widely promote the development of various sectors as well as benefit the national defense to help reach the objective of making China strong and wealthy. After more than half a century of development railway construction made considerable progress in China, and according to statistics in 1933 a total mileage of more than 10,000 kilometers covering 19 provinces had been constructed. Assets reached $860 million yuan and liabilities were more than 1.2 billion. Although still a very minor operation compared to other industrialized countries, this was the largest enterprise in modern China, transporting 45 million passengers and 27 kilotons of cargo annually, employing 120,000 people. Operating income reached $148 million yuan and output, $160 million yuan.

Political rituals can be seen as non-verbal expressions of an existing or desired political reality. Whether ritual is defined with the emphasis on the cremonial aspect (Tennekens), with attention to emotional meaning (Lukes) or with regard to repetitions (Kertzer), all definitions stress this symbolic function. Rituals are about the expression of a wish or a fact in symbolic form, in other words they refer to another reality behind the directly observable. Rituals are a form of communication about deeper values, norms and relationships. Political rituals thus convery messages about political relationships and the configurations and exercise of power.

Kingsley Martin's critique of imperialism was born out of socialist rationalism and long overseas lecture tours. But in Leonard Woolf, his friend and periodic replacement at the offices of the New Statesman, we have a confidant who had, for several years before 1914, abandoned the rarefied circles of Bloomsbury, to become a civil administrator in Ceylon. Woolf's experience of colonial government had soured him from the beginning. He came to feel that the British were eternally shut out from knowledge of the lives of the Ceylonese subjects by an almost palpable curtain of ignorance and racial prejudice. Those temples of accumulated colonial knowledge, the district offices where he worked, were ‘great monuments of official incompetence, bottlenecks of delay’. When he tried to galvanize into action these places of sacred lore, the squeals of rage, from Briton and Ceylonese alike, were louder than if he had trespassed into the holiest Buddhist shrine. Yet, for all that, Woolf remained a devout believer in the individualist myth that sustained colonial rule: the ideal of the lone colonial officer and sage, standing at the centre of a web of untainted knowledge, the man who ‘knows the country’.British rule might be saved from damnation if liberal judgement were based on pure information. The problem was that, at some level, information hadto come from a ‘native informant’, an agent, a spy, an ‘approver’ who turned King's Evidence, and, by their very nature, such agencies could not be trusted.

The JVP (Janatha Vikmuthi Peramuna—the People's Liberation Front) first came to the attention of the world outside Sri Lanka when it launched an abortive insurrection in 1971. In 1987, the JVP made another bid to come to power by force of arms. The insurrection of 1987–1989 was better-prepared and more deeply-rooted than that of 1971; the human costs and societal consequences of its extirpation were correspondingly greater. Although the JVP came close to achieving state power both in late 1988 and mid-1989, it was thereafter destroyed very rapidly.

Lord Curzon was the imperial gatekeeper who opened the way to parliamentary government in India by composing Edwin Montagu's declaration of 20 August 1917. He defined British policy as ‘the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’. Curzon himself acknowledged his authorship in an endorsement on his own printed copy of the declaration. On the eve of the War Cabinet's agreement to the declaration he included his proposed key words in a letter to Montagu, a document strangely overlooked in all of the many accounts of the matter. The only Cabinet departure from Curzon's key words was the substitution of ‘progressive’ for ‘fuller’. Montagu questioned the latter term and Curzon proposed the former. There was nothing impromptu about the drafting. For months variations on it had been floated in correspondence between the authorities in India and London. The use and meaning of ‘self-government’ had been widely canvassed. It is generally understood that ‘responsible government’ went beyond ‘self-government’, for in constitutional parlance it must mean a parliamentary system (with a responsible executive), whereas ‘self-government’ might be achievable in non-Westminster forms. The justification for dyarchy, the essence of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, lay in its apparent satisfaction of the declaration's espousal of the principle of responsiblity.

The Japanese Twenty-one Demands toward the Chinese government headed by Yuan Shih-k'ai in 1915 marked a milestone in Sino-Japanese relations as well as in the Chinese response to imperialism. Yet studies on the event, particularly on its consequence and influence in China, are still insufficient. Studies by Chinese scholars have not gone far beyond Wang Yun-sheng's publication of collected materials more than fifty years ago. The only book-length study on the event is the first volume of Li Yu-shu's study, published in Taiwan. This last does not even cover the whole period of Sino-Japanese negotiations. His second volume has not yet appeared. Li's contribution is that he has made use of more Japanese documents than Wang. In mainland China, the most current study on the event is a chapter on the Demands in the first volume of the work by Li Hsin and Li Tsung-i. This chapter is based primarily on the works of Wang and Li Yu-shu. Compared with Japanese studies on other landmarks of Sino-Japanese relations, the coverage of this episode is rather thin. There is only one book-length study, published in 1958. As for works in English, Madeleine Chi's book has a chapter dealing with the Sino-Japanese negotiations. Two general works examine the event from a broader perspective.

The persistence and yet transformation of the office of akhbār nawīs (‘newswriter’) reflected fundamental aspects of the transition from the Mughal to the British Empires. The Mughals appointed akhbār nawīs to collect and transmit specific kinds of information. This office continued, albeit with new functions, through the decentralizing of political power that characterized eighteenth-century South Asia. The expansion fo hte English East India Company meant constant change in the essential nature of political relations, changes mirrored in this office. Indeed, the Company, and its political Residents, subordinated and redefined this office. Under the British Raj, the concept ‘akhbār nawīs’ stood transformed, like the nature of the information it conveyed.

Between 1943 and 1945, 1,500 Indian women in Burma, Malaya and Singapore exchanged their colorful saris for the khakis, breeches, half caps and boots of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, the all-female brigade of the Indian National Army (INA). Under the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, members of the moneyed elite and the daughters of rubber plantation laborers shared the same food and fate to fight a jungle war for India's freedom.

In his historical defence of the record of the East India Company in India Kaye headed his chapter on thuggee with the following summary of contents: ‘Thuggee—Increased knowledge of the Habits of the People—Its Results’. It was with the flourish of mystery unveiled and mastered that a group of officers of the Political Department had lobbied for special operations against this ‘murderous fraternity’ and for special laws to deal with it.

Bengal textiles enjoyed a unique place and an indisputable supremacy in the world market for centuries before the invasion of the machinmade fabrics in the early nineteenth century following the industrial revolution of the West and Political control of the Indian sub-continent by the English East India Company. It need not be emphasized that the products of the Bengal handloom industry reigned supreme all over the accessible Asian and North African markets in the middle ages, and later became one of the major staples of the export trade of the European Companies. Most travellers from Europe starting with Tomé Pires, Varthema and Barbosa in the sixteenth century to Bernier, Tavernier and others in the seventeenth singled out especially textiles of Bengal for comments on their extraordinary quality and exquisite beauty. But it was not only in the field of high qulity cloth that Bengal had a predominant position; it was also the main Production centre of ordinary and medium quality textiles. Long before the advent of the Europeans, the Asian merchants from different parts of the continent and Indian merchants from various regions of the country derived a lucrative trade in Bengal textiles.

Modern Kerala presents us with a paradox: the state, best known to the outside world for its association with communism, is also where communalism has, arguably, found its most complex political expression. This raises tantalizing questions about the part considerations of class and community have played in the evolution of state politics. The aim of this paper is shed light on a little explored aspect of the background to the Kerala conundrum—the way in which politicians before independence mobilized communal support in elections.

The present paper seeks ‘to explore the nature of Indian secularism, the difficulties it has run into, and the ways in which it may be revised’. This is a large undertaking for a short text, originally written as public lecture, particularly because the issues posed do nopt readily translate into plain questions. The most that I can hope to do is to raise some doubts and make a few suggestions for rethinking the issues involved.

I came upon this passage in Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1927: 1: 1: 19) after having spent a year in the provincial town of Janakpur, documenting the Maithili language of northern Bihar and southeastern Nepal. Many local people encouraged and assisted me in my research, but all told me in good faith that I had come to the wrong place. I should have gone twenty miles to the southeast, where the ‘authentic’ language is spoken. It seems that I had not been alone in having been urged by informants and well-wishers to go somewhere else: either in pursuit of languages that do not exist or being redirected down the road to where the language is really spoken. Unfortunately visa problems prevented me from taking up the advice of friends, yet a cursory reading of the literature on regional and social dialectology would have been enough to turn anyone into a skeptic about what one might have been gained from such a journey. Subjective dialect boundaries do not often register on maps of isoglosses, and the objective methods of linguists usually reveal local perceptions of speech behaviour to be based on stereotypes.

Elsewhere in this number, Sushil Chaudhury has provided a critique of a part of Chapter VIII of my book The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal 1630–1720 (Princeton University Press, 1985). An earlier version of this part of the chapter had appeared as ‘Bullion for Goods: European Trade and the Economy of Early Eighteenth Century Bengal’ in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 1976. Chaudhury is worried about the bad influence I have had on fellow researchers such as Michael Twomey who have found it useful to follow in their own work the methodology that I had developed. Chaudhury is even more concerned about the use of my work and of the conclusions I had arrived at by fellow scholars such as Peter Marshall, Niels Steensgaard and John Richards.

Historians have generally explained the consolidation of Company power in terms of the superior fiscal base which it came to acquire in north India. Bayly argues that in the eighteenth century the ‘commercialisation of royal power’, begun under the Mughals, extended to meet the needs of military organization and growing bureaucratizationof the numerous small polities that succeeded the Mughals. He argues that in this perio Indian merchant capital was redeployed in the search for greater control over labour productivity through control over revenue collections of all sorts; and the unified merchant class met in the new qasbahs and the small permanent markets (ganjs) attached to them. It was here that theinfrastructure for Europea trade in, and ultimate dominion over, India was constructed.1 The efficiency and wide scale on which the Company could exercise and extend the pre-colonial practice of military fiscalism2 has provided another explanation for the dominant position it came to occupy more specifically, in south India.3 Yang highlights the role ofthe Indian elite in facilitating the Company's revenue collection and thereby contributin to its political dominance and stability in the Saran district of Bihar. He constructs a model of'limited Raj', to explain the a free flow of revenue. He analyses the dynamics ofthis 'limited Raj' by explaining its functioning at the lowest level where the power of the colonial state tapered off and the landholders' system of control took over. Yang argues that these two control systems collectively sustained British rule in the region.4 More recently the Company's superior power in north Indian politics has been explained in terms of its exclusive right to violence. R. Mukherjee, analysing the 1857 mutiny, arguesthat 'British rule in India, as an autocracy, had meti meticulously constructed a monopoly of violence. The revolt of 1857 shatteredthat monopoly by matching an official, alien violence by an indigenous violence of the colonised