A study of the impact of the 1930s World Depression on Southwest China intersects with two major controversies in modern Chinese economic history. First, there is still substantial disagreement over the severity of the impact of the Depression on China. The ‘traditional’ interpretation inside China has focused on the ‘bankruptcy’ of the economy in the 1930s (of which the Depression was one but not the only cause). While many aspects of the ‘bankruptcy’ and ‘stagnation’ theses have more recently been discarded or modified by Chinese scholars, recognition is still made of the gravity of the crisis of the 1930s: China's leading historian of its modern economy, Wu Chengming, writes in the third volume of the History of Chinese Capitalism: ‘The economic crisis of 1932–1935 was, with the exception of the wars of invasion launched by foreign countries, the single most severe blow to the Chinese economy’.

Pursued over the last two years of the Pacific war, the Free French effort to organize and direct an effective resistance to the Japanese occupation of Indo-China ended in military failure. Characterized by administrative complexity, inadequate supplies and attenuated communications, Gaullist insurgency was marred by Free France's de facto reliance upon Admiral Louis Mountbatten's South East Asia Command (SEAC). While the re-conquest of Malaya and Burma remained incomplete, British backing for a resistance network in Indo-China was bound to be limited. And as British interest in the final re-conquest of their own territories climaxed in the spring and summer of 1945, so material provision for the French in Indo-China inevitably declined. Although Mountbatten consistently supported his Free French protégés, Churchill, in particular, was reluctant to take issue with his American allies. Neither the US government nor American commanders in China and the Pacific supported Free French methods and objectives. By 1945, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), dedicated to supporting guerrilla warfare and resistance organization, and the Office of War Information (OWI), which disseminated US propaganda, were developing independent contacts inside northern Indo-China. As a result, the OSS increasingly endorsed the one truly effective resistance movement: Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh coalition.

By the grace of the Almighty an extraordinary species of sentient life has been found on earth in the nineteenth century: they are known as modern Bengalis. After careful analysis zoological experts have found that this species displays the external bodily features of homo sapiens. They have five fingers on their hands and feet; they have no tails; and their bones and cranial structures are indeed similar to the human species. However as yet there is no comparable unanimity about their inner nature. Some believe that in their inner nature too they are similar to humans; others think that they are only externally human; in their inner nature they are in fact beasts.

Which side do we support in this controversy? We believe in the theory which asserts the bestiality of Bengalis. We learnt this theory from English newspapers. According to some redbearded savants, just as the creator had taken atoms of beauty from all beautiful things to make Tilottama, in exactly the same way, by taking atoms of bestiality from all animals he has created the extraordinary character of the modern Bengali. Slyness from the fox, sycophancy and supplication from the dog, cowardliness from sheep, imitativeness from the ape and volubility from the ass—by a combination of these qualities He has made the modern Bengali rise in the firmament of history: a presence which illuminates the horizon, the centre of all of India's hopes and future prospects, and the great favourite of the savant Max Mueller.

The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal states each in its own way reconstituted a common legacy of combined Perso-Islamic and Turco-Mongolian religious and political elements into sociopolitical structures that exhibit remarkable similarities alongside significant differences. This, as well as the myriad ways in which they interacted, culturally, politically, as well as economically, renders these three states more than simply a series of discreet and self-contained political entities. Premodern and early modern west and south Asia is most productively approached and analyzed as an interactive continuum.

At the beginning of July 1997 Thailand was forced to allow the baht to fall 20% against the $US, triggering a financial crisis across Asia. This crisis toppled governments in the region and sent out a series of shock waves that threatened prosperity in the rest of the world. The main symptom of the crisis was a profound distrust in the currencies of developing countries in Asia which precipitated repeated devaluations in the ‘miracle’ economies of Indonesia, South Korea and Malaysia. One of the results of the Asian financial crisis is renewed interest in the monetary relations of the region, and in the mechanics of the transmission of currency instability between countries.

Dr Kaiser Haq gives his fine new English translation of Tagore's novella Chaturanga the title ‘Quartet’. This elegantly preserves much of the meaning of the Bengali title, for not only does it imply the ‘four limbs’ or ‘four parts’ that make up the novella—the four chapters that were originally published separately in consecutive issues of Sabujpatra (November–February, 1915–16)—but also, as in a string quartet, the interplay between the four characters that the chapters are named after. Since Tagore was always alert to the full meaning or etymology of names, perhaps we should also remember that a chaturanga in epic India was a complete army comprising elephants, chariots, cavalry and infantry. This matches the grandeur of the novella, the vigour and precision of its prose, and the moral and spiritual battles that are its subject. Finally, chaturanga as a name for a chess game (technically a four-player version of the game) evokes both the intellectualism of the book and its concentrated passion.

In the late nineteenth century the Japanese embarked upon a swift ideological transition that enabled them to accept a considerable influx of Western ideas and systems. A key to their successful adoption of the values of ostensibly different cultures has often been attributed by observers of Japan to the receptivity and adaptability of the Japanese to new, alien elements. Yet, the receptivity of the Japanese to alien elements as the key is inherently connected to their recognition of affinities found in different cultures. Valuable insights on the process of Meiji acculturation will be gathered from a case study based on the examination of the early years of the Sapporo Agricultural College, established to accelerate modernization, and the impact on the students of the values inculcated by the New Englander staff. A study of their interaction suggests that it was the affinities the Japanese found between Japanese syncretic, revisionist, thought development and values of different cultures that formed the foundation for successful assimilation of elements of Western culture, a process that also helped the Japanese to reinvestigate and remould their own cultural tradition.

The poet known to the Hindi literary world as ‘Bachchan’ was born as ‘Harivansh Rai’ in 1907 to an Allahabad Kāyasth family. His given name derived from a prescribed recitation of the Harivamśa Purāna that had broken his parents' much-lamented childlessness; the pandit's honorarium for the recitation was 1001 rupees, paid off in monthly instalments over the first ten years of the boy's childhood. The roman spelling of the name varies, the Sanskritic ‘Harivansh’ standing in contrast to the form ‘Harbans’ with which the author's Ph.D. thesis is signed. Such a distinction is not without significance, for underlying the author's cosmopolitan exterior lies an intimately provincial Allahabadi character more fully caught by the ‘Harbans’ spelling than its somehow sanitized, all-India tatsama equivalent. It is a feature that one longs in vain to recapture in English translation many a time, for example to resonate with the semi-tatsama phrase pūrab-pacchim, for ‘East and West’, so much more redolent of the vernacular scene than its Sanskritic parent pūrva-paścim. But in English, East is ‘East’ and West is ‘West’.

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant to inveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).

If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history of literature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of literary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yet literary histories are a rich source for understanding local conceptions of both history and literature. More accessible than archaeology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturally constructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the light of contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, the focus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence to be advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities, language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were all asserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India. Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

This article examines the dissemination of military propaganda and the operation of censorship structures within the Indian Army ‘units’—a term used in historically contemporary documentary sources to denote regiments, divisions or battalions—serving in the eastern provinces of the subcontinent during the Second World War. Instead of presenting propaganda as merely being misleading information, this work operates with Philip Taylor's interpretation of it being a combination of ‘facts, fiction, argument or suggestion’, and concentrates instead on unravelling its form and the intent behind its deployment. Moreover, the often artificial distinction between ‘propaganda’ and ‘counter-propaganda’ is avoided, since the many wartime British public relations projects in South Asia that were aimed at contradicting particular enemy claims were very frequently represented as having other concerns. Particular attention is devoted to describing the military's attitudes towards policies of propaganda and information between 1942 and 1945, as these years saw Eastern India, defined in wartime official documents as being comprised of Assam, Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, the eastern districts of the United Provinces and the sparsely populated frontier areas bordering Burma, develop into an important base of operations against the Japanese armies located in Southeast Asia.