To the South Asianist India appears unique in the modern world. A country characterized by vast poverty and widespread illiteracy, it nevertheless has managed to maintain the civil liberties and democratic politics bequeathed to it by an enlightened colonial power. In spite of a two-year long hiatus of ‘Emergency Rule,’ few third world countries can make such a proud claim. Of those that can, such as Sri Lanka, none have the extraordinary size or social complexity of India.

Three great Durbars, royal assemblages, were staged in Delhi by the Government of British India, in 1877, 1903, and 1911. These are particularly interesting as examples of explicitly political rituals, their purpose being to legitimate and popularize British rule in India. The rituals would therefore exemplify, for many social theorists, a form of political manipulation which employs symbolic action as an adjunct to raw force. Yet, while many anthropologists, at least, would reject, in favor of an analysis which addresses the political aspirations of ritual manipulators, any unreconstructed Durkheimian paradigm that would equate ritual acts with social consensus (Moore and Myerhoff, 1975:9), many would also reject, as Tambiah has, the notion that ritual, by nature, constitutes a ‘diabolical smokescreen.’ The more useful approach, in Tambiah's view, is that ritual is ‘an ideological and aesthetic social construction that is directly and recursively implicated in the expression, realization, and exercise of power.’ (Tambiah, 1979: 153)1 shall be working with a similar theoretical point of view and not, largely, with the opposed view that the ritual form is merely a strategy employed by manipulative agents to perpetuate, in Bloch's words, an ‘institutionalized hierarchy’ or ‘legitimate order of inequality.’ (Bloch, 1977:289)

In recent studies of warlordism, one source has not, to my knowledge, been used. This is the collection of reports of the Sino-foreign salt inspectorate held in the Toyo Bunko. Of all the institutions of the China coast, the salt inspectorate, its offices deep in the interior, its revenues a magnet for predatory armies, was perhaps in closest touch with warlordism. This paper studies the relationship of salt and warlordism in Szechwan between 1914 and 1922. Szechwan in this period has been selected for 3 reasons. First, the reports from the inspectorates of Ch'uan-nan and Ch'uan-pei, which together covered not only Szechwan but also Yunnan, Kweichow and Hupei as supplied by its salt, are unusually informative on politics. Second, between 1914 and 1922, Szechwan, a border province both northern and southern or neither, ran a full gamut of warlordism: regional, provincial, subprovincial and stabilized. It also attracted the attention of ‘guest armies’ from outside. Third, 1914–1922 has coherence; 1914 saw Yüan Shih-k'ai ascendant and the inspectorate established in Szechwan; 1922 saw Yüan's legatee Hsü Shih-ch'ang descendant, and Liu Hsiang, the embodiment of stabilized warlordism in Szechwan, ascendant.

This paper explores the goals, nature and results of government interventions into the rice and palm oil markets of Malyasia since independence. Its purpose is to compare the relatively successful way in which the government has promoted the palm oil industry with the failure of interventions in the rice market. The historical comparison of public efforts in these two industries points up the importance of setting consistent goals, of encouraging crops which match the natural resource endowment of the country, of having a private sector which is capable of responding to production incentives, and of letting supply and demand determine prices when designing a strategy of market intervention. Above all, it is important to distinguish programs of intervention based primarily on efficiency criteria from those which seek to perform social welfare (e.g. income support) and political (e.g. food security) functions as well.

There are two lemons in the larder of Modern China's history. Stalin's, dating from April 1927, is certainly the better known:

Chiang Kaishek is submitting to discipline. The Kuomintang is a bloc, a sort of revolutionary parliament, with the Right, the Left and the Communists. Why make a coup d'etat? Why drive away the Right when we have the majority and the Right listens to us?… Also, they have connections with the rich merchants and can raise money from them. So they have to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then flung away.

In April of 1868, the Restoration government issued an anti-Christian proscription—‘a fixed law for all ages’ it was styled. Christianity was declared a pernicious sect; rewards were offered for information leading to the discovery of Christians. In the name of the proscription, the government carried out a persecution which, in the first four years of the new era, resulted in the deaths of as many as 500 native Christians. These men, women and children died from torture, starvation or from sickness induced by the conditions in which they were kept. The native Christians were, of course, from the recently discovered hidden Christian communities around Nagasaki. The Nagasaki Christian affair is a fascinating one to which I shall return, but I mention it at the outset since it serves usefully to stress the climate of the times as far as Christianity was concerned. Given this climate, it is remarkable that there emerged by 1871, or thereabouts, a small number of enlightened intellectuals who criticized government policy on Christianity and went so far as to advocate religious freedom. The most famous of the few were Mori Arinori, Nakamura Keiu, Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nishi Amane—names known to anyone familiar with early Meiji intellectual history. There is, however, one other name that needs to be added to this short list. That is Fukuba Bisei. The little known Fukuba Bisei was, perhaps, the most remarkable of these men since he was an early Meiji Shintoist.

Is there a positive symbiosis between the liberal economy and the liberal polity? From the time the question became meaningful, mainstream Western social theory and doctrine has tended to give a positive answer. It has generally been possible convincingly to argue an intrinsic causal connection between the dispersal of economic (and thus political) power inherent in the competitive market economy and the pluralism which is central to all definitions of the liberal polity. At a ‘broad-brush’ level the historical evidence is supportive. There is a strong empirical association between liberal democracy and (successful) capitalist market systems. While there are a number of quite plausible arguments indicating some potential deep and long-term causal connections between capitalism/the market economy and political unfreedom, the balance of long term historical evidence appears to support orthodoxy.

Imagine you are in a dark and lofty interior. All around you can dimly see huge racks piled high with cloth bundles—blue, red, green and white. In the middle of the space a rickety ladder leads up to another level also filled with racks and bundles, over and above which rises another ladder and another level. If you decide to move you must step carefully between piles of old papers strewn across the floor and, perhaps, small channels of water. If you try to grasp hold of one of the coloured bundles to see what it contains you will be assailed by clouds of gritty dust that catch at your eyes and throat and may even force you to retire quickly from that dark and inhospitable place. Is this a dacoits' hideout or perhaps the cave of Ali Baba? No—as you've certainly guessed by now—it is or could be almost any district record room anywhere in Pakistan.

In July 1983 communal violence in the southern towns of Sri Lanka left between 300 and 3,000 people dead, nearly all of them members of the minority Tamil population. While such a disturbing manifestation of social pathology would seem to demand a response from concerned social scientists, there are special difficulties in confronting such events. Dominant trends in the historical study of popular disturbance, for example the concern to recover the rationality and dignity of participants in food riots (Thompson 1971), or the current interest in manifestations of ‘resistance’, may look altogether inappropriate in this context. Explanation can all too often look like apologetic, and this may explain why much of the existing writing on communal violence in South Asia deals with virtually everything except the violence itself. One recent study in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer's Legends of People, Myths of State (Kapferer 1988), has recently tackled this question head on, arguing that there is a clear link between collective violence in Sri Lanka and what the author describes as a ‘logic of being in the world’, or ‘ontology’ to be found in everyday Sinhala life. While Kapferer has earned our gratitude for even raising the issue of the connection between collective violence and everyday life, his specific argument, as I shall show below, is based on a limited reading of the available evidence.

In recent years, China has adopted new strategies for economic development. These strategies seek increased productivity and effectiveness in the use of resources. Spatially regions specialize in the lines of production for which they have comparative advantages. And the coastal areas are experiencing an accelerated economic growth. The policy, however, operates under various constraints. First, the material base for development is a finite one and resources are very unevenly distributed across the landscape. Second, this development strategy depends to a certain extent on a substantial increase in China's foreign trade. As a result important investments are conceded to the transport sector. In the present context, is this strategy optimizing the use of available resources? The answer which is tentatively accepted here as a working hypothesis rests on the contradictory aspect of the concept of accessibility. Essentially all systems of transport and their networks generate territorial contradictions; and the resolution of these contradictions points to the direction of territorial development. The present analysis will focus on the geographic environment of China as a determining factor in the establishment of transport networks, followed by the history and performance of China's transport system within the confines of this paradigm. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, toexplore the role of transportation in territorial development, and second, to understand that transport systems do not solely reflect the physical conditions of a territory as an objective reality but also political ideologies which are forged to a certain extent by this reality.