This paper traces aspects of the evangelical encounter in Chhattisgarh, a large region bound through linguistic ties in Central India. Evangelical missionaries, bearing the Cross and signs of civilization, arrived in Chhattisgarh in the 1860s. Oscar Lohr, the pioneer missionary of the German Evangelical Mission Society, chanced upon a group of heathens, the Satnamis, whose faith enjoined them to believe in one god and to reject idolatory and caste. Was this not the hand of ‘divine providence’? The missionary, it seemed, had only to reveal the evangelical ‘truth’ to the Satnamis before they would en masse‘witness’ and be redeemed by Christ-the-Saviour. The group did not see the coming of the millennium. It did not go forward to meet its destiny. The missionaries persevered. The halting enterprise of conversion in the region grew primarily through ties of kinship among indigenous groups and the prospects of a better life under the paternalist economy of mission stations.

Japan's departure from the League of Nations in 1933 over the Manchurian issue has often been portrayed as an act of national self assertiveness signifying a willingness to defy international opinion and pursue an independent course in world affairs. The physical act by Matsuoka Yosuke and his delegation of walking out of the League Assembly on 24 February promotes an image of a firm and uncompromising attitude on the part of Japan; and as time passed, the interpretation recorded in 1944 by Joseph Grew, US Ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1942, became a standard one: ‘Nobody could miss the political significance of Japan's decision to quit the League of Nations. It marked a clear break with the Western powers and prepared the way for Japan's later adherence to the Axis’.

After a decade in which the social science research environment in China has improved dramatically, a detailed mass of information is now becoming available on the impact of the changing economy on the social structure of the rural areas. Generalizations based on secondary sources and interviews with migrants to Hong Kong have given way to detailed case studies based on longer-term fieldwork. Much of this has so far centred in Guandong Province, fanning out to Sichuan, Shandong and even as far north as Hebei and Liaoning. The picture which is emerging is one of quite considerable local variation. As Whyte and Harrell have recently suggested, the changes over large parts of the country remain unmapped, and what we need is more case studies to fill in the gaps (Whyte, 1992; Harrell, 1992).

In 1920, Sikhs in the Punjab started a campaign aimed at freeing their principal gurdwaras (temples) from the control of their hereditary incumbents. The campaign quickly gathered momentum, and, within a few months, it developed into a non-violent anti-government movement. Unlike the rather shortlived 1919 Disturbances and the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement in the Punjab, the Sikh agitation, which came to be known as the Akali movement, did not cease until 1925 and caused considerable concern to the Punjab authorities, as well as the Government of India. The Akali movement was not limited, as in past cases of anti-British agitation involving the Sikhs, to small groups of disaffected Sikhs, returned emigrants, or Congress sympathizers; at its height in 1922, the unrest encompassed the bulk of central Punjab's Jat Sikh peasantry, one of the most militarized sections of Punjabi society. The Sikh community's martial traditions, fostered by their religious doctrines and culture, had been kept alive during British rule by the recruitment policies of the Indian Army, where, in 1920, one in every fourteen adult male Sikhs in the Punjab was in service. This meant that the abiding allegiance of the Sikh community to the Raj was a matter of considerable importance, and their estrangement, especially that of the Jat Sikh peasantry, would adversely affect the Sikh regiments of the Indian Army. It also meant that if the community as a whole was provoked into open rebellion, British hold on the Punjab could well nigh prove untenable.

Despite the attention that has been given to the role of economic sanctions in Japan's decision to launch the Pacific war, Australia's decision to ban iron ore exports to Japan has been given little attention, even though this was one of the earliest economic sanctions imposed onimperial Japan in the 1930s. To a degree this neglect can be traced to a preoccupation with the actions and objectives of the great powers and a failure to consider the opportunities available to small nations to take significant initiatives. The following article traces the origins of the iron ore embargo back to 1934 when Essington Lewis, the Managing Director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Ltd (BHP), Australia's iron and steel monopoly, visited Japan and subsequently advocated the development of an Australian armaments industry to counter probable Japanese aggression in the Pacific. In Japan Lewis crossed paths with J. G. Latham, the Minister for External Affairs, who was leading the Australian government's Eastern Mission. Latham returned to Australia with conclusions that differed fundamentally from those of Lewis, who came up with a plan to take advantage of Japan's dependence on imports of iron ore and other iron products to finance investment in Australian armaments manufacturing. In explaining this outcome the article discusses interactions between a number of conflicts: between Latham and Lewis; between the British Treasury and the Foreign Office; and between the Japanese army and navy. In London the Treasury wanted to focus on the European theatre, while also holding down military spending in order to achieve balanced budgets. The Treasury believed that the way to best defend British commercial interests in Asia was to appease Japan. On the other hand, the Foreign Office was committed to the protection of British interests in the Far East by a more forceful diplomacy, although it was only willing to counten-ance behavior short of military action. Consistent with Latham's recommendations to his government, the emerging consensus in London was that while a settlement in China would help to safeguard British interests there, as long as the Japanese were bound up in their war in China they were less likely to attack British colonies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In 1936 this orientation was challenged by a shift in the balance of power in Tokyo away from the army and in favor of the navy. Although priority continued to be placed on winning the war in China and guarding against an attack from the Soviet Union, now the navy's plan for southward expansion was given more careful consideration and credibility.

Much has been written and published about Christianity in China, less has been known about the particular interest that the Mission had evinced toward the Muslims of China, much less has been recorded about the Muslim reactions to this activity, and almost nothing has been concluded in terms of the dialectical interaction between Christianity and Islam in that part of the world.

It is almost common knowledge by now, thanks to the penetrating research by several scholars in the field, that Bengal silk was an important commodity in international trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the general assumption so far has been that it was the Europeans rather than the Asians who played the major role in the export of raw silk from Bengal.As a corollary to thi and taking into consideration the dominant position of the European Companies in Bengal textile trade, historians have maintained even in recent studies that around the mid-eighteenth century, European trade was the most important factor in Bengal's commercial economy. 1 There is no denying the fact that the Companies were the most dominant factor in Bengal's seaborne trade but that does not necessarily imply that they were far ahead of Asians in Bengal's export trade as a whole. For the above does not take into account Bengal's export trade by overland routes which had always been extremely significant. It is generally assumed that with the fall of the great empires–Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman–and the consequent decline of ports like Surat, the overland trade was doomed. The reason for this sort of assumption, it seems, was mainly the lack of data regarding India's overland trade compared to the abundance of quantitative material in the Company archives on European exports from Bengal. It is also possible that the fascination of the sea and preoccupation with the European market, as also the nature of the surviving evidence, have obscured the significance of the traditional and continuing trade through the overland route from India. Moreland thought that India's overland trade in the seventeenth century was of small importance and that the important development took place at sea.2

During an evening's conversation in September of 1989 in Hyderabad, two educated men: onea retired professor of economics, the other a civil servant whose avocation was lexicography, entered into a spirited and lengthy debate over the proper way of translating ‘fundamentalist’ into Urdu. The lexicographer argued that ‘bunyād-parast (lit: one who loves the basics)’ was the most accurate as it conveyed not only the English meaning, but also the reality of what a fundamentalist Muslim believed. In opposition, the economist held that ‘mullah-yī (lit: like a mullah)’ was culturally more correct. The ‘foundation’ implied by bunyad was not specifically religious. It could apply to the fundamentals of anything: grammar, for example. In addition, he argued that what fundamentalists really did was to dress, act and talk like mullahs. In a sense, both were correct, because each was struggling over the transfer of a notion alien to traditional Islam into the vocabulary of a living language through which Muslims interact.

In the 1950s Hong Kong was the centre of the Southeast Asian gold trade due to its traditional facilities as an entrepot. In the postwar period, however, this trade took place illegally, which distorted the direction of the trade. This article surveys the British attitude to the gold market in the immediate postwar period, using archival records from the British Treasury and the Bank of England. The changing pattern of the gold trade between the major centres of Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand is then described. The gold market offers an almost unique view of the pattern of smuggling trade in the region due to detailed reports in the local press and investigations at the time by the Bank of England.

International trade figures prominently in the economic growth strategies of East and Southeast Asian countries. Despite the economic recession experienced across much of the world since the early 1990s, the pace of economic growth was sustained virtually unabated in the countries of East and Southeast Asia.During the entire decade of the 1980s the East and Southeast Asian economies grew more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the world economy. Along with this growth performance, international trade in the East and Southeast Asian region increased at about twice the rate of Europe and North America. Merchandise exports in East and Southeast Asia increased at an annual average rate of 10% per annum between 1965 and 1989. In 1990 and 1991 aggregate merchandise exports from Asia's Newly Industrializing Economies (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong) grew by 9.0% and 11.4%, while the four ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) developing countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) recorded average increases of 12.9% and 14.3%, respectively.Expanding merchandise exports were accompanied by surging capital inflows and rising investment rates, culminating in accelerated growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) along with a significant reduction in the incidence of poverty.