On 1 January 1862, the British enacted the Indian Penal Code, and within two decades most of India's law was codified. Ironically, England still awaits a criminal code, and the vast majority of English law remains uncodified, in the form of statute or common law. Hindu and Muslim law was rarely included in these Indian law codes, so the entire codification process represented the transplantation of English law to India, complete with lawyers and judges. A modest historiography has investigated the effect codification had on Indian society; or as Marc Galanter theorized, what happened to India's indigenous law as a result of the formation of a modern Indian legal system. However, Galanter's question implicitly assumed that England's legal system was modern. That assumption has resulted in a misleading interpretation of the Indian Penal Code.

This paper is about the small war that ended with the British conquest of Surat castle in 1759. This event brought about the establishment of English paramountcy in Surat, which, in turn, was the first step taken by the English on their way to empire along the Western coast of India. As such, the developments leading to the take-over of Surat castle represent a case study of some importance in the early rise of British power in India and the reasons behind it.

My bangles are broken

my days of shame are gone.

I have one small son, one calf, one field.

A calf to feed, a son to nurture.

but the land, baiji, this half acre of earth

to feed me, to rest my head.

(Malli, a Rajasthani widow I interviewed in 1987)

This paper is woven around two main arguments: One, to ensure effective economic security for widows in India it is necessary to ensure their command over property; and in the context of rural India, the most significant form of property is arable land. Two, we need to see widows not as a category in themselves, but as embodying a stage in most women's life cycle—a stage which is often coterminous with old age. Effective economic security during widowhood would therefore need securing women's property rights prior to the event, not only after it, namely securing their claims as daughters in addition to their claims as widows.

For perhaps a quarter of a century, from the mid-1930s to the year 1960, the Indochinese Communist Party—later the Workers' Party of Vietnam and now the Vietnamese Communist Party—celebrated the anniversary of its foundation on 6 January each year. The thirtieth anniversary (6 January 1960) was given special prominence in Hanoi and was marked by the publication of an official Party history in Vietnamese, French, English and other languages. Then, quite abruptly in September of the same year, the Party's Third National Congress approved a resolution to the effect that in future the anniversary would be commemorated on 3 February, which thereafter was held to be the ‘correct’ date.

The Mughal literary culture has been noted for its notable achievements in poetry and a wide range of prose writings in Persian. In terms of profusion and variety of themes this literary output was also perhaps incomparable. The court's patronage has rightly been suggested as an important reason for this. This patronage, however, was not consistent throughout; much of the detail of its detour thus requires a closer scrutiny. The phenomenal rise of the language defies explanation in the first instance. The Mughals were Chaghtā'i Turks and we know that, unlike them, the other Turkic rulers outside of Iran, such as the Ottomans in Turkey and the Uzbeks in Central Asia, were not so enthusiastic about Persian. Indeed, in India also, Persian did not appear to hold such dominance at the courts of the early Mughals. In his memoir, Bābur (d. 1530), the founder of the Mughal empire in India, recounted the story of his exploits in Turkish. The Prince was a noted poet and writer of Turkish of his time, second only to ‘Alī Sheēr Nawā’ī (d. 1526). Turkish was the first language of his son and successor, Humāyūn (d. 1556), as well.

Contemporary historians imagine reformist activity relating to women in colonial India as a series of public debates scattered across the nineteenth century. Whether such historians discuss sati, widow remarriage, the Rakhmabai case or the Age of Consent controversy, they privilege highly specific vocabularies of contestation, forms of argument and forums of expression. Judicial reformist activity, occurring incrementally within the technical vocabularies of law, tends largely to be disregarded. This disregard is hardly new. Anglo-Indian judges themselves recognized that their reformist activity was shielded from scrutiny when they boasted that ‘judicial decisions have silently promoted the cause of female emancipation and progress.’

Masjid Manzilgah forms a chapter in a biography of Mohammed Ayub Khuhro on which the author is currently working. Khuhro (1901-80) was an important politician of Sind whose political career spanned over fifty years from 1921 to the end of the ‘seventies. He was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council from 1923 till the severance of the connection between Bombay and Sind in 1935 when the latter province attained autonomy under the Government of India Act of 1935. He was in the forefront of the political struggle for the ‘separation’ of Sind and after 1936 became a front-ranking Muslim League leader who helped organize the party in Sind and put it behind the Pakistan movement. Khuhro was the first Premier of Sind after independence and held that office altogether three times. He came into confrontation with Jinnah over the issue of severing Karachi from Sind and became identified as the protagonist of states' rights (or provincial autonomy) and as a champion of politicians' supremacy in the fight against the domination of the bureaucracy which bedevilled Pakistani politics for nearly half a century of its existence. This fight resulted in his repeated enforced exile from the political field depriving Pakistan of one of its most experienced public men during its formative years.

This article uses a biography of banker and economist Paul Bernard to describe the debates that influenced economic policy makers and business circles during the last quarter century of French rule in Indochina. Bernard, from the Great Depression through to his death in 1960, exercised considerable influence on the way French leaders thought about the economy of their Southeast Asian colony and of their overseas territories as a whole. As a financier, he also played a part in its shaping. This article outlines his business activities, especially as managing director of the French and Colonial Finance Company (SFFC), an important colonial finance house, and is to this extent a business history. Bernard, finally, participated in the state planning of the colonial economy during the heyday of French interventionism. From the point of view of his involvement, the article describes the role of the state in colonial economic development. His involvement was both constructive, in the drawing up of Indochina's industrialization plans, and critical, in repeated attacks on what he saw as misguided or irrelevant policy. He did not confine his comments to economic matters, and his criticism of the administration of Indochina may be taken as a running commentary of the final decades of France's colonial engagement in Southeast Asia.

The Naning War, long dismissed by historians as a ‘little war’, was part of a more expansive drama in the history of the Malay world. The war expressed traditional modes of power-broking and opposition, as well as anticipated later political developments in Malaya. From the wider perspective of imperial history, this important but neglected episode of British expansion in the East merits a modern treatment. This article seeks to rectify deficiencies of existing histories of the Naning War by exploring the nature of indirect rule and formal control from the metropolis, and authority and conflict at the ‘periphery’. It sets the war both within the cultural context of Malay warfare, and within the regional context of indigenous resistance and Islamic protest against British incursions.

Peace based on a fallacy is not for the living. The living must and shall demand the truth, for such is the way of nations, and such is the way of man.—Seni Pramoj, speaking at the World Court, March 27, 1962 (Pleadings, 564)

On 15 June 1962, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) pronounced judgment on a dispute between Cambodia, formerly a colony of France, and Thailand, formerly called Siam, a neighboring kingdom which had never been formally colonized. The dispute regarded territorial sovereignty over the area of an ancient Brahmanic temple named Preah Vihear (following the Khmer language of Cambodia) or Phra Viharn (following Thai language). The Temple is perched high on a spur of the Dangrek mountain chain which roughly forms the boundary between both countries. North of the Dangrek lies the Khorat Plateau of Northeast Thailand, while to the south the Temple affords a magnificent view of the forested Cambodian plain below. The judgment was peculiar in that it relied upon absence to startling effect. Applying the principle qui tacet consentire videtur si loqui debuisset ac potuisset (Judgment, 23) [He who keeps silent is held to consent if he must and can speak—ibid., 96], ICJ held that Thailand's failure to protest the inaccuracy of a map purporting to reflect the watershed line between the two states, and thus by the Treaty of 1904 the international boundary between them, constituted tacit acceptance of the map line as the line established by treaty.

When A‘la Hazrat [Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan] was born, his . . . paternal grandfather put him in his lap and said, ‘This [grand]son of mine will be a great ‘ alim’ ...

And one day someone knocked on the door. A‘la Hazrat, who was then ten years old, opened it and saw an elderly holy man (faqir) standing outside. . . . the man put his hand on A‘la Hazrat's head and said, ‘You are a great scholar.’

Six months after [Maulana Mustafa Riza's] birth, Nuri Miyan Sahib [Shah Abu'l Husain Ahmad Nuri] came to Bareilly. Putting his finger into [the child's] mouth, [Nuri Miyan] entered him into [his] chain of spiritual authority, and gave him permission (ijazat) [to have disciples of his own] and investiture as his successor (khilafat), and he predicted that this child would be a great ‘alim in his time as well as a perfect saint (wali).

When Mutfi-e A‘zam-e Hind [Mustafa Riza Khan] was nine years old, his father A‘la Hazrat invited all the famous men and ‘ulama to Bareilly and announced . . . this son of mine is a wali. Learn from him.

This is an essay about a father and a son, who were individually revered as ‘ ulama (scholars) and pirs (spiritual preceptors), whose lives together spanned more than a hundred-year period, between 1856 and 1981. Both were leaders of the reform movement known to its followers as the Ahl-e Sunnat wa Jama‘at (lit., ‘people of the [prophetic] way and the [majority] community’) and to others as the Barelwi movement.

The relations between James Brooke and the various peoples of northwest Borneo have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Nineteenth-century Iban experiences have been analysed extensively and continue to provide the basis for a healthy industry in historical anthropology. Daniel Chew and Craig Lockard examined the development of the Sarawak Chinese community. Sabihah Osman explored Malay political activity during the Brooke period. In contrast, although Bidayuh were the subject of a detailed anthropological survey in the 1950s, political relations between Bidayuh and Rajah Brooke's regime have been largely ignored by scholars.

The story of the ‘opening’ of Korea presents us with a peculiar problem of its own. For, when Westerners arrived on the shores of Korea in the nineteenth century, they found a country that was shielded in the shadow of China. Korea, so it seemed to Westerners, would not open the country without Chinese approval, but China would not interfere in Korea on Western countries' behalf or, at times, even on her own behalf. And both Korea and China professed that they were acting according to the dictates of the traditional relationship which had bound the two countries for many centuries in peace and harmony. To Western observers this traditional Sino-Korean relationship seemed to offer nothing but a diplomatic cul-de-sac. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Western diplomats concluded that this relationship was merely ceremonial and largely dismissed it as having little political consequence.

By writing about the late eighteenth-century revolution which led to the East India Company rule, members of a largely Muslim pre-colonial administrative elite in eastern India sought take control over their own history. They explained the society and ancien régime of India, as well as themselves, to the new British rulers for whom they worked. In so doing, they strove to inform and guide the new British colonial authorities into employing them in the new administration as well as into valuing the cultural mores and bureaucratic experience which they embodied. They also wrote introspectively for the own class, trying to understand the causes of the revolution that had displaced their own traditional rulers and themselves with rule by Europeans and administrations staffed increasingly by Indians with backgrounds different from their own.

Tropical deforestation and the associated economic, ecological, and equity issues have become a matter of general interest and concern for scholars, international conservation and environmental organizations, and local pressure groups. ‘Remote’ outposts like Sarawak (‘Land of the White Rajahs’) have suddenly been thrust into the limelight as conflicts arose between different interest and ethnic groups for allocation of land and rights to utilize forest resources. A review of existing knowledge and data is therefore necessary to set rainforest clearance in Sarawak in a local, national, and international political economy context. This paper looks at the following themes: the historical legacy of ‘commercial’ extraction of forest products; the growth of the timber sector and the development of state forest regulation; and the conflicts of interest for allocation of land and rights to utilize forest resources.

Frontier Wars are but the surf that marks the edge and the advance of the wave of civilization.

—Lord Salisbury, 1892

Like the jellyfish, the absence of a backbone to be broken was the greatest defense of the tribes against the waves of state power which beat upon them.

[Yapp 1983:186]

Introduction

An aphorism occasionally heard today purportedly summarizes the approach the British took to govern the parts of the empire that now constitute Pakistan. Their formula, it says, was ‘Rule the Punjabis, intimidate the Sindhis, buy the Pushtun, and honor the Baloch.’ While doing fieldwork in Quetta, the capital of Pakistani Balochistan and, in recent years the setting for several incidents of serious ethnic conflict, I found that current stereotypes about Baloch and Pushtun held by members of both groups about themselves and each other reflect essentially the same attitudes as those expressed in the aphorism.

This essay is an enquiry into the context, nature, and significance of militant sectarian conflict in Pakistan. The parties to the conflict are the Sunnis, who constitute the majority of Muslims in Pakistan, and the Shi‘a, a small but influential minority. Conflict between these two religious communities has deep roots in the history of Islam and of South Asia. In Pakistan, which aspires to be in some sense an ‘Islamic state’, sectarian conflict is part of, and interacts with, broader issues concerning the place of Islam in public life. This essay seeks to analyse some of factors which have contributed, especially in the past twenty-five years or so, to militant sectarian conflict in Pakistan and to assess the significance of this rather neglected form of Islamic radicalism.

If power is mediated by knowledge, then the early decades of British colonial rule in India were indeed, as Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, the intellectual and historian par excellence of those times wrote, a time of ‘half-knowledge’.The decades between 1757 and 1772 witnessed the implantation of this colonial regime in Eastern India through the transformation of the English East India Company from a mercantilist trading corporation into the paradoxical status of ‘merchant-sovereign and the sovereign merchant’ at the same time. The role of sovereign thrust upon the officials of the company the far from easy task of administering this society in ways that were most conducive to the extraction of the largest possible surplus from it for its new masters.

Contemporary critics argued that counter-insurgency in Malaya represented more than the defeat of militant communism. Britain's campaign against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was seen as resulting from British government collaboration with British capitalists to maintain profits at the expense of the legitimate aspirations of Malayan workers. More recently, it has been argued that the declaration of the emergency in June 1948 was a pre-emptive strike intended to ‘resolve the problem of political control’ and prevent the ‘radical nationalist forces organized around the MCP’ from gaining a nation-wide following. According to this view, government strategy was to ‘manage nationalism’ and ‘control’ decolonization so as to preserve the position of British capital in Malaya. For marxists, the emergency is seen as part of the process of establishing ‘neo-colonialism’. Even for less determinist models, the general complicity between British government and British business in colonial counter-insurgency campaigns is apparently clear. In primary-producing territories like Malaya, the harmony of interests between ‘gentlemanly capitalist’ officials and unofficials (centred on the City of London) ensured that after 1945 ‘coercion tended to be the first resort of policy’. The majority of scholarly output on the emergency has focused on official and guerrilla strategies leaving aside the role of business interests. As a result, the relationship between British business and British government has not been explored in depth. The present article seeks to fill this historiographical gap by reassessing official and commercial interaction in politically disturbed Malaya.

In recent years the issue of human rights in China has been in the international limelight, especially since the Beijing Massacre of 4 June 1989. It is, however, not a new issue in the history of modern and contemporary China. Earlier in the 1970s and 1980s, a movement for Chinese democracy and human rights was launched by dissidents, though with little success. Nor is it widely known that during the first years of the Nationalist rule there was a short-lived Human Rights Group (HRG) made up of a small number of Western-educated intellectuals.