The history of composite religious cultures in India has over recent decades attracted much more consistent attention than the history of syncretic political and intellectual cultures. During the 1970s and 1980s, when the study of pre-colonial India drew greater numbers of scholars than has been the case more recently, a number of historians of the Mughal north concerned themselves with the means by which Akbar and his political allies were able to draw into imperial service a very disparate range of ethnic groups—Irani, Turani, Afghan, Rajput, Indian Muslim, high-caste Hindu scribalists—and to generate for them a new corporate and inclusivist ideology of service to emperor and state. John Richards has described how a powerful dynastic ideology, formulated by Akbar's close friend and servant Abu'l Fazl in his monumental history of the empire the Akbar-Nāma, and given dramatic public expression in the ceremonial of the imperial court, glorified Akbar as the living embodiment of the Empire itself, and focus for the direct personal devotion of the imperial nobility. Stephen Blake has drawn out the importance of patrimonial themes in the techniques which Akbar and his successors devised to maintain the sense of a personal familial bond between the emperor and his servants. Historians of Mughal administration such as M. Athar Ali have explored the ways in which the systematisation of mansab grants and appointments to offices under Akbar provided a common framework within which imperial servants from different backgrounds could seek advancement. With a different emphasis again, Mughal art historians have drawn attention to Akbar's intense interest in the power of images as a means of communicating new understandings of the nature of kingship and its place in the natural and social worlds, particularly through the dazzling illustrations for the Akbar-Nāma produced in Akbar's imperial atelier. S.A.A. Rizvi and Peter Hardy have focussed on the role of Abu'l Fazl in helping to project, through the massive illuminated history of his Akbar-Nāma, a new and more inclusive style of rulership for Akbar, which drew on sufi and medieval ishrāqī theories of the divine illumination of kingship. This presented Akbar as insān-i kāmil, ‘the perfect man’, whose inner virtues of justice, self-control and renunciation of worldly attachments enabled him to attain the divine blessing of sulh-i kull, an attitude of universal concord and toleration.

British expansion in Sri Lanka was halted by the mountains in the centre of the island. The kings of Kandy guarded knowledge about topography and this led in part to the British army's defeat of 1803. Within the Kandyan kingdom, boundary books and verses provide evidence of a vibrant tradition of oral knowledge about the land, linked with piety and history. When the British took control of the interior in 1815 Governor Barnes urged the necessity of a road to Kandy in order to open up the hills. Surveys were vital to this road and surveying was posited as a rational and heroic science. However, the British continued to rely on local knowledge in planning public works; they surveyed ruined tanks in the north-central provinces. British expansion therefore witnessed both competition and cooperation between different orders of knowledge. There were multiple encounters between knowledge, empire and the land.

This article engages with a long critical tradition, particularly amongst historians of India but also more generally within environmental and economic history, which describes the modern West's hubristic scientific domination of Asian environments. Confidence in the universal applicability of scientific knowledge, such critiques argue, justified one-size-fits-all technical schemes being exported across vastly different climates and societies, and landscape and communities reshaped to fit the rational visions of planners and engineers. The article examines the actual procedures of Indian canal engineering, whose protagonists ostensibly portrayed precisely this scientific hubris. It finds that even the most ‘scientific’ canal construction and management, borrowing ideas and procedures from steam engines and astronomy, involved precisely the sorts of local knowledge and social reliability evident in opposing forms of flexible, administrative irrigation management. While these two types of water management attempted literally to engineer two different political economies into India's agrarian landscape, in practice their management styles differed little. Both enlisted social and racial prejudice, rather than scientific knowledge, to defend the administrative superiority and actions of British officials. Instruments for economic governance and administrative control, it argues, thus derived as much from the colonial limits of ‘universal’ European science as from its global applicability.

In September 1950, the Government of West Bengal dispatched 500 Hindu refugee families to the village of Jirat in Hooghly district. It intended to build a camp there permanently to house these refugees, who had fled from East Bengal in the turbulent aftermath of the partition of India. Some forty miles from Calcutta, Jirat was situated on the west bank of the River Hooghly. It had once been a substantial and prosperous village, significant enough to earn a mention in Rennell's Atlas of 1786, where wealthy people built large homes and temples. Indeed the ancestral home of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee—educationist and politician, founder of the Hindu nationalist Jana Sangh party, and ironically, one of the most vociferous champions of the Hindu refugees in Bengal after partition—was situated in the village. In the 19th century, however, the river had changed its course and Jirat's population was ravaged by a particularly virulent strain of the dreaded ‘Burdwan fever’. By 1950, when the refugees arrived at Jirat, the village had long since been abandoned, its waterways choked with silt, its ponds filthy and overgrown with water hyacinth, its great buildings crumbling and derelict. A rare ‘empty’ corner in crowded West Bengal, the Government of West Bengal deemed it to be an appropriate place to house and rehabilitate two and a half thousand refugees: men, women and children.

This paper explores the relationship between Hindu nationalist ideology and the disciplinary practices of the Saraswati Shishu Mandir Primary School. It is an attempt to understand how the rhetoric that revolves around the creation of a ‘Hindu rashtra’ (Hindu nation) is translated and implemented in pedagogical terms and interpreted and articulated by children. Specific focus is on the way that primary school children experience and talk about the School's disciplinary enterprise, which is underpinned by ideas about Hindu superiority and the need to protect the Hindu nation against threatening cultural and religious minorities. With respect to the political end to which this enterprise is geared, it is argued that children interpret and value this enterprise not as a vehicle for the spread of Hindu nationalist ideals, but as a means by which educational success can be ensured.

This paper analyses Manchuria's economic history between 1929 and 1936, as part of a larger project on the Great Depression's impact on China. Based on a new series for Manchurian GDP, 1924–1937, the paper advances four key arguments. First, early in the Depression, Manchuria's use of silver currency partially protected its economy from the global downturn, while creating serious problems for importers and Japanese-owned enterprises, resulting in a small net decline in GDP. Second, as elsewhere, the Depression's impact was deepest where cyclical effects were accompanied by structural change – here, the decline in the soybean trade. Third, output levels, especially in agriculture, declined most steeply in response to climatic and military disasters rather than economic shocks. Fourth, as in Japan, policies that were Keynesian in effect led to rapid growth of the modern sector, especially construction, and to the recovery of many sectors of Manchuria's economy from 1934–1935.