This paper represents the working through of some problems related to the purpose and usefulness of my research in progress on a trilogy on the urban/social history of Singapore with particular reference to the Chinese labouring class. The initial volume is about the life and labour of the rickshawman of Singapore. Rickshaw Coolie examines the origin and development of the rickshaw trade in Singapore; its control and regulation from the standpoint of the Chinese and British; the method of earning a livelihood in rickshaw pulling, and the character of a rickshaw coolie's life. The other two volumes are provisionally titled “The Social Evil: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in Colonial Singapore, 1867-1941” and “Chinese Suicide in Singapore, 1883-1939.”

In an article published in this journal (V (1981), 1), I argued that we will not be able to fully understand the political significance (if any) of the widespread eruption in John Company's Bengal Army in 1857, unless we hear from the “other side of the hill,” from the alienated sepoy officer and rank and file. In the interim we have heard principally from several senior British writers. And because of, for instance, a much flawed research methodology, they have reached unanimity in their analysis of the shock to British rule in India: it was simply a mutiny, one absolutely void of any organized political aims or expressions. The work of Thomas Spear is typical. He has this to say in his India: A Modern History concerning the question of the mutiny as a nationalist movement, a war of independence: “The view that the mutiny was a concerted movement against the British, a violent predecessor of Mahatma Gandhi's campaigns, overlooks the fact that there was then no Indian nation.” He adds: “The new classes with ideas of nationalism were then very few in numbers and they were wholly opposed to the movement.” Philip Mason added the weight of his distinguished reputation to this chorus of disbelievers, who appeared to cringe in retrospective horror at the thought that the good and faithful sepoy could harbor such hideous–and ungrateful–thoughts as freedom from (what was) alien tyranny. After all, Mason muses, did not every British writer up to the mutiny repeat the belief that the Indian soldier had no sense of nationalism? No, he concludes smugly, the Indian soldier had no national feeling until long after World War One. The sepoy was, then, nothing more than a mindless mercenary-child-robot. The mutiny, however, and the other disturbances among the native soldiery prior to 1857, would indicate that the British, then and now, never fully understood their Indian auxiliaries.

As is well-known, between 1639 and 1853 the only officially allowed communication between Japan and the rest of the world flowed through the single Dutch trading post on Deshima island in the bay of Nagasaki. Even before this, and indeed for a short time thereafter, the Dutch trading establishment there provided a spyhole through which Europeans could observe some of what went on in the Land of the Rising Sun and through which Japanese could gain some insight into the rest of the world. It is therefore not surprising that since the 1880s the archives of the Dutch factory have been seen as an important source for the history of Japan. In particular the daily Daghregister (or Journal) which is unbroken between 1633 and 1860, forms the basic key to the records of the Deshima factory, especially during the annual journey to the court in Edo (Tokyo).

J.P. de Korte, De jaarlijkse financiële verantwoording in de Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, Leiden, Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. Werken uitgegeven door de Vereeniging Het Nederlandsch Economisch Historisch Archief, 17. XIV + 94 blz, 14 appendices. ISBN 90 247 2108 3.

J.J. Steur, Herstel of ondergang. De voorstellen tot redres van de V.O.C. 1740-1795, Utrecht, HES Uitgevers, 1984, 322 blz. ISBN 90 6194 214 4.

Maria de Jesús dos Mártires Lopes, Epistolário de um Açoriano na Índia: D. António Taveira da Neiva Brunt da Silveira (1750-1775), Ponte Delgada (Universidade dos Açores), 1983.

Artur Teodoro de Matos, O Estado da Índia nos Anos de 1581-1588: Estrutura Administrativa e Económica, Alguns Elementos para o seu Estado. Ponte Delgada (Universidade dos Açores), 1982.

J.C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (Foris Publications, Dordrecht, Holland/USA 1983). 465 p.

Six essays by J.C. van Leur (1908-1942) were published in English translation in 1955 as the first volume in the series Selected Studies on Indonesia by Dutch Scholars and the above is an unrevised, photomechanic reprint of the same. The bibliography of Van Leur's writings which is provided in the volume lists another 37 separate items, articles, journalism, reviews, etc. that bear out the author's multifarious involvement in contemporary affairs in Indonesia and elsewhere and which may be of interest to many who have regretted Van Leur's neglect of the history of Indonesia in the 19th and 20th centuries in his major writings. The present six essays all deal with pre-colonial Indonesian or Asian social and economic history and the colonial period is passed over in a few paragraphs.