The vast majority of premodern chinese literature, certainly all of the most famous works of the classical tradition, were composed in one form or another of Literary Sinitic (hereafter LS, wen-yen[-wen], also often somewhat ambiguously called “Classical Chinese” or “Literary Chinese”). Beginning in the medieval period, however, an undercurrent of written Vernacular Sinitic (hereafter VS, pai-hua[-wen]) started to develop. The written vernacular came to full maturity in China only with the May Fourth Movement of 1919, after the final collapse during the 1911 revolution of the dynastic, bureaucratic institutions that had governed China for more than two millennia. It must be pointed out that the difference between wen-yen and pai-hua is at least as great as that between Latin and Italian or between Sanskrit and Hindi. In my estimation, a thorough linguistical analysis would show that unadulterated wen-yen and pure pai-hua are actually far more dissimilar than are Latin and Italian or Sanskrit and Hindi. In fact, I believe that wen-yen and pai-hua belong to wholly different categories of language, the former being a sort of demicryptography largely divorced from speech and the latter sharing a close correspondence with spoken forms of living Sinitic.

Most discussions of economic growth and economic policy in postwar Japan focus on the economy as an isolated sector, neglecting its place in Japanese history as a whole. Partly this is because discussion of the economy usually moves quickly to technical problems. Partly it is due to the common assumption that high-speed economic growth emerged out of an attempt to create high-speed economic growth for its own sake-thus making redundant any sustained inquiry into its origins (as opposed to its mechanisms). We now have a fairly clear understanding of the technical means by which Japan became rich: rapid growth was achieved through high savings used for technology-led investment, based both on market forces channeled into planned directions and a flexible response to unplanned opportunities, such as American assistance to Japanese economic development. What is murkier is the social and political context for economic growth.

Kālī, the Hindu goddess ‘Time,’ is a ubiquitous presence in contemporary rural and urban Bengali life and occupies a historic place as Calcutta's patron deity. Her prototypes go back to pre-Vedic India (Kinsley 1977:90; MacKenzie-Brown 1985:111). Kālī was incorporated into the orthodox Hindu textual tradition in the myths of the Devī-Māhātmya, or Candī, as this sixth-century A.D. text is known in Bengal. She subsequently became the chief divinity as Female Principle (Śakti, ‘Force’, ‘Creatrix’) in the esoteric Sākta Tantra cult, which was especially prevalent in eastern India around the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, Kālī's worship moved to the public sphere. The Kālī saints Rāmaprasāda (eighteenth century) and Rāmakrsna (late nineteenth century) were especially responsible for popularizing the devotional (bhakti) conception of Kālī as Mother, the prevalent perception of this deity among Bengalis today (Gatwood 1985:174; Kapera n.d.:71; Kinsley 1977:93, 117; Kinsley 1986:116, 125; MacKenzie-Brown 1985:118–19).

Scholars in china and chinese studies commonly think of culture as an autonomous and transcendental force that defines agents and institutions and determines the outcome of events. They often conclude that China's allegedly illiberal authoritarian culture inevitably generates authoritarian politics. In this article we will bring culture down to earth by arguing that it is not transcendental but entangled in reciprocal relationships with various social institutions, not the least of which are politics and political institutions. If culture is not fixed in a realm beyond everything else, then rehearsing traditional accounts of traditional culture is not enough to distinguish the range of possible futures. Instead, we have to look at why people have the ideas they have and how they can and might change.

The six countries of the association of southeast asian nations, ASEAN (comprising Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand), together constitute only about 1.5 percent of the world economy. In the East Asian context, they tend to be overshadowed by the larger, more industrialized Northeast Asian NIEs (newly industrializing economies), and the recent extraordinary growth of China. But ASEAN is far more important than its economic share might suggest. First, most of the economies are growing much faster than the rest of the world. This means their share of the world economy is rising. It also means that, unless the good performance is due wholly to luck or good fortune, there must be something about these economies, their organization, and their public policies, that other, poorer performing countries could well emulate. Second, ASEAN is more important according to other yardsticks. Its share of the world's population, 6 percent, is four times its share of the economy. Moreover, most of these economies are outwardlooking in orientation, with the result that the region's trade share is about three times its share of the world economy.

In his perceptive essays entitledOn History, Fernand Braudel declared that “there is no problem which does not become increasingly complex when actively investigated, growing in scope and depth, endlessly opening up new vistas of work to be done” (University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 15). These observations are reflected in this masterful study of Donald Lach and Edwin Van Kley as they depict the intricacies of Asian civilization from India to Japan during the seventeenth century. This is a significant contribution to the overall multivolume project that seeks to delineate Europe's formation of the images of Asia from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries by examining the literature published at that time. That the more than two thousand pages under review are not the completion, but the next to last step of a work still in progress and so “growing in scope and depth,” assuredly increases the reader's appreciation for this vast enterprise.