Nationalist struggles are invariably civil as well as anticolonial wars. The processes of popular politicization are shaped as much by internal contests as by mobilized sentiments against foreign rule. Political engagement by the rural poor is typically influenced by local power struggles, ethnic conflicts, and class tensions that may deflect the poor's stakes in and concern for national liberation. To discover the quotidian contours of revolution, we must turn to these sorts of relationships and constraints. To understand the conditions that foster or discourage the active participation of subordinate groups in revolution, we must appreciate the local relations under which people labor as much as the political context in which they fight.

On the face of it, rural Java and Bangladesh appear remarkably similar. The similarities are particularly pronounced in lowland Java and southeastern Bangladesh where there are virtually identical population densities and nearly universal modern rice technology. Extraordinary population pressure on the land is accompanied by minute farm size and, despite lower land concentration than in many other parts of the world, both Java and Bangladesh display substantial disparities in control over land and high levels of landlessness or near-landlessness.

In america we love to put our names on things. Everything from tree trunks to subway cars bears the evidence of our desire to announce what we are and own, and in the world of arts and letters the landscape is little changed. There the copyright expresses our instinct that even creativity has its property aspect: we claim what we have composed. There is a great tendency among us to be suspicious of anything unsigned, and pseudonymity is rare.

Justice in chinese society was literally of cosmic importance. Traditional Chinese thinking considered man and nature organic elements of a seamless cosmic web. Injustice of any kind did not simply rend the web in one place but placed tension on the entire structure. To restore equilibrium, the injustice had to be perfectly redressed, no more, no less. To ignore the injury was to risk catastrophe. As one late-Qing official wrote, “The recent natural disasters and interferences with heavenly harmony [i.e., the droughts and famines of the late 1870s and early 1880s] are a product of the countless number of cases where no appeal could be made, where there were no impeachments of the delinquent officials, and where consequently the innocent suffer deep injustices in the underworld” (Xinzeng XAHL 1886, 50:5a).