The decline of the Mughal empire is usually considered to begin late in the reign of the emperor Aurangzib (1658–1707). The favorite explanations consist of circles, or even spirals, usually vicious in nature. One important interpretation sees the decline as originating from an increased taxation burden on the peasantry, who revolted in several areas, ultimately with such success that the empire was weakened. More money was needed to crush more revolts, so there was more oppressive taxation and so more revolts. This is less than convincing, for peasant revolts—whether or not led by zamindars locally important land-holders)—were more or less a constant in Mughal India. They were particularly prevalent in Gujarat and Bengal, but Hindustan was far from exempt. What we really need here is an attempt at a quantitative assessment of the number of revolts, and of participants in them, during the whole seventeenth century.

Marriage has been widely accepted as a universal institution that allows a kinship system to establish and perpetuate itself (Levi-Strauss 1963). Although the well-known case of the Nayar in Central Kerala of India has seriously problematized the anthropological definitions of marriage (Gough 1959), the universality of the institution is still accepted up to this day (Ember and Ember 1999). Since the early 1980s, however, a growing body of literature on the Moso, a matrilineal group in Southwest China, has made available an ethnographic case in which marriage is not the primary sexual-reproductive institution (Zhan et al. 1980; Yan and Song 1983; YNSBJZ 1986, 1987, 1988; Shih 1993; Weng 1993; Guo 1997; Cai 1997). Among the Moso, the majority of adults have practiced a visiting system called tisese (pronounced as “tea-say-say”), which differs from marriage in that it is noncontractual, nonobligatory, and nonexclusive (Shih 1993). Meanwhile, mostly amongst the elites, marriage has coexisted with tisese in Moso society for centuries.

A common conceptualization of development as a binary relationship between trustees and target groups is inadequate. This article proposes the metaphor of development as an entangled cultural knot, constituted by multiple power relations. It uses this concept to analyze a recent slaughter renunciation movement, in which some leading Tibetan Nyingma masters from Larung Gar have suggested that Tibetan herders give up selling their livestock to the slaughter market for religious reasons. The movement reflects an alternative form of development articulated by several leading Tibetan Buddhist teachers, particularly Khenpo Tsultrim Lodroe, yet it goes against the state project of developing the yak meat industry. This movement has been criticized not only by state officials, but also by secular Tibetan intellectuals, as well as by herders. This article argues that the complex relationships among Tibetan Nyingma teachers, state officials, Tibetan secularists, and herders; their shared and competing interests; and the apparently contradictory positions they take on various issues require a much more sophisticated conceptual tool than the simple dichotomous conceptualization of development.

When I was a child at the height of the Cold War, the press painted China in vivid primary colors—red menace, yellow peril, blue-clad masses. China was a back-burner story, however, compared to the Soviet threat, and my education through high school never touched upon it. A shift in public attention began with the 1971 China visit of the U.S. ping-pong team and Nixon's state visit in February 1972. Suddenly the mainstream U.S. press discovered beggar-free streets, healthy children, acupuncture anesthesia, and national optimism.

The 1915 Buddhist-Muslim riots in Ceylon are often attributed to religious animosity, but economic and political factors significantly influenced the environment in which the riots occurred and help to explain the drastic government reaction to the disorders. The Muslims involved, recent arrivals from India called Coast Moors, were primarily traders and moneylenders. Resentment against price increases and alleged profiteering developed among the Sinhalese Buddhists. Before 1915, communal tensions had grown, with many Sinhalese-language newspapers denouncing the Coast Moors for exploitation of the Ceylonese. A Buddhist temperence movement had become a channel for articulating nationalist sentiments and was viewed with suspicion by the colonial regime. Labor unrest and trade unionism had appeared in Colombo prior to the riots. There, the 1915 disorders were led by the most militant urban workers, particularly railway workers, and reflected working-class grievances over rising living costs and unemployment. Fear of German intrigue during the war, the spread of nationalism and terrorism from India, and urban working-class unrest led colonial officials to interpret the riots as a threat to British rule. The officials were divided on the severity of action required, but those favoring the most drastic measures prevailed.

Different methods of communication imply different social and political relations. Generally, mass media are distributed through centralized broadcast stations or presses and controlled by the elite. Face-to-face communications, which circulate through physically close contact between people, have more subversive potential. The author analyzes rumors spread in the press and by word of mouth during October and November 1998 in East Java, Indonesia. Conspirators and ninjas were suspected of killing many alleged sorcerers and persecuting the traditionalist Muslim majority. In response, local residents established guards against, attacked, and even killed suspected ninjas. Suspicion also was directed against the government, elites, and the armed forces. This subversive content is attributed to the interaction of two forms of communication: oral rumors became written rumors, and vice versa.

On May 19, 2009, the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, dressed in his traditional white sarong and shirt, solemnly addressed Parliament: “The writ of the state now runs across every inch of our territory … we have completely defeated terrorism.” The same day, photographs of the corpse of the ruthless rebel leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran adorned all of the local newspapers. With his death, the secessionist war was over—this endless war that had pitted the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against the security forces of the government of Sri Lanka since 1983. It had sunk deep into the psyche of the people of all communities, and its terrible violence had elicited much international attention and reprimand. President Rajapaksa then addressed his citizens in the Tamil language, promising reconciliation and embracing the Tamil-speaking people in his program of recovery for the ravaged North. A “northern spring” would soon come. On the streets of Colombo, there was a feeling of trepidation, while celebrations, some spontaneous and others orchestrated by sycophantic politicians, peppered the capital. The day had been given as a special holiday for the war-weary people to celebrate by eating kiribath (milk rice) and launching (peaceful) rockets, as fireworks are commonly called. People waved the Lion Flag and compared the president to the famous second-century bce Sinhalese hero Dutugemunu, another son of the Ruhuna (Southern Sri Lanka) who succeeded in conquering Anuradhapura from the Tamil king Elara, whom he famously slew with a dart. King Dutugemunu has long been a folk hero in Sri Lanka for uniting the country under a single rule.

A creative, potent, formless energy is assumed to animate the universe in parts of island Southeast Asia. In Luwu, a former kingdom of South Sulawesi (Celebes), Indonesia, this energy is called sumange'. This paper describes how sumange' is treated within the human body, which it is said to animate, and the logic of ritual substance that it implies. Because it can be lost through shock and routine depletion, humans make efforts to care for it, retain it, and increase it. Because it is potent, concentrations of it in people and places are dangerous. Its differential distribution orders the social and natural universe.

Revolutionary mass upheaval generally weakens the people's respect for authority, law, and discipline; and it brings in its wake social, economic, and political disorders, facilitating the establishment of an authoritarian regime. The French Revolution was based on the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but the destruction of the old social and political fabric, and the failure to institutionalize the new ideas, led Frenchmen to search for “the man of genius destined at once to carry on and to abolish the revolution.” The Russian Revolution of 1917 was also followed by several years of civil war, which led to the establishment of the ruthless totalitarian regime of Stalin, itself reminiscent of the Thermidorian Reaction. In Algeria, Cuba, China, and North Vietnam, successful mass armed revolutions have been consolidated only because of their one-party dictatorships.

In his autobiography Loren Eiseley wrote: “One exists in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place. But they are necessary in every human culture, like a drill sergeant's commands, something not to be questioned.” We who are non-Japanese students of Japan form a culture of our own, and Edward Said's Orientalism helps us to see, perhaps for the first time, the “drill sergeant's commands” to which we respons.

In the mid-1930s, criticisms of modern women's habits, clothing, and hairstyles exploded in the Burmese popular press, showing that “modern fashion” made a man no less virtuous and patriotic but rendered a woman immoral and unpatriotic. This article examines the nature of these criticisms and their motivations, and reveals that the controversy over the dress and comportment of modern women was a complex and multifaceted phenomenon sustained by irreducibly plural interests. It argues that neither the appeal for traditionalism and national sufficiency in the face of multiple modern and colonial temptations, nor the changing tides of Burmese nationalist movements sufficiently explain the preoccupation with modern women's fashion, and suggests that the discourse on modern women needs to be analyzed as stemming from a profound unsettling of existing notions of masculinity and femininity, and its effect on relations between the sexes.

Historically, tokugawa Samurai were a legal creation that grew out of the landed warriors of the medieval age; they came to be defined by the Tokugawa shogunate in terms of hereditary status, a right to hold public office, a right to bear arms, and a “cultural superiority” upheld through educational preferment (Smith 1988, 134). With the prominent exception of Eiko Ikegami's recent The Taming of the Samurai (1995), little has been written in English in the past two decades regarding the sociopolitical history of the samurai in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. E. H. Norman's seminal work, Japan's Emergence as a Modern State, established the parameters of debate among American historians of Japan from the 1950s through the 1970s. Drawing on the Marxist historiography of prewar Japan, Norman interpreted the Meiji Restoration in terms of class conflict: a modified bourgeois revolution directed against a feudal Tokugawa regime, led by a coalition of lower samurai and merchants, and supported by a peasant militia (Norman [1940] 1975).

Japan's acquisition and development of Taiwan did not stem from the efforts of a capitalist class seeking cheaper resources and new market outlets, or engaging in dumping practices to maintain a high rate of domestic profit. Taiwan's economic transformation was brought about by enterprising bureaucrats who formulated a policy of state action in areas unattractive to private capital in order to create conditions that would encourage and sustain private investment. Taiwan's traditional economy was not destroyed completely, but restructured in such a way that land and labor became more productive and resources previously idle were now employed. Japanese colonial policy was successful for the following reasons.

(1) The administration of Kodama and Gotō consisted of able leaders assisted by expert young subordinates who were dedicated to their jobs. Kodama was a first class administrator and apparently had a genius for organizing and extracting the best from his officials. Throughout his governorship he gave Gotō full support, especially in the early years when many military officers and foreign advisers complained to Kodama about Gotō's administrative methods. Aldiough Kodama's career ended in 1906, he stands out as one of the most able and imaginative young officials of the late Meiji period. In Gotō, Kodama had an enterprising, intelligent, and dedicated assistant capable of surrounding himself with able, loyal officials and providing the coordination and leadership necessary to organize their work efficiently. Gotō also had the initiative and ability to make the right strategy move or policy decision when the occasion demanded. He possessed a unique talent for discerning which elements in the traditional society could be used to strengthen modern institutions. His policy of integrating the pao-chia with a modern police system was the political key to the Japanese success in enforcing their control in the colony and obtaining local acceptance of it at the same time.

(2) The Kodama-Gotō administration simultaneously introduced a number of important reforms and investment to establish an extensive infra-structure. This encouraged expansion of the market and enabled the administration to formulate policies of promotion, regulation, and financial support to build an industry of great comparative advantage to the island, sugar.

(3) Kodama and Gotō relied on fiscal reform and deficit financing to finance their programs of reform and economic development. Taiwan's fiscal resources were limited, but the administration managed to secure the home government's underwriting of a large debt issue. The land tax reform, the introduction of new excise taxes, and the creation of the monopoly bureaus resulted in large tax revenues which enabled the administration to repay its debt within the stipulated repayment period and accumulate large budget surpluses at the same time. Taiwan's early economic growth was financed on a pay-as-you-go basis.

On first appearance, the events in Taiwan seemed to duplicate the Meiji modernization achievement. But one important distinction must be kept in mind. The Meiji bureaucracy, unlike the small group of active bureaucrats in Taiwan's administration, applied their policies of reform and state support to sectors other than agriculture. Kodama insisted that Taiwan's agriculture, particularly the export of food and raw materials to Japan, be developed to augment Japan's power for economic warfare. Had Kodama and Gotō remained in Taiwan, they might have introduced different economic and social programs in response to changing demands from Japan's industrialization and Taiwan's population increase. Subsequent colonial administrators only imitated Kodama's economic program, and while it is easy to explain this behavior by reference to the usual pattern of modern colonial rule, this seems overly facile in the light of Japan's early and heavy investment in her colony. An explanation of this puzzle is possible only after further study of Taiwan's economic growth and her economic and political relationships with Japan.

A number of Korean legal historians have argued that Chosŏn Korea had a tradition of customary law and that it was suppressed and distorted by the Japanese during the colonial period. But a comparison of Korean “custom” with that in late medieval France, where the legal concept of customary law developed, reveals that custom as a judicial norm was absent in premodern Korea. The Korean “customary law” that has been postulated as a true source of private law in Korean historiography was the invention of the Japanese colonial jurists. The Japanese collected Korea's popular usages that were supposed to serve as an antecedent for a modern civil law, and colonial judges employed the legal instrument of custom in reordering Korean practices into a modern civil legal framework. In colonial Korea, custom played the role of an intermediary regime between tradition and the demands of modern civil law.

Two articles published in early 1992 in the monthly opinion journal Chūō kōron set off a minor debate on the essence of Japan's historical experience. The articles were written by Kawakatsu Heita, a professor of economic history at the Waseda University, as a critique of Ueyama Shunpei, a noted cultural historian. A rejoinder by Ueyama was published subsequently in the same journal, and a critique of Kawakatsu by another economic historian, Tsunoyama Sakae, also followed.

Pigs have played a central role in the subsistence and culture of China for millennia. The close relationship between pigs and people began when humans gradually domesticated wild pigs over 8,000 years ago. While pigs initially foraged around settlements, population growth led people to pen their pigs, which made them household trash processors and fertilizer producers. Household pigs were in daily contact with people, who bred them to fatten quickly and produce larger litters. Early modern Europeans found Chinese pigs far superior to their own and bred the two to create the breeds now employed in industrial pork production around the world, including China. In recent decades, industrial farms that scientifically control every aspect of pigs’ lives have spread rapidly. Until recently, most Chinese people ate pork only on special occasions; their ability in recent decades to eat it regularly exemplifies China's increasing prosperity. Meanwhile, vast areas of North and South American farmland are now devoted to growing soybeans to feed hundreds of millions of pigs in China, and the methane, manure, and antibiotic resistance they produce creates environmental and health problems on a global scale.

China-India history of the 1950s remains mired in concerns related to border demarcations and a teleological focus on the causes, course, and consequences of the war of 1962. The result is an overt emphasis on diplomatic and international history of a rather narrow form. In critiquing this narrowness, this article offers an alternate chronology accompanied by two substantive case studies. Taken together, they demonstrate that an approach that takes seriously cultural, scientific, and economic life leads to different sources and different historical arguments than an approach focused on political (and especially high political) life. Such a shift in emphasis, away from conflict and onto moments of contact, comparison, cooperation, and competition, can contribute fresh perspectives not just on the histories of China and India, but also on the histories of the Global South.

For nearly two decades, study of the Chinese economy involved constructing pictures of broad macro trends from extremely limited data painstakingly obtained. Given the quantity and quality of data available, a majority of analysts came surprisingly close to the mark in explaining what happened. A few economists attempted to deny that any economic progress had occurred, while there were others who painted a picture approaching Utopia, but these were always in the minority. When China began to open up in the late 1970s and data were once again systematically published, there were some surprises, but much of that written before the opening remained valid. If economists did a reasonably good job of explaining what happened, however, they did much less well explaining why.