This paper explores the causes behind the institutional change that promoted regulated private-sector competition in India's booming telecommunications sector. This change occurred incrementally by resolving conflicts of interest driven by the twin engines of fiscal crisis and technological change in cellular telephony. The Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Finance pushed for the change, whereas the Department of Telecommunications resisted it. As private participation succeeded, the relationship between the private sector and government financial organizations made a significant impact on parts of the government that favored change. Cellular technology offered the private sector with a first-mover's advantage because it had gambled on it when government-owned corporations had ignored its commercial potential. Evolutionary change occurred through a process of institutional layering that involved establishing new institutions along the edges of old ones and allowing them to grow differentially. The pace of institutional change accelerated in times of financial crises when the mismatch between policy intention and institutions led to a withdrawal of private investment.

The present parochialism of Thai studies, although partial, suggests parallels with the situation of Modern Greek studies in the early 1970s. The cultural and political conditions attendant on both in the respective time periods—especially the prudery, emphasis on bourgeois notions of respectability, and restrictions on the scope and content of scholarship—suggest that a comparative framework, already emergent, would benefit both Thailand and Thai studies today. Thailand and Greece both represent conditions of “crypto-colonialism,” in which the combination of adulation and resentment of powerful Western nations produces a distinctive set of attitudes. Important cultural and political consequences flow from this shared condition, as is also contrastively demonstrated by the two countries’ very different recent histories. For example, censorship, once deeply intrusive but now virtually nonexistent in Greece, was instantiated by absent voices and official surveillance at the Thai studies conference at which this article was originally presented. A defensive posture, such censorship exposes an underlying sense of political weakness and cultural embarrassment.

In August 2011, India was in the headlines due to an anti-corruption hunger strike that played upon Gandhi's legacy of civil disobedience and mass protest. The strike was initiated by a short, bespectacled, 74-year-old man called Anna Hazare to protest the government's new anticorruption legislation, which Hazare said was too weak. Hazare's call for a strong anticorruption Lokpal (ombudsman) had slowly gained momentum in the first half of 2011, when the self-styled Gandhian had collected a sizeable following. But it was Hazare's unexpected arrest on the eve of the August hunger strike that pushed him into the limelight, sparking candlelit marches across the country. A shaken government ordered his release in less than twelve hours, but in stunning turnaround, Hazare refused to leave and began his “fast unto death” in Delhi's notorious Tihar Jail, South Asia's largest high-security prison.

This paper examines the role of language in nationalist attempts at decolonization. In the case of the Philippines, American colonial education imposed English as the sole medium of instruction. Native students were required to suppress their vernacular languages so that the classroom became the site for a kind of linguistic war, or better yet, the war of translation. Nationalists have routinely denounced the continued use of English as a morbid symptom of colonial mentality. Yet, such a view was deeply tied to the colonial notion of the sheer instrumentality of language and the notion that translation was a means for the speaker to dominate language as such. However, other practices of translation existed based not on domination but play seen in the classroom and the streets. Popular practices of translation undercut colonial and nationalist ideas about language, providing us with an alternative understanding of translation in democratizing expression in a postcolonial context.

This article, based on newly opened archives, explores the rights of tenants in the neighborhood of Chongqing during the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Changes in tenancy arrangements are discussed within the context of Chongqing's role as the main transshipment center for rice and goods from Southwest China to the middle and lower Yangtze. By the 1820s there was a tendency toward the collection of fixed rents in kind. Rent deposits, a major source of liquid capital for landlords, became an almost universal feature of Baxian leases. High deposits encouraged subletting and multiple tenancy, but appear to have provided little security of tenure. The large collection of lawsuits in the Baxian Archives allows an examination of the treatment of tenants in the magistrates' court and of the rights of persons who had disposed of land by means of conditional sale (dianmai).

The British administrative frontier in India had widely differing effects on the political and social structures of the regions into which it moved from the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. It is impossible to generalize on the impact of the administration, because the regions into which it moved differed in their political and social structures, and because British administration and ideas about administration, both in India and in Great Britain, changed markedly throughout this hundred year period.

Early in the morning of August 26, 2008, a large group of stick-wielding, black-shirted masked men forced their way into the studios of Bangkok's NBT television station, briefly detaining a number of staff. Once inside, they flung open the main doors, allowing several hundred more yellow-shirted protestors from the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) inside. Other PAD supporters occupied the grounds of the station. NBT, the channel of the government's Public Relations Department (PRD) formerly known as Channel 11, was held by the PAD for around twelve hours. During this time, rogue engineers tried unsuccessfully to channel their illegal—but wildly popular—ASTV television signal through the NBT network. Defeated by the technical challenges, the protestors gave up their occupation of NBT, returning to Government House, the office of the Thai prime minister. That same afternoon, PAD supporters had climbed the fence of Government House and occupied the compound surrounding the Italianate Khu Fa building.

Asia, a region grappling with the impacts of climate change, increasing natural disasters, and transboundary water issues, faces major challenges to water security. Water resources there are closely tied to the dramatic Hindu-Kush Himalayan (HKH) mountain range, where over 46,000 glaciers hold some of the largest repositories of fresh water on earth (Qiu 2010). Often described as the water tower of Asia, the HKH harbors the snow and ice that form the headwaters of the continent's major rivers (Bandyopadhyay 2013). Downstream, this network of river systems sustains more than 1.3 billion people who depend on these freshwater sources for their consumption and agricultural production, and increasingly as a source of hydropower (Immerzeel, Van Beek, and Bierkens 2010; National Research Council 2012; Rasul 2014).

It was once popular for Western scholars to view the liberation of women as one of the most dramatic accomplishments of the Chinese revolution. This article reviews three recently published studies that present a more sanguine view of the impact of the policies adopted by the Chinese Communist party on women's lives. Throughout its history (with the possible exception of the 1920s) the CCP has failed to commit itself to the achievement of gender equality. To have done so, the new scholarship suggests, would have alienated male peasants, the most important constituency of the CCP Patriarchy, rather than being dismantled, has thus been perpetuated and reinforced in China. This argument is substantiated in the three volumes under review by an analysis of Party policy and political campaigns. The extent to which these policies and campaigns reflect social reality is a task that future scholars will have to confront.

This article explores the role of affect and sentiment in shaping cross-cultural encounters in late colonial Korea, as seen and experienced through the eyes of Japanese men and women who grew up in Seoul. By interweaving the oral and written testimonies of former settlers who came of age on the peninsula between the late 1920s and the end of colonial rule in 1945, the paper attempts to reconstruct their emotional journey into adulthood as young offspring of empire: specifically, how they apprehended colonialism, what they felt when encountering different segments of the Korean population, and in what ways their understanding of the world and themselves changed as a result of these interactions. Focusing on the intimate and everyday zones of contact in family and school life, this study more broadly offers a way to understand colonialism without reducing complex local interactions to abstract mechanisms of capital and bureaucratic rule.

In recent years, a considerable change has taken place in the way in which analysts of economic development have come to understand the nature of the growth process in rural areas and the relations between agricultural and nonagricultural activity as industrialization takes place. Growing awareness of the significance of nonagricultural activities in rural areas, of rural industrialization, and of the “livelihood diversification strategies” adopted by rural households has prompted this shift in understanding (Ellis 1998, 1–2). The strict agriculture/industry divide of standard dual-economy models has been broken down, and scholars have recognized the implications, both theoretical and policy-related, of the existence and development of the “pluriactive” rural household that derives its income from a variety of sources alongside agriculture. Various ways of analyzing the nature and implications of agriculture/industry interaction within rural areas, and the economic activities of rural households that underlie them, have been developed, but central to much of the work on the issue has been a model of the “growth linkages” between agricultural and nonagricultural activity. This model seeks to demonstrate how backward and forward linkages between growth in agricultural output and the expansion of manufacturing activity in rural areas operate to produce a “virtuous circle” of expanding employment opportunities, rising and often quite equally distributed rural incomes, and improving standards of living.

India's history provides one of the best documented examples of colonialism. The British kept meticulous records of their attempts to improve, govern, and even exploit the people and institutions of the subcontinent. Improvement and government often occurred at the expense of traditional institutions, especially in the area of the legal tradition. The British are responsible for the decline and eventual demise of the living dharmaśāstra (science of orthodox behavior) tradition. The tradition has not been resuscitated in independent India. Nevertheless, even though the office of Paṇḍita (traditional expert) has long been abolished from the courts and the very training of modern Paṇḍitas has become rare, the texts of the dharmaśāstra tradition continue to be used in a very “paṇḍitic” fashion by the courts of modern India. The justices function as Paṇḍitas, and the texts they cite are mere window dressing for the interpretations of Hindu law they seek to promulgate.

This article is based on academic journals published in the People's Republic of China (PRC) from 1978 to early 1980 and analyzes the trend in post-Mao historiography regarding peasant rebellions. Previous belief in the revolutionary nature of peasant rebellions is being reversed, and their “anti-feudal” character being questioned. The question now is whether peasant rebellions, or even class struggle itself, constitute an important motive force for progress in Chinese history. Conflicting views persist, but overall a more negative view of peasant behavior has led many PRC writers to view the small producers' “patriarchy,” which fosters hierarchy and particularism, as a source of current bureaucratic problems.

The study of abandoned civilizations, and of the reasons for the disaster, is a field in which many imaginations have wandered. In several parts of Southeast Asia, notably in Cambodia, northern Siam (the Kingdom of Haripunjaya), the Pagan area in the dry zone of Burma, and the dry zone of Ceylon, this pattern has been repeated. Only in Ceylon is there a more or less continuous historical record, plus numerous stone inscriptions, to assist in solving the puzzle. Otherwise the cases are suggestively alike. All arose on reasonably level plains (often the only level land in the region), in a climate of alternating wet and long dry seasons, which especially in the tropics usually means irrigation if agriculture is to be productive enough to support a more than primitive civilization. All did in fact depend heavily on extensive irrigation, and appear to have shared the characteristics which Wittfogel has associated with this kind of basis: a strong central state, massive public works, a highly structured society, and a powerful ramified bureaucracy. All were plagued with chronic invasions from nearby densely populated areas, and all collapsed with dramatic suddenness, to be blotted out by jungle so that with some even their memory was forgotten. Finally, all were abandoned at about the same period, the thirteenth century (Angkor Vat somewhat later), and with few exceptions no significant attempts were made to reoccupy them until very recent years.

Myanmar has been conventionally regarded as one of the most repressive countries in the world. As a result, many scholars, journalists, and human rights organizations understandably focus their attention on the draconian policies of the Myanmarese military regime. When the country makes headlines, the story of events taking place is typically framed in terms of state oppression and direct popular opposition. This leads to a restrictive view of the “political” dimensions of life in Myanmar, an approach to the topic that deals with only a small number of admittedly important subjects: authoritarian governance, organized efforts to bring about systemic change, and the fate of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate whose latest release from house arrest put Myanmarese politics back in the headlines in November 2010. What is left out of the picture—or given only glancing attention—are a host of social, economic, and cultural issues that also have political dimensions and implications, namely the efforts by Myanmarese citizens to carve out space for independent, meaningful action on a personal level. These actions, which have political aspects but stop short of being outright forms of dissent, will be my focus in this essay.

While the men worked in the fields in the wine-like [winter] air, the women sat in the afternoon sun spinning and embroidering while they sang together, before starting to cook for their men. They embroidered phulkaris….” (Tandon 1968, 65). These stereotypes of feminine and masculine work in Prakash Tandon's memory book Punjabi Century illustrate dominant literary representations of economic production in Punjab, a province of the British Raj from the mid-nineteenth century until it was partitioned between independent India and Pakistan in 1947 (see fig. 1). Many Punjabi women used phulkari (literally, “flower-work”) embroidery to decorate their daily garments and handmade gifts in the nineteenth century. Illustrations only partially convey the vibrant visual impact of phulkaris, and even color photographs fail to capture fully the sheen of the silk thread. The embroidery ranges from striking geometric medallions in reds, shocking pinks, and maroons, through almost monochromatic golden tapestry-like, fabric-covering designs, to narrative embroideries depicting people and objects of rural Punjab. Women stitched phulkaris generally on handwoven cotton cloth (khadi), and phulkaris shared linked construction techniques, a dominant embroidery stitch (the darning stitch), and several distinctive motifs (Frater 1993, 71–74; Yacopino 1977, 42–45; Askari and Crill 1997, 95–101).

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has produced two different narratives in India. One, here described as “historical,” looks back to the pandemics of the colonial past—bubonic plague from 1896, influenza in 1918–19—as a source of comparisons, lessons, and dire warnings for the present. This narrative envisages the reenactment of past scenes, including flight from the cities, victimization of the poor, and the questioning of state authority. The other narrative, here called “insurgent,” questions the value of historical analogies, doubts that history ever substantially repeats itself, and stresses the specificity of postcolonial Indian politics and health. While recognizing the validity of both narratives, the author urges caution in employing colonial history to critique contemporary events and, while recognizing the 1890s plague as a watershed moment, questions whether even the most devastating pandemics (such as 1918's influenza) necessarily result in profound social, political, and health care changes.

This paper explores the context in which skilled artisans introduced innovations in India around 1900 and suggests that such steps carried the potential for conflicts between the innovator and those affected by his actions. Conflicts could arise over the protection of knowledge, over the right to make a change, in the form of resistance, or as a choice between maintaining and diluting quality. Conflicts were absent when the mediation of social and political leaders was available and when skilled artisans emerged from unconventional backgrounds. By stressing the capacity of artisans to innovate and by suggesting that individuals were the agents of innovation, this paper refocuses attention on the skilled individual within a historiography that has been rather neglectful of both craftsmanship and the craftsman.

The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself.