The emergence of an historiographical tradition in Ceylon was caused by the importance of an unbroken succession of ordinations in the Sangha for the survival of Theravada Buddhism and by the emergence of the Sinhalese nation. One of the main factors of this nation-building process was the acceptance of Buddhism as the national religion. The survival of Buddhism depended on the state of the Sangha. History of Theravada Sangha is largely a history of efforts towards monastic reforms, and most reforms were implemented by the worldly power. The description of Asoka's religious politics in Sinhalese chronicles laid a basis for state-Sangha relations. Political thinking shows a dualism of ideological concepts based on religious values and of a tradition of practical political science. The impact of historical factors in the development of Sangha structures becomes visible from a comparison of these structures is the predominantly Buddhist countries and in the Buddhist minority community in Bengal. In this context, recent changes in state-Sangha within society, and the interrelations of Buddhism and popular cults can be analyzed as a result of the interaction of ideological, historical and political factors.

The Peiyang Army was the most significant military development in China between the Hsiang and Huai Armies which suppressed the Taiping and Nien rebellions in the 1860's and the army that Chiang Kai-shek raised and employed in the northern expedition of 1926–27. The Peiyang was the first Chinese army to be comparatively modern in training and discipline as well as in weaponry. Formed for the most part by Yuan Shih-k'ai while he was governor-general of Chihli province from 1901 to 1907, the Peiyang Army grew to six divisions of about 10,000 men each. Size alone gave the army a major role in politics during the last decade of the Ch'ing dynasty and the early years of the Republic.

One of the most controversial interpretations of recent Indian history is that the British governed the subcontinent through a strategy of divide and rule which led to Hindu-Muslim conflict and ultimately the 1947 partition. Divide et Impera has often been portrayed in vernacular tracts, Congress publications, and scholarly works as a fundamental cause of communal tension.

The similar assumptions, methodology, and sources upon which these assessments rest, however, have resulted in a clouding of key issues and a misreading of the historical record. The studies generally focus upon twentieth-century developments such as Hindu and Muslim political parties or communal riots and then project their findings backward to earlier periods. Because British attempts to play Hindu and Muslim against one another apparently intensified antagonism following the Morley-Minto reforms, it is argued that similar policies prior to 1900 helped create the initial estrangement between the two communities. Communal activities are admittedly easier to examine once Hindus and Muslims began to organize for elections and legislative proceedings, but preoccupation with formal competition and a concomitant simplistic explanation of the origins of communalism have postponed a much-needed investigation of the formative period in the nineteenth-century when British rule and changes within Indian society set the stage for subsequent communal organization.

For most cultures and most of human history, the death penalty was taken for granted and directed at a wide range of offenders. In ancient Israel, death was prescribed for everything from murder and magic to blasphemy, bestiality, and cursing one's parents. In eighteenth-century Britain, more than 200 crimes were punishable by death, including theft, cutting down a tree, and robbing a rabbit warren. China of the late Qing dynasty had some 850 capital crimes, many reflecting the privileged position of male over female and senior over junior.

The history of photography in Indonesia reveals Chinese Indonesians—members of a marginalized, transnational minority—as active participants in the project of nation making, rendering visible the cosmopolitan origins of national formations. In the early postcolonial period, Chinese Indonesian amateur and studio photographers acted as cultural brokers who mediated global currents and reworked colonial-era conventions to forge new national visual idioms. The specific cosmopolitanisms of these two distinct groups of ethnic Chinese photographers yielded divergent iconographies that have remained important strands in Indonesia's visual and political culture, in which a nostalgic ideology of the “asli” (authentic, original, or indigenous) competes with an outward-looking vision of Indonesia as a location from which to participate in global modernity.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's troubles in 2018 owe much to Japan's resilient liberal media. Between 2011 and 2017, the media was mostly on its back foot, losing credibility over its initial coverage about the Fukushima nuclear accident and withstanding heavy-handed efforts by Abe's government to pressure and intimidate the media into self-censorship (Kingston 2018a). Since early 2017, however, the liberal Asahi newspaper led the way in exposing two cronyism scandals involving private-school projects linked to Abe. It also exposed a series of cases revolving around information disclosure practices that revealed a culture of deception aimed at avoiding government accountability. These included a cover-up at the Defense Ministry regarding a Peace Keeping Operation (PKO) in South Sudan that violated legal constraints imposed by the Diet, and revelations about doctored data used to support Abe's proposed labor reforms. In these and other cases, the government's lack of transparency and mishandling of documents drew sharp public criticism. The press played its role of informing the public about these apparent transgressions while highlighting the arrogance of power that has undermined public trust in Abe; 80 percent do not believe his self-exonerating explanations about the cronyism scandals (Bloomberg 2018). Nonetheless, in September 2018 he won reelection to a third term as Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) president and is set to become Japan's longest serving prime minister. Popular support, however, is tepid, as monthly polls since 2013 by Japan's national broadcasting organization (NHK) indicate that about 50 percent of the public supports him due to a lack of alternatives rather than his virtues as a leader (about 15 percent) or the appeal of his policies (about 15 percent). Despite mixed reviews in the press, he has won a series of elections, and in politics that is what counts (Kingston 2018b).

The qing court had a love-hate relationship with popular drama. From the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) to the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), several Qing rulers were renowned for their doting patronage of popular opera, yet the state was far from sanguine about drama's social effects, viewing public theaters with great suspicion. Theaters, in the eyes of the authorities, were notorious hangouts for ruffians, slackers, gamblers, and insurgents, providing these roustabouts with the ideal environment in which to scheme and swindle. In addition to waging campaigns to censor and weed out “seditious passages” from popular dramas (Guy 1987, 92), emperors throughout the Qing dynasty issued dozens of edicts regulating the construction, location, and clientele of commercial theaters. In rural areas, especially in times of unrest, local authorities often canceled scheduled performances for fear that such occasions offered gangs and secret societies prime opportunities for stirring up trouble (Mackerras 1972, 37). Urban theaters were no safer. According to popular lore, even the Kangxi emperor was cheated by hoodlums when he ventured into a public theater during one of his legendary outings disguised as a commoner (Liao 1997, 80). Yet in spite of their reputation for breeding disorder and moral vice, commercial theaters—commonly known as teahouses (chayuan)—increasingly thrived, and in this new social space, the genre of Peking opera came into full flower during the last century of the Qing dynasty.

[Languages] determine the unique, often ambiguous tenor of human consciousness and make the relations of that consciousness to 'reality' creative…. To a greater or lesser degree, every language offers its own reading of life.

Vīraśaivism is usually presented as a unified, sectarian, reformation movement founded in the twelfth century by Basava. But within Virasaivism there are actually two, separate denominations—viraktas and gurusthalins. For the former, the beliefs and practices reflected in the Basava legend serve as norms for their sectarian-type religious organization. In contrast, gurusthalins derive norms for their basically ecclesiastical organization from the timeless myths of five great gurus. Hence the two accounts of origins serve as legitimizing and normative etiologies for competitive denominations divided by fundamentally different visions of how Virasaivism should be organized and what ideals it should propagate.

This paper describes mortality patterns across forty localities in the nineteenth century Philippines and suggests an interpretation of these patterns. Burial records from the Catholic church archives of the localities (parishes) are combined with local population estimates to obtain local mortality levels and trends over time, seasonal variations in mortality, and, especially, episodes of abnormal or “crisis” mortality. It is observed that the level of mortality increased as the nineteenth century progressed, that this was due in large part to an increase in the intensity and frequency of crisis mortality, and that these episodes occurred over time and across the localities in a patterned fashion. Among the underlying causes explored are possible declines in the level of living among the peasantry resulting from the nineteenth century commercialization of Philippine agriculture.

In-migration embodies the liberal-democratic paradox: the tension between the right of an individual and the collective will of a polity. This is well illustrated by escalating conflicts over admission of the “special category” of international migrants: refugees. Taking Japan as a notoriously difficult case, this paper analyzes recent developments in Japan's embattled refugee policy and argues that grassroots efforts by civil society provide a way to move beyond the current gridlock of the state-centric paradigm of refugee admission. Specifically, empirical evidence available to date suggests that private refugee sponsorship that enables individuals and community organizations to voluntarily sponsor the resettlement of UN-recognized refugees offers a viable policy instrument in Japan's context. While retaining the democratic communitarian outlook on admission of foreigners, the model injects liberal universalist qualities into immigration policy that are capable of motivating positive change domestically and, potentially, across East Asia at large.

With some exaggeration, one could claim that these three biographies, despite their disparate subjects—a seventeenth-century aristocratic lady of the Mughal court, an eighteenth-century French adventurer, and a twentieth-century Muslim intellectual and political figure—all tell the same story. In each case, a figure is born (as it happens, outside the Indian subcontinent) in relatively humble circumstances and emerges as a singular figure in some combination of the political, economic, intellectual life of the day. Each account proceeds chronologically, with the life presented as an unfolding, linear story, the fruit of “developments” and “influences,” in which the protagonist independently takes action. These accounts fit, in short, the genre of biography or autobiography known to us Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X, of rags to riches—and, typically, lessons to impart (Ohmann 1970). Each is an example of the canonical form of male biography and autobiography that emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century.

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.

Three dimensions capture much of the variation in Western scholarly images of Southeast Asian history. Different works attribute to the region different combinations of relative unity or diversity, continuity or change, and originality or dependence. Each of these choices summarizes a major controversy in the study of Southeast Asia. Together they form a cube that can be used to review existing literature and to identify room for future interpretation. In the 1970s, the antithesis of original continuity (historicism) and dependent change (modernism) was orthodox. In the 1980s, scholars could transcend these alternatives by recasting them as an opposition of original change (microdynamism) to dependent continuity (macrosystemism). Historicist and modernist writings have relied too heavily on psychocultural and political explanations, as have the rationalizations of indigenous elites. Pursuing the proposed dialectic could therefore help to rescue economic differentiation and conflict from their present neglect as aids to understanding.

This author will attempt to present a preliminary study of the economic aspects of the Imperial Household (Nei-wu-fu), which played a unique role during the Chʻing Dynasty in the grand strategy of the Manchu rule over China. The fact that this vital area of Chʻing history has long been neglected can be gauged from the lack of scholarly studies on the Nei-wu-fu up to the present. Even in the imperial days, few Chinese scholars knew about the actual workings of the Nei-wu-fu, for it remained a closed field to outsiders—almost a shrouded mystery. The reasons for its mysterious character were twofold: on the one hand, inaccessibility of sources of information prevented people from getting a clear picture of the Imperial Household; on the other hand, Chinese were inhibited from investigation, since to peer into the “secret affairs of the Court” (Kung-wei chin-shih) was to run a political risk.

The Chengdu Plain is an agroecosystem that depends on the Dujiangyan (Capital River Weir) for its functioning. This system has been sustained at high levels of productivity for more than two thousand years, experiencing only a few disturbances that have disrupted its functioning. Integrating field and documentary research on ecological, market, and governance factors, this article discusses the remarkable resilience of this system from the late Qing to the present and identifies current threats to its resilience. When the ecology consists of patchy and diverse landscapes, markets allow for adaptation through exchange, and governance includes cross-cutting sources of authority and flexible property regimes, the ecosystem is more resilient—that is, better able to withstand disturbances and maintain its basic functions.

This essay examines the cross-border trade among the migrant Yunnanese between Burma and Thailand during the era of the Burmese socialist regime. It was a period when the Burmese government implemented a nationalized economic system and strictly forbade free movement and private trade. Taking a transborder perspective, the essay looks beyond government institutions and probes the mercantile agency of the migrant Yunnanese traders, which contributed to the formation of their socioeconomic mechanisms. The findings suggest that the economic practices of the Yunnanese traders in effect constituted a transnational popular realm that formed an informal oppositional power against the Thai and Burmese national bureaucracies on the one hand, and incorporated varied state agencies on the other hand.

This article examines the divergent approaches pursued by Japan and South Korea in their attempts to resolve an issue that is related to a fundamental responsibility of sovereign states: the protection of citizens. The case considered here is North Korea's abduction of Japanese and South Korean nationals. In Japan, the abduction issue has taken center stage in the country's North Korea policy, whereas in South Korea, recent administrations have downplayed the issue—despite the fact that nearly 500 South Korean citizens remain detained in North Korea, compared to fewer than 20 known Japanese abductions. The authors find that the key to understanding the divergent responses lies in the politicization of specific, ostensibly apolitical demands for the state to fulfill its duty to protect citizens. In particular, the proximity of the abductions issue to key nationalist themes, which politicians in each country use to mobilize support, prevents the matter from being addressed in a neutral way.

Shanghai has often been called the Paris of the Orient. This is only half true. Shanghai has all the vices of Paris and more but boasts of none of its cultural influences. The municipal orchestra is uncertain of its future, and the removal of the city library to its new premises has only shattered our hopes for better reading facilities. The Royal Asiatic Society has been denied all support from the Council for the maintenance of its library, which is the only center for research in this metropolis. It is therefore no wonder that men and women, old or young, poor or rich, turn their minds to mischief and lowly pursuits of pleasure, and the laxity of police regulations has aggravated the situation.